Like a star, sailing on throngh the depths of the blue,
On whose brightness we gaze every evening anew.

His white tent is pitched on the beautiful plain,
Where the tumult of battle comes never again,

Where the smoke of the war-cloud ne'er darkens the air,

Nor falls on the spirit a shadow of care.

The songs of the ransomed enrapture his ear,

And he heeds not the dirges that roll for him here;
In the calm of his spirit, so strange and sublime,
He is lifted far over the discords of time.

Then bear him home gently, great son of the West-
'Mid her fair blooming praries lay Lincoln to rest;
From the nation who loved him, she takes to her trust,
And will tenderly garner the consecrate dust.

A Mecca his grave to the people shall be,

And a shrine evermore for the hearts of the free.

XLVIII.

THE ALARM, APRIL 19, 1776.

GEORGE BANCROFT.

Darkness closed upon the country and upon the town, but it was no night for sleep. Heralds on swift relays of horses transmitted the war-message from hand to hand, till village repeated it to village; the sea to the backwoods; the plains to the highlands; and it was never suffered to droop, till it had been borne North, and South, and East, and West, throughout the land. It spread over the bays that receive the Saco and the Penobscot. Its loud reveille broke the rest of the trappers of New Hampshire, and ringing like bugle-notes from peak to peak, overleapt the Green Mountains, swept onward to Montreal, and descended the ocean river, till the responses were echoed from the cliffs of Quebec. The hills along the Hudson told to one another the tale. As the summons hurried to the South, it was one

day at New York; in one more at Philadelphia; the next it lighted a watchfire at Baltimore; thence it waked an answer at Annapolis. Crossing the Potomac near Mount Vernon, it was sent forward without a halt to Williamsburg. It traversed the Dismal Swamp to Nansemond, along the route of the first emigrants to North Carolina. It moved onwards and still onwards through boundless groves of evergreen to Newbern and to Wilmington. "For God's sake, forward it by night and by day," wrote Cornelius Harnett, by the express which sped for Brunswick. Patriots of South Carolina caught up its tones at the border and despatched it to Charleston, and through pines and palmettos and moss-clad live oaks, further to the South, till it resounded among the New England settlements beyond the Savannah. Hillsborough and the Mecklenburg district of North Carolina rose in triumph, now that their wearisome uncertainty had its end. The Blue Ridge took up the voice and made it heard from one end to the other of the valley of Virginia. The Alleghanies, as they listened, opened their barriers that the "loud call" might pass through to the hardy riflemen on the Holston, the Watauga and the French Broad. Ever renewing its strength, powerful enough even to create a commonwealth, it breathed its inspiring word to the first settlers of Kentucky; so that hunters who made their halt in the matchless valley of the Elkhorn, commemorated the nineteenth day of April by naming their encampment LEXINGTON.

With one impulse the colonies sprung to arms; with one spirit they pledged themselves to each other "to be ready for the extreme event." With one heart the continent cried, "Liberty or death.”

XLIX.

CHARACTER OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN.

REV. HENRY FOWLER 1864.

The progress of the President illustrates the progress of the people. Arthur Stanley speaks of Samuel, the prophet, as mediator

between the old and new, in Jewish history. His two-sided sympathy enabled him to unite the passing and the coming epoch. Such an epoch of perplexity, transition, change, is not often witnessed. In every such passage of a nation there ought to be a character like that of Samuel. Misunderstood and misrepresented at the time; attacked from both sides; charged with not going far enough and with going too far; charged with saying too much and saying too little; he slowly, conscientiously and honestly worked out the mighty problem. He was not the founder of a new state of things like Moses; he was not a champion of the existing order of things like Elijah. He stood between the two; between the living and the dead; between the past and the present; between the old and the new; with that sympathy for each which, at such a time, is the best hope for any permanent solution of the question that torments it. His duty is carefully to distinguish between that which is temporal and that which is eternal. He has but little praise from partisans ; but is the careful healer, binding up the wounds of the age in spite of itself; the good surgeon, knitting together the dislocated bones of the disjointed times.

Such a man was Samuel among the Jews; such a man was Athanasius among the early Christians; such a man is Abraham Lincoln in this day. The explanation for his every act is this: He executes the will of the people. He represents a controlling majority. If he be slow it is because the people are slow. If he has done a foolish act, it was the stupidity of the people which impelled it. His wisdom consists in carrying out the good sense of the nation. His growth in political knowledge, his steady movement towards emancipation, are but the growth and movement of the national mind. Indeed, in character and culture, he is a fair representative of the average American. His awkward speech and yet more awkward silence, his uncouth manners, his grammar self-taught and partly forgotten, his style miscellaneous, concreted from the best authors, like a reading-book, and yet oftimes of Saxon force and classic purity; his humor an argument, and his logic a joke, both unseasonable at times and irresistable always; his questions answers, and his answers questions; his guesses prophesies, and fulfillment even beyond his

promise; honest, yet shrewd; simple, yet reticent; heavy, yet energetic; never despairing, and never sanguine; careless in forms; conscientious in essentials; never sacrificing a good servant once trusted, never deserting a good principle once adopted; not afraid of new ideas, nor despising old ones; improving opportunities to confess mistakes, ready to learn, getting at facts, doing nothing when he knows not what to do; hesitating at nothing when he sees the right; lacking the recognized qualification of a party leader, and yet leading his party as no other man can; sustaining his political enemies in Missouri to their defeat, sustaining his political friends in Maryland to their victory; conservative in his sympathies and radical in his acts; Socratic in his style and Baconian in his method; his religion consisting in truthfulness, temperance, asking good people to pray for him, and publicly acknowledging in events the hand of God, he stands before you as the type of "Brother Jonathan," a not perfect man, and yet more precious than fine gold.

L.

THE LOST STEAMSHIP.

FITZ-JAMES O'BRIEN.

"Ho, there! fisherman, hold your hand!
Tell me what is that far away ·

There, where over the Isle of Sand

Hangs the mist-cloud sullen and gray?

See! it rocks with a ghastly life,

Raising and rolling through clouds of spray,
Right in the midst of the breakers' strife-
Tell me, what is it, Fisherman, pray?"

"That, good sir, was a steamer, stout

As ever paddled around Cape Race,

And many's the wild and stormy bout

She had with the winds in that self-same place;

But her time had come; and at ten o'clock

Last night she struck on that lonesome shore,
And her sides were gnawed by the hidden rock,
And at dawn this morning she was no more.

"Come, as you seem to know, good man, The terrible fate of this gallant ship, Tell me all about her that you can,

And here's my flask to moisten your lip. Tell me how many she had on boardWives and husbands, and lovers true How did it fare with her human hoard, Lost she many or lost she few?"

"Master, I may not drink of your flask,
Already too moist I feel my lip;
But I'm ready to do what else you ask,
And spin you my yarn about the ship:
'T was ten o'clock, as I said, last night,

When she struck the breakers and went ashore,

And scarce had broken the morning's light

Than she sank in twelve feet of water, or more.

“But long ere this they knew their doom,

And the Captain called all hands to prayer;

And solemnly over the ocean's boom

The orisons rose on the troubled air. And round about the vessel there rose

Tall plumes of spray as white as snow, Like angels in their ascension clothes, Waiting for those who prayed below.

"So those three hundred people clung

As well as they could to spar and rope;
With a word of prayer upon every tongue,
Nor on any face a glimmer of hope.
But there was no blubbering weak and wild-
Of tearful faces I saw but one,

A rough old salt, who cried like a child,
And not for himself, but the Captain's son.

"The Captain stood on the quarter-deck,

Firm but pale, with trumpet in hand, Sometimes he looked on the breaking wreck, Sometimes he sadly looked on land.

t