"Pace through thy cell, old Socrates,

Cheerily to and fro;

Trust to the impulse of thy soul

And let the poison flow.

They may shatter to earth the lamp of clay

That holds a light divine,

But they cannot quench the fire of thought

By any such deadly wine;

They cannot blot thy spoken words
From the memory of man,

By all the poison ever was brewed
Since time its course began.
To-day abhorred, to-morrow adored,
So round and round we run,

And ever the truth comes uppermost,
And ever is justice done.

"Plod in thy cave, gray Anchorite; Be wiser than thy peers:

Augment the range of human power

And trust to coming years.

They may call thee wizard, and monk accursed,

And load thee with dispraise:

Thou wert born five hundred years too soon

For the comfort of thy days:

But not too soon for human kind:

Time hath reward in store;

And the demons of our sires become

SELECTIONS.

The saints that we adore.

The blind can see, the slave is lord;

So round and round we run;

And ever the wrong is proved to be wrong,
And ever is justice done.

'Keep, Galileo, to thy thought,

And nerve thy soul to bear;

They may gloat o'er the senseless words they wring

From the pangs of thy despair:

They may veil their eyes, but they cannot hide

The sun's meridian glow;

The heel of a priest may tread thee down,

And a tyrant work thee woe;

But never a truth has been destroyed:
They may curse and call it crime;
Pervert and betray, or slander and slay
Its teachers for a time.

But the sunshine aye shall light the sky,

As round and round we run;

And the truth shall ever come uppermost,
And justice shall be done.

"And live there now such men as theseWith thoughts like the great of old? Many have died in their misery,

And left their thought untold;

And many live and are ranked as mad,
And placed in the cold world's ban,
For sending their bright far-seeing souls
Three centuries in the van.

They toil in penury and grief,

Unknown, if not maligned;

Forlorn, forlorn, bearing the scorn

Of the meanest of mankind.

But yet the world goes round and round,

And the genial seasons run,

And ever the truth comes uppermost,

And ever is justice done."

179

LXXVIII.

AGAINST CURTAILING THE RIGHT OF SUFFRAGE,

VICTOR HUGo.

GENTLEMEN :—I address the men who govern us, and say to them,-Go on, cut off three millions of voters; cut off eight out of nine, and the result will be the same to you, if it be not more decisive. What you do not cut off, is your own fault; the absurdities of your policy of compression, your fatal incapacity, your ignorance of the present epoch, the antipathy you feel for it, and that it feels for you; what you will not cut off, is the times which are advancing, the hour now striking, the ascending movement of ideas, the gulf opening broader and deeper between yourself and the age, between the young generation and you, between the spirit of liberty and you, between the spirit of philosophy and you.

What you will not cut off, is this immense fact, that the nation goes to one side, while you go to the other; that what for you is the sunrise, is for it the sun's setting; that you turn your backs to the future, while this great people of France, its front all radiant with light from the rising dawn of a new humanity, turns its back to the past.

Gentlemen, this law is invalid; it is null; it is dead even before it exists. And do you know what has killed it? It is that, when it meanly approaches to steal the vote from the pocket of the poor and feeble, it meets the keen, terrible eye of the national probity, a devouring light, in which the work of darkness disappears.

ویدم

Yes, men who govern us, at the bottom of every citizen's conscience, the most obscure as well as the greatest, at the very depths of the soul, (I use your own expressions,) of the last beggar, the last vagabond, there is a sentiment, sublime, sacred, insurmountable, indestructable, eternal, the sentiment of right! This sentiment, — which is the very essence of the human conscience, which the Scriptures call the corner-stone of justice, is the rock on which iniquities, hypocrisies, bad laws, evil designs, bad governments, fall, and are shipwrecked. This is the hidden, irresistable obstacle

veiled in the recesses of every mind, but ever present, ever active, on which you will always exhaust yourselves; and which, whatever you do, you will never destroy. I warn you, your labor is lest; you will not extinguish it, you will not confuse it. Far easier to drag the rock from the bottom of the sea, than the sentiment of right from the heart of the people!

LXXIX.
IRELAND.

T. F. MEAGHER,

I do not despair of my poor old country, her peace, her liberty, her glory. For that country I can do no more than bid her hope. To lift this island up; to make her a benefactor instead of being the meanest beggar in the world; to restore to her her native powers and her ancient constitution; this has been my ambition, and this ambition has been my crime. Judged by the law of England, I know this crime entails the penalty of death, but the history of Ireland explains this crime, and justifies it. Judged by that history I am no criminal; you are no criminal; I deserve no punishment; we deserve no punishment. Judged by that history, the treason of which I stand convicted loses all its guilt; is sanctified as a duty; will be ennobled as a sacrifice. With these sentiments, my lord, I await the sentence of the court; having done what I felt to be my duty; having spoken what I felt to be the truth, as I have done on every other occasion of my short career. I now bid farewell to the country of my birth, my passion and my death; the country whose misfortunes have invoked my sympathies, whose factions I have sought to still; whose intellect I have prompted to a lofty aim; whose freedom has been my fatal dream. I offer to that country, as a proof of the love I bear her, and the sincerity with which I thought and spoke and struggled for her freedom, the life of a young heart; and with that life all the hopes, the honors, the endearments of an honorable home. Pronounce then, my lords, the sentence which the law directs, and I will be prepared to hear it. I trust I shall be prepared to meet its execution. I hope to be able, with a pure heart and a perfect

composure to appear before a higher tribunal

a tribunal where a judge of infinite goodness, as well as of justice, will preside, and where, my lords, many, many of the judgments of this world will be reversed.

LXXX.

PLEA FOR THE UNION.

W. H. SEWARD -1861.

MR. PRESIDENT:-I have designedly dwelt so long on the probable effects of disunion upon the safety of the American people as to leave me little time to consider the other evils which must follow in its train. But, practically, the loss of safety involves every other form of public calamity. When once the guardian angel has taken flight, everything is lost.

Dissolution would not only arrest, but extinguish the greatness of cur country. Even if separate confederacies could exist and endure, they could severally preserve no share of the prestige of the Union. If the constellation is to be broken up, the stars, whether scattered widely apart or grouped in smaller clusters, will thenceforth shed feeble, glimmering, and lurid lights. Nor will great achievements be possible for the new confederacies. Dissolution would signalize its triumph by acts of wantonness which would shock and astound the world. It would provincialize Mount Vernon, and give the Capitol over to desolation at the very moment when the dome is rising over our heads that was to be crowned with the statue of Liberty. After this there would remain for disunion no act of stupendous infamy to be committed. No petty confederacy that shall follow the United States can prolong, or even renew, the majestic drama of national progress. Perhaps it is to be arrested because its sublimity is incapable of continuance. Let it be so, if we have indeed become degenerate. After Washington, and the inflexible Adams, Henry, and the peerless Hamilton, Jefferson, and the majestic Clay, Webster, and the acute Calhoun, Jackson, the modest Taylor, and Scott, who rises in greatness under the burden of years, and Franklin, and Fulton, and Whitney, and Morse, have all performed their parts, let the curtain fall.