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of St. Peter's? Or is not, rather, each work good in its kind? Is not each suited to its place?

If we judge by the standard of the French, Corneille alone can be compared with Racine. The author of the Cid and of Cinna may have conceived of some more heroic characters than his younger rival; but, in female characters, in perfection of plan, in smoothness of versification, in mastery of language, in exquisite sensibility, in melting pathos, and in sustained excellence, his plays are inferior to those of Racine. While we assign to our author such rank as a dramatic poet, we cannot forget the versatility of his genius. His prose is chaste and pure. His sacred lyrics are unequalled in beauty. His Epigrams and Letters, as well as the " Plaideurs," evince a genial humor and subtle wit. When Voltaire was asked to edit the works of Racine with notes, he replied: "What should I have to do, except to write at the foot of every page -beau! sublime! pathétique! admirable!" Lessing has said that, if Racine were not the prince of poets, he certainly was the poet of princes. And yet he has never yielded to the temptation to sully his works by a single impure expression. He who is most widely acquainted with the literature of France, will best appreciate this distinguishing merit of Racine. His genius was womanly and sensitive, rather than manly and daring. Hence he excelled in the portraiture of warm and glowing passions; and especially of love, in all its varied manifestations. It is maternal in Andromaque; it is furious in Phèdre; it is earnest and tender in Bérénice; it is innocent and pious in Esther; it appears as patriotic and filial devotion, in Iphigénie; it rises into sublimest faith, in the priestly Jehoiada.

There are poets whom we love rather than admire. There are others, whom we admire more than we love. There are a chosen few, like Racine, whom we cannot but love and admire. We love him with an ardent love, when we see him a spirited boy at Beauvais, a studious youth in the groves of Port Royal, an earnest man, hastening on, with a generous enthusiasm, to the highest triumphs of genius. We love him with a tender and pitying love, when we see him possessed of the idea

that his whole past life had been a life of sin, bowing in contrition at the throne of an offended God, withering with his pious maledictions the brightest laurels he had won, blotting out, with his fast-flowing tears, the beautiful lines which seemed to him the dark witnesses of his guilt. We love him with a holy love, as we see him shedding the kindliest influences over the household, whose sunlight had dispelled his clouds of despair, as we hear the music of that rich voice in the lowly cot of the sick and the afflicted, repeating the consolatory psalms of David, or leading the spirit heavenward in humble, heartfelt prayer. We love him with a sorrowing love, as we see his noble but sensitive heart pierced by a shaft from the hand of the monarch, to whose reign he had given one of its highest titles to glory. We may admire the poet and dramatist; but we love the scholar, the penitent, the Christian, the martyr to his own love.

ARTICLE VI.

AFRICA AND COLONIZATION.1

By Professor William G. T. Shedd, Andover.

On the 22d of March, 1775, Edmund Burke, pleading for the liberties of the American Colonies, in the British House of Commons, had occasion to allude to their marvellous growth, as outrunning everything of the kind in the then past history of England, or the world.. In less than seventy years, he said, the trade with America had increased twelvefold. It had grown from a half-million of pounds per annum to six millions—a sum nearly equal to the whole export trade of England at the commencement of the eighteenth

An Address delivered before the Massachusetts Colonization Society, Boston, May 27th, 1857.

century. This rapid growth, he continued, might all be spanned by the life of a single man, "whose memory might touch the two extremities." Lord Bathurst was old enough, in 1704, to understand the figures and the facts, as they then stood. The same Lord Bathurst, in 1775, was a member of that parliament, before whom the great orator was reciting the new facts that were stranger than fiction, in order to waken England to a consciousness that the colonies beyond the sea were bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, and must be treated accordingly. Warming from the gravity of his theme, and rising in soul as the vision slowly evolved before him, he represents the guardian angel of the youthful Bathurst as drawing aside the curtain of the future and unfolding the rising glories of his country; and particularly as pointing him, while absorbed in the commercial grandeur of England, to "a little speck scarce visible in the mass of the national interest, a small seminal principle, rather than a formed body," and as saying to him: "Young man, there is America; which, at this day, serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world."1

We have alluded to this well-known but ever fresh and fine prosopopoeia of the great Englishman, because it spontaneously comes into memory when one commences to read, to think, or to speak upon Africa. That tropical continent lies nearly as dim and vague before the mind of this generation, as the cold and cheerless America did before the mind of England when Johnson and Burke were boys. With the exception of a small strip of the Atlantic coast, the wilds of this Western world were as unknown to the Englishman of 1700, as the jungles of Soudan or the highlands of Central Africa are to us. And yet it may be that there are youth of this generation who will live to see those dim beginnings of Christianity, of civilization, and of empire,

1 Speech on Conciliation with America.

which are now scarcely visible on the African Atlantic coast, expanded and still expanding into vigorous and vital churches, into strong and mighty States. The guardian genius, in this instance too, might with perhaps as much probability of verification, say to the youth whom he leads by the hand: "Young man, there is Africa; which, at this day, serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners; yet it shall, before you taste of death, take its place among the continents, and be no longer an unknown world.”

For nothing is more wonderful than the changes and transformations of history. But involved, as every present generation is, in the great stream, and whirled along by it, it is not strange that no generation of men are ever fully aware of the strength and rapidity of their own movement. He who be longs to another generation, and looks back, can see that in such a century, and in such a quarter of the globe, a mighty current was running. The spectator always sees more than the actor. The rare prophetic mind, also, that beholds the future in the instant, may foresee and predict a history too great and grand for contemporaneous belief. The philosophic statesman is aware of what is going on in the struggling masses around him, and auspicates accordingly. But the common man, of the busy present time, never knows the rate he is moving; because he is, himself, absorbed and carried headlong in the movement. It is not strange, therefore, that all hopeful, glowing vaticination, in respect to changes upon this sin-smitten planet, is regarded with distrust. Such anticipations are supposed to belong to the poet and the orator. They have no support in the data and calculations of the statician or the statesman.

Called upon then, as we are at this time, to consider the present and prospective condition of the most wretched and unpromising quarter of the globe, by the voice of that Colonizing Society which has already done more than any other single association for the welfare of Africa, and which is destined, we believe, under that benign Providence which has protected and blessed it thus far, to see its own great

ideas and plans realized; called upon to speak and to think for a hundred millions of our fellow-creatures, by a small corporate body, not yet a half-century old, and annually disbursing only a few thousands of dollars, we desire to assign some reasons for believing that a career similar to that of the British colonies in America, and similar to that of all the great colonizing movements of the past, awaits the Republic of Liberia.

What, then, are the grounds for expecting that the plans and purposes of the American Colonization Society will be ultimately realized in the Christianization of the African continent?

1. The first reason for this expectation is of a general nature. Africa has no past history. It is the continent of the future: for it is the only one now left to feel, for the first time, the recuperating influences of a Christian civilization. Religion, law, and letters began their march in Asia, and a large part of that continent once felt their influence. From thence they passed into Europe; and Europe is still the stronghold of religion, law, and letters. Westward they then took their way; and the vast spaces of the American continent are still waiting for the Christianity and Republicanism that have so rapidly and firmly taken possession of that comparatively small belt called the United States. It is true that these influences were, for a time, felt along the northern border of Africa. Egypt and Carthage were once civilized; and a very vigorous Christianity, for three centuries, erected its altar, and kept its fires bright, along the southern shore of the Mediterranean. But Egypt, though African in nature and blood, derived its ideas from Asiatic sources; and its place in history is Asiatic rather than African. That ancient and wonderful pantheistic civilization which built Thebes and the pyramids, was but the corrupted remains of a yet more ancient Asiatic monotheism; as South tells us that "an Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of paradise." Carthage was Phoenician; and when both Egypt and Carthage were absorbed into Rome, North-Africa belonged much more to the European

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