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mission, more efficient than any that ever bore the royal seal. Their banishment to Holland was fortunate; the decline of their little company in the strange land was fortunate; the difficulties which they experienced in getting the royal consent to banish themselves to this wilderness were fortunate; all the tears and heart-breakings of that ever memorable parting at Delfthaven' had the happiest influence on the rising destinies of New En gland.

2 All this purified the ranks of the settlers. These rough touches of fortune brushed off the light, uncertain, selfish spirits. They made it a grave, solemn, self-denying expedition, and required of those who engaged in it to be so too. They cast a broad shadow of thought and seriousness over the cause; and, if this sometimes deepened into melancholy and bitterness, can we find no apology for such a human weakness?

3. It is sad, indeed, to reflect on the disasters which the little band of Pilgrims encountered; sad to see a portion of them, the prey of unrelenting cupidity, treacherously embarked in an unsound, unseaworthy ship, which they are soon obliged to abandon, and crowd themselves into one vessel; one hundred persons, besides the ship's company, in a vessel of one hundred and sixty tons. One is touched at the story of the long, cold, and weary autumnal passage; of the landing on the inhospitable rocks at this dismal season; where they are deserted, before long, by the ship which had brought them, and which seemed their only hold upon the world of fellow-men, a prey to the ele ments and to want, and fearfully ignorant of the numbers, the power, and the temper of the savage tribes, that filled the unexplored continent, upon whose verge they had ventured.

4. But all this wrought together for good. These trials of wandering and exile, of the ocean, the winter, the wilderness, and the savage foe, were the final assurances of success. It was these that put far away from our fathers' cause all patrician softness, all hereditary claims to preeminence. No effeminate nobility crowded into the dark and austere ranks of the Pilgrims.

'Delft ha' ven, a fortified town in South Holland (now Belgium), between Rotterdam and Schiedam. At this place the Pilgrims of New England took their last farewell of their European friends.

No Carr nor Villiers' would lead on the ill-provided band of despised Puritans. No well-endowed clergy were on the alert to quit their cathedrals, and set up a pompous hierarchy in the frozen wilderness. No craving governors were anxious to be sent over to our cheerless El Dorados' of ice and snow.

5. No; they could not say they had encouraged, pătronized, or helped the Pilgrims: their own cares, their own labors, their own councils, their own blood, contrived all, achieved all, bore all, sealed all. They could not afterward fairly pretend to reap where they had not strewn; and, as our fathers reared this broad and solid fabric with pains and watchfulness, unaided, barely tolerated, it did not fall when the favor, which had always been withholden, was changed into wrath; when the arm, which had never supported, was raised to destroy.

6. Methinks I see it now, that one solitary, adventurous vessel, the Mayflower3 of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future State, and bound across the unknown sea. I behold it pursuing, with a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and weeks and months pass, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shōre.

7. I see them now scantily supplied with provisions; crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison; delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route, and now driven in fury before the raging tempest, on the high and giddy waves. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly, from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with ingulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats, with deadening, shivering weight, against the staggered vessel.

8. I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landed at last, after five months'

1 CARR and VILLIERS, the unworthy favorites of James I., the English monarch. Villiers is better known in history as the Duke of Buckingham, and Carr, as the Earl of Somerset.- El Do rå' do, a fabulous region in the interior of South America, supposed to be immensely rich in gold, gems, &c.- Mayflower, the name of the vessei in which the settlers of Plymouth, in Massachusetts, came to America, in 1620.

passage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth,-weak and weary from the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, depending on the charity of their shipmaster for a draught of beer on board, drinking nothing but water on shore, without shelter, without means, surrounded by hostile tribes.

9. Shut now the volume of history, and tell me, on any principle of human probability, what shall be the fate of this handfu of adventurers. Tell me, man of military science, in how many months were they all swept off by the thirty savage tribes, enumerated within the early limits of New England? Tell me, politician, how long did this shadow of a colony, on which your conventions and treaties had not smiled, languish on the distant coast? Student of history, compare for me the baffled projects, the deserted settlements,, the abandoned adventures of other times, and find the parallel of this.

10. Was it the winter's storm, beating upon the houseless heads of women and children; was it hard labor and spare meals; was it disease; was it the tomahawk; was it the deep malady of a blighted hope, a ruined enterprise, and a broken heart, aching in its last moments at the recollection of the loved and left beyond the sea;-was it some, or all of these united, that hurried this forsaken company to their melancholy fate? And is it possible that neither of these causes, that not all combined, were able to blast this bud of hope? Is it possible, that, from a beginning so feeble, so frail, so worthy, not so much of admiration as of pity, there has gone forth a progress so steady, a growth so wonderful, an expansion so ample, a reality so important, a promise, yet to be fulfilled, so glorious?

EDWARD EVERETT1

1.

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67. THE GRAVES OF THE PATRIOTS.

ERE rest the great and good. Here they repose
After their generous toil. A sacred band,

They take their sleep together, while the year
Comes with its early flowers to deck their graves,
And gathers them again, as Winter frowns.

'See Biographical Sketch, p 89.

2.

Theirs is no vulgar sepulchre-green sods
Are all their monument, and yet it tells
A nobler history than pillar'd piles,
Or the eternal pyramids.

They need

No statue nor inscription to reveal

Their greatness. It is round them; and the joy
With which their children tread the hallow'd ground
That holds their venerated bones, the peace

That smiles on all they fought for, and the wealth
That clothes the land they rescued, these, though mute
As feeling ever is when deepest-these

Are monuments more lasting than the fanes
Rear'd to the kings and demigods of old.

3. Touch not the ancient elms, that bend their shade
Over their lowly graves; beneath their boughs
There is a solemn darkness even at noon,
Suited to such as visit at the shrine
Of serious Liberty. No factious voice
Call'd them unto the field of generous fame,
But the pure consecrated love of home.
No deeper feeling sways us, when it wakes
In all its greatness. It has told itself
To the astonish'd gaze of awe-struck kings,
At Marathon,' at Bannockburn, and here,
Where first our patriots sent the invader back
Broken and cow'd. Let these green elms be all
To tell us where they fought, and where they lie.

4. Their feelings were all nature, and they need

No art to make them known. They live in us,

'Mår' a thon, a hamlet, small river, and plain of Greece, government of Attica. The hamlet is 18 miles N. E. of Athens. The plain, bounded S. by Mount Pentelicus, is renowned for the victory of Miltiades over the army of Xerxes, B. c. 490.-2 Bån' nock burn, a town of Scotland, famous for the great victory gained here 24th of June, 1314, by the Scots, under Bruce, over the English, commanded by Edward II., and his generals

5.

While we are like them, simple, hardy, bold,
Worshiping nothing but our own pure hearts,
And the one universal Lord. They need
No column pointing to the heaven they sought,
To tell us of their home. The heart itself,
Left to its own free purpose, hastens there,
And there alone reposes.

Let these elms

Bend their protecting shadow o'er their graves,
And build with their green roof the only fane,
Where we may gather on the hållōw'd day
That rose to them in blood, and set in glory.
Here let us meet, and while our motionless lips
Give not a sound, and all around is mute

In the deep Sabbath of a heart too full

For words or tears-here let us strew the sod
With the first flowers of spring, and make to them
An offering of the plenty Nature gives,

And they have render'd ours-perpetually.

J. G. PERCIVAL.

JAMES GATES PERCIVAL, the poet, was born in Berlin, near Hartford, in Connecticut, on the 15th of September, 1795. He entered Yale College when fifteen years of age, and graduated in 1815, with the reputation of being the first scholar of his class. From Yale Medical School, in 1820, he received the degree of Dr of Medicine. He wrote verses at an early age, and in his fourteenth year produced an able satire. He composed "Zamor, a Tragedy," while in college He first appeared before the public, as an author, in 1821, when he published some minor poems, and the first part of his "Prometheus," which at once attracted attention, and was favorably noticed by EDWARD EVERETT, in the N. A. Review. In 1822 he published two volumes of miscellaneous poems and prose writings, entitled "Clio," and the second part of "Prometheus," the latter of which is a poem containing nely four hundred stanzas, in the Spenserian measure. An edition of his principal poetical writings soon after appeared in New York, and was republished in London. He was appointed assistant surgeon in the U. S. army in 1824, and acted as Professor of Chemistry in the Military Academy at West Point. The duties of his office infringing too much upon his favorite studies, after a few months he resigned his commission. The third volume of "Clio" appeared in New York early in 1827. For two years subsequent he superintended the printing of the first quarto edition of Dr. WEBSTER'S American Dictionary, a situation for which his ripe scholarship, and critical acquaintance with ancient and modern languages, rendered him eminently qualified. In 1835 he was employed by the government of Connecticut to make a geological survey of that State, an elaborate and very able report of which was printed in 1842. While engaged in these duties he published poetical translations from eleven modern languages, and wrote a portion of "The

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