General Cass, he wrote a defence of the American claim to the north-eastern boundary, which was republished from Galignani's Messenger, where it originally appeared, in the leading American journals, and universally regarded as an able presentation of the argument. It was during the same visit to Paris that he suggested to Mr. Wheaton the project of writing a History of the Law of Nations. The impression made by Mr. Sumner in England may be judged of from the complimentary remark made by Baron Parke, on the citation in the Court of Exchequer, of Sumner's Reports, in a case under consideration, to the effect that the weight of the authority was not "entitled to the less attention because rcported by a gentleman whom we all knew and respected." After his return, he again, in 1843, lectured in Cambridge, and in 1844-6 edited an edition of Vesey's Reports in twenty volumes, to which he contributed a number of valuable notes, many of which are concise treatises on the points in question. He also introduced a number of biographical notices of the eminent persons whose names occur in the text. After the death of Judge Story, in 1845, Mr. Summer was universally spoken of as his appropriate successor in the Law School, an opinion in accordance with the openly expressed wish of the deceased. He, however, expressed a disinclination to accept the post, and the appointment was not tendered. Mr. Sumner took an active part as a public speaker in opposition to the annexation of Texas, and in support of Mr. Van Buren for the Presideney in the canvass of 1848. In 1851 he was elected the successor of Mr. Webster in the United States Senate. Mr. Sumner's name is prominently identified with the Peace party-some of his finest oratorical efforts having been made in favor of the project of a Congress of Nations as the supreme arbiter of international disputes. Mr. Sumner's Orations and Speeches were collected and published in Boston in two stout duodecimo volumes in 1850. The collection opens with an oration delivered before the authorities of the city of Boston, July 4, 1845, entitled The True Grandeur of Nations, in which the speaker enforced his peace doctrines by arguments drawn not only from the havoc and desolation attendant on and following the conflict, but by an enumeration of the cost of the state of preparation, maintained, not in view of impending danger, but as an every-day condition of military defence. In the next oration, The Scholar, the Jurist, the Artist, the Philanthropist, delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, in 1846, we have a feeling and eloquent memorial of John Pickering, Joseph Story, Washington Allston, and William Ellery Channing. This is followed by a Lecture on White Slavery in the Barbary States, a curious and picturesquely presented chapter of history. We have next an Oration on Fame and Glory, occupied in a great measure by an argument on the superior honors of peace. The Law of Human Progress, a Phi Beta Kappa Society Oration at Union College in 1818, follows, in which a history is given of the gradual recognition of the doctrine of the progress of the human race, and a brilliant series of sketches of Leibnitz, Herder, Descartes, Pascal, Turgot, Condorcet, and others of its early advocates, presented. The address exhibits to advantage the speaker's varied learning, and his happy art in the disposal of his acquirements. The second volume opens with an address before the American Peace Society, entitled The War System of the Commonwealth of Nations, in a portion of which the author has followed the plan of his last mentioned discourse by tracing through the record of history the progress of the cause, and the advocates to whom that progress was in great measure due. The remainder of the work is occupied by a number of speeches delivered on various political occasions, touching on the Mexican war, the Free Soil party, the Fugitive Slave Law and other matters growing out of the slavery question, maintaining decided views with an energy and ability which have been followed by rapid political elevation. In addition to the works we have mentioned, Mr. Sumner is the author of a small volume on White Slavery in the Barbary States. Mr. George Sumner, the brother of Charles Sumner, is the author of An Address on the Progress of Reform in France, delivered in 1853, and of other similar productions. He has passed several years in Europe, and has acquired a thorough knowledge of the politics, social condition, and intellectual products of its leading states. He possesses a taste for statistics and unwearied industry in research, combined with the ability to place the results of investigation before the public in a pleasing and attractive form. WAR. I need not dwell now on the waste and cruelty of war. These stare us wildly in the face, like lurid meteor-lights, as we travel the page of history. We see the desolation and death that pursue its demoniac footsteps. We look upon sacked towns, upon ravaged territories, upon violated homes; we behold all the sweet charities of life changed to wormwood and gall. Our soul is penetrated by the sharp moan of mothers, sisters, and daughtersof fathers, brothers, and sons, who, in the bitterness of their bereavement, refuse to be comforted. Our eyes rest at last upon one of those fair fields, where nature, in her abundance, spreads her cloth of gold, spacious and apt for the entertainment of mighty multitudes or, perhaps, from the curious subtlety of its position, like the carpet in the Arabian tale, seeming to contract so as to be covered by a few only, or to dilate so as to receive an innumerable host. Here, under a bright sun, such as shone at Austerlitz or Buena Vista-amidst the peaceful harmonies of nature-on the Sabbath of peace-we behold bands of brothers, children of a common Father, heirs to a common happiness, struggling together in the deadly fight, with the madness of fallen spirits, seeking with murderous weapons the lives of brothers who have never injured them or their kindred. The havoc rages. The ground is soaked with their commingling blood. The air is rent by their commingling cries. Horse and rider are stretched together on the earth. More revolting than the mangled victims, than the gashed limbs, than the lifeless trunks, than the spattering brains, are the lawless passions which sweep, tempest-like, appointed Recorder of the Recorder's Court, through the fiendish tumult. "Alas! alas! I know not; friend and foe together fall, O'er the dying rush the living; pray, my sister, for them all!" Horror-struck, we ask, wherefore this hateful contest? The melancholy, but truthful answer comes, that this is the established method of determining justice between nations! The scene changes. Far away on the distant pathway of the ocean two ships approach each other, with white canvas broadly spread to receive the flying gales. They are proudly built. All of human art has been lavished in their graceful proportions, and in their well compacted sides, while they look in dimensions like floating happy islands of the sea. A numerous crew, with costly appliances of comfort, hives in their secure shelter. Surely these two travellers shall meet in joy and friendship; the flag at the mast-head shall give the signal of fellowship; the happy sailors shall cluster in the rigging, and even on the yard-arms, to look each other in the face, while the exhilarating voices of both crews shall mingle in accents of gladness uncontrollable. It is not so. Not as brothers, not as friends, not as wayfarers of the common ocean, do they come together; but as enemies. The gentle vessels now bristle fiercely with death-dealing instruments. On their spacious decks, aloft on all their masts, flashes the deadly musketry. From their sides spout cataracts of flame, amidst the pealing thunders of a fatal artillery. They, who had escaped "the dreadful touch of merchant-marring rocks"-who had sped on their long and solitary way unharmed by wind or wave-whom the hurricane had sparedin whose favor storms and seas had intermitted their immitigable war-now at last fall by the hand of each other. The same spectacle of horror greets us from both ships. On their decks, reddened with blood, the murders of St. Bartholomew and of the Sicilian Vespers, with the fires of Smithfield, seem to break forth anew, and to concentrate their rage. Each has now become a swimming Golgotha. At length these vessels-such pageants of the sea-once so stately-so proudly built-but now rudely shattered by cannon-balls-with shivered masts and ragged sails-exist only as unmanageable wrecks, weltering on the uncertain waves, whose temporary lull of peace is now their only safety. In amazement at this strange, unnatural contestaway from country and home-where there is no country or home to defend-we ask again, wherefore this dismal duel? Again the melancholy but truthful answer promptly comes, that this is the established method of determining justice between nations. ROBERT T. CONRAD. ROBERT T. CONRAD, the author of the highly successful tragedy of Aylmere, was born in Philadelphia about the year 1810. After completing his preliminary education, he studied law with his uncle, Mr. Thomas Kittera; but in place of the practice of the profession, devoted himself to an editorial career, by the publication of the Daily Commercial Intelligencer, a periodical he subsequently merged in the Philadelphia Gazette. In consequence of ill health he was forced to abandon the toil of daily editorship. He returned to the practice of the law, and was immediately Philadelphia. After holding this office for two years, he became a judge of the Court of Criminal Sessions; and on the abolition of that tribunal, was appointed to the bench of the General Sessions established in its place. Mr. Conrad occupies a prominent place in, and is now Mayor of Philadelphia, having been elected to that office by the Native American party. Mr. Conrad wrote his first tragedy before his twenty-first year. It was entitled Conradin, and performed with success. Aylmere was written some years after. It is the property of Mr. Edwin Forrest, and has proved one of his most successful plays. The hero, Jack Cade, assumes the name of Aylmere during his concealment in Italy, to escape the consequences of a daring act of resistance to tyranny in his youth. He returns to England, and heads the insurrection which bears his name in history. The democratic hero is presented with energy, and the entire production abounds in spirited scenes and animated language. The tragedy was published by the author in 1852 in a volume entitled Aylmere, or the Bondman of Kent; and Other Poems. The leading article of the latter portion of the collection, The Sons of the Wilderness-Reflections beside an Indian Mound, extending to three hundred and seventy lines, is a meditative poem on the Indians, reciting their wrongs and sympathizing with their fate in a mournful strain. The remaining pieces are for the most part of a reflective character. The wind which bloweth where it listeth, why That she is chainless now, and will for ever be! That ministers to man, in lowly wise, He scans the unbourned wild-and who shall say him nay? If Freedom thus o'er carth, sea, air, hath cast Her spell, and is Thought's idol, man may well, To star-crowned Sparta in the glimmering past, Turn from the gilded agonies which swell Wrong's annals. For the kindling mind will dwell Upon Leonidas and Washington, And those who for God's truth or fought or fell, When kings whose tombs are pyramids, are gone. Justice and Time are wed: the eternal truth lives on. Ponder it, freemen! It will teach that Time That lifts us to the right where truth makes free, Is from on high. Pale virtue! Yet with thee Will gentle freedom dwell, nor dread a foe! Above expiring Time, her starry flag shall flow! A cherished thought. The hardy hordes which threw Rome from the crushed world's empire, caught the light That led them from soft eyes, and never knew Shame, fear, nor fetter. The stern Spartan drew, From matrons weeping o'er each recreant son, His spirit; and our Indian thus will woo The stake-his forest Portia by-smile on, Till the death-rattle ring and the death-song is done. Fame is man's vassal; and the Maid of France, The shepherd heroine, and Padilla's dame, Whose life and love and suffering mock romance, Are half forgotten. Corday-doth her name Thrill you? Why, Brutus won eternal fame: Was his, a Roman man's, a bolder blow Than that weak woman's? same For the cause the The desert rock may yield a liberty— The eagle's; but in cities, guarded Right Finds her first home. Amid the many, she Gives union, strength, and courage. In the night Of time, from leaguered walls, her beacon light Flashed o'er the world. And Commerce, whose white wing Makes the wide desert of the ocean bright, Is Freedom's foster nurse; and though she fling Her wealth on many a shore, on none where fetters ring! And weath diffused is Freedom's child and aid. A heaped-up wealth corrupts. But to the free Labor on Freedom waits (what hope to cheer The slave to toil?), the labor blithe, whose day Knows not a want, whose night knows not a tear; And wealth; and high-browed science; and the play Of truth-enamoured mind, that mocks the sway Hope, courage, pride, joy, conscious mirth upstart, Beneath her smile, to raise the mind and glad the heart. Twin-born with Time was Freedom, when the soul, Of the scorched sky-she'll wing her radiant way, Freed from the traitor's taint, the tyrant's sway; Chastened and bright, to other spheres will flee; Sun her unruffled joys in Heaven's own ray,Where all the crushed are raised, the just are free Her light the living God-her mate eternity! FREDERICK WILLIAM THOMAS. F. W. THOMAS was born in Baltimore about the year 1810. In 1830 he removed to Cincinnati, and on his descent of the Ohio composed a poem of some six or eight stanzas, which appeared in the Commercial Daily Advertiser on his arrival at his destination. This he subsequently enlarged and recited in public, and in 1833 published with the title The Emigrant, or Reflections when descending the Ohio. In 1835 Mr. Thomas published the novel of Clinton Bradshaw. The hero of this story is a young lawyer, who is brought in the course of his professional pursuits in contact with criminals, while his desire to advance himself in politics introduces him to the low class of hangers-on and wire-pullers of party. The publication made a sensation by the spirit and animation with which it was written and the bold delineations of character it contained. It was followed in 1836 by East and West, a story which introduces us in its progress to the two great geographical divisions of our country, and possesses animation and interest. An account of a race between two Mississippi steamboats, terminating in the usual explosion, is deservedly celebrated as a passage of vigorous description. In 1840 Mr. Thomas published Howard Pinckney, a novel of contemporary American life. He is also the author of The Beechen Tree, a Tale told in Rhyme, published by the Harpers, and of seve ral fugitive poems of merit. The song which we quote has attained a wide popularity. TIS SAID THAT ABSENCE CONQUERS LOVE. "Tis said that absence conquers love! And smile to hear thy name; They know me still the same; And when some other name I learn, And would not be forgot; E'en as the wounded bird will seek So, lady! I would hear thee speak, I've tried, alas! its power to prove HORACE GREELEY. HORACE GREELEY, a prominent journalist, was born at Amherst, New Hampshire, February 3, 1811. He received a limited common school education, the deficiencies of which he, however, in some measure supplied by unwearied activity from his earliest years in the pursuit of knowledge. At the age of fourteen, his parents having Herose Eve lez in the meantime removed to Vermont, he obtained employment as an apprentice in the office of the Northern Spectator, Pultney, Vermont. In 1830, the paper was discontinued and he returned home; but soon after made a second engagement to work as an apprentice in Erie, Pa., for fifty dollars a year, out of which he saved enough in a few months to expend twenty-five or thirty dollars for his father, then a farmer on the line between Chautauque county, New York, and Pennsylvania, and pay his travelling expenses to New York, where he arrived in August, 1831, “with a suit of blue cotton jean, two brown shirts, and five dollars in cash." He obtained work as a journeyman printer, and continued thus employed for eighteen months. 1834, he commenced with Jonas Winchester, afterwards the publisher of the New World, a weekly paper of sixteen pages quarto, called the In New Yorker. It was conducted with much ability as a political and literary journal, but was not successful. Its conductors gave it a long and fair trial of several years, and were finally compelled to abandon the enterprise. While editing this journal Mr. Greeley also conducted, in 1838, the Jeffersonian, published by the Whig Central Committee of the State, and the Log Cabin, a “campaign" paper, published for six months preceding the presidential election of 1840. Mr. Greeley's next enterprise was the publication of the New York Tribune, the first number of which appeared on Saturday, April 10, 1841. It soon took the stand which it has since maintained of a thoroughly appointed, independent, and spirited journal. In the July after its commencement, its editor formed a partnership with Mr. Thomas McElrath, in conjunction with whom the paper has been since conducted. In 1848 Mr. Greeley was elected a member of the House of Representatives. In 1851 he visited Europe, and was chosen chairman of one of the juries of the World's Fair at London. His letters written during his journey to the Tribune, were collected on his return in a volume, with the title Glances at Europe. In 1853 he edited a volume of papers from the Tribune, Art and Industry as Represented in the Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, New York. A number of addresses delivered by him on various occasions have been also collected in a volume, with the title of Hints towards Reforms. Mr. Greeley has been fortunate in securing, during an early stage of his career, a biographer who combines in an unusual degree the essential characteristics of enthusiasm, research, and good sense. Mr. J. Parton has presented to the public in The Life of Horace Greeley, a volume well balanced in its proportions, and attractive in style. ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY, THE present editor of the North American Review, was born in Beverley, Mass., March 19, 1811. He was graduated at Harvard in 1826; studied at the Cambridge Divinity School; remained a year at the college as mathematical tutor in 1832 and 1833; and was ordained in the latter year pastor of the South Congregational Church in Portsmouth, N. H., to which he is still attached. In the course of his ministerial life he has published in 1844, Lectures on Christian Doctrine, and in 1847, Sermons of Consolation. He has written memoirs, and edited the writings of the Rev. Jason Whitman, James Kinnard, Jr., J. W. Foster, and Charles A. Cheever, M. D. His published sermons and pamphlets are numerous. It is chiefly as a periodical writer that Mr. Peabody has become generally known. He was for several years one of the editors of the Christian Register, and has been for a long time a promi nent contributor to the Christian Examiner and North American Review, of which he became the editor on the retirement of Mr. Francis Bowen, at the commencement of 1854.* To recapitulate the different editorships of the North American, from a passage to our hand in the recently published "Memoirs of Youth and Manhood," by Prof. Sidney Willard, of Harvard. Mr. William Tudor commenced the work in Mr. Peabody's review articles cover most of the social and educational questions of the day, with the discussion of many topics of miscellaneous literature. He handles a ready and vigorous pen, is clear and animated in style, and well skilled in the arts of the reviewer. His address before the united literary societies of Dartmouth College on "the Uses of Classical Literature," is a suggestive analysis of this important question. Mr. Peabody is at present engaged in editing and preparing for the press, a Memoir of the late Gov. William Plumer of New Hampshire, from a manuscript life, left by his son the late IIon. William Plumer. FIRST VIVID IMPRESSIONS IN THE ANCIENT CLASSICS.* The Greek and Roman authors lived in a newer, younger world than ours. They were in the process of learning many things now well known. They were taking first glances, with earnestness and wonder, at many things now old and trite,-no less worthy of admiration than they were then, but dropped from notice and neglected. They give us first impressions of many forms of nature and of life, -impressions, which we can get nowhere else. They show us ideas, sentiments, and opinions in the process of formation,-exhibit to us their initial elements, reveal their history. They make known to us essential steps in human culture, which, in these days of more rapid progress, we stride over unmarked. They are thus invaluable aids in the study of the human mind, and of the intellectual history of the race, in the analysis of ideas and opinions,-in ascertaining, apart from our artificial theories, the ultimate, essential facts in every department of nature and of human life. For these uses, the classics have only increased in value with the lapse of time, and must still grow more precious with every stage of human progress and refinement, so that classical literature must ever be a favorite handmaid of sound philosophy. On subjects of definite knowledge, what we call the progress of knowledge is, in one aspect, the growth of ignorance. As philosophy becomes more comprehensive, it becomes less minute. As it takes in broader fields of view, it takes less accurate cognizance of parts and details. Even language participates in this process. Names become more general. Definitions enumerate fewer particulars. What are called axioms, embrace no longer self-evident propositions alone, but those also, which have been so established by the long and general consent of mankind, that the proofs on which they rest, and the truths which they include, are not recurred to. schoolboy now takes on trust, and never verifies, principles, which it cost ages of research to discover and mature. What styles itself analysis goes not back to the "primordia rerum." Now, the more rigid and minute our analysis, the more accurate of course our conceptions. Indeed, we do not fully understand general laws or comprehensive truths, until we have traced them out in detail, and seen them mirrored back from the particulars which they include. A whole can be faithfully studied only in its parts; and every part obeys the law, and bears the A May, 1815, ard edited it for two years. Then, from May, 1817, to March, 1818, inclusive, it was edited by Jared Sparks; from May, 1818, to Oct. 1819, inclusive, by Edward T. Channing; from Jan. 1820, to Oct. 1823, inclusive, by Edward Everett; from Jan. 1824, to April, 1880, inclusive, by Jared Sparks; from July, 1880, to Oct. 1835, by Alexander H. Everett; from Jan. 1836, to Jan. 1843, by John G. Palfrey; from 1848 to 1853, by Francis Bowen; and since, by Andrew P. Peabody. From the address on the "Uses of Classical Literature." type of the system, to which it belongs, so that, the more numerous the parts with which we are conversant, the more profound, intimate, vivid, experimental, is our knowledge of the whole. This minute, exhausting analysis we may advantageously prosecute by the aid of ancient philosophy and science. Laugh as we may at the puerile theories in natural history, broached or endorsed by Aristotle and by Pliny, they often, by their detailed sketches of facts and phenomena, which we have left unexamined because we have thought them well known, invest common things with absorbing interest, as the exponents of far reaching truths and fundamental laws. In like manner, in Plato's theories of the universe and of the human soul, or in the ethical treatises of Cicero, though we detect in them much loose and vague speculation, and many notions which shun the better light of modern times, we often find the constituent elements of our own ideas,-the parent thoughts of our truest thoughts,-those ultimate facts in the outward and the spiritual universe, which suggest inquiry and precede theory. A similar train of remark applies emphatically to the departments of rhetoric and eloquence. I know of no modern analysis of the elements and laws of written or uttered discourse, which can bear a moment's comparison with those of Cicero or Quintilian. We may, indeed, have higher moral conceptions of the art of writing and of oratory than they had. We may perhaps hold forth a loftier aim. We may see more clearly than they did, the intrinsic dignity of the author's or the orator's vocation; and may feel, as none but a Christian can, of what incalculable moment for time and for eternity his influence may be. But these eighteen centuries have only generalized, without augmenting, the catalogue of instruments by which mind is to act on mind, and heart on heart,-of the sources of argument and modes of appeal, which those master-rhetoricians defined in detail. Nor is it possible that, eighteen centuries hence, the "De Oratore" of Cicero should seem less perfect, or be less fruitful, or constitute a less essential part, than now, of the training of him, who would write what shall live, or utter what is worthy to be heard. Modern rhetoricians furnish us with weapons of forensic attack and defence, ready cast and shaped, and give us technical rules for their use. Cicero takes us to the mine and to the forge,--exhibits every stage of elaboration through which the weapons pass,-proves their temper, tries their edge for us. By his minute subdivision of the whole subject of oratory, by his detailed description of its kinds, its modes, and its instruments, by his thorough analysis of arguments, and of the sources whence they are drawn, he wrote in anticipation a perfect commentary on the precepts of succeeding rhetoricians; and we must look to him to test the principles and to authenticate the laws, which they lay down. And this preeminence belongs not to his transcendent genius alone; but is, to a great degree, to be traced to the fact, that he wrote when oratory as an art was young in Rome, and had perished before it grew old in Greece,— when it had no established rules, no authoritative canons, no prescriptive forms, departure from which was high treason to the art, when therefore it was incumbent on the orator to prove, illustrate, and defend whatever rules or forms he might propose. The view of ancient literature now under consideration obviously extends itself to the whole field of poetry. In our habitual straining after the vast and grand, we pass by the poetry of common and little things, and are hardly aware how much there is worthy of song in daily and unnoticed scenes and events,--in |
