volution of 1776, the Eroquah proposed their confederacy to our fathers as a model on which to form a union of the colonies. The Hollanders came hither deeply imbued with their national spirit of liberty and rectitude, and like the followers of Penn, enjoyed peace, toleration and happiness, the legitimate results of the comparatively free institutions they had respectively established, and which by a singular coincidence seemed to flourish best in this northern land. The early puritans contemned all nobles and earthly distinctions; and in regarding toleration as an abomination and punishing men as criminals for matters of conscience, and more than all, in the exterminating policy they adopted towards their red brethren, they gave evidence of the imperfection of their principles of liberty. A regard for truth compels us to say, that this policy was not adopted by the Hollanders, who settled in this state and in New Jersey. The Dutch lived with their red brethren on terms of the strictest amity and friendship. The life of not a single Indian was destroyed, nor a single acre of land occupied except by regular purchase or donation. The colonial assemby of New York in 1717, expressed their opinion in reference to this matter, in the following strong terms: "To reduce the Indians by force and possess their lands, we utterly abhor. Such an action must bear the brand of the blackest perfidy and ingratitude." The Eroquah were kind-hearted and affectionate, and never returned evil for good, and in them the character of the good Samar itan of the Scriptures was well exemplified. Without the Christian virtue of tolerance, civil and religious liberty, two fundamentals of a republican government, cannot exist. The principles of liberty introduced by the puritans and Dutch, full of imperfections though they were, yet lie at the foundation of our political institutions. If the memories of our venerated puritanic and Dutch ancestors, are dear to our hearts, is it not, ought it not to be mainly because they assisted in sowing the seed from which has germinated that goodly tree of liberty that now stands rooted firm in the congenial soil of our country, whose wide spread and ever and anon wider spreading branches encompass our land, and under whose delightful shades we can now sit "having none to molest or to make us afraid." If to these, our ancestors, we owe so much, ought we not to do them honor, and commemorate their virtues? Influenced by similar reasons and motives, let us not withhold the just tribute of respect due to the "free united Braves," the former sovereigns of an Empire Republic, who occupied the site of our own, our native state. Who will refuse to join us in cherishing their memories, and holding them up to view "a light to after times." A SERENADE. Sung to the air of "LA CRACOVIENNE;" slow and with much expression. How sad these earthly partings are, With hearts which friendship's spell have known! How brighter shines that silver chain Which deepest love has round me thrown! When softly shone the star of night O'er silent stream and lonely bower, To tones of soul-entrancing power— But though affection's heart-warm gush We part-but 'tis to meet again. Then dearest! wake once more the lay That oft so sweetly, warmly fell, Let mem'ry's grief in music die, While now we sadly breathe-Farewell! Albany, June, 1843. L'A. DESTINIES OF POETRY. [From the French of Lamartine. Continued from No. 5, p. 288.] Such is poetry in the past, but what will it be in the future? One day, nearly two months afterward, I had crossed the summit of Sannim, covered with eternal snow, and had again descended from Lebanon crowned with its diadem of cedars, into the bare and barren plane of Heliopolis. At the end of a long and weary day's journey, upon the horizon still far distant before us and along the farther outline of the black halls of Anti-Lebanon, an immense group of yellow ruins gilded by the setting sun, stood out from the shade of the mountain, and reflected the evening rays. Our guides pointed them out to us with the finger, exclaiming Balbec! Balbec! It was indeed that wonder of the desert, mysterious Balbec, coming forth all brilliant from its unknown sepulchre, to tell us of the ages whose memory history has forever lost. We were slowly advancing upon our wearied horses, with gaze riveted upon the gigantic wall, upon the glittering and colossal columns which seemed to rise and swell and stretch away at our approach. A deep stillness reigned through all our caravan; each one feared to lose a single impression of this scene by uttering the feeling he had just experienced; even the Arabs were mute and seemed to take in a great and deep thought from this spectacle, which brings to one level all our thoughts. At last we reached the first blocks of marble and the first broken columns which the earthquake had thrown a full mile from the temples themselves, like dry leaves thrown far from the forest-tree, when the whirlwind has gone by. The deep and broad quarries which seam like gorges the black sides of Anti-Lebanon, already opened their depths below our horses' feet. These vast stone basins, the edges of which still showed the deep traces of the chisel which had opened them to draw thence other hills of stone, presented still some enormous blocks, half detached from their base, and others hewn on four sides and which seemed to await only the carriages or the arms of giants in order to remove them. A single one of these moellons of Balbec, was sixty-two feet long, twenty-four feet broad, and sixteen feet thick. One of the Arabs dismounted, lowered himself into the quarry and laying hold of the sculptured ornaments and the moss that had rooted itself there, clambered up and ran hither and thither upon the platform, uttering his wild cries. But the massive pedestal overwhelmed the man of our day. Man here sinks into insignificance before his own handiwork. It would demand the united strength of sixty-thousand men of our time, to raise this stone alone; and the temples of Balbec offer still more enormous ones, raised twenty-five or thirty feet above the ground to hold colonnades proportioned to such a base. We pursued our course with the desert on our left and the wavy outline of Anti-Lebanon on the right, passing some little fields cultivated by Arab shepherds, and the bed of a broad torrent which winds among these ruins and on whose borders grow some tall walnut trees. The acropolis or artificial hill, upon which all the great monuments of Heliopolis stand, was visible here and there between branches and above the tops of the trees, till at length we saw it full before us and the entire caravan halted instinctively. No pen, no pencil could describe the impression which this one view makes upon the soul. Beneath our feet, in the bed of the torrent, in the fields, around the trunks of the trees, huge blocks of red or grey granite, blood-red porphyry, snowy marble, stone, yellow and brilliant as the marble of Paros, shafts, sculptured capitals, architraves, volutes, cornices, entablatures, pedestals, the scattered and seemingly palpitating fragments of prostrate statues-all this in disorder, gathered in heaps, dispersed in a thousand fragments, and, so to speak, flowing from all points like the lava of some huge volcano, vomiting the remains of a great empire. There was scarce a path to move along these ruins; and the hoofs of our animals struck at each step against the polished acanthus of some cornice, or on the snowy breast of a prostrate female statue; only the water of the river of Balbec, showed itself here and there among the fragments, laving with its soft foam, the broken stones that opposed its course. Beyond these crests of ruins, which seemed to stretch away like immense marble reefs, the hill of Balbec a square of a thousand paces by about seven hundred, built by the hand of man, and of hewn stones, some fifty or sixty feet in length and from fifteen to thirty feet high, lifted before us its eastern side, with its low base and its encrustation of granite, in which three pieces alone covered a surface of one hundred and twenty feet and the broad mouths of its subterranean vaults, where the stream plunged in, roaring, and the wind bore with the spray murmurings like the distant sound of a great cathedral-bell. On this immense platform, the extremity of the great temples displays itself in golden color, detached from the rose-tinted horizon. Some of these solitary monuments seemed as perfect as though they came but yesterday from the hands of the workman; others presented only standing fragments, isolated columns, remnants of bending walls, and dismantled pediments; the eye lost itself in the avenues of colonnades and temples, and the too elevated horizon prevented us from seeing the place where this population of stone ended. The seven gigantic columns of the great temple, raising majestically above all their rich and and colossal entablature, held dominion over all this scene, and lost itself in the blue heaven of the desert like an aerial altar for the sacrifice of giants. We stopped but a few minutes to examine only that for which we had crossed such perils and distances to visit; and sure at last of enjoying for the next day this spectacle, which even dreams could never restore to us, we continued our journey. The day declined, and it was necessary to find an asylum under the tent or under the arch of the ruins, where we might pass the night and rest ourselves after a march of fourteen hours. We set out, leaving on our left the mountain of ruins, a vast region white with their rubbish, and traversing several fields of grass browsed by goats and camels, we bent our course towards the smoke which rose several hundred feet from us, from among a group of ruins intermingled with Arab huts. The soil was uneven and mountainous and resounded under the shoes of our horses, as if the vaults over which we were treading, would open. We arrived at the door of a cabin half concealed by the fragments of fallen marble, and of which the door and narrow windows, without glass or shutters, were con structed from the rubbish of marble and porphyry badly cemented together. A small arch of stone, raised one or two feet above the platform, served as a roof for this domicile, and a small bell, like those they paint on the grotto of hermits, trembled at every gust of wind. This was the Episcopal palace of the Arabian bishop of Balbec, who has the charge of a little flock of twelve or fifteen families of the Greek communion lost in the midst of these deserts, and the ferocious tribes of independent Arabs of Bekaa. Until now we had not seen a living being, except the jackals which ran between the columns, and the little swallows with rose-colored necks, which bordered like an ornament of oriental architecture the cornices of the platform. The bishop, warned by the noise of our caravan, arrived soon and leaning on his door offered me its hospitality. He was a fine old man with whitened locks and beard, of a grave and mild physiognomy, a noble speech soft and cadenced, realizing the idea of the priest in poem or romance, and altogether worthy of representing the figure of peace, resignation and charity, in this solemn scene of ruins and meditation. He invited us into a small inner court, paved also with the precious fragments of statues, pieces of mosaic and antique vases, and, delivering up to us his house, that is to say, two small, low rooms, without furniture and without doors, following the oriental custom, he retired and left us absolute masters of his residence. Whilst our Arabs forced in the earth outside of the house pins of iron, to which, by means of rings they might fasten the legs of our horses, and whilst the others lighted a fire in the court to prepare for us the boiled rice and to cook the muffins of barley, we went out to throw a second look upon the monuments which surrounded us. The great temples were before us like statues on their pedestal; the sun was casting upon them its last ray, which retired slowly from one column to another, as the glimmers of a lamp which the priest carries away to the bottom of the sanctuary: the thousand shadows of porticos, of pillars, of colonnades, of altars, quickly spread themselves afar, under the vast forest of stone, and by degrees on the acropolis, the brilliant gleam of marble. Farther on in the plain was an ocean of ruins which was only lost in the horizon; or rather vast waves of stone, broken against a rock and covering an immense shore with their whiteness and their foam. Nothing elevated itself above this sea of ruins, and night which fell on a chain of mountains already gray, buried them successively in its shadows. We remained some moments seated, silent and pensive before this spectacle, and then slowly re-entered the little court of the bishop, lightened by the fire of the Arabs. Seated upon some fragments of cornice and capitals which served as benches in the court, we hastily partook of the sober repast of a traveller in the desert, and we rested some time to talk over before sleeping, that which filled our thoughts. The fire |