Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain-storm!
Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds!
Ye signs and wonders of the element !

Utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise!

Thou too, hōar mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks,
Oft from whose feet the avalanche, unheard
Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene
Into the depth of clouds, that veil thy breast-
Thou too, again, stupendous mountain! thou,
That, as I raise my head, awhile bowed low
In adoration, upward from thy base

Slow traveling, with dim eyes suffused with tears,
Solemnly seemest, like a vapory cloud

To rise before me,-rise, oh, ever rise,

Rise like a cloud of incense, from the earth!
Thou kingly spirit, throned among the hills,
Thou dread ambassador from earth to heaven,
Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

S. T. COLERIDGE,

CCI. PATRICK HENRY AS A SPEAKER.

His voice was not remarkable for its sweetness; but it was firm, full of volume, and rather melodious than otherwise. Its charms consisted in the mellowness and fullness of its note, the ease and variety of its inflections, the distinctness of its articulation, the fine effect of its emphasis, the felicity with which it attuned itself to every emotion, and the vast compass which enabled it to range through the whole empire of human passion, from the deep and tragic half whisper of horror, to the wildest exclamation of overwhelming rage.

In mild persuasion it was as soft and gentle as the zephyr of spring; while in rousing his countrymen to arms, the winter storm that roars along the troubled Baltic, was not more awfully sublime. It was at all times perfectly under his command; or rather, indeed, it seemed to command itself, and to modulate its notes, most happily, to the sentiment he was uttering. It never exceeded, or fell short of the occasion. There was none of that long-continued and deafening Ovociferation, which always takes place when an ardent speaker has lost possession of himself—no monotonous clangor, no discordant shriek. Without being strained, it had that body and enunciation

which filled the most distant ear, without distressing those which were nearest him: hence it never became cracked or hoarse, even in his longest speeches, but retained to the last all its clearness and fullness of intonation, all the delicacy of its inflection, all the charms of its emphasis, and enchanting variety of its cadence.

His delivery was perfectly natural and well timed. It has indeed been said, that, on his first rising, there was a species of sub-cantus very observable by a stranger, and rather disagreeable to him; but that in a very few moments even this itself became agreeable, and seemed, indeed, indispensable to the full effect of his peculiar diction and conceptions. In point of time, he was very happy: there was no slow and heavy dragging, no quaint and measured drawling, with Cequidistant pace, no stumbling and floundering among the fractured members of deranged and broken periods, no undignified hurry and trepidation, no recalling and recasting of sentences as he went along, no retraction of one word and substitution of another not better, and none of those affected bursts of almost inarticulate impetuosity, which betray the rhetorician rather than display the orator.

On the contrary, ever self-collected, deliberate, and dignified, he seemed to have looked through the whole period before he commenced its delivery; and hence his delivery was smooth, and firm, and well accented; slow enough to take along with him the dullest hearer, and yet so commanding that the quick had neither the power nor the disposition to get the start of him. Thus he gave to every thought its full and appropriate force; and to every image all its radiance and beauty. No speaker ever understood better than Mr. Henry, the true use and power of the pause; and no one ever practised it with happier effect. His pauses were never resorted to, for the purpose of investing an insignificant thought with false importance; much less were they ever resorted to as a finesse, to gain time for thinking. The hearer was never disposed to ask, "Why that pause?" nor to measure its duration by a reference to his watch. On the contrary, it always came at the very moment when he would himself have wished it, in order to weigh the striking and important thought which had just been uttered; and the interval was always filled by the speaker with a matchless energy of look, which drove the thought home through the mind and through the heart.

His gesture, and this varying play of his features and voice, were so excellent, so ex'quisite, that many have referred his power as an orator principally to that cause; yet this was all his own, and his gesture, particularly, of so peculiar a cast, that it is said it would have become no other man. I do not learn that it was very abundant; for there was no trash about it; none of those false motions to which undisciplined speakers are so generally addicted; no chopping nor sawing of the air; no thumping of the bar to express an earnest

ness, which was much more powerfully, as well as more elegantly, expressed by his eye and his countenance. Whenever he moved his arm, or his hand, or even his finger, or changed the position of his body, it was always to some purpose; nothing was inefficient; every thing told; every gesture, every attitude, every look, was emphatic; all was animation, energy, and dignity.

Its great advantage consisted in this—that, various, bold, and original as it was, it never appeared to be studied, affected, or theatrical, or "to overstep," in the smallest degree, "the modesty of nature;" for he never made a gesture or assumed an attitude, which did not seem imperiously demanded by the occasion. Every look, every motion, every pause, every start, was completely filled and dilated by the thought which he was uttering, and seemed indeed to form a part of the thought itself. His action, however strong, was never vehement. He was never seen rushing forward, shoulder foremost, fury in his countenance, and frenzy in his voice, as if to overturn the bar, and charge his audience sword in hand. His judgment was too manly and too solid, and his task too true, to permit him to indulge in any such extravagance. His good sense and his self-possession never deserted him. In the loudest storm of declamation, in the fiercest blaze of passion, there was a dignity and temperance which gave it seeming.

IIe had the rare faculty of imparting to his hearers all the excess of his own feelings, and all the violence and tumult of his emotions, all the dauntless spirit of his resolution, and all the energy of his soul, without any sacrifice of his own personal dignity, and without treating his hearers otherwise than as rational beings. He was not the orator of a day; and therefore sought not to build his fame on the sandy basis of a false taste, fostered, if not created, by himself. He spoke for immortality; and therefore raised the pillars of his glory on the only solid foundation-the rock of nature.

WILLIAM WIRT.

CCII. NIGHT.

HAIL, glorious Night! we greet thy dewy reign,
Thy moonlit shadows and thy starry train,
The fleecy clouds that swim thy glowing sky,
Chased by the wanton zephyrs as they fly;
The silvery mists that form a gauzy vest,
To hide the throbbings of thy sombre breast,
And all the rivaling beauties that combine
To cast their star-eyed offerings at thy shrine.

.

Wearied with wanderings, and oppressed with woe,
The tired sojourner o'er this waste below,
Beholds with beaming eye the setting sun,

And hails the hour that tells his toil is done,
Throws his coarse blanket on the grassy plain,
And in thy arms forgets awhile his pain;
Rises refreshed, pursues his devious way,
In night forgetting all the toils of day,
Until he pauses at his journey's end,
And finds in Heaven, a father and a friend.

God said, "Let there be light," and darkness fled
Before the glory that his presence shed,
Celestial brightness rent the frowning sky,
And man first heard the gush of melody;
But Night returned her grateful °meed repose,
To soothe his toil and mitigate his woes,
When 'reft of Heaven he wandered o'er the wild,
Misfortune's hêir, and Sorrow's weeping child;
Wrapped in her mantle, cradled on her breast,
His tortured spirit sought a transient rest,
And in its dreamy flights regained once more
The dear delights of Heaven's receding shore.

So the pale prisoner in his narrow cell,
Forgets the morrow tolls his awful knell,

And smiles as bright-winged Fancy leads him on,
Through halcyon bowers and days for ever gone;
The shadowy elms, the cot that nestled wild,—
Where cloud-capt mountains were on mountains piled;
The merry brooklet, and the flashing stream
That glittered in the sun's resplendent beam;
The lake's smooth surface of the deepest blue,
The fragrant woodbine sparkling in the dew,
And all the joys that boyhood loved before,
Return to bless his longing soul once more.
But, see! while yet he dreams, yon clouds proclaim
The approach of day, and kindle with the flame;
He starts-awakes-the fond delusion flies,
And Hope, bright angel, folds her wings and dies!

Pale are the stars, and silence deep has thrown
Around a sleeping world her mystic zone,
No sound disturbs the stillness of repose,
And men forget their passions and theif woes,
Save the low twittering of the tiny wren
Who broods her fledglings in the wooded glen,

And the soft zephyrs sighing lest their breath
Should wake the forest-all is still as death:
With noiseless step across the barren moor
A white-robed angel seeks the cotter's door,
Enters unbidden, breaks the golden bowl,

And claims the prize of Heaven-a good man's soul.
He hears the summons as a veteran old

Whose days of toil and warfare have been told,
At death's dark portals lays his armor down,
And grasps the rich reward, a seraph's crown,

Mysterious Night! to weary mortals given,
The prelude of a better rest in Heaven,
With watchful care thy mild-eyed spirit broods
O'er peopled 'marts and trackless solitudes;
And on the shades thy mighty pinions sweep,
The foamy waters of a restless deep,
Until their silent influence circles round
The trackless waste-old ocean's deep profound.

Spirit of gloom! as countless ages roll,
In quick succession to their Lethean goal,
Thy shadowy wings shall hover in the skies,
And thy wild beauties ravish other eyes;
Beneath thy earnest watch shall thousands sleep,
Doomed for awhile to struggle and to weep,
Until they pause on life's remotest shore,
And Time, with all its cares, shall be no more.

ROLLIN MCNEIL.

CCIH.-GIANT PLANTS.

As there are some orders of plants of larger growth than others, so in the same order there are species of such colossal dimensions, as to have long been not only subjects of wonder, but of religious reverence and historical association. Among these may be ranked the Adansonia, the banyan, and others of the tropical forest, on which nature has invariably impressed the most gigantic proportions. Such individuals may be regarded not only as giants, but as patriarchs; not only as emblems of strength, but as emblems of duration.

The Adansonia, which derives its name from the French botanist Michel Adanson, belongs to the Bombacea, or cotton tree tribe, and is justly regarded as the colossus of the vegetable kingdom. It is a