NOT A STATESMAN.

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60. NOT A STATESMAN.

PERHARS; Mise, had

ERHAPS, Mr. Speaker, I should not have pre

sumed to rise, had I been duly influenced by what the gentleman from Alabama has just now told us of the characteristics of a statesman. For in that gentleman's esteem, the heart does not enter into the composition of a statesman. With him the statesman

is a creature all head and no heart. With me, on the contrary, the heart is of more account than the head and that, too, in all the possible circumstances of life, including even the province of statesmanship. A higher authority than the gentleman from Alabama makes more of the heart than of the head. His command, as well upon the statesman as upon every other person, is, "My son, give me thine heart." The heart first, the head afterwards. The faculties of man drive on but to mischief and ruin, unless the heart be first given to the right and the true.

Another gentleman from Alabama, upon reviewing my speech a fortnight ago, kindly informed me that I am but a sentimentalist, and not a statesman. To use almost precisely his words, "though I had attained some notoriety in the country as a sentimentalist, I had never risen to the dignity of a statesman.”

I beg that gentleman to be patient with me. I may yet become the dignified, heartless, frigid, conventional sort of being that makes up the accepted and current idea of a statesman. They say that Congress is a capital place for making a statesman of one who is willing to come under the process. They say so for the reason that Congress is a capital place

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DIMES AND DOLLARS.

for getting rid of all sentiment, and sympathy, and conscience.

Now, I cannot say that I am very ambitious to have realized in my own person the popular idea of a statesman. Nevertheless, I beg the gentleman to be patient with me. When I shall have been in Congress a few weeks longer, I may so far have lost my heart, and killed my soul, as to be a candidate for the honors of a statesman; and then the gentleman will, no doubt, be willing to take me by his own right hand and install me into that dignity which he and other statesmen so self-complacently enjoy.

61. DIMES AND DOLLARS

IMES and dollars! dollars and dimes!"

"DIME

Thus an old miser rang the chimes,
As he sat by the side of an open box,
With ironed angles and massive locks:
And he heaped the glittering coin on high,
And cried in delirious ecstasy ·

"Dimes and dollars! dollars and dimes!
Ye are the ladders by which man climbs
Over his fellows. Musical chimes!
Dimes and dollars! dollars and dimes!"

A sound on the gong, and the miser rose,
And his laden coffer did quickly close,

And locked secure.

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These are the times

For a man to look after his dollars and dimes.

A letter ! Ha! from my prodigal son.
The old tale poverty. Pshaw, begone!

DIMES AND DOLLARS.

Why did he marry when I forbade ?
As he has sown, so he must reap;
But I my dollars secure will keep.
A sickly wife and starving times?

IIe should have wed with dollars and dimes."

Thickly the hour of midnight fell;
Doors and windows were bolted well.
"Ha!" cried the miser, "not so bad:
A thousand dollars to-day I've made.
Money makes money; these are the times
To double and treble the dollars and dimes.
Now to sleep, and to-morrow to plan;
Rest is sweet to a wearied man."

And he fell to sleep with the midnight chimes,
Dreaming of glittering dollars and dimes.

The sun rose high, and its beaming ray
Into the miser's room found way.

It moved from the foot till it lit the head

Of the miser's low, uncurtained bed;

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And it seemed to say to him, "Sluggard, awake;
Thou hast a thousand dollars to make.
Up, man, up!" How still was the place,
As the bright ray fell on the miser's face!
Ha! the old miser at last is dead!
Dreaming of gold, his spirit fled,
And he left behind but an earthly clod,
Akin to the dross that he made his god.

What now avails the chinking chimes
Of dimes and dollars! dollars and dimes!
Men of the times! men of the times!
Content may not rest with dollars and dimes

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DEAD LANGUAGES.

Use them well, and their use sublimes
The mineral dross of the dollars and dimes.
Use them ill, and a thousand crimes
Spring from a coffer of dollars and dimes.
Men of the times! men of the times!
Let Charity dwell with your dollars and dimes.

A

62. DEAD LANGUAGES.

DEAD language! What a sad and solemn expression! I can understand what is meant by a "Dead Sea,” and should suppose it to be a sheet of water cut off from all intercourse with the main ocean, never rising with its flow, never sinking with its ebb, never skimmed by the sail of commerce, never flapped by wing of wandering bird, undisturbed by the bustle of the restless world; but slumbering in a desolate wilderness, far from the track of caravan, or railway, or steamship, in å stagnant and tide-forgotten and unheeded repose.

An enterprising traveller recently exhumed the sculptured monuments of a dead civilization. We then learned that Nineveh and Babylon were not only the homes of conquering kings, but the seats of tranquil learning and treasured science before ever a fleet had sailed from Aulis, or the eagles had promised empire to the watcher on the greeň Palatine.

The language of priestly and kingly Etruria is revealed to us only by dim marks upon vase or tablet, or by melancholy inscriptions upon sepulchral stones. That is indeed a language unquestionably dead. But can such a term be applied to the great Hellenic

DEAD LANGUAGES.

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speech, that in the Iliad has rolled, like the great "Father of Waters," its course unhindered down three thousand years; that moves stately and black-stoled in Eschylus; that reverberates with laughter half Olympian in Aristophanes; that pierces with a trumpet sound in Demosthenes; that smells of crocuses in Theocritus; that chirrups like a balm cricket in Anacreon? If this language be dead, then what lan

guage is alive?

Or is that old Italian speech dead and gone, that in Virgil flows like the Eridanus, calmly but majestically, through rich lowlands, fringed with tall poplars and rimmed with grassy banks; that quivers to wild strings of passion in Catullus; that sparkles in Horace like a well-cut diamond?

No! no! The music of Homer will die with the choral chants of "the Messiah," and the strains of Pindar with the symphonies of Beethoven; together Aristophanes, Cervantes, and Molière will pass away; the Mantuan will go hand in hand to oblivion with the Florentine; IIorace will fade out of ken linked arm in arm with that sweet fellow-epicure Montaigne; Antigone will be forgotten, may be a short century before Cordelia; and Plato and Aristotle will be entombed beneath the mausoleum that covers forever the thoughts of Bacon, Kepler, Newton, and La Place.

Moreover, before the last echoes of Greece and Rome shall have died away, a Slavonian horde will throng the Morea and the Cyclades; and, in some crumbling cathedral, Catholicism will have chanted for the last time its own 'nunc dimittis" in the grand imperial language of the City of the Seven Hills.