194 FIRST VIEW OF THE HEAVENS.

raises his inquiring gaze towards heaven; and lo! a silver crescent of light, clear and beautiful, hanging in the western sky, meets his astonished gaze. The young moon charms his untutored vision, and leads him upward to her bright attendants, which are now stealing, one by one, from out the deep blue sky. The solitary gazer bows, wonders, and adores.

The hours glide by; the silver moon is gone; the stars are rising, slowly ascending the heights of heaven, and solemnly sweeping downward in the stillness of the night. A faint streak of rosy light is seen in the east; it brightens; the stars fade; the planets are extinguished; the eye is fixed in mute. astonishment on the growing splendor, till the first rays of the returning sun dart their radiance on the young earth and its solitary inhabitant.

The curiosity excited on this first solemn night, the consciousness that in the heavens God had declared his glory, the eager desire to comprehend the mysteries that dwell in their bright orbs, have clung, through the long lapse of six thousand years, to the descendants of him who first watched and wondered. In this boundless field of investigation, human genius has won its most signal victories.

Generation after generation has rolled away, age after age has swept silently by; but each has swelled, by its contributions, the stream of discovery. Mysterious movements have been unravelled; mighty laws have been revealed; ponderous orbs have been weighed; one barrier after another has given way to the force of intellect; until the mind, majestic in its strength, has mounted, step by step, up the rocky height of its self-built pyramid, from whose star

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crowned summit it looks out upon the grandeur of the universe self-clothed with the prescience of a God.

I

92. THE UNION IN DANGER.

MAKE no threats; they are out of time and place; but I tell you, "more in sorrow than in anger," not only that you must pause, but that you must retrace your steps.

Often, sir, have I stood in a valley and watched the sun as it descended behind the mountains At morning and at noon, the whole earth was bathed in a flood of glorious light; but as the great luminary of day travelled westward on his journey, shadow after shadow began to steal along the mountain side. As he sank lower and lower, the shade gathered deeper and deeper, until the whole valley was covered with gloom, and not a solitary beam lighted up the thick darkness which settled upon it.

Even so has it been with this Republic. Its earlier days were blessed with the glad light of a glorious prosperity; trials and difficulties, like summer clouds, rapidly melted away; hosts of invaders, in all the dread panoply of war, landed upon our shores; but they were swept off like insects by the wing of the tempest. Everything around us was brightness and security. After a while the great arch enemy of man evoked this spirit of discord, and then slowly but surely the shadow and the night began to creep over the land.

I have watched it as I have watched the shade on the mountain. What it has once gained it has never

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lost. The spot that has once grown dark has remained dark forever. Steadily and continuously it has increased and deepened until it has spread above us a pall, like that which hung over Jerusalem when the curses denounced by the prophets were about to be fulfilled. And am I now to be told that I must neglect all the warnings written on the canvas of the past? madly turn away from the contemplation of the future, and permit myself to be lulled into a fatal security by siren songs in favor of the Union?

However much I may have loved that Union, I love the liberties of my native land far more; and you have taught me they may become antagonists, that the existence of the one might be incompatible with the other. The conviction came but slowly, for it was not without its bitterness. As a boy, I looked upon the Union as a holy thing, and worshipped it. As a man, I have gone through that in its defence which would have shrivelled thousands of the wretched silkworms who, in peaceful times, earn a cheap reputation for patriotism by professing unbounded love for the Union.

Even now I am not unmindful of all the glorious memories we have in common; I do not forget that there has come down to us a rich inheritance of glory which is incapable of division. I know that, side by side, the North and the South struggled through the Revolution; that side by side their bloody footprints tracked the snow of Valley Forge; that side by side they crossed the icy billows of the Delaware, and snatched from fate the victory at Trenton. I remember all the story of "the times that tried men's souls," and feel the full strength of all the bonds it

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has woven around us. If they have been fearfully weakened, if they are now about to snap asunder, the sin and the folly belong not to us, but to those who have forced us to choose between chains and infamy on the one hand, or equality and independence on the other. We are not the assailants, but the assailed, and it does not become him who maintains a just cause to calculate the consequences.

93. DISSOLUTION OF THE UNION IMPOSSIBLE.

GENTLEMEN: I desire to remark as to the threats

of disunion, listened to so painfully and so intensely, that the great body of the people of the North have never wished to raise such a question, nor to excite unreasonable agitation. They will not believe, when the scenes and speeches of to-day are laid out before them, that their brethren of the South are in earnest.

We will be governed by the will of the majority of the people, constitutionally expressed; but neither for the District of Columbia, nor for California, nor for New Mexico, will we even dream of a dissolution of the Union. Gentlemen, when you threaten we shall doubt, when you protest we shall disclaim; but no fervid declarations, no fiery appeals to southern feeling, no solemn invocations to the Almighty, will make us believe that here in this hall there is one man who chambers in his secret heart a purpose so deadly and so accursed. Sir, we do not believe the Union can

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ever be dissolved. No evidence shall convince us till the deed is done.

Yet if such a thing be possible, it shall not be our fault. We shall not be intimidated by threats of violence. We shall not shrink from the calm expression of our deliberate judgment. We are here as freemen to speak for freemen, and we will speak and act as becomes us in the face of the world and of posterity.

Who is there among us, with all this talk of dissolution, that does not love the Union? Is there a man in this vast assemblage who, on the coolest reflection, would not give his blood to cement it? Is not this our country, and is it not all our country? Gentlemen, I confess the response which you make gladdens my heart, and already I reproach myself that I could waver in my confidence, even for a moment.

It was a mournful spectacle to a true-minded man when threats of disunion, fierce and bitter, could draw forth shouts of applause from a part of this House, as if disunion were glory, and as if, indeed, the threat were already accomplished. And yet, sir, the echo contradicts the utterance. This shout for the Union will be taken up by the masses until it becomes a perpetual ANTHEM of hope and joy. It will swell among the mountains of the North, and travel with the winds

across the prairies of the West. It will reverberate through the land, and be repeated by a thousand advancing generations.

Sir, in the name of the North so rudely attacked, and speaking what I know to be their sentiments, I say a dissolution of this Union is, must be, shall be,