soul remain unadorned and naked! What! send out your vessels to the furthest ocean, and make battle with the monsters of the deep, in order to obtain the means of lighting up your dwellings and workshops, and prolonging the hours of labor for the meat that perisheth, and permit that vital spark, which God has kindled, which he has intrusted to our care, to be fanned into a bright and heavenly flame,-permit it, I say, to languish and go ont! What considerate man can enter a school, and not reflect, with awe, that it is a seminary where immortal minds are training for eternity? What parent but is, at times, weighed down with the thought, that there must be laid the foundations of a building which will stand, when not merely temple and palace, but the perpetual hills and adamantine rocks on which they rest, have melted away!-that a light may there be kindled which will shine, not merely when every artificial beam is extinguished, but when the affrighted sun has fled away from the heavens? THE ETERNAL CLOCKWORK OF THE SKIES. We derive from the observations of the heavenly bodies which are made at an observatory our only adequate measures of time, and our only means of comparing the time of one place with the time of another. Our artificial timekeepers,-clocks, watches, and chronometers, however ingeniously contrived and admirably fabricated, are but a transcript, so to say, of the celestial motions, and would be of no value without the means of regulating them by observation. It is impossible for them, under any circumstances, to escape the imperfection of all machinery, the work of human hands; and the moment we remove with our timekeeper east or west, it fails us. It will keep home-time alone, like the fond traveller who leaves his heart behind him. The artificial instrument is of incalculable utility, but must itself be regulated by the eternal clockwork of the skies. This single consideration is sufficient to show how completely the daily business of life is affected and controlled by the heavenly bodies. It is they and not our main-springs, our expansion. balances, and our compensation-pendulums, which give us our time. To reverse the line of Pope, 'Tis with our watches as our judgments: none But for all the kindreds and tribes and tongues of men,-each upon their own meridian,-from the Arctic pole to the equator, from the equator to the Antarctic pole, the eternal sun strikes twelve at noon, and the glorious constellations, far up in the ever lasting belfries of the skies, chime twelve at midnight--twelve for the pale student over his flickering lamp-twelve amid the flaming wonders of Orion's belt, if he crosses the meridian at that fated hour-twelve by the weary couch of languishing humanity, twelve in the star-paved courts of the Empyrean-twelve for the heaving tides of the ocean; twelve for the weary arm of labor; twelve for the toiling brain; twelve for the watching, waking, broken heart; twelve for the meteor which blazes for a moment and expires; twelve for the comet whose period is measured by centuries; twelve for every substantial, for every imaginary thing, which exists in the sense, the intellect, or the fancy, and which the speech or thought of man, at the given meridian, refers to the lapse of time. Discourse at Albany, 1856. THE HEAVENS BEFORE AND AFTER DAWN. I had occasion, a few weeks since, to take the early train from Providence to Boston, and for this purpose rose at two o'clock in the morning. Every thing around was wrapt in darkness and hushed in silence, broken only by what seemed at that hour the unearthly clank and rush of the train. It was a mild, screne midsummer's night: the sky was without a cloud, the winds were whist. The moon, then in the last quarter, had just risen, and the stars shone with a spectral lustre but little affected by her presence. Jupiter, two hours high, was the herald of the day; the Pleiades just above the horizon shed their sweet influence in the east; Lyra sparkled near the zenith; Andromeda veiled her newly-discovered glories from the naked eye in the south; the steady pointers far beneath the pole looked meekly up from the depths of the north to their sovereign. Such was the glorious spectacle as I entered the train. As we proceeded, the timid approach of twilight became more perceptible; the intense blue of the sky began to soften; the smaller stars, like little children, went first to rest; the sister-beams of the Pleiades soon melted together; but the bright constellations of the west and north remained unchanged. Steadily the wondrous transfiguration went on. Hands of angels hidden from mortal eyes shifted the scenery of the heavens; the glories of night dissolved into the glories of the dawn. The blue sky now turned more softly gray; the great watch-stars shut up their holy eyes; the east began to kindle. Faint streaks of purple soon blushed along the sky; the whole celestial concave was filled with the inflowing tides of the morning light, which came pouring down from above in one great ocean of radiance; till at length, as we reached the Blue Hills, a flash of purple fire blazed out from above the horizon, and turned the dewy tear-drops of flower and leaf into rubies and diamonds. In a few seconds, the everlasting gates of the morning were thrown wide open, and the lord of day, arrayed in glories too severe for the gaze of man, began his state. Ibid. THE UNIVERSAL BOUNTIES OF PROVIDENCE. A celebrated skeptical philosopher of the last century—the historian, Hume-thought, to demolish the credibility of the Christian revelation, by the concise argument,-"It is contrary to experience that a miracle should be true, but not contrary to experience that testimony should be false." Contrary to experience that phenomena should exist which we cannot trace to causes perceptible to the human sense, or conceivable by human thought! It would be much nearer the truth to say that within the husbandman's experience there are no phenomena which can be rationally traced to any thing but the instant energy of creative power. Did this philosopher ever contemplate the landscape at the close of the year, when seeds, and grains, and fruits have ripened, and stalks have withered, and leaves have fallen, and winter has forced her icy curb even into the roaring jaws of Niagara, and sheeted half a continent in her glittering shroud, and all this - teeming vegetation and organized life are locked in cold and marble obstructions, and after week upon week, and month upon month, have swept, with sleet, and chilly rain, and howling storm, over the earth, and riveted their crystal bolts upon the door of nature's sepulchre,-when the sun at length begins to wheel in higher circles through the sky, and softer winds to breathe over melting snows,-did he ever behold the long-hidden earth at length appear, and soon the timid grass peep forth; and anon the autumnal wheat begin to paint the field, and velvet leaflets to burst from purple buds, throughout the reviving forest, and then the mellow soil to open its fruitful bosom to every grain and seed dropped from the planter's hand,-buried, but to spring up again, clothed with a new, mysterious being; and then, as more fervid suns inflame the air, and softer showers distil from the clouds, and gentler dews string their pearls on twig and tendril, did he ever watch the ripening grain and fruit, pendent from stalk, and vine, and tree; the meadow, the field, the pas ture, the grove, each after his kind, arrayed in myriad-tinted garments, instinct with circulating life; seven millions of counted leaves on a single tree, each of which is a system whose exquisite complication puts to shame the shrewdest cunning of the human hand; every planted seed and grain, which had been loaned to the earth, compounding its pious usury thirty, sixty, a hundred fold, all harmoniously adapted to the sustenance of living nature, the bread of a hungry world; here, a tilled corn-field, whose yellow blades are nodding with the food of man; there, an unplanted wilderness, the great Father's farm,-where He "who hears the raven's cry" has cultivated, with his own hand, his merciful crop of berries, and nuts, and acorns, and seeds, for the humbler families of animated nature; the solemn elephant, the browsing deer, the wild pigeon whose fluttering caravan darkens the sky, the merry squirrel, who bounds from branch to branch, in the joy of his little life, has he seen all this? Does he see it every year, and month, and day? Does he live, and move, and breathe, and think, in this atmosphere of wonder,-himself the greatest wonder of all, whose smallest fibre and faintest pulsation is as much a mystery as the blazing glories of Orion's belt? And does he still maintain that a miracle is contrary to experience? If he has, aud if he does, then let him go, in the name of Heaven, and say that it is contrary to experience that the august Power which turns the clods of the earth into the daily bread of a thousand million souls could feed five thousand in the wilderness. Address before the New York Agricultural Society, October 9, 1857 JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE, 1795-1820. Green be the turf above thee, Will tears the cold turf steep. There should a wreath be woven, And I, who woke each morrow And feel I cannot now. While memory bids me weep thee, JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE was born in the city of New York, August 7, 1795. After a suitable preparatory education, he entered upon the study of medicine, obtained his degree in October, 1816, and soon after was married to a daughter of Henry Eckford, a wealthy merchant, and was thus placed above the necessity of laboring in his profession. It was well that it was so; for his health, always delicate, began to decline, and, in the winter of 1819, he went to New Orleans, in the hope that its milder climate would be of service to him. But he returned in the spring of 1820, not in the least improved, lingered through the summer, and died on the 21st of September, 1820. Drake began to write verses when he was very young, and, before he was sixteen, contributed, anonymously, to two or three newspapers. Some humorous and satirical odes, called the Croaker Pieces, were written by him for the "Evening Post," in March, 1819; and soon after, his friend Halleck, the poet, united with him, and the pieces were signed "Croaker & Co." The last one, written by Drake, was that spirited ode, The American Flag. But THE CULPRIT FAY is that on which the fame of Drake chiefly rests, and an ever-enduring foundation will it prove to be; for a poem of more exquisite fancy--as happily conceived as it is artistically executed-we have hardly had since the days of Milton' "Comus." It opens with the gathering-"in the middle watch of a summer's night"-of countless spirits of earth from their various homes. IV. They come from beds of lichen green, They creep from the mullen's velvet screen; Some on the backs of beetles fly From the silver tops of moon-touch'd trees, Where they swung in their cobweb hammocks high, And rock'd about in the evening breeze; Some from the hum-bird's downy nest, They had driven him out by elfin power, And, pillow'd on plumes of his rainbow breast, Had slumber'd there till the charméd hour; Some had lain in the scoop of the rock, With glittering ising-stars inlaid; And some had open'd the four-o'clock, And now they throng the moonlight glade, Their little minim forms array'd They assemble for the following purpose: V. For an Ouphe has broken his vestal vow; He has loved an earthly maid, And left for her his woodland shade; He has lain upon her lip of dew, Fann'd her cheek with his wing of air, To the elfin court must haste away :- The hapless creature is thus condemned: VIII. "Thou shalt seek the beach of sand |