BY THE PASSAIC. WHERE the river seeks the cover There I dangle, O, 'tis sweet to feel the plastic And I dangle, Mute and sly. Then I gently shake the tackle, That old trout, so wary grown. So I dangle, All alone. Then when grows the sun too fervent, Now we see the treacherous hook!" FREEDOM THE CURE OF ANARCHY. Maud, as if by hazard wholly, There to dangle, With her hook. Then somehow the rod reposes, That unfold upon her cheek ; And her small hand, white and tender, While I angle? 115 Cupid, speak! FITZ JAMES O'BRIEN. Note 47. FREEDOM THE CURE OF ANARCHY. THE march of the human mind is slow. It was not until two hundred years discovered that, by an eternal law, Providence had decreed vexation to violence, and poverty to rapine. Your ancestors did, however, at length, open their eyes to the ill husbandry of injustice. They found that the tyranny of a free people could of all tyrannies the least be endured, and that laws made against a whole nation were not the most effectual methods for securing its obedience. Accordingly, in the twenty-seventh year of Henry the Eighth the course was entirely altered. With a preamble, stating the entire and perfect rights of the Crown of England, it gave to the Welsh all the rights and privileges of English subjects. A political order was established. The military power gave way to the civil. The marches were turned into counties. But that a nation should have a right to English liberties, and yet no share in the fundamental security of those liberties, seemed a thing so incongruous that eight years after a complete representation by boroughs was bestowed upon Wales by act of Parliament. From that moment, as by charm, the tumults subsided; obedience was restored; peace, order, and civilization followed in the train of liberty. When the day-star of the English Constitution had arisen in their hearts, all was harmony within and without. The very same year the County Palatine of Chester received the same relief from its oppressions, and the same remedy to its disorders. Before this time it was little less distempered than Wales. The inhabitants, without rights themselves, were the fittest to destroy the rights of others; and from thence Richard the Second drew the standing army of archers with which for a time he oppressed England. The people of Chester applied to Parliament in a petition of grievances. What did Parliament do with this audacious address? Reject it as a libel? Treat it as an affront to government? Spurn it as a derogation from the rights of legislation? Did they toss it over the table? Did they burn it by the hands of the common hangman? They took the petition of grievance, all rugged as it was, without softening or temperament, unpurged of the original bitterness and indignation of complaint. They made it the very preamble to their act of redress, and consecrated its principle to all ages in the sanctuary of legislation. Chester, civilized as well as Wales, demonstrated that freedom, and not servitude, is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition. EDMUND BURKE. Note 48. THE GENIUS OF SUCCESS. A FEW months ago one of our popular periodicals, in its comments upon the deeds of a departed statesman, said: "His life was a success." So we whose hearts to-day throb THE GENIUS OF SUCCESS. 117 warm with life, wish that when death's messenger has summoned us, the same words may be our eulogy. Then indeed would the future make glorious our still living memories. Time's obscuring footsteps would not crush into oblivion our history, but chisel it in immortal characters on the eternal adamant. The But fame is not to be had without a recompense. pathway which leads to the heights of success is not hedged with flowers and cut with evenly graded steps. It is rugged, steep, difficult; and he who seeks to reach the eminence will find many obstacles which oppose him and which must be conquered before he rests upon the summit. More than twenty years of exhaustive study, and a quarter of a century in the more practical labor of public life, gave Milton the mental strength and polish which made him the great poet of his age. This enabled him to do for England what Homer did for Greece, Virgil for Rome, and Dante for Italy. At the celebrated trial of Warren Hastings the audience was spell-bound by Burke's masterly plea. The accused shrank in terror from the vivid picture which the great lawyer drew of his base character. But Burke was one of the profoundest scholars of his age, and never depended upon his reputation, but made exhaustive study the battlement of his power. History is filled with the records of men who attained success and were the controlling, directing forces of their land and time. They gained success because they were active, determined, patient. These are they who have given to literature its thought and beauty: made science the mighty force of civilization and art, almost the rival of nature. They have made steam the soul of machinery and peopled land and water with the forms it animates. By them the ocean has become the whispering gallery of continents, and air the highway of thought. A little more than two centuries ago a venerable old man was summoned befor the Inquisition and compelled to swear that truths which it had taken a life to demonstrate were false. But the world moved notwithstanding, and today, in the clearer light which those very truths have flooded upon us, civilization names Galileo with her great apostles. Thus the success of some lives is obscured for long years; but time at last dispels the cloud and the sunlight of truth flashes in golden glory over the world. The true genius of success culminates in self-sacrificing labor for the welfare of humanity. Howard, revolutionizing the prison-system of Europe and tempering human justice with divinest mercy: Garibaldi, laboring for the freedom of his beloved Italy: Mrs. Stowe, Garrison, and Phillips speaking for the negro! Death never comes to such lives. They need no eulogy, no song, no marble pile. Their names live in the beating hearts of millions. The student, toiling by his midnight-lamp, the convict in prison and dungeon, turn back to them for hope and encouragement. Their names are rich legacies to the future, which measures the success of every life by deeds and not by years. Note 49. THE GREAT DANGER OF THE REPUBLIC. Ir is a terrible thought that the very splendor of our civilization is the danger of our times. In the multiplication of the sources of wealth and prosperity, in the utilization of all the agencies of nature to do the service of man, in mechanical, industrial, and intellectual development, this century is unparalleled. And yet every element of progress carries with it the agencies of destruction, the greatest benefits find the most dangerous evils marching along at equal pace. As dynamite has made possible the tunneling of the Alps and the Sierras, the piercing of isthmuses by great ship canals, and the illimitable expanse of the world's commerce, and at the same time threatens, both in old countries and the new, the very foundations of society, so |