of this great people, and America will indeed tower aloft, incarnate Liberty enlightening the world.*

Puritan principle and Puritan pluck! Whether you contemplate the one or the other, you see but different forms of the same thing. In the old fable, whether the knight looked at the golden side or the silver side, it was still the same resplendent shield. So whether it was John Pym moving the Grand Remonstrance in Parliament, or John Milton touching the loftiest stop of epic song, or Oliver Cromwell and his Ironsides raising the mighty battle-cry at Worcester and Dunbar, "Arise, O Lord, and scatter Thine. enemies," then putting spur and sweeping forward like a whirlwind to scatter them; or that immortal company of men and women who before Pym and Milton and Cromwell bore their triumphant testimony and renewed upon the wild New England shore the miracle of Moses in the earlier wilderness, making Plymouth Rock like the rock of Horeb, a fountain of refreshment for all the people-all this long line of light in history, like the milky way compact of stars across the sky, is the splendid story of Puritan principle and Puritan pluck.

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

THE CONTEST AGAINST EXECUTIVE POWER.

THE contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from executive power. Whoever has engaged in her sacred cause, from the days of the downfall of those great aristocracies which had stood between the king and the people, to the time of our independence, has struggled for the accomplishment of that single object. On the long list of the champions of human freedom there is not one name dimmed by the reproach of advocating the extension of executive authority:

* This selection may end here.

THE CONTEST AGAINST EXECUTIVE POWER.

5

on the contrary, the uniform and steady purpose of all such champions has been to limit and restrain it. To this end the spirit of liberty, growing more and more enlightened, and more and more vigorous from age to age, has been battering for centuries against the solid butments of the feudal system. To this end, all that could be gained from the imprudence, snatched from the weakness, or wrung from the necessities of crowned heads, has been carefully gathered up, secured, and hoarded, as the rich treasures, the very jewels of liberty. To this end, popular and representative right has kept up its warfare against prerogative with various success, sometimes writing the history of a whole age in blood, sometimes witnessing the martyrdom of Sidneys and Russells; often baffled and repulsed, but still gaining, on the whole, and holding what it gained with a grasp which nothing but the extinction of its own being could compel it to relinquish. At length, the great conquest over executive power in the leading Western States of Europe has been accomplished. The feudal system, like other stupendous fabrics of past ages, is known only by the rubbish which it has left behind it. Crowned heads have been compelled to submit to the restraints of law, and the people, with that intelligence and that spirit which made their voice resistless, have been able to say to prerogative: "Thus far shalt thou come, and no further."

Into the full enjoyment of all which Europe has reached only through so slow and painful steps, we sprang at once, by the Declaration of Independence, and by the establishment of free, representative governments, governments borrowing more or less from the models of other free States, but strengthened, secured, improved in their symmetry, and deepened in their foundation by those great men of our own country, whose names will be as familiar to future times as if they were written on the arch of the sky.

DANIEL WEBSTER.

THE NECESSITY OF GOVERNMENT.

SOCIETY can no more exist without government, in one form or another, than man without society. The political, then, is man's natural state. It is the one for which his Creator formed him, into which he is impelled irresistibly, and the only one in which his race can exist and all his faculties be fully developed. It follows that even the worst form of government is better than anarchy; and that individual liberty or freedom must be subordinate to whatever power may be necessary to protect society against anarchy within or destruction without.

Just in proportion as a people are ignorant, stupid, debased, corrupt, exposed to violence within and danger without, the power necessary for the government to possess, in order to preserve society against anarchy and destruction, becomes greater and greater, and individual liberty less and less, until the lowest condition is reached, when absolute and despotic power becomes necessary on the part of the government, and individual liberty becomes extinct.

So, on the contrary, just as a people rise in the scale of intelligence, virtue, and patriotism, and the more perfectly they become acquainted with the nature of government, the ends for which it was ordered and how it ought to be administered, the power necessary for government becomes less and less, and individual liberty greater and greater. JOHN C. CALHOUN.

HELIOTROPE.

AMID the chapel's chequered gloom

She laughed with Dora and with Flora,
And chattered in the lecture-room-

The saucy little Sophomora!

HELIOTROPE.

Yet while (as in her other schools)
She was a privileged transgressor,
She never broke the simple rules
Of one particular professor.

But when he spoke of varied lore,
Paroxytones and moods potential,
She listened with a face that wore

A look half fond, half reverential.
To her that earnest voice was sweet,
And, though her love had no confessor,
Her girlish heart lay at the feet

Of that particular professor.

And he had learned, among his books,
That held the lore of ages olden,
To watch those ever-changing looks,

The wistful eyes, and tresses golden,
That stirred his pulse with passion's pain
And thrilled his soul with soft desire,
Longing for youth to come again,
Crowned with its coronet of fire.

Her sunny smiles, her winsome ways,
Were more to him than all his knowledge,
And she preferred his words of praise
To all the honors of the college.
Yet "What am foolish I to him?"
She whispered to her one confessor.
"She thinks me old, and gray, and grim,”
In silence pondered the professor.

Yet once, when Christmas bells were rung
Above ten thousand solemn churches,

And swelling anthems, grandly sung,

Pealed through the dim cathedral arches

7

Ere home returning, filled with hope,
Softly she stole by gate and gable,
And a sweet spray of heliotrope

Left on his littered study-table.

Nor came she more, from day to day,

Like sunshine through the shadows rifting;
Above her grave, far, far away,

The ever-silent snows were drifting :
And those who mourned her winsome face,
Found in its stead a swift successor,

And loved another in her place—

All, save the silent, old professor.

But, in the tender twilight gray,

Shut from the sight of carping critic,
His lonely thoughts would often stray
From Vedic verse and tongues Semitic-
Bidding the ghost of perished hope
Mock with its past the sad possessor

Of the dead spray of heliotrope

That once she gave the old professor.

FROM "ACTA COLUMBIANA."

TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF CHARLOTTE CORDAY.

Note 2.

(Abridged.)

On Wednesday morning, July 17, 1793, the thronged Palace of Justice and Revolutionary Tribunal can see the face of Charlotte Corday, beautiful and calm. A strange murmur ran through the hall at sight of her, you could not say of what character. Tinville has his indictments and tape-papers. The cutler of the Palais Royal will testify that he sold her the sheath-knife. "All these details are needless," interrupted Charlotte. "It is I that killed Marat." "By whose instigation?" "By no one's." "What tempted