8. Let no man dare, when I am dead, to charge me with dishonor; let no man attaint' my memory by believing that I could have engaged in any cause but that of my country's liberty and independence; or that I could have become the pliant minion of power in the oppression or the miseries of my countrymen.

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9. I would not have submitted to a foreign oppressor, for the same reason that I would resist the domestic tyrant in the dignity of freedom, I would have fought upon the threshold of my country, and her enemy should enter only by passing over my lifeless corpse. Am I, who lived but for my country, and who have subjected myself to the vengeance of the jealous and watchful oppressor, and now to the bondage of the grave, only to give my countrymen their rights, am I to be loaded with calumny, and not to be suffered to resent or repel it? No: God forbid!

10. If the spirits of the illustrious dead participate in the concerns and cares of those who are dear to them in this transitory life, O, ever dear and venerated shade of my departed father! look down with scrutiny on the conduct of your suffering son, and see if I have even for a moment deviated from those principles of morality and patriotism which it was your care to instil into my youthful mind, and for an adherence to which I am now to offer up my life!

11. My lords, you are impatient for the sacrifice. The blood which you seek is not congealed by the artificial terrors which surround your victim; it circulates warmly and unruffled, through the channels which God created for noble purposes, but which you are bent to destroy for purposes so grievous that they cry to Heaven! Be yet patient! I have but a few words more to say. I am going to my silent grave; my lamp of life is nearly extinguished; my race is run; the grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom.

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12. I have but one request to ask, at my departure from this world; it is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph; for, as no one who knows my motives dares now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse 10 them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character. When my country shall take her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written!

1 MIT-I-GA'TION.

Abatement of any | PĂR'RI-CĪDE. The murder or the

thing painful or severe; a rendering less severe.

TRI-BU'NAL. Judgment-seat; court of justice.

murderer of a parent.

7 AT-TAINT'. Cloud with infamy; stain; disgrace.

8 MIN'ION. A favorite in an ill sense; a low, base dependant.

9 PREJ'U-DICE. A leaning in favor of one side of a cause, for some reason other than its justice; previous bias or judgment.

10 AS-PËRSE'. Slander; defame.

[Rev. Samuel F. Smith, D. D., is a native of Boston, and a graduate of Harvard College of the class of 1829. He is a clergyman of the Baptist denomination, and the editor of the publications of the American Baptist Missionary Union.]

1. My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing;

Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrim's pride,
From every mountain side
Let freedom ring.

[The following extract is a portion of a sermon of striking eloquence and beauty, by the Rev. Leonard Swain, of Providence, Rhode Island, published in the "Bibliotheca Sacra."]

1. MAN'S dominion is the solid land. If the Old World speaks of man, to tell where he has been, so the New World seems to speak of him, and to tell where he shall be. In the forests of the Mississippi, a thousand miles

beyond the outmost cities, the sound of the axe and the gun declares that the all-conquering wave of civilization is coming; and a thousand miles farther on, where even these prophetic sounds have not been heard, there is that which speaks of human approach.

2. The stillness which is there is the stillness of fear and not of security. It tells that man is coming. The very silence is full of his name. The trees whisper it to one another. The fox and the panther utter it in their cry. The winds take up the secret, and give it to the hills, and these to the echoing vales. The fountains publish it to the brooks, and the brooks to the rivers, and the rivers spread it a thousand miles along their banks, and proclaim it at last to the northern seas that man, the conqueror and king, is coming; that his footstep has been heard on the Atlantic shore; that the hills await him; that the vales expect him; that the forests bend their tremulous tops to listen for him; that the fear of him is upon the beasts of the wood, the fowl of the mountain, the cattle of a thousand hills; upon all rivers and plains, upon all quarries of rock and mines of precious ore'; for all that is within the compass of land is given to his dominion, and he shall subdue its strength and appropriate its treasures, and scatter the refuse of it as the dust beneath his feet.

3. There man's empire stops. God has given the land to man, but the sea he has reserved to himself. "The

sea is his, and he made it." He has given man “no inheritance in it; no, not so much as to set his foot on." If he enters its domain, he enters it as a pilgrim and a stranger. He may pass over it, but he can have no abiding place upon it. He cannot build his house, nor so much as pitch his tent, within it. He cannot mark it with his lines, nor subdue it to his uses, nor rear his monuments upon it. It steadfastly refuses to own him as its lord and

master. Its depths do not tremble at his coming. Its waters do not flee when he appeareth. All the strength of all his generations is to it as a feather before the whirlwind; and all the noise of his commerce, and all the thunder of his navies, it can hush in a moment within the silence of its impenetrable abysses.

4. Whole armies have gone down into that unfathom. able darkness, and not a floating bubble marks the place. of their disappearing. If all the populations of the world, from the beginning of time, were cast into its depths, the smooth surface of its oblivion would close over them in an hour; and if all the cities of the earth, and all the structures and monuments ever reared by man, were heaped together over that grave for a tombstone, it would not break the surface of the deep, or lift back their memory to the light of the sun and the breath of the upper air. The sea would roll its billows in derision, a thousand fathoms deep, above the topmost stone of that mighty sepulchre.

5. The patient earth submits to the rule of man, and the mountains bow their rocky heads before the hammer of his power and the blast of his terrible enginery. The sea cares not for him; not so much as a single hair's breadth can its level be lowered or lifted by all the art, and all the effort, and all the enginery of all the generations of time. He comes and goes upon it, and a moment after it is as if he had never been there. He may engrave his titles upon the mountain top, and quarry his signature into the foundations of the globe, but he cannot write his name on the sea.

6. And thus, by its material uses and its spiritual voices, does the sea ever speak to us, to tell us that its builder and maker is God. He hewed its channels in the deep, and drew its barriers upon the sand, and cast its belted3 waters around the world. He fitted it to the earth and the sky, and poised them skilfully, the one against the other,