be given to the history of that splendid literature, from which has sprung all the strength, the wisdom, the freedom, and the glory of the western world. 3. If we consider merely the subtilty of disquisition, the force of imagination, the perfect energy and elegance of expression, which characterize the great works of Athenian genius, we must pronounce them intrinsically most valuable; — but what shall we say, when we reflect that from hence have sprung, directly or indirectly, all the noblest creations of the human intellect; that from hence were the vast accomplishments and the brilliant fancy of Cicero;a the withering fire of Juvenal; the plastic imagination of Dante; the humor of Cervantes; d the comprehension of Bacon;e the wit of Butler;f the supreme and universal excellence of Shakspeare ? g 4. All the triumphs of truth and genius over prejudice and power, in every country, and in every age, have been the triumphs of Athens. Wherever a few great minds have made a stand against violence and fraud, and the cause of liberty and reason, there has been her spirit in the midst of them, inspiring, encouraging, consoling, by the lonely lamp of Erasmus;h by the restless bed of Pascal;i in the tribune of Mirabeau; in the cell of Galileo;k on the scaffold of Sidney.1 Cicero, see p. 65. b Juvenal, a Roman poet, celebrated for the spirit, boldness, and elegance of his satires. c Dante, an Italian poet, born at Florence, 1265, and died in 1321. a Cervantes, a celebrated Spanish writer. He died in 1616. Bacon, (Francis,) lord high chancellor of England, born in 1561, and died in 1626. He was one of the greatest and most universal geniuses, that any age or country has produced. Butler, an English poet, who wrote satires. He died in 1680. s Shakspeare, see p. 27. h Erasmus, see p. 27. i Pascal, (Blaise,) a Frenchman, eminent as a mathematician, and a zealous friend of the Christian religion as taught by the Jansenists. He was born in 1623, and died in 1662. j Mirabeau, a celebrated French nobleman, born 1749, and died 1791. k Galileo, a most eminent philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, and inventor of the telescope; born at Florence, 1564. He was imprisoned as a heretic, for teaching that the sun, and not the earth, is in the center of the world, and immovable, and that the earth moves by a diurnal motion. He died, 1642, aged seventy-eight. 1 Sidney, (Algernon,) a celebrated English republican, and martyr to liberty. He was unjustly executed for treason in 1678. 5. But who shall estimate her influence on private happiness? Who shall say how many thousands have been made wiser, happier, and better, by those pursuits in which she has taught mankind to engage; to how many the studies, which took their rise from her, have been wealth in poverty, liberty in bondage, health in sickness, society in solitude? Her power is indeed manifested at the bar; in the senate; in the field of battle; in the schools of philosophy. 6. But these are not her glory. Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain; wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,- there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens. 7. Surely it is no exaggeration to say, that no example advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye, which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world; all the hoarded treasures of the primeval dynasties; all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored mines. This is the gift of Athens to man. Her freedom and her power have, for more than twenty centuries, been annihilated; her people have degenerated into timid slaves; her language into a barbarous jargon; her temples have been given up to the successive depredations of Romans, Turks, and Scotchmen; but her intellectual empire is imperishable. 8. And, when those who have rivaled her greatness shall have shared her fate; when civilization and knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant continents; when the scepter shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travelers from distant regions, shall in vain labor to decipher on some moldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest temple; and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts, her influence and her glory will still survive,- fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over which they exercise their control. LESSON XXV. KNOWLEDGE VERSUS GOLD.— EVERETT. 1. If we look only to material prosperity, to physical welfare, nothing is now more certain than that they are most powerfully promoted by every thing which multiplies and diffuses the means of education. We live in an age in which cultivated mind is becoming more and more the controlling influence of affairs. Like that mysterious magnetic influence, whose wonderful properties have been lately brought from the scientific lecture-room into the practical business of life, you cannot see it, you cannot feel it, you cannot weigh it; but it pervades the globe, from its surface to its center, and moves every particle of metal which has been touched, into a kindred sensibility. 2. We hear much, at present, of the veins of gold which are brought to light in almost every latitude of either hemisphere; in fact, we hear of nothing else. But I care not what mines are opened in the north or in the south, in the mountains of Siberia, or the Sierras of California; wheresoever the fountains of the golden tide may gush forth, the streams will flow to the regions where educated intellect has woven the boundless network of the useful and ornamental arts. It matters not if this new Pactolus a flow through a region which stretches for furlongs a wide tract of solid gold; the jewels and the ingots will find their way to the great centers of civilization, where Pactolus, a river of Asia Minor, celebrated for its golden sands. cultivated mind gives birth to the arts, and freedom renders property secure. 3. If we will not be taught by any thing else, let us learn of history. It was not Mexico and Peru, nor Portugal, nor Spain, which reaped the silver and golden harvest of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries;-it was the industrious, enlightened, cultivated states of the north and west of Europe; it was little Holland, scarcely one-fifth as large as New England, but with five universities dotting her limited surface; it was England, with her foundation schools, her indomitable public opinion, her representative system, her twin universities;-it was to these free and enlightened countries that the gold and silver flowed; not merely adding to the material wealth of the community, but quickening the energy of the industrious classes, breaking down the remains of feudalism, and furnishing the sinews of war to the champions of protestant liberty. 4. What the love of liberty, the care of education, and a large and enlightened regard for intellectual and moral interests, did for the parent state, they will do for us,--giving us a temporal prosperity, and with it, what is infinitely better, not only a name and a praise with contemporary nations, who form with us the great procession of humanity, but a name and a praise among enlightened men, and enlightened states, to the end of time. LESSON XXVI. THE EMIGRANT'S FAREWELL.-BROWN. [See pages 213 and 214.] 1. Farewell to the land that my fathers defended; Ah! soft be the bed where the hero reposes! The graves of my sires, and the land of my birth. 2. Adieu to the scenes which my heart's young emotions Have dressed in attire so alluringly gay; Ah! never, no never, can billowy oceans, Nor time, drive the fond recollections away! From days that are past, present comfort I borrow; The scenes of to-day shall be brighter to-morrow; In age I'll recall, as a balm for my sorrow, The graves of my sires, and the land of my birth. 3. I go to the west, where the forest receding, I Invites the adventurous ax-man along; go to the groves where the wild deer are feeding, And mountain birds carol their loveliest song. Adieu to the land that my fathers defended! Adieu to the soil on which freemen contended! Adieu to the hopes from which heroes descended! The graves of my sires and the land of my birth. 4. When far from my home, and surrounded by strangers, My thoughts shall recall the gay pleasures of youth, Though life's stormy ocean shall threaten with dangers, My soul shall repose in the sunshine of truth. While streams to their own native ocean are tending, And forest-oaks, swept by the tempest, are bending, My soul shall exult, as she's proudly defending The graves of my sires, and the land of my birth. Flora, the goddess of flowers and blossoms. |