prompt. With alternate fortunes they persevered to the last, and greatly contributed to that success which was the first object of their efforts.

[From a speech in defence of the Union and the Constitution, delivered in the Senate of the United States, January 26, 1830.]

1. THE eulogium1 pronounced by the honorable gentleman on the character of the State of South Carolina, for her Revolutionary and other merits, meets my hearty concurrence. I shall not acknowledge that the honorable member goes before me in regard for whatever of distinguished talent or distinguished character South Carolina has produced. I claim part of the honor, I partake in the pride, of her great names. I claim them for countrymen, one and all, the Laurenses, the Rutledges, the Pinckneys, the Sumters, the Marions, Americans all, whose fame. is no more to be hemmed in by state lines, than their talents and patriotism were capable of being circumscribed 2 within the same narrow limits.

2. In their day and generation, they served and honored the country, and the whole country; and their renown is of the treasures of the whole country. Him whose honored name the gentleman himself bears, does he esteem me less capable of gratitude for his patriotism, or sympathy for his

sufferings, than if his eyes had first opened upon the light of Massachusetts, instead of South Carolina? Sir, does he suppose it in his power to exhibit a Carolina name so bright as to produce envy in my osom? No, sir; increased gratification and delight, rather. I thank God, that, if I am gifted with little of the spirit which is able to raise mortals to the skies, I have yet none, as I trust, of that other spirit, which would drag angels down.

3. When I shall be found, sir, in my place here in the Senate, or elsewhere, to sneer at public merit because it happens to spring up beyond the little limits of my own state or neighborhood; when I refuse, for any such cause, or for any cause, the homage due to American talent, to elevated patriotism, to sincere devotion to liberty and the country; or if I see an uncommon endowment 3 of Heaven, if I see extraordinary capacity and virtue in any son of the South, and if, moved by local prejudice or gangrened by state jealousy, I get up here to abate the tithe of a hair from his just character and just fame, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!

4

4. Sir, let me recur to pleasing recollections, let me indulge in refreshing remembrances of the past, let me remind you that, in early times, no states cherished greater harmony, both of principle and feeling, than Massachusetts and South Carolina. Would to God that harmony might again return! Shoulder to shoulder they went through the Revolution, hand in hand they stood round the administration of Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for support. Unkind feeling, if it exist,

alienation and distrust, are the growth, unnatural to such soils, of false principles since sown. They are weeds, the seeds of which that same great arm never scattered.

no encomium There she is.

There is her

The past, at Concord, and

5. Mr. President, I shall enter on upon Massachusetts; she needs none. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. history; the world knows it by heart. least, is secure. There is Boston, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, fallen in the great struggle for Independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every state, from New England to Georgia; and there they will lie forever.

6. And, sir, where American Liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood, and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it; if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it; if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed in separating it from that Union by which alone its existence is made sure,-it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; it will stretch forth its arm, with whatever of vigor it may still retain, over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amid the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.

1 EU-LŌ'ĢI-UM. Praise; eulogy.

2 CIR-CUM-SCRIBED'. Enclosed; con

fined.

3 EN DÖŴ'MENT. Gift of nature; talent

4 GAN'GRENED. Corrupted and mor

tified.

XCIII. EXTRACT FROM SNOW-BOUND.

WHITTIER.

1. UNWARMED by any sunset light,
The gray day darkened into night,
A night made hoary 1 with the swarm
And whirl-dance of the blinding storm,
As zigzag wavering to and fro

Crossed and recrossed the wingéd snow;
And ere the early bed-time came
The white drift piled the window-frame,
And through the glass the clothes-line posts
Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.

2. So all night long the storm roared on,
And when the second morning shone,
We looked upon a world unknown,
On nothing we could call our own.
Around the glistening wonder bent
The blue walls of the firmament,
No cloud above, no earth below, --
A universe of sky and snow!

3. The old familiar sights of ours

Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and

towers

Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood,

Or garden wall, or belt of wood;

A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed,
A fenceless drift what once was road;

The bridle-post an old man sat

With loose-flung coat and high-cocked hat;

The well-curb had a Chinese roof:
And even the long sweep, high aloof,
In its slant splendor, seemed to tell
Of Pisa's leaning miracle.*

4. A prompt, decisive man, no breath
Our father wasted: "Boys, a path!"
Well pleased, (for when did farmer boy
Count such a summons less than joy?)
Our buskins 2 on our feet we drew;
With mittened hands, and caps drawn low,
To guard our necks and ears from snow,
We cut the solid whiteness through,
And, where the drift was deepest, made
A tunnel walled and overlaid
With dazzling crystal: we had read
Of rare Aladdin's wondrous cave,
And to our own his name we gave,
With many a wish the luck were ours
To test his lamp's supernal powers.

5. We reached the barn with merry din,

And roused the prisoned brutes within:
All day the gusty north wind bore
The loosening drift its breath before;
Low circling round its southern zone,
The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone
No church-bell lent its Christian tone
To the savage air, no social smoke
Curled over woods of snow-hung oak.

6. As night drew on, and, from the crest
Of wooded knolls that ridged the west,

*The Leaning Tower at Pisa (pē'zä).