generation by which these commentators were succeeded appreciated the philosophic harmony of the poet's writings; and admired, as they de(Conclusion next month.)

served to be admired, the many fine passages which are scattered through "The Excursion."*

ΟΝ

N this occasion I have thought that instead of enlarging on the commonplace topics of education or literature, which would be equally advantageous at any time or in any place, to say a few words suggested by a recent journey to the United States, which will not be unsuitable to the general interests of an institution like this. It is not my purpose to give to you what are called "impressions of America." Even if the circumstances of my journey did not render such an undertaking impossible, I should have felt that, before an audience at Birmingham, the ground had already been preoccupied by a distinguished pastor well known to all of you, whose activity and zeal must be admired even by those who most widely differ from him, and whose controversial vigor of style few can imitate or emulate. I propose to confine myself to that side of American life which perhaps was of more interest to me than to most travelers: its purely historical aspect—that aspect presented by the original Eastern States to which my journey was confined. It is a part of history of which, for whatever reason, Englishmen are strangely ignorant—at least I speak for myself—until their imagination has been touched by the actual sight of that vast continent with its inspiring suggestions and recollections.

I. There are two remarks which an Englishman constantly hears from the lips of Americans, uttered with a 'kind of plaintive apology, "We are a young people," and "We have no antiquities." The truth of the first of these remarks every one must admit; the truth of the second I venture to question. There is a saying of Lord Bacon, part of which has been made familiar from its having become the title of an interesting work by an eloquent and multifarious writer of our own time, "Antiquitas sæculi juventus mundi," "The age of the world is also its youth." But there is the reverse of this saying, which is equally true, "The youth of a nation is also its antiquity." It was a fundamental

life. But eighty lines on such a subject makes us yawn -much worse, smile."-"History of English Literature," vol. ii., p. 262.

maxim of the historical philosophy of a great teacher once well known in the neighborhood of Birmingham, and I trust not yet forgotten, Arnold of Rugby, that every nation has its ancient and modern history, irrespectively of the chronological place which such a nation may hold in the general succession of events. This is strikingly illustrated in the case of America. Its youth brings it within the category of a period of history which may truly be called ancient, because it still breathes something of the freshness of its first beginnings, because it still exhibits society, not in the shape of absolute achievement, but of gradual formation. No doubt the scientific and material appliances of the nineteenth century, in some respects carried to a further extent in the New World than in the Old, give an appearance of novelty, and in a certain sense of perfection, which is altogether alien to the first origin of a people; but, when we penetrate below this, we shall find that there are abundant traces of this youthful, childlike, and therefore primitive aspect. The youth of America corresponds to the antiquity of Europe. It is this peculiarity of American history in its past, its present, and its future, which constitutes its peculiar interest, often its best apology, always its powerful incentive. It is a characteristic which, in a large measure, it shares with Russia, but which in America is brought to a nearer focus from the shortness of the career it has hitherto run.

The history of the United States may be said

* There are four passages in "The Excursion" which are probably as fine as any that have been composed during the present century. The first is the well-known "Exchange the shepherd's frock of native gray for robes with royal purple tinged," etc. The second is the reflection, "How from his lofty throne the sun can fling colors as bright on exhalations bred by reedy pool or pestilential swamp, as by the rivulet sparkling where it runs." The third is the comparison of moral truth to the water

lily. The fourth, the reflection that as the murmuring of the shell expresses to the child "mysterious union with its native sea, e'en such a shell the universe itself is to the ear of faith."

↑ An Address given before the Birmingham and Midland Institute at Birmingham, December 16, 1878.

to class itself into four principal epochs, which emerge from the level to which the larger part of its annals are confined:

1. The first epoch is what we may call the Era of the Founders. It is rarely that we are able so nearly to place ourselves within the reach of the first inhabitants and the first chieftains of a powerful people. What most resembles this epoch is perhaps the accounts, historical or legendary, of the foundation of the Grecian states, whether in the mother country or its dependencies. But the Greek founders are, for the most part, more or less involved in a cloud of fable, while those of the American Commonwealth stand out in all the distinctness of living and actual personalities.

It was an extraordinary sensation which I experienced when, two days after landing in America, I found myself assisting at the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the town of Salem in Massachusetts. Around me were guests and speakers who derived their lineage and names from those who had first set foot on what was then a desolate wilderness. On one side was a distinguished judge, the representative of Endicott, the first governor, and on the other side the venerable and accomplished descendant of Winthrop, if not the first actual, the first undisputed, governor of the colony. The office itself was well represented by the honored citizen who in direct succession filled it at that moment. On the right hand and the left were the Saltonstalls, the Bowditches, the Wilders, and the Higginsons, names obscure here, but household words there. Their progenitors were not shadowy phantoms-like the heroes of Ossian's poems-with the stars shining through them, but stout and stalwart yeomen, or merchants, or clergy, like ourselves; each home in the place claimed some connection with one or the other of these ancestral patriarchs; their portraits, their letters, the trees they had planted, the fruit they had reared, the churches they had built, were still among us. It was as if one were sitting at table far back in the opening of English or European history, with the grandsons or great-grandsons of Hengist and Horsa, or Clovis and Pepin. It gave that sense of near proximity to the beginnings of the state which is so marvelously reproduced in Sir Walter Scott's novel of "Ivanhoe"; where, with perhaps a too close foreshortening of his picture, he makes us feel that Cedric and Athelstan, Front-de-Boeuf and the Templars, still breathed the spirit of the Saxon monarchy and of the Norman Conquest.

Look for a moment at some of the separate groups into which the founders of the American States arrange themselves. In the brilliant pages of the venerable historian of the United States,

George Bancroft, you see them one by one, from Florida to Quebec, emerging, as if from the ocean, under the guidance of those ancient heroes. Take first that which is still in common parlance called the Mother State, or the Old Dominion of Virginia. What can be more stirring or more primeval than the account of those brilliant adventurers who in the dazzling glory of the Elizabethan age were fired with the hope of perpetuating the name of the Virgin Queen on a new continent? Look at the first projector of the scheme, statesman, poet, historian, discoverer, Sir Walter Raleigh! He lies in a nameless grave at Westminster, but his true monument is the colony of Virginia. Look at the strange figure-well known in America; dimly, I fear, recognized in England-of him who, though bearing the homely name of John Smith, was the life and soul of that early settlement, and whose career, both before and afterward, was checkered with a series of marvelous risks, which might well have belonged to a Grecian Argonaut or a mediæval Crusader. With a scientific and nautical ardor which has descended to his lineage in this country-including the late renowned hydrographer, Admiral Smyth-was combined an impetuous passion for adventure which had previously led him through the wars of Hungary, and plunged him into the dungeons of the Turk-ish corsairs; and which, in America, won the affection of the Indian tribes against whom he alone was able to guard the infant colony. Thrice was his life saved by the interest which his pres- · ence inspired in three princesses whom he encountered in these various hazards: Calameta, the lady of Hungary; Trabegizonda, the lady of the Turkish harem; and Pocahontas, the young daughter of the Indian chief Powhatan, who threw herself between him and her father's anger. It is by a singular fate that while Pocahontas, the earliest, or almost the earliest, Christian convert of the native tribes of North America, lies buried within the parish church of Gravesend, where she closed her life, the remains of John Smith, after his long and stormy career, should repose in the solemn gloom of the Church of St. Sepulchre, in the city of London. "Here," such was his epitaph, he lies conquered who conquered all."

Turn to another group. Can any one stand on the hill above the bay of Plymouth in New England, and see without a yearning, as toward the cradle of a sacred state, the Mayflower winding her difficult way from promontory to promon-tory, from island to island, till at last the little crew descend upon the one solitary rock on that level shore-the rock of which the remains are still visited by hundreds of pilgrims from every part of North America? Is it not truly a record

the colors of those Indian tribes who were the terror and the attraction alternately of both the contending parties, carry us back to times which assure us that the American novelist, Fenimore Cooper, rightly chose them as a theme of his most heart-stirring and picturesque tales, and which make even an Englishman or a Scotchman feel that in traversing them he is, as it were, on the Loch Katrine or the Loch Lomond of his own kindred isles. And when in the hills of the American Berkshire we see the huge bowlder which with its simple inscription marks "the grave of the Stockbridge Indians, the friends of our fathers," we feel that we stand on the boundary of those days when the civilized man and the savage were not yet parted asunder, when there was still a sense of mutual gratitude between the two races such as carries us back to the times when Goth and Roman, Celt and Saxon met in their varied vicissitudes of war and peace.

3. We pass to the third epoch, that of the War of Independence. We now approach a region which, compared with the two that have preceded it, may well be called modern. Yet here also there is a savor of antiquity and of primitive inspiration in the circle of renowned characters who, for the first, perhaps we may say the only, time in American history, appear equal to the greatness of their country's destinies. When in the public place at Richmond we see the statue of George Washington surrounded by the group of the famous Virginians of his time, the eloquence of Patrick Henry, the judicious sagacity of Marshall, the eccentric energy of Jefferson-when to these we add the stern vigor of John Adams, and Samuel, his namesake from Boston, and last, not least, the homely and penetrating genius of Benjamin Franklin from Philadelphia, and the brilliant philosophic friend and equal of Talleyrand, the gifted and unfortunate Alexander Hamilton, we feel that we are in the presence of one of those constellations which mark only those great creative epochs in the history of nations, such as may indeed appear in their later history, but usually belong to those moments when the nation itself is struggling into existence. In all the events of that struggle there is a dramatic movement which belongs to those critical times when mankind is going through one of its decisive trials. Old Martin Routh of Oxford, who had lived through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, when asked in his extreme old age what event of his time had produced in England the deepest impression, answered, "The separation of the American States"; and when, in his hundredth year, he wandered in his dying moments to the recollections of former days, his last words murmured something of 'the war

with America." Many are the scenes which impress on the mind the momentous aspect of that time. Let me select two. One shall be that in which the first British blood was shed on the 19th of April, 1775. It is in the green meadows close to the village of Concord. A gentle river divides the swelling hills on either side; a rustic bridge crosses the stream. On one side is a simple pillar which marks the graves where the first English soldiers that were slain still lie buried; on the other side is a monument, erected in later times, representing one of the simple American peasants with one hand on the plow and the other on the musket, and underneath are written the memorable words of one of the greatest living writers, himself a native of Concord, and the grandson of the pastor of the village who was present at the time of the conflict:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world. The other scene is Mount Vernon, the unadorned yet spacious wooden mansion where Washington spent his latest years, with his devoted wife, with his retinue of slaves, with the gracious hospitality of almost regal majesty, looking out from the oaks which now overhang his grave over the broad waters of the Potomac, on whose banks was to rise the noble but still unfinished capital which bears his canonized name. No Englishman need grudge the hours that he gives to the biography which Washington Irving has devoted to our great countryman (for such he still was), the father of the American Commonwealth.

4. There is yet one fourth group of events which makes us feel that even now, in the time in which we live, America belongs to those old days of European nations when society was not yet welded together, when the wars of York and Lancaster, or the wars of Cromwell and Charles I., were still possible. I refer to the only civil war of recent times—perhaps the greatest civil war of all times-the war between the Northern and the Southern States ten years ago. But this is too close to our days for us to safely touch upon; the smoldering ashes of that fierce volcano are too near the surface. I do but glance at it and move onward.

II. What I have said of the history, so to .speak, of America at once illustrates and is illustrated by some of the chief characteristics of the present condition of the United States, and also of our expectations of its future.

1. Look, for example, at the extraordinary munificence shown in the multiplication of institutions emanating in a large degree from the piety and liberality of individual founders and

benefactors. The very phrase which I use recalls the mediæval beneficence out of which sprang some of the chief educational institutions of our own country. I do not say that this munificence has died out of the nineteenth century, at home or in the older countries. In one branch, that of public libraries for general use which is the chief glory of the modern institutions of the United States, as its almost total absence is the chief reproach to the metropolis of London-in these public libraries I understand that at least in Birmingham a near approach has been made to the generosity, whether of corporations or of individuals, in the United States. Still the freedom, almost the recklessness, with which these benefactions are lavished beyond the Atlantic, bears upon its face the characteristic of an older age, reappearing amid our modern civilization like the granite bowlder of some earlier formation. For the likenesses in our English history to John Harvard, to the "Ten Worthy Fathers" of Yale, to Johns Hopkins and Astor and George Peabody and Peter Cooper, we must look to our Wykehams, our Waynfletes, our Wolseys, at Oxford, and those whose names are immortalized in Gray's splendid ode on the benefactors of Cambridge.

2. Again, the distinct character, the independent government, the separate legislation of the various States which compose the Republic of North America, represent a condition of political society to which modern Europe offers no parallel, except perhaps in the small federation of Switzerland, and for which on so large a scale we must for an example go back to the not yet developed states of Europe, just emerging from the old Roman Empire into the new Christian empire of Charlemagne, each indeed marked by the separate nationalities which were already beginning to show themselves, but even in the sixth or the ninth century speaking, as in the vast continent of North America at the present day, at least among the educated classes, one language, and subject, at least in name, to one central government. You will not suppose that in thus referring to the independence and diversity of the different States of America I am presuming to enter on that most delicate question of American politics, the exact point where the rights of the separate States terminate and the rights of the central Government begin. I treat of it only in its general features as an unquestionable phenomenon, which indicates that the American Commonwealth is yet in the beginning of political society, and that the end may be something far different from that which we now behold.

3. Again, in the relations of the laboring classes to the educated or upper classes of America, without intrenching on the thorny questions

of capital and labor, of socialism and of political economy, which are now beginning to agitate the New World as they agitate the Old, there is a peculiarity which exists in no European country at the present time, and which is a problem kindred to the first arrangements of the states of the ancient classical world. It is the peculiarity by which mechanical and manual labor is performed, for the most part, not by natives but by foreigners. What the Pelasgians were in Attica, what the Helots were in Sparta, what the Israelites were in Egypt, what the Canaanites were in Palestine, what the Greeks generally called by the varying names Paraci or Periæci, that is to say, the aboriginal or foreign element which the ruling class appropriated to itself for these inferior purposes-that, in some measure, the Irish, the negroes, and the Chinese are to the Anglo-Saxon race of the United States. It has often been observed how widely this diversity of the Grecian commonwealths from those of modern Europe influences any judgment which we may draw from them and their condition to ours; it is not less true that a like precaution is rendered necessary by the appearance of this similar phenomenon in the United States of America.

I might multiply indefinitely the instances of this divergence in the relative stages of social and political and ecclesiastical existence in America and Europe. Whether we condemn or approve the institutions of the United States or of our own country, the main practical condition under which we must start on any comparison is, that to a very large extent the two spheres of the Old World and the New World are as almost incommensurable as the period of Theseus or Lycurgus with the age of Alexander, or the period of Egbert or Charles Martel with the period of Henry VIII. or Charles V.

But besides the light which this view of American history throws on the past and the present, there is also the further question of the light which it throws upon the future. It does not follow that because a nation has flourished for many centuries it is near its end. Far from us be any such desponding fatalism. Yet still it can not be denied that the longer the retrospect is, there is produced a sense of satiety or of completeness which, to a certain degree, contracts the vision of the future. It is the reverse of this feeling that is produced by what I have called the near and, as it were, closely present antiquity of the American States. We insensibly look forward to the possibility of a vaster development than we do in the older nations. And this expectation is no new thing. Amid all the evil forebodings, and all the failures of American existence, it has always been present. Whether from the remarkable circumstance of its first beginnings, certain