Who does not know, that, while every pulse of civil liberty in the heart of the British empire beat warm and full in the bosom of our ancestors, the sobriety, the firmness, and the dignity, with which the cause of free principles struggled into existence here, constantly found encouragement and countenance from the friends of liberty there? 3. Who does not remember, that, when the Pilgrims went over the sea, the prayers of the faithful British confessors, in all the quarters of their dispersion, went over with them, while their aching eyes were strained till the star of hope should go up in the western skies? And who will ever forget, that, in that eventful struggle which severed these youthful republics from the British crown, there was not heard, throughout our continent in arms, a voice which spoke louder for the rights of America, than that of Burke' or of Chatham within the walls of the British Parliament, and at the foot of the British throne? 4. No for myself, I can truly say, that, after my native land, I feel a tenderness and a reverence for that of my fathers. The pride I take in my own country makes me respect that from which we are sprung. In touching the soil of England, I seem to return, like a descendant, to the old family seat; to come back to the abode of an agèd and venerable parent. I acknowledge this great consanguinity of nations. The sound of my native language, beyond the sea, is a music to my ear, beyond the richest strains of Tuscan softness or Castilian majesty. I am not yet in a land of strangers, while surrounded by the manners, the habits, and the institutions under which I have been brought up. 5. I wander delighted through a thousand scenes, which the historians and the poets have made familiar to us, of which the names are interwoven with our earliest associations. I tread osophical literature, author of the celebrated "Essay Concerning the Human Understanding," was born at Wrington, near Bristol, England, on 29th August, 1632, and died at Oates, in Essex, on 28th October, 1704. —1 Edmund BurkE, a celebrated British orator, statesman, and philosopher, was born at Dublin on 1st of January, 1730, and died July 8th, 1797. WILLIAM PITT, Earl of CHATHAM, one of the most celebrated of British statesmen and orators, born on the 15th of November, 1708, and died on the 11th of May, 1778. with reverence the spots where I can retrace the footsteps of our suffering fathers: the pleasant land of their birth has a claim on my heart. It seems to me a classic, yea, a holy land; rich in the memory of the great and good, the champions and the martyrs of liberty, the exiled heralds of truth; and richer as the parent of this land of promise in the West. 6. I am not I need not say I am not the panegyrist of England. I am not dazzled by her riches, nor awed by her power. The scepter, the miter, and the coronet,—stars, garters, and blue ribbons,-seem to me poor things for great men to contend for. Nor is my admiration awakened by her armies mustered for the battles of Europe, her navies overshadowing the ocean, nor her empire grasping the farthest East. It is these, and the price of guilt and blood by which they are too often maintained, which are the cause why no friend of liberty can salute her with undivided affections. 7. But it is the cradle and the refuge of free principles, though often persecuted; the school of religious liberty, the more precious for the struggles through which it has passed; the tombs of those who have reflected honor on all who speak the English tongue; it is the birthplace of our fathers, the home of the Pilgrims;-it is these which I love and venerate in England. I should feel ashamed of an enthusiasm for Italy and Greece, did I not also feel it for a land like this. In an American, it would seem to me degenerate and ungrateful to hang with passion upon the traces of Homer' and Virgil, and follow without emotion the nearer and plainer footsteps of Shakspeare3 and Milton. I should think him cold in his love for his native 1 HOMER, the most distinguished of poets, entitled "The Father of Song." He is supposed to have been an Asiatic Greek, though his birth-place, and the period in which he lived, are unknown.- VIRGIL, the most distinguished of the Roman poets, was born at Andes, a small village of Mantua, on the 15th of October, B. c. 70. He died on the 22d of September, B. c. 19, before completing his fifty-first year. His body lies buried at the distance of two miles from the city of Naples.WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE, the most celebrated of all dramatists, was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in 1564, and died in 1616.-* JOHN MILTON, the most illustrious English poet, was born in London, on the 9th of December, 1608, and died on Sunday, the 8th of November, 1675. land who felt no melting in his heart for that other native country which holds the ashes of his forefathers. 59. LANGUAGE. EDWARD EVERETT.' 1. OME words on Language may be well applied; SOME And take them kindly, though they touch your prido. Coarse speech, bad grammar, swearing, drinking, vice. The native freedom of the Saxon lips: 2. The crampy shackles of the ploughboy's walk Can smooth this roughness of the barnyard down; 8. It can't be help'd; though, if we're taken young, 'See Biographical Sketch, p. 89.- The poet here humorously alludes to the difficulty which many persons, bred in retirement, find in pronouncing this word correctly. It will be difficult to express in letters the manner in which it is frequently mispronounced, but it is a sound somewhat similar to vỏ. The proper pronunciation is vù. They also who give the second sound of o in the words soap, road, coat, boat, and most, come in for a small share of his lash. 4. A few brief stanzas may be well employ'd Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope. The clownish voice that utters road for road, 5. Once more: speak clearly, if you speak at all; Try over hard to roll the British R; Do put your accents in the proper spot; Don't let me beg you-don't say "How?" for "What?” Don't strew the pathway with those dreadful urs. O. W. HOLMES. OLIVER Wendell Holmes, son of the late ABIEL HOLMES, D. D., was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 29th of August, 1809. He received his early education at Phillips Exeter Academy, and entered Harvard University in 1825. On being graduated, after a year's application to the study of law, he relinquished it, and devoted himself with ardor and industry to the pursuit of medicine. He visited Europe in the spring of 1833, principally residing at Paris while abroad, where he attended the hospitals, became personally acquainted with many of the most eminent physicians of France, and acquired an intimate knowledge of the language. He returned to Boston near the close of 1835, and in the following spring commenced the practice of medicine in that city. He was elected Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the medical institution connected with Dartmouth College, in 1838, but resigned the place on his marriage, two years later. He soon acquired a large and lucrative practice, and in 1847 succeeded Dr. WARREN as Professor of Anatomy in the medical department of Harvard University. His earlier poems appeared in “The Collegian." 1 Root. Root (rût). The drawling style in which many persons are in the habit of talking, heedlessly hesitating to think of a word, and the meanwhile supplying its place by the unmeaning syllable "ur,' is here happily condemned. Such habits may easily be corrected by a little presence of mind, and particularly by following the direction, Think twice before you speak once. a monthly miscellany, published in 1830, by the under-graduates at Cambridge His longest poem, " Poetry, a Metrical Essay," delivered before a literary society at Cambridge, in 1835, is in the heroic measure, and in its versification is not surpassed by any poem written in this country. He published "Terpsichore," a poem read at the annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, in 1843; and in 1846, "Urania, a Rhyme Lesson," pronounced before the Mercantile Library Association. Dr. HOLMES is a poet of art and humor and genial sentiment, with a style remarkable for its purity, terseness, and point, and for an exquisite finish and grace. He possesses the rare distinction of blending ludicrous ideas with fancy and imagination, and displaying in their conception and expression the same poetical qualities usually exercised in serious composition. "His lyrics ring and sparkle like cataracts of silver, and his serious pieces arrest the attention by touches of the most genuine pathos and tenderness." THAT 60. SOUND AND SENSE. THAT, in the formation of language, men have been much influenced by a regard to the nature of the things and actions meant to be represented, is a fact of which every known speech gives proof. In our own language, for instance, who does not perceive in the sound of the words thunder, boundless, terrible, a something appropriate to the sublime ideas intended to be conveyed? In the word crash we hear the very action implied. Imp, elf,-how descriptive of the miniature beings to which we apply them! Fairy,-how light and tripping, just like the fairy herself!—the word, no more than the thing, seems fit to bend the grass-blade, or shake the tear from the blue-eyed flower. 2. Pea is another of those words expressive of light, diminutive objects; any man born without sight and touch, if such ever are, could tell what kind of thing a pea was from the sound of the word alone. Of picturesque' words, sylvan and crystal are among our greatest favorites. Sylvan !—what visions of beautiful old sunlit forests, with huntsmen and buglehorns, arise at the sound! Crystal!-does it not glitter like the very thing it stands for? Yět crystal is not so beautiful as its own adjective. Crystalline!-why, the whole mind is lightened up with its shine. And this superiority is as it should be; Picturesque (pikt yer ěsk'), expressing that peculiar kind of beauty that is pleasing in a picture. |