were sown for you; the latter sprang up in the path of the simple native. Two hundred years have changed the character of a great continent, and blotted forever from its face a whole peculiar people. Art has usurped the bowers of nature, and the anointed children of education have been too powerful for the tribes of the ignorant. Here and there a stricken few remain; but how unlike their bold, untamable progenitors! The Indian of falcon glance and lion bearing, the theme of the touching ballad, the hero of the pathetic tale, is gone! and his degraded offspring crawls upon the soil where he walked in majesty, to remind us how miserable is man, when the foot of the conqueror is on his neck.

As a race, they have withered from the land. Their arrows are broken, their springs are dried up, their cabins are in the dust. Their council-fire has long since gone out on the shore, and their war-cry is fast fading to the untrodden West. Slowly and sadly they climb the distant mountains, and read their doom in the setting sun. They are shrinking before the mighty tide which is pressing them away; they must soon hear the roar of the last wave which will settle over them forever. Ages hence, the inquisitive white man, as he stands by some growing city, will ponder on the structure of their disturbed remains, and wonder to what manner of persons they belonged. They will live only in the songs and chronicles of their exterminators. Let these be faithful to their rude virtues as men, and pay due tribute to their unhappy fate as a people.

68.-DIRGE.

HOWARD WORCESTER GILBERT.

Of thy stream, Amelete, who reaches the shore,
O'er the mountains shall wearily wander no more,
But blissfully deeming his sorrows are past,
He shall gladly lie down by thy waters at last.
He shall drink of that draught of oblivion deep,
And shall fall, as at evening, serenely to sleep,
And for aye, from the regions of light and of day
He shall fade in the land of the shadow away,
Like the mist, as it melts in the blue of the sky,
Or the wave that dissolves on the shore with a sigh;
Like the dying away of the wind on the wold,
And the ending at evening a tale that is told.

And whether the spirit be only a breath
Sleeping, also, at last, in the quiet of death,
Or, whether beyond the oblivious stream,
It abandons the land of the shadow and dream,

And afar, on the peaceful Elysian plain,
Embraces the friend of its bosom again,

Still we know, as they knew,-on that rock we rest sure-
That 'tis better forever to strive and endure.

We will lay them to rest with their glorious mien,
And chaunt o er the mortal, our tenderest threne,-

We will weep o'er their beauty, as mortals must weep,
Knowing we, too, shall follow and enter that sleep,

In the hope that at last, on some radiant shore,
We shall meet them again and be severed no more.

69.-THE AIR AND SEA.

M. F. MAURY.

The atmosphere forms a spherical shell, surrounding the earth to a depth unknown to us, by reason of its growing tenuity, as it is released from the pressure of its own superincumbent mass. Its upper surface cannot be nearer than fifty, and scarcely more remote than five hundred miles. It surrounds us on all sides, yet we see it not; it presses on us with a load of fifteen pounds on every square inch of surface of our bodies, or from seventy to one hundred tons on us in all, yet we do not so much as feel its weight. Softer than the finest down, more impalpable than the finest gossamer, it leaves the cob-web undisturbed, and scarcely stirs the lightest flower that feeds on the dew it supplies; yet it bears the fleets of nations on its wings around the world, and crushes the most refractory substances with its weight. When in motion, its force is sufficient to level with the earth the most stately forests and stable buildings, to raise the waters of the ocean into ridges like mountains, and dash the strongest ships to pieces like toys. It warms and cools by turns the earth and the living creatures that inhabit it. It draws up vapors from the sea and land, retains them dissolved in itself or suspended in cisterns of clouds, and throws them down again as rain or dew, when they are required. It bends the rays of the sun from their path to give us the aurora of the morning and twilight of evening; it disperses and refracts their various tints to beautify the approach and the retreat of the

orb of day. But for the atmosphere, sunshine would burst on us in a moment and fail us in the twinkling of an eye, removing us in an instant from midnight darkness to the blaze of noon. We should have no twilight to soften and beautify the landscape, no clouds to shade us from the scorching heat; but the bald earth, as it revolved on its axis, would turn its tanned and weakened front to the full unmitigated rays of the lord of day.

The atmosphere affords the gas which vivifies and warms our frames; it receives into itself that which has been polluted by use, and is thrown off as noxious. It feeds the flame of life exactly as it does that of the fire. It is in both cases consumed, in both cases it affords the food of consumption, and in both cases it becomes combined with charcoal, which requires it for combustion, and which removes it when combustion is over. It is the girdling, encircling air that makes the whole world kin. The carbonic acid, with which element our breathing fills the air, to-morrow seeks its way round the world. The date-trees that grow round the falls of the Nile will drink it in by their leaves; the cedars of Lebanon will take of it to add to their stature; the cocoanuts of Tahiti will grow rapidly upon it; and the palms and bananas of Japan will change it into flowers. The oxygen we are breathing was distilled for us some short time ago by the magnolias of Florida, and the great trees that skirt the Orinoco and the Amazon; the giant rhododendrons of the Himalayas contributed to it, and the roses and myrtles of Cashmere, the cinnamon-tree of Ceylon, and the forest, older than the flood, that lies buried deep in the heart of Africa, far behind the Mountains of the Moon, gave it out. The rain we see descending was thawed for us out of the icebergs which have watched the Polar Star for ages, or it came from snows that rested on the summits of the Alps, but which the lotus lilies have soaked up from the Nile, and exhaled as vapor again into the everpresent air.

There are processes no less interesting going on in other parts of this magnificent field of research. Water is nature's carrier with its currents it conveys heat away from the torrid zone and ice from the frigid; or, bottling the caloric away in the vesicles of its vapor, it first makes it impalpable, and then conveys it, by unknown paths, to the most distant parts of the earth. The materials of which the coral builds the island and the nautilus its shell are gathered by this restless leveler from mountains, rocks and valleys in all latitudes. Some it washes down from the Mountains of the Moon, or out

of the gold-fields of Australia, or from the mines of Potosi; others from the battle-fields of Europe, or from the marblequarries of ancient Greece and Rome. These materials, thus collected and carried over falls or down rapids, are transported from river to sea, and delivered by the obedient waters to each insect and to every plant in the ocean at the right time and temperature, in proper form and in due quantity.

Treating the rocks less gently, it grinds them into dust, or pounds them into sand, or rolls and rubs them until they are fashioned into pebbles, rubble or boulders; the sand and shingle on the sea-shore are monuments of the abrading, triturating power of water. By water the soil has been brought down from the hills, and spread out into valleys, plains, and fields for man's use. Saving the rocks on which the everlasting hills are established, everything on the surface of our planet seems to have been removed from its original foundation and lodged in its present place by water. Protean in shape, benignant in office, water, whether fresh or salt, solid, fluid or gaseous, is marvelous in its powers. It is one of the chief agents in the manifold workshops in which and by which the earth has been made a habitation fit for man.

70.-SOUL SCULPTURE.

ANONYMOUS.

A block of marble caught the glance
Of Buonarotti's eyes,

Which brightened in their solemn deeps,

Like meteor-lighted skies.

And one who stood beside him listened,

Smiling as he heard;

For "I will make an angel of it,"

Was the sculptor's word.

And mallet soon and chisel sharp

The stubborn block assailed,

And blow by blow, and pang by pang,
The prisoner unveiled.

A brow was lifted, high and pure,
The waking eyes outshone;
And as the master sharply wrought,
A smile broke through the stone!

Beneath the chisel's edge, the hair
Escaped in floating rings;

And, plume by plume, was slowly freed
The sweep of half-furled wings.

The stately bust and graceful limbs
Their marble fetters shed,

And where the shapeless block had been,
An angel stood instead!

Oh, blows that smite! Oh, hurts that pierce
This shrinking heart of mine!
What are ye but the Master's tools,
Forming a work divine?

Oh, hope that crumbles at my feet!
Oh, joy that mocks and flies!
What are ye but the clogs that bind
My spirit from the skies?

Sculptor of souls! I lift to Thee

Encumbered heart and hands;
Spare not the chisel, set me free,
However dear the bands.

How blest, if all these seeming ills,
Which draw my thoughts to Thee,
Should only prove that Thou wilt make
An angel out of me!

71.-THE REFORMER.

HORACE GREELEY.

Though the life of the Reformer may seem rugged and arduous, it were indeed hard to say considerately that any other life were worth living at all. Who can thoughtfully affirm that the career of the conquering, desolating, subjugating warrior, of the devotee of gold, or pomp, or sensual joys; the monarch in his purple, the miser by his chest, the wassailer over his bowl,-is not a libel on humanity and an offense against God? But the earnest, unselfish Reformer, born into a state of darkness, evil, and suffering, and honestly striving to replace these by light and purity and happiness,—he may fall and die, as so many have done before him, but he cannot fail. His vindication shall gleam from the walls of his hovel, his dungeon, his tomb; it shall shine in the radiant eyes of uncorrupted childhood, and fall in blessings from the lips of highhearted, generous youth.

As the untimely death of the good is our strongest moral assurance of the Resurrection, so the life wearily worn out in