And know, for that1 thou slumb'rest' on the guard,
Thou shalt be made to answer at the bar
For every fugitive; and when thou thus
Shalt stand impleaded at the high tribunal
Of hood-wink'd justice, who shall tell thy audit?

3

Cotton.

At midnight (when mankind is wrapt in peace
And worldly fancy feeds on golden dreams,)
To give more dread to man's most dreadful hour;
At midnight, 'tis presumed this pomp will burst
From tenfold darkness; sudden as the spark
From smitten steel; from nitrous grain, the blaze.
Man starting from his couch, shall sleep no more.
The day is broke, which never more shall close.
Above, around, beneath, amazement all,
Terror and glory joined in their extremes;
Our God in grandeur, and our world on fire.
All nature struggling in the pangs of death.
Dost thou not hear her? Dost thou not deplore
The strong convulsions, and her final groan?
Where are we now? Ah me! the ground is gone
On which we stood, Lorenzo. While thou mayst,
Provide more firm support or sink forever. [late!
Where? How? From whence ? Vain hope! It is too
Where, where," for shelter shall the guilty fly,

When consternation turns the good man pale.-Young.

A man perishing in the snow: from whence reflections are raised on the miseries of life.

1. As thus the snows arise, and foul and fierce
All winter drives along the darken'd air;
In his own loose resolving fields, the swain
Disaster stands; sees other hills ascend,
Of unknown joyless brow; and other scenes
Of horrid prospect, shag the trackless plain:
Nor finds the river, nor the forest, hid
Beneath the formless wild; but wanders on

2.

From hill to dale, still more astray;

Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps,

Stung with the thoughts of home; the thoughts of home
Rush on his nerves, and call their vigor forth

In many a vain attempt.

How sinks his soul!
What black despair, what horror fills his heart!
When for the dusky spot which fancy feign'd
His tufted cottage rising through the snow,
He meets the roughness of the middle waste,
Far from the track, and blest abode of man ;
While round him night resistless closes fast,
And every tempest howling o'er his head,
Renders the savage wilderness more wild.

3. Then throng the busy shapes into his mind,
Of cover'd pits, unfathomably deep,

A dire descent, beyond the power of frost!
Of faithless bogs; and precipices huge,

Smooth'd up with snow; and what is land, unknown,
What water of the still unfrozen spring,

In the loose marsh or solitary lake,

Where the fresh fountain from the bottom boils.

4. These check his fearful steps; and down he sinks
Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift,
Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death,
Mix'd with the tender anguish nature shoots
Through the wrung bosom of the dying man,
His wife, his children, and his friends unseen.
5. In vain for him th' officious wife prepares
The fire fair-blazing, and the vestment warm;
In vain his little children, peeping out
Into the mingled storm, demand their sire,
With tears of artless innocence. Alas!
Nor wife nor children more shall he behold;
Nor friends, nor sacred home. On every nerve
The deadly winter seizes; shuts up sense;
And o'er his inmost vitals creeping cold,
Lays him along the snows a stiffen'd corse,
Stretch'd out and bleaching in the northern blast.
6. Ah, little think the gay licentious proud,
Whom pleasure, power and affluence surround;

They who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth,
And wanton, often cruel riot, waste;

Ah, little think they while they dance along,
How many feel, this very moment, death,
And all the sad variety of pain.

How many sink in the devouring flood,
Or more devouring flame. How many bleed,
By shameful variance betwixt man and man!

7. How many pine in want and dungeon glooms,
Shut from the common air, and common use
Of their own limbs! How many drink the cup
Of baleful grief, or eat the bitter bread
Of misery! Sore pierc'd by wintry winds,
How many sink into the sordid hut

Of cheerless poverty! How many shake
With all the fiercer tortures of the mind,
Unbounded passion, madness, guilt, remorse!

8. How many, rack'd with honest passions, droop,
In deep retir'd distress! How many stand
Around the death-bed of their dearest friends,
And point the parting anguish! Thought fond man
Of these and all the thousand nameless ills,
That one incessant struggle render life,
One scene of toil, of suffering and of fate,
Vice in his high career would stand appall'd,
And heedless rambling impulse learn to think;
The conscious heart of charity would warm,
And her wide wish benevolence dilate;
The social tear would rise, the social sigh;
And into clear perfection, gradual bliss,
Refining still, the social passions work.

Having finished an arduous task, and the day being spent, we enjoy the luxury of a leisure evening; and, to acknowledge the fact, we are happy to conclude our labors.

One of the effects of envy, in respect to the object of it, is a busy, curious inquiry or prying into all the concerns of the person envied or maligned; and this, no doubt, only as a step to those farther mischiefs, which envy assuredly aims at.

For no man inquires into another's concerns, or makes it his business to acquaint himself with his privacies, but with a design to do him some shrewd turn or other. Such an eye is never idle, but always looking about to see where a man lies open to a blow. It is, withal, an indefatigable teller and hearer of base stories. It is this blessed quality, forsooth, that so insinuates into families, that puts them upon hiring servants to betray their masters, and inveigling one friend, if possibly they can, to supplant another; it is this that listens at doors and windows, that catches at every breath or whisper that is stirring, etc..

Detraction. We have already seen the first effort made by it, by an insidious diving into his (the envied person's) most secret affairs, and the next to this always works out at the mouth; so that' if a man cannot overbear his neighbor by downright violence of action, he will attempt it at least by vilifying expressions, and that there may not want art, as well as malice, to carry on the attack more sure and home. Has a man done bravely, and got himself a reputation too great to be borne down by any base and direct aspersions? Why then envy will seemingly subscribe to the general vogue in most things, but then it will be sure to come over him again with a sly oblique stroke in some derogating [but]3 or other, and so slide in some scurvy exception, which shall effectually stain all his other virtues.-South.

And here it comes in one's way, to take notice of a manifest error, or mistake, in the author now cited, unless perhaps he has incautiously expressed himself, so as to be misunderstood; namely, "that it is malice only and not goodness, which can make us afraid." Whereas, in reality, goodness is the natural and just object of the greatest fear to an ill man. Malice may be appeased or satiated: humor may change; but goodness is a fixed, steady, immovable principle of action. If either of the former holds the sword of justice, there is plainly ground for the greatest crimes to hope for impunity.

1ý 188, R. 2.

2188.

3265, R. 6.

4 § 178.

PART IV.

PROSODY.

271. Prosody teaches the rules of Punctuation, Utterance, Figures, and Versification.

PUNCTUATION.

§ 272. "Punctuation is dividing a written composition into sentences, or parts of sentences, by points or stops, for the purpose of marking the different pauses which the sense and a correct pronunciation require.

REMARK. Punctuation is a modern art. The ancients were entirely unacquainted with the use of our commas, colons, etc.; and wrote not only without any distinction of members and periods, but also without distinction of words; which custom continued till the year 360 before Christ. How the ancients read their works, written in this manner, it is not

easy to conceive. After the practice of joining words together had ceased, notes of distinction were placed at the end of every word. This practice, with some variation, continued a considerable time.

As it appears that the present usage of stops did not take place, whilst manuscripts and monumental inscriptions were the only known methods of conveying knowledge, we must conclude that it was introduced with the art of printing. The introduction was, however, gradual; all the points did not appear at once. The colon, semicolon, and note of admiration, were produced some time after the others. The whole set, as they are now used, came to be established, when learning and refinement had made considerable progress."Murray's Gram., p. 266.

$273. The principal marks used in punctuation are the following; as,

1. The Comma [,] which denotes the shortest pause. 2. The Semicolon [;] which denotes a pause double that of a comma.

3. The Colon [:] which denotes a pause double that of a semicolon.