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is literally true. Temples and palaces, amphitheatres and catacombs, monuments of power, and magnificence, and skill, to perpetuate the memory and preserve even the ashes of those who lived in past ages, must, in the revolutions of earthly events, not only perish themselves by violence or decay, but the very dust in which they perished be so scattered, as to leave no trace of their material existence behind. There is no security, beyond the passing moment, for the most permanent or the most precious of these; they are as much in jeopardy as ever, after having escaped the changes and chances of thousands of years. An earthquake may suddenly ingulf the pyramids of Egypt, and leave the sand of the desert as blank as the tide would have left it on the sea shore. A hammer in the hand of an idiot may break to pieces the Apollo Belvidere or the Venus de Medici, which are scarcely less worshipped as miracles of art in our day, than they were by idolaters of old as representatives of deities.

Looking abroad over the whole world, after the lapse of nearly six thousand years, what have we of the past but the words in which its history is recorded? What beside a few mouldering and brittle ruins, which time is imperceptibly touching down into dust? What, beside these, remains of the glory, the grandeur, the intelligence, the supremacy of the Grecian republics, or the empire of Rome? Nothing but the words of poets, historians, philosophers and orators, who, being dead, yet speak, and, in their immortal works, still maintain their ascendency over inferior minds through all posterity. And these intellectual sovereigns not only "rule our spirits from their urns," by the power of their thoughts, but their very voices are heard by our living ears, in the accents of their mother tongues. The beauty, the eloquence and art of these collocations of sounds and syllables, the learned alone can appreciate, and that only (in some cases) after long, intense and laborious investigation; but as thought can be made to transmigrate from one body of words into another, even through all the

languages of the earth, without losing what may be called its personal identity, the great minds of antiquity continue to hold their ascendency over the opinions, manners, characters, institutions and events of all ages and nations, through which their posthumous compositions have found way, and been made the earliest subjects of study, the highest standards of morals, and the most perfect examples of taste to the master minds in every state of civilized society. In this respect, the words of inspired prophets and apostles among the Jews, and those of gifted writers among the ancient Gentiles, may truly be "said to last for ever."

LESSON LXXXIII.

Extract from a Speech on the Indian Bill, in the Congress of the United States.-ISAAC C. BATES.

SIR, you cannot take a step in the argument towards the result contended for by the friends of this bill, without blotting out a treaty, or tearing a seal from your bond. 'I give to the bill the connection which it has in fact, whatever may be said to the contrary, with the laws of the states to which it is subsidiary, and with the decision of the president, that the Indians must submit or remove. Now, sir, I say you are bound to protect them where they are, if they claim it at your hands; that you violate no right of the states in doing it, and will violate the rights of the Indian nations by not doing it; that when the United States, in consideration of the cession of land made by the Cherokees to this government, guarantied to them the “remainder of their country for ever," you meant something by it. Sir, it is in vain to talk upon this question; impossible patiently to discuss it. If you have honor, it is pledged ; if you have truth, it is pledged; if you have faith, it is pledged; a nation's faith, and truth, and honor! And to

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whom pledged? To the weak, the defenceless, the dependent. We chose to covenant with the Americans, they say to you. Selecting your faith, and no other, you would not have it otherwise, we reposed our trust and confidence in you, and you alone. And for what pledged? Wherever you open your eyes, you see it, and wherever you plant your foot upon the earth, you stand upon it. And by whom pledged? By a nation in its youth-a republic, boastful of its liberty; may it never be added, unmindful of its honor. Sir, your decision upon this subject is not to be rolled up in the scroll of your journal, and forgotten. The transaction of this day, with the events it will give rise to, will stand out upon the canvass in all future delineations of this quarter of the globe, putting your deeds of glory in the shade. You will see it every where on the page of history, in the essay of the moralist, in the tract of the jurist. You will see it in the vision of the poet; you will feel it in the sting of the satirist; you will encounter it in the indignant frown of the friend of liberty and the rights of man, wherever despotism has not subdued to its dominion the very look. You will meet it upon the stage; you will read it in the novel; and the eyes of your children's children, throughout all generations, will gush with tears as they run over the story, unless the oblivion of another age of darkness should come over the world, and blot out the record and the memory of it. And, sir, you will meet it at the bar above. The Cherokees, if they are men, cannot submit to such laws and such degradation. They must go. Urged by such persuasion, they must consent to go. If you will not interfere in their behalf, the result is inevitable-the object will be accomplished. When the Cherokee takes his last look of the cabin he has reared-of the field he has cultivated-of the mound that covers the ashes of his fathers for unknown generations, and of his family and friends, and leaves all to be desecrated by the greedy and obtrusive borderer-sir, I will not venture upon a description of this scene of a nation's exit and exile. I will

only say I would not encounter the secret, silent prayer that should be breathed from the heart of one of these sufferers, armed with the energy that faith and hope would give it, if there be a God that avenges the wrongs of the injured, for all the land the sun has looked upon. These children of nature will go to the stake, and bid you strike without the motion of a muscle; but if they can bear this; if they have reduced whatever there is of earth about them to such a subjection to the spirit within, as to bear this, we are the men to go into the wilderness, and leave them here as our betters.

There are many collateral arguments, bearing upon the main point of this discussion, that I intended to have urged, and many directly in my way, that I have passed over, and most of them I have but touched. But, full of interest as this question is, I dare not venture longer upon the patience of the House. At this age of the world, and in view of what the original possessors of this continent have been, and what we were, and of what they have become, and we are; any thing but the deep and lasting infamy-to say nothing of the appalling guilt-of a breach of faith with the Indian tribes. If the great men who have gone before us were so improvident as to involve the United States in contradictory and incompatible obligations, a breach of faith with all the world besides, rather than with these our confiding neighbors. If we must be made to blush, let it be before our equals. Let there be at least dignity in our humiliation, and something besides unmixed selfishness and domineering cowardice in the act that produces it.

LESSON LXXXIV.

Sabbath Days.-BERNARD BARTON.

TYPES of eternal rest, fair buds of bliss,
In heavenly flowers unfolding week by week,
The next world's gladness imaged forth in this,
Days of whose worth the Christian heart can speak.

Eternity in time, the steps by which

We climb to future ages, lamps that light

Man through his darker days, and thought enrich,
Yielding redemption for the week's dull flight.

Wakeners of prayer in man, his resting bowers,
As on he journeys in the narrow way,
Where, Eden-like, Jehovah's walking hours.
Are waited for as in the cool of day.

Days fixed by God for intercourse with dust,
To raise our thoughts and purify our powers,
Periods appointed to renew our trust,

A gleam of glory after six days' showers.

A milky way, marked out, through skies else drear,
By radiant suns that warm as well as shine;

A clue, which he who follows knows no fear,
Though briers and thorns around his pathway twine.

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Foretastes of heaven on earth, pledges of joy
Surpassing fancy's flight and fiction's story,
The preludes of a feast that cannot cloy,
And the bright out-courts of immortal glory.

LESSON LXXXV.

Prospects of the Cherokees.-PELEG SPRAGUE.

WHITHER are the Cherokees to go? What are the benefits of the change? What system has been matured for their security? what laws for their government? These questions are answered only by gilded promises in general terms; they are to become enlightened and civilized husbandmen.

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