more, on the anniversary of the skirmish at Lexington, April 19th, 1775.

THE MASSACHUSETTS LINE.

AIR: "Yankee Doodle."

I.

Still first, as long and long ago,

Let Massachusetts muster;
Give her the post right next the foe;
Be sure that you may trust her.
She was the first to give her blood
For freedom and for honor;
She trod her soil to crimson mud:
God's blessing be upon her!

II.

She never faltered for the right,
Nor ever will hereafter;

Fling up her name with all your might,
Shake roof tree and shake rafter.
But of old deeds she need not brag,
How she broke sword and fetter;
Fling out again the old striped flag!
She'll do yet more and better.

III.

In peace her sails fleck all the seas,
Her mills shake every river;
And where are scenes so fair as these
God and her true hands give her?
Her claim in war who seek to rob?
All others come in later-
Her's first it is to front the Mob,

The Tyrant and the Traitor.

IV.

God bless, God bless the glorious State !
Let her have her way to battle!
She'll go where batteries crash with fate,
Or where thick rifles rattle.

Give her the Right, and let her try,

And then, who can, may press her; She'll go straight on, or she will die; God bless her! and God bless her! DUANESBURGH, May 7, 1861.

Excellent this, and all the better because it is true, which cannot be said of the greater number of national lyrics. But attempt to sing it to the air to the rhythm. of which it is written, and you will not be able to finish the first stanza for laughing. To intone the benediction at the end of the first and last stanzas to the notes of the last phrase of the air, would put the gravity of the Reverend writer to a test which not all his sense of professional decorum would enable him to sustain. And so although we must partly admit the truth of the following lines from one of the proposed National Hymns, sent to the New York Committee,

"Familiar too as household name,

Is Yankee Doodle's thrilling song;

It cheers the warrior in the field,

It triumphs in the festive throng;"

we must yet confess that the "thrilling song" in question hardly meets the requirements of the present state of civilization.

"Hail Columbia" is really worse than "Yankee

Doodle." That has a character, although it is comic; and it is respectable, because it makes no pretence. But both the words and music of "Hail Columbia ” are common-place, vulgar, and pretentious; and the people themselves have found all this out.*

*The "Star-Spangled Banner" is an old French air, long known in England as "Anacreon in Heaven," and in America as "Adams and Liberty," until the song so designated was supplanted by Key's. The air to which Hopkinson wrote "Hail Columbia" was a march written by a German band-master on occasion of a visit of Washington, when President, to the old John street theatre in New York. It was called the "President's March." Yankee Doodle is an old English air.

II.

And so we are practically without a national hymn. That we have thus far remained so, must be attributed in part to the brevity of our national existence, partly to the peaceful and prosperous course of that existence, until now-for national peril, or, at least, national triumph, is needful to the strong development of the sentiment of nationality-and partly to the fact that it is only of late years that music, excepting psalmody, has been cultivated by all sorts and conditions of men among us.

For music is not a spontaneous product of the English race; and we are but Englishmen under new skies and new circumstances. The emigration from other races that has reached these shores, is, to all intents and purposes, as nothing. Comparatively very small, it is at once swallowed up, and becomes an undistinguishable part of the native element. By intermarriage, and yet more by dominant influence, in a generation or two, Irishmen, Germans, and

Frenchmen become Americans, their origin detected only by their names; and an American is but an Englishman, reared in a somewhat unkempt, unfinished republic, where work, and land, and social honor, and political distinction, are to be had by all men who will strive for them. This makes some difference between the British subject and the American citizen; but it is a difference of development, not of essential traits. Were the latter, from his childhood up, under as constant and severe a restraint as the former is, were failure in business, in profession, as ruinous here as it is in the mother country, Americans would cease to be independent, rash, and adventurous, and become submissive, cautious, and steady-going. Their so-called excitability (which is not excitability but mere mobility; for they are, if there be a difference, less excitable than their brothers across the water)* would give place to that steadiness of habit

* Thus, for instance, I remember having seen three first-rate ships, one of them a frigate, launched. The throngs which shared the sight were immense; people having come for miles, and stood hours waiting in the sun, for the sake of this almost momentary spectacle. In each case the launch was splendid; yet not a cheer went up. In what other country in the world would this have happened! Fanny Kemble, too, grumbles in her Journal that the audiences were sluggish, and that the pit did not rise to her father. Mrs. Charles Kean, and some of the great singers, have also complained of the coldness of the immense audiences which gathered to hear them, which yet gave every other proof of intelligent enjoyment, except excitement. Americans generally look and listen in silence. Their readiness for a new "sensation" is due in a great measure to their craving for novelty, and their freedom from those restraints which silently, but inexorably, check the movements of other nations.