"Oh! if the young enthusiast bears O'er weary waste and sea the stone Or olive-bough from some wild tree, "If leaflets from some hero's tomb, Or moss-wreath torn from ruins hoary, Or fragments from the Alhambra's crest, "If it be true that things like these To these memorials cling? Which need no mellowing mist of time But the most remarkable characteristic of our early history is, that Providence seems to have assigned each man an especial duty, and to have marked each battlefield of forensic strife with distinguished honors. It is interesting to observe how the citadel of oppression was attacked at different points, and a stone loosened here and there, by individual efforts, preparatory to the general storm and complete downfall. James Otis, in his argument against "Writs of Assistance," avowed and triumphantly defended the doctrine, that "taxation without representation is tyranny;" and Samuel Adams, in a college exercise pronounced in the presence of the chief minions of British power, boldly announced for his theme that "Resistance to the Chief Magistrate is a duty, when the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved." These were radical principles and struck at the foundation of all colonial wrongs. About the same time, Patrick Henry led off the southern wing of freedom's young army in a most bold and daring manner. The ruins of the old House of Burgesses will be for ever associated with his name. It was on that spot, in 1764, that he originated the great question which led eventually to American Independence. The whole colony of Virginia was confounded and dispirited on the promulgation of the Stamp-Act. It was in that dark crisis that Henry arose, and the thunders of his eloquence were heard, holding up to public indignation the tyranny of Great Britain, and animating his countrymen to resist the injustice which in that Act she had presumed to inflict. It was in allusion to the august scene, when this "forest-born Demosthenes" boldly braved the popular feeling of the world and the world's greatest power, that Jefferson declared, "Mr. Henry certainly gave the first impulse to the ball of the Revolution.” The same hand smote down another iniquitous principle in the old court-house yet standing in Hanover county. We refer to the famous controversy between the clergy on the one hand and the people of the colony on the other, touching the stipend claimed by the former. Goaded to a sense of religious freedom by the arrogance .of a state establishment and the stings of intolerance, the colonists sought a defender of their rights, and found him in the person of a rustic patriot, then but twenty four years old. We need not here recount the splendid scene when Henry delivered his famous "speech against the parsons," making the blood of all to run cold, and their hair to rise on end. It was thus that Otis, by the flames of his eloquence, calcined the corner-stone of legal tyranny, and Henry with a thunder-bolt shattered the key-stone of ecclesiastical wrongs. Like Hercules and Theseus, they were the avengers of the oppressed and the destroyers of monsters. These were not men who, as Burke said of the aristocratic politicians of his acquaintance, had been "rocked and dandled into legislators." James Otis and Patrick Henry were, above all others, best fitted for the emergency to which they were born, because they dared to say more in public than any other men. They possessed the brawny strength of the giant under whose massy club the hydra fell, and the ethereal terrors that rendered Jupiter Tonans dreadful to his foes, rather than the effeminate ease and elegant locks of Adonis, graceful in the dance, but inefficient on the field of severe and solemn conflict. Every conquest of value is at the price of popular commotion and heroic blood. Men must dare if they would win. The atmosphere we breathe would stagnate without tempests, and the ocean becomes putrid without agitation. Galileo fought in the observatory and suffered in prison while establishing the true doctrines of astronomy. Otis, Henry and Adams struggled on the rostrum, and pleaded with a price set upon their heads, while they cleared a space for the sunshine and growth of enlarged liberty. They were just the men for the task. They struck for freedom and not for plunder, and were ready to sacrifice everything in behalf of the boon for the attainment of which they fought. To give battle single-handed, like Cocles, against a horde of foes, or, like Curtius, to immolate themselves for the good of their country, was a duty which they courted rather than shunned. Those three men were the Horatii of this nation, and their renown will grow broader and brighter with the lapse of time. It is interesting to observe what great results sometimes flow from little causes. On November the seventeenth, 1307, three patriotic Swiss met at night on the border of a lake in the bosom of the Alps, and mutually pledged their labors and their lives for the disenthralment of their country. By the blessing of Providence on their efforts, and the vigilance of their successors, Freedom won and has maintained her sublime throne on that spot for six hundred years. Near the same place, three rivulets pour their limpid waters and unite in a stream constantly augmented.as it leaves mountain and forest behind and rushes on to linger a while in the placid beauty of Lake Constance; thence it leaps down the cataract of Schauffhausen, rolls along the bases of the Jura, the Vosges and the Taurus; traverses the plains of Friesland, waters the low countries of Holland; and having received twelve thousand tributaries, flowed by one hundred and fourteen cities and towns, divided eleven nations, murmuring the history of thirty centuries and diffusing innumerable blessings all along its course, it stretches its mighty career from central Europe to the sea. But who can measure the length or fathom the depth of that current of good, first opened by the instru mentality of Otis, Henry and Adams?—a stream which, more beneficent than the mighty river of Egypt or the Rhine, is destined to inundate and fertilize the world. The source of American independence may be traced higher than to the period when, to speak in the verse of Thomson, "Strait to the voted aid, Free, cordial, large, of never-failing source, Of the worst ruffians, those of tyrant power." It was not the Stamp-Act that produced, although it immediately occasioned, the struggle with the mothercountry. It has been well said by Mr. Jefferson, that "the ball of the Revolution received its first impulse, not from the actors in that event, but from the first colonists." The latter emigrated to America in search of civil and religious freedom; they fled hither with a hatred toward the shackles which feudal institutions and the canon law imposed upon the soul. The spirit of revolt against oppression originated in England, and went with Robinson's congregation to Holland; thence it emigrated in the Mayflower to Plymouth, and became the basis of all the legislation put forth by the wisest of colonists. Our Pilgrim Fathers moulded their social compacts and ecclesiastical government in direct opposition to the systems under which they had been so severely oppressed. But this spirit of freedom, which had been developing from the first planting of the |