And God alone to-night knows where The dread that stirs the peasant Both hold their country dear. Be just and fear not; ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER. Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's, Thy God's, and truth's; then if thou fall'st, O Cromwell, Thou fall'st a blessed martyr. Henry VIII, Act III, Scene 2. XCII. AN APPEAL IN BEHALF OF VIRTUE. HORACE MANN (1796-1859), statesman and educator, was born at Franklin, Massachusetts. He was a reformer who did much to improve the educational systems of America. He did much for the cause of temperance, and he was the founder of lunatic asylums for his State. He was a member of the Massachusetts State Legislature for eleven years, Secretary of the State Board of Education, Representative in Congress from Massachusetts, and for many years president of Antioch College, a school for both sexes, at Yellow Springs, Ohio. His work has made a lasting impression upon the century in which he lived. There are few nobler names in American history than that of Horace Mann. HORACE MANN. 1. I INVOKE the sons of genius, through the sure promotion and supremacy of this cause, to add a luster to their names which the highest perfection of their own beautiful arts can never give, and which no corrosions of time can ever impair. 2. Painters, sculptors, representatives of a race whose eldest born dwelt amid forms of eternal beauty, and whose hallowed spirits, in every age, have presided over the sanctuaries where genius has worshipped, know you not that there are forms of loftier beauty than any which ever shone in the galleries of art; souls, souls, created in the very likeness of God, but now faded, blackened, defiled, deformed, yet still capable of renovation, still capable of being appareled in such celestial covering, and of bearing such a divine impress, as no skill of human artist can ever emulate? 3. I know that the out-raying gladness of the forms which quicken beneath your plastic skill, betoken to the eye a sense of living spirit within; yet reason assures us that, though we call them "divine," they are still unconscious. However deeply they may thrill or ravish us, we know their charms are external only; that no immortal spirit is enshrined beneath their surface; that conscience, benevolence and joy are not their attributes. 4. Spare, then, a brief hour to shed actual blessedness on bosoms whose heavings and anguish are no illusion of the senses. Leave, for a time, the dead marble and the insensate canvas; mount up to higher conceptions of art than to give coloring, however brilliant, or shape, however exquisite, to inanimate forms; go from perishable matter to the imperishable spirit, and pour blissful feelings deep inward, along the agonized nerve and the quivering heart-strings. 5. You shape the semblance of divinest contour and features, but they are cold and motionless; their very existence to themselves is death, and day and night are alike darkness to them. Is it not nobler to waken, all the day long, in redeemed house holds, such spontaneous songs of joy as the statue of Memnon never uttered, and to send dreams of paradise, by night, to visit the once thorny pillow of wife and children? 6. Rise, then, from the feigned to the real, and by reluming the human countenance with the light of long-departed joys, convert your own loveliest emblems into glorious realities. As you await a happy moment of inspiration to give the last lighting-up touches to your own choicest works, so seize the higher inspirations of benevolence to solace the disconsolate, and thus give a hallowing finish, an unfading halo, to your own fame, and consecrate the immortality you win. 7. Young men, you last, you chiefest, let me implore! You, whose precious privilege it still is to make life long by commencing the performance of its duties early! Where lie your own welfare, your own honor, your own blessedness? Lie they not in that future course of life which is to flow out of your own minds and hearts, and which your own hands are to fashion as the temple is fashioned by the builder? The future, that greatest heritage on earth, is all your own. Dilate, expand your thoughts to some comprehension of its value. 8. Each day is a tablet which is put into your hands, unmarked by a single line. Your thought, your resolves, your deeds, for that day, are engraven upon it; it is then taken away and deposited in the chambers of the indestructible Past. There, by an irreversible law of God, it must remain forever; nor time, nor decay, nor man, nor angels, can ever obliterate a word of its eternal record. Let that record be your glory, and not your shame, forever. 9. When a Roman youth passed from minority to manhood, when he ceased to be a child in the family and became a pillar of the state, the day of his emancipation was celebrated with solemn services. The ceremony of putting on the graceful garment of manhood, in token that the duties of manhood were then to be assumed, was performed on some great festival day of the nation, amid crowds of assembled friends, and under the auspices of his household gods. 10. Thence in long procession they moved to some public temple, where, with songs and vows, they implored the divinities to crown with honor and usefulness the life of the newborn citizen; while he himself was commended, and, as it were, apprenticed to the example of some of the city's illustrious men. Such were the solemn rites and aspirations which ushered a young man into life in pagan Rome. What holy resolutions, then, what self-consecration of the entire life to truth and duty, befit the aspiring and ingenuous youth of the American republic! 11. As your fathers are swiftly passing away into the realms of shade, do not all the transcendent interests of society, its prosperity, its happiness, its honor in distant lands and in distant times, devolve upon you? How is all that is precious in our public institutions to be ennobled, and transmitted from early ancestors to late posterity, unless one generation after another shall receive and improve, and then pass it onward as from hand to hand? 12. Grasp, then, this conception of your high destiny. Embody it in deeds. Your power to fulfill it is the choicest boon of heaven; and ere the habits, the morals, the institutions of society, pass beyond your reach forever, redeem them from all pollution, cast out from them the seeds of death and every element of decay, and imbue them with the immortal strength of knowledge, purity, and temperance. HORACE MANN. XCIII. BREAK! BREAK! BREAK! 1. BREAK, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O sea! And I would that my tongue could utter 2. O well for the fisherman's boy That he shouts with his sister at play! O well for the sailor lad That he sings in his boat on the bay! 3. And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanished hand, 4. Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead TENNYSON. XCIV. GLACIERS. 1. A GLACIER is an enormous mass of solid ice filling up a valley, and stretching from the eternal snows which crown the summits of the mountains down to the smiling cornfields and rich pastures of the plains. It is constantly fed by the accumulating snows of winter, which, slipping and rolling down the slopes of the mountains, lodge in the valleys below, and are there converted into ice. |