All that clamorous throng; and thus he spake to his people; Deep were his tones and solemn; in accents measured and mournful Spake he, as, after the tocsin's alarum, distinctly the clock strikes. "What is this that ye do, my children? what madness has seized you? Forty years of my life have I labored among you, and taught you, Not in word alone, but in deed, to love one another! Is this the fruit of my toils, of my vigils and prayers and privations? Have you so soon forgotten all lessons of love and forgiveness? This is the house of the Prince of Peace, and would you profane it Thus with violent deeds and hearts overflowing with hatred? Lo! where the crucified Christ from His cross is gazing upon you! See! in those sorrowful eyes what meekness and holy compassion! Hark! how those lips still repeat the prayer, 'O Father, forgive them!' Let us repeat that prayer in the hour when the wicked assail us, Let us repeat it now, and say, 'O Father, forgive them!""" Few were his words of rebuke, but deep in the hearts of his people Sank they, and sobs of contrition succeeded the passionate outbreak, While they repeated his prayer, and said, "O Father, forgive them!" There disorder prevailed, and the tumult and stir of embarking. Busily plied the freighted boats; and in the confusion Wives were torn from their husbands, and mothers, too late, saw their children Left on the land, extending their arms, with wildest entreaties. Half the task was not done when the sun went down, and the twilight Deepened and darkened around; and in haste the refluent ocean Fled away from the shore, and left the line of the sand-beach Covered with waifs of the tide, with kelp and the slippery seaweed. Farther back in the midst of the household goods and the wagons, Like to a gypsy camp, or a leaguer after a battle, All escape cut off by the sea, and the sentinels near Suddenly rose from the south a light, as in autumn the blood-red Moon climbs the crystal walls of heaven, and o'er the horizon Titan-like stretches its hundred hands upon the mountain and meadow, Seizing the rocks and the rivers and piling huge shadows together. Broader and ever broader it gleamed on the roofs of the village, Gleamed on the sky and sea, and the ships that lay in the roadstead. Columns of shining smoke uprose, and flashes of flame were Thrust through their folds and withdrawn, like the quivering hands of a martyr. Then as the wind seized the gleeds and the burning thatch, and, uplifting, Whirled them aloft through the air, at once from a hundred house-tops Started the sheeted smoke with flashes of flame inter And as the voice of the priest repeated the service of sorrow, Lo! with a mournful sound, like the voice of a vast congregation, Solemnly answered the sea, and mingled its roar with the dirges. 'Twas the returning tide, that afar from the waste of the ocean, With the first dawn of the day, came heaving and hurrying landward. Then recommenced once more the stir and noise of embarking; And with the ebb of the tide the ships sailed out of the harbor, Leaving behind them the dead on the shore, and the village in ruins. Still stands the forest primeval; but under the shade of its branches Dwells another race, with other customs and lan guage. Only along the shore of the mournful and misty Atlantic Linger a few Acadian peasants, whose fathers from exile Wandered back to their native land to die in its bosom. In the fisherman's cot the wheel and the loom are still busy; Maidens still wear their Norman caps and their kirtles of homespun, And by the evening fire repeat Evangeline's story, While from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced, neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest. a lar' um, signal; warning. An' gel us, bell for prayer. con tri' tion, sincere penitence. im' pre ca' tion, curse. pri me' val, of or belonging to the first ages; original. ref' lu ent, ebbing; surging back. sol' stice, the time at which the sun is farthest from the equator. toc' sin, public alarm bell. tur' bu lent, restless. REVOLUTIONS. RUFUS CHOATE. (Extract from a lecture on " The Eloquence of Revolutionary Periods.") Turn, now, to another form of revolution altogether. Turn to a revolution in which a people, who were not yet a nation, became a nation,-one of the great, creative efforts of history, her rarest, her grandest, one of her marked and widely separated geological periods, in which she gathers up the formless and wandering elements of a preexisting nature, and shapes them into a new world, over whose rising the morning stars might sing again. And these revolutions have an eloquence of their own, also; but how unlike that other, exultant, trustful, reasonable, courageous! The cheerful and confident voice of young, giant strength rings through it, the silver clarion of his hope that sounds to an awakening, to an onset, to a festival of glory, preparing! preparing! - his look of fire now fixed on the ground, now straining toward the distant goal; his heart assured and high, yet throbbing with the heightened, irregular pulsations of a new consciousness, beating unwontedly,- the first, delicious, strange, feeling of national life. Twice within a century men have heard that eloquence. They heard it once when, in 1782, Ireland, in arms, had extorted-in part from the humiliation and necessities of England, in part from the justice of a new administration-the independence of her parliament and her judiciary, |