Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

company, self-exiled, went from Massachusetts to Connecticut. If to the former the movement was not optional, it was the same that the latter chose when it was optional; and it proved advantageous for all the parties concerned.

A GOOD DAUGHTER.

A good daughter!-there are other ministries of love more conspicuous than hers, but none in which a gentler, lovelier spirit dwells, and none to which the heart's warm requitals more joyfully respond. There is no such thing as a comparative estimate of a parent's affection for one or another child. There is little which he needs to covet, to whom the treasure of a good child has been given. But a son's occupations and pleasures carry him more abroad, and he lives more among temptations, which hardly permit the affection, that is following him perhaps over half the globe, to be wholly unmingled with anxiety, till the time when he comes to relinquish the shelter of his father's roof for one of his own; while a good daughter is the steady light of her parent's house. Her idea is indissolubly connected with that of his happy fireside. She is his morning sunlight and his evening star. The grace, and vivacity, and tenderness of her sex have their place in the mighty sway which she holds over his spirit. The lessons of recorded wisdom which he reads with her eyes come to his mind with a new charm as they blend with the beloved melody of her voice. He scarcely knows weariness which her song does not make him forget, or gloom which is proof against the young brightness of her smile. She is the pride and ornament of his hospitality, and the gentle nurse of his sickness, and the constant agent in those nameless, numberless acts of kindness, which one chiefly cares to have rendered because they are unpretending, but all-expressive proofs of love. And then what a cheerful sharer is she, and what an able lightener, of a mother's cares! what an everpresent delight and triumph to a mother's affection! Oh, how little do those daughters know of the power which God has committed to them, and the happiness God would have them enjoy, who do not, every time that a parent's eye rests on them, bring rapture to a parent's heart! A true love will almost certainly always greet their approaching steps. That they will hardly

alienate. But their ambition should be not to have it a love merely which feelings implanted by nature excite, but one made intense and overflowing by approbation of worthy conduct; and she is strangely blind to her own happiness, as well as undutiful to them to whom she owes the most, in whom the perpetual appeals of parental disinterestedness do not call forth the prompt and full echo of filial devotion.

WILLIAM WARE, 1797-1852.

WILLIAM WARE, the son of Rev. Henry Ware, D.D., Hollis Professor of Divinity in Harvard University, was born in Hingham, Massachusetts, on the 3d of August, 1797, and graduated at Cambridge in 1816. When he had finished his theological studies there, and had preached a short time at Northboro', Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, Connecticut, he was settled over the Unitarian congregation in Chambers Street, New York, in December, 1821, where he remained about sixteen years. Near the close of this period, he commenced, in the "Knickerbocker Magazine," the publication of those brilliant papers which, in 1836, were published under the title of Zenobia, or the Fall of Palmyra, an Historical Romance, which gave him at once very high rank as a classical scholar and a classic author. In 1838, he published another volume of a similar character, entitled Probus, or Rome in the Third Century, a sort of sequel to Zenobia, and now known under the title of Aurelian. In 1841, he published Julian, or Scenes in Judea, in which he has described the most striking incidents in our Saviour's life, the work closing with an account of the crucifixion.

While these works were in the course of publication, he became the editor of the " Christian Examiner," having removed to Cambridge, Massachusetts. But ill health obliged him to give up all literary occupation, and he sailed for Europe in 1848. On his return, he gave a series of lectures in Boston, New York, and other places, upon the scenes he had visited, and, in 1851, published Sketches of European Capitals. This was his last work; for his health rapidly declined, and he died on the 19th of February, 1852.1

PALMYRA IN ITS GLORY.

I was still buried in reflection, when I was aroused by the shout of those who led the caravan, and who had attained the summit of a little rising ground, saying, "Palmyra! Palmyra!" I urged forward my steed, and in a moment the most wonderful prospect I ever beheld-no, I cannot except even Rome-burst upon my sight. Flanked by hills of considerable elevation on the east, the city filled the whole plain below as far as the eye could reach, both toward the north and toward the south. This immense plain was all one vast and boundless city. It seemed to me to be larger than Rome. Yet I knew very well that it could

"It was an adventure in literature somewhat bold when the pen of an Occidental scholar of the nineteenth century attempted to reproduce not merely the outward manners and institutions, but the inner thoughts and principles of life in Rome, Palmyra, and Judea in the early ages of the Christian era. How well Mr. Ware succeeded, the great popularity of his works testify. To the strange fascination of ancient and Oriental life, so vividly reproduced, there was added the higher charm of a Christian philosophy, delicately, unobtrusively, and yet with a marked impression interweaving its lessons with the story. His works have passed into the rank of classics, and no longer need the critic's pen to point out their worth."-New York Independent.

not be, that it was not.

And it was some time before I understood the true character of the scene before me, so as to separate the city from the country, and the country from the city, which here wonderfully interpenetrated each other, and so confound and deceive the observer. For the city proper is so studded with groups of lofty palm-trees, shooting up among its temples and palaces, and, on the other hand, the plain in its immediate vicinity is so thickly adorned with magnificent structures of the purest marble, that it is not easy, nay, it is impossible, at the distance at which I contemplated the whole, to distinguish the line which divided the one from the other. It was all city and all country, all country and all city. Those which lay before me I was ready to believe were the Elysian Fields. I imagined that I saw under my feet the dwellings of purified men and of gods. Certainly they were too glorious for the mere earth-born. There was a central point, however, which chiefly fixed my attention, where the vast Temple of the Sun stretched upwards its thousand columus of polished marble to the heavens, in its matchless beauty, casting into the shade every other work of art of which the world can boast. I have stood before the Parthenon, and have almost worshipped that divine achievement of the immortal Phidias. But it is a toy by the side of this bright crown of the Eastern capital. I have been at Milan, at Ephesus, at Alexandria, at Antioch; but in neither of those renowned cities have I beheld any thing that I can allow to approach, in united extent, grandeur, and most consummate beauty, this almost more than work of man. On each side of this, the central point, there rose upwards slender pyramids-pointed obelisks-domes of the most graceful proportions, columns, arches, and lofty towers, for number and for form, beyond my power to describe. These buildings, as well as the walls of the city, being all either of white marble, or of some stone as white, and being everywhere in their whole extent interspersed, as I have already said, with multitudes of overshadowing palm-trees, perfectly filled and satisfied my sense of beauty, and made me feel for the moment as if in such a scene I should love to dwell, and there end my days.

PALMYRA AFTER ITS CAPTURE AND DESTRUCTION.

No language which I can use, my Curtius, can give you any just conception of the horrors which met our view on the way to the walls and in the city itself. For more than a mile before we reached the gates, the roads, and the fields on either hand, were strewed with the bodies of those who, in their attempts to escape, had been overtaken by the enemy and slain. Many a group of bodies did we notice, evidently those of a family, the parents and

the children, who, hoping to reach in company some place of security, had all-and without resistance, apparently-fallen a sacrifice to the relentless fury of their pursuers. Immediately in the vicinity of the walls, and under them, the earth was concealed from the eye by the multitudes of the slain, and all objects were stained with the one hue of blood. Upon passing the gates, and entering within those walls which I had been accustomed to regard as embracing in their wide and graceful sweep the most beautiful city in the world, my eye met nought but black and smoking ruins, fallen houses and temples, the streets choked with piles of still blazing timbers and the half-burned bodies of the dead. As I penetrated farther into the heart of the city, and to its better-built and more spacious quarters, I found the destruction to be less, that the principal streets were standing, and many of the more distinguished structures. But everywhere-in the streets-upon the porticos of private and public dwellings-upon the steps and within the very walls of the temples of every faith -in all places, the most sacred as well as the most common, lay the mangled carcasses of the wretched inhabitants. None, apparently, had been spared. The aged were there, with their bald or silvered heads-little children and infants-women, the young, the beautiful, the good,-all were there, slaughtered in every imaginable way, and presenting to the eye spectacles of horror and of grief enough to break the heart and craze the brain. For one could not but go back to the day and the hour when they died, and suffer with these innocent thousands a part of what they suffered, when, the gates of the city giving way, the infuriated soldiery poured in, and, with death written in their faces and clamoring on their tongues, their quiet houses were invaded, and, resisting or unresisting, they all fell together, beneath the murderous knives of the savage foe. What shrieks then rent and filled the air-what prayers of agony went up to the gods for life to those whose ears on mercy's side were adders'—what piercing supplications that life might be taken and honor spared! The apartments of the rich and the noble presented the most harrowing spectacles, where the inmates, delicately nurtured and knowing of danger, evil, and wrong only by name and report, had first endured all that nature most abhors, and then there, where their souls had died, were slain by their brutal violators with every circumstance of most demoniac cruelty.

Oh, miserable condition of humanity! Why is it that to man have been given passions which he cannot tame, and which sink him below the brute? Why is it that a few ambitious are permitted by the Great Ruler, in the selfish pursuit of their own aggrandizement, to scatter in ruin, desolation, and death, whole kingdoms,-making misery and destruction the steps by which

they mount up to their seats of pride? O gentle doctrine of Christ!-doctrine of love and of peace,-when shall it be that I and all mankind shall know Thy truth, and the world smile with a new happiness under Thy life-giving reign!

JOHN G. C. BRAINARD, 1796-1828.

Thou art sleeping calmly, Brainard; but the fame denied thee when
Thy way was with the multitude-the living tide of men-

Is burning o'er thy sepulchre,-a holy light and strong;
And gifted ones are kneeling there. to breathe thy words of song,-
The beautiful and pure of soul,-the lights of Earth's cold bowers,
Are twining on thy funeral-stone a coronal of flowers!

Ay, freely hath the tear been given, and freely hath gone forth
The sigh of grief. that one like thee should pass away from Earth;
Yet those who mourn thee, mourn thee not like those to whom is given-
No soothing hope, no blissful thought, of parted friends in Heaven;
They feel that thou wast summon'd to the Christian's high reward,--
The everlasting joy of those whose trust is in the Lord!--J. G. WHITTIER.

JOHN GARDNER CALKINS BRAINARD, son of the Honorable J. G. Brainard, one of the Judges of the Supreme Court of Connecticut, was born in New London, on the 21st of October, 1796, and graduated at Yale College in 1815. On leaving college, he studied law, and commenced the practice of it at Middleton; but, the profession not being congenial to his tastes, he abandoned it, and, in 1822, undertook the editorial charge of the "Connecticut Mirror," at Hartford, which for five years he enriched with his beautiful poetical productions and chaste and elevated prose compositions. His pieces were extensively copied, often with very high encomium, and the influence his paper exerted over its readers could not but be purifying and elevating. But consumption had marked him for her own; and in less than five years he returned to his father's house, at New London, where, with calm and Christian resignation,' he expire on the 26th of September, 1828. In 1825, a volume of his poems was published in New York, mostly made up from the columns of his newspaper. After his death, a second edition appeared, in 1832, enlarged from the first, with the title of Literary Remains, accompanied by a just and feeling memoir by the poet Whittier, a kindred spirit, and one every way calculated to appreciate and illustrate his subject.

Just before his death, he remarked, "The plan of salvation in the gospel is all that I wish for: it fills me with wonder and gratitude, and makes the prospect of death not only peaceful but joyful."

2 The sketch of Brainard's life in Kettell's "Specimens" was written by S. G. Goodrich. In 1842, a beautiful edition of his poems was published at Hartford, by Edward Hopkins, accompanied by a portrait, and by an admirable memoir written by Rev. Royal Robins, of Berlin, Connecticut.

« ForrigeFortsett »