Nature opposed her everlasting mounds, Her Alps, and snows; o'er these with torrent force,

He pours, and rends through rocks his dreadful course,

Already at his feet Italia lies;—

Yet thundering on, “Think nothing done," he cries,

"Till Rome, proud Rome, beneath my fury falls,

And Afric's standards float along her walls!" Big words!—but view his figure! view his face!

O, for some master-hand the lines to trace,
As through the Etrurian swamps, by floods
increast,

The one-eyed chief urged his Getulian beast!
But what ensued? Illusive glory, say.
Subdued on Zama's memorable day,
He flies in exile to a petty state,
With headlong haste; and, at a despot's gate,
Sits, mighty suppliant! of his life in doubt,
Till the Bithynian's morning nap be out.
Nor swords, nor spears, nor stones from
engines hurl'd,

Shall quell the man whose frown alarm'd the world:

The vengeance due to Canna's fatal field,
And floods of human gore, a ring shall yield!
Fly, madman, fly! at toil and danger mock,
Pierce the deep snow and scale the eternal
rock,

To please the rhetoricians, and become
A DECLAMATION-for the boys of Rome!

One world the ambitious youth of Pella found

Too small; and toss'd his feverish limbs around,

And gasp'd for breath, as if immured the while,

In Gyare, or Serîpho's rocky isle:

But entering Babylon, found ample room,
Within the narrow limits of a tomb!
Death, the great teacher, Death alone pro-
claims,

The true dimensions of our puny frames.
The daring tales, in Grecian story found,
Were once believed:-of Athos sail'd around,
Of fleets, that bridges o'er the waves supplied,
Of chariots, rolling on the steadfast tide,
Of lakes exhausted, and of rivers quaft,
By countless nations, at a morning's draught,
And all that Sostratus so wildly sings
Besotted poet, of the king of kings.

But how return'd he, say? this soul of fire, This proud barbarian, whose impatient ire Chastised the winds that disobey'd his nod, With stripes, ne'er suffer'd from the Eolian

god;

Fetter'd the Shaker of the sea and landBut, in pure clemency, forbore to brand!

They catch at glory, and they clasp disgrace! "LIFE! LENGTH OF LIFE!" For this, with earnest cries,

Or sick, or well, we supplicate the skies.
Pernicious prayer! for mark what ills attend,
Still, on the old, as to the grave they bend.
But grant his senses unimpair'd remain ;
Still woes on woes succeed, a mournful train!
He sees his sons, his daughters, all expire,
His faithful consort on the funeral pyre.
Sees brothers, sisters, friends, to ashes turn,
And all he loved, or loved him, in their urn;
Lo here, the dreadful fine we ever pay,
For life protracted to a distant day!
To see our house by sickness, pain pursued,
And scenes of death incessantly renew'd:
In sable weeds to waste the joyless years,
And drop, at last, 'mid solitude and tears!

The Pylian's (if we credit Homer's page) Was only second to the raven's age.

O happy, sure, beyond the common rate, Who warded off, so long, the stroke of fate! Who told his years by centuries, who so oft Quaff'd the new must! O happy, sure"But, soft,

This "happy" man of destiny complain'd, Curs'd his gray hairs, and every god arraign'd;

What time he lit the pyre, with streaming

eyes,

And, in dark volumes, saw the flames arise
Round his Antilochus :-"Tell me," he cried
To every friend who linger'd at his side,
"Tell me what crimes have roused the Immor-

tals' hate,

That thus, in vengeance, they protract my date?"

So question'd heaven Laertes-Peleus so(Their hoary heads bow'd to the grave with woe)

While This bewail'd his son, at Ilium slain, That his, long wandering o'er the faithless main.

While Troy yet flourish'd, had her Priam died,

With what solemnity, what funeral pride,
Had he descended, every duty paid,
To old Assaracus, illustrious shade!-
Hector himself, bedew'd with many a tear,
Had join'd his brothers to support the bier;

And Troy's dejected dames, a numerous train,
Follow'd in sable pomp, and wept amain,
As sad Polyxena her pall had rent,
And wild Cassandra raised the loud lament:

Had he but fall'n, ere his adulterous boy
Spread his bold sails, and left the shores of
Troy.

But what did lengthen'd life avail the sire? To see his realm laid waste by sword and fire. Then too, too late, the feeble soldier tried Unequal arms, and flung his crown aside; Totter'd his children's murderer to repel, With trembling haste, and at Jove's altar fell, Fell without effort; like the steer, that now,' Time-worn and weak, and by the ungrateful plough,

Spurn'd forth to slaughter, to the master's knife,

Yields his shrunk veins, and miserable life.
I pass, while hastening to the Roman page,
The Pontic king, and Croesus, whom the
Sage

Wisely forbad in fortune to confide,

Or take the name of HAPPY, till he died.

JUVENAL.

THE GOTH AND THE ROMAN.

[GEORGE P. MARSH, an American author and diplomatist, was born at Woodstock, Vt., in 1801, graduated at Dartmouth in 1820, and became a lawyer. He has been close student through life, although largely engaged in public affairs, having been in Congress from 1842 to 1849, minister to Turkey, 1849-53, and minister to Italy

from 1861 to 1881. Mr. Marsh's principal works are "Lectures on the English Language" (1861), “Origin and History of the English Language" 1862, "Man and Nature" (1864), re-issued in 1874 with additions, as

"The Earth as Modified by Human Action." Mr. Marsh's philological studies have been extensive; he annotated a reprint of Wedgwood's Etymology, besides making other contributions to lexicography. He died in 1882.]

I shall do my audience the justice to suppose, that they are too well instructed to be the slaves of that antiquated and vulgar prejudice, which makes Gothicism and barbarism synonymous. The Goths, the common ancestors of the inhabitants of North Western Europe, are the noblest branch of the Caucasian race. We are their children. It was the spirit of the Goth that guided the May-Flower across the trackless ocean; the blood of the Goth that flowed at Bunker's

Hill.

Nor were the Goths the savage and destructive devastators that popular error has made them. They indeed overthrew the dominion of Rome, but they renovated her

| people; they prostrated her corrupt government, but they respected her monuments; and Theodoric the Goth not only spread but protected many a precious memorial, which Italian rapacity and monkish superstition have since annihilated. The old lamentaBarberini, contains a world of truth, and tion, Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecere had not Rome's own sons been her spoilers, she might have shone at this day in all the splendour of her Augustan age.

England is Gothic by birth, Roman by adoption. Whatever she has of true moral grandeur, of higher intellectual power, she owes to the Gothic mother; while her grasp ing ambition, her material energies, her spirit of exclusive selfishness, are due to the Roman nurse.

;

The Goth is characterized by the reason, the Roman by the understanding; the one by imagination, the other by fancy; the former aspires to the spiritual, the latter is prone to the sensuous. The Gothic spirit produced a Bacon, a Shakspeare, a Milton the Roman, an Arkwright, a Brindley, and a Locke. It was a Roman, that gathered up the coals on which St. Lawrence had been broiled; a Goth, who, when a fellow disciple of the great Swiss reformer had rescued his master's heart from the enemy, on the field where the martyr fell, snatched that heart from its preserver, and hurled it, yet almost palpitating with life, into the waters of a torrent, lest some new superstition should spring from the relics of Zwingli.

Rome, it is said, thrice conquered the world; by her arms, by her literature and art, by her religion. But Rome was essentially a nation of robbers. Her territory She was acquired by unjust violence. plundered Greece of the choicest productions of the pencil and the chisel, and her own best literature and highest art are but imperfect copies of the master-pieces of the creative genius of the Greek. She not only sacked the temples, but removed to the imperial city the altars, and adopted the Gods of the nations she conquered. Tiberius even prepared a niche for the Christian Saviour among the heathen idols in the Pantheon, and when Constantine made Christianity the religion of the state, he sanctioned the corruptions which Rome had engrafted upon it, and handed it down to his successors, contaminated with the accumulated superstitions of the whole heathen world.

The Goth has thrice broken her sceptre.

The Goth dispelled the charm that made her arms invincible. The Goth overthrew her idolatrous altar, and the Goth is now surpassing her proudest works in literature and in art.

The cardinal distinction between these conflicting elements, as exemplified in literature and art, government, and religion, may be thus stated. The Roman mistakes the means for the end, and subordinates the principle to the form. The Goth, valuing the means only as they contribute to the advancement of the end, looks beneath the form, and seeks the in-dwelling, life-giving principle, of which he holds the form to be but the outward expression. With the Goth, the idea of life is involved in the conception of truth, and though he recognises life as an immutable principle, yet he perceives that its forms of expression, of action, of suffering, are infinitely diversified, agreeing, however, in this, that all its manifestations are characterized by development, motion, progress. To him truth is symbolized by the phenomena of organic life. The living plant or animal, that has ceased to grow, has already begun to die. Living truth, therefore, though immutable in essence, he regards as active, progressive in its manifestations; and he rejects truths which have lost their vitality, forms divorced from their spirituality, symbols which have ceased to be expressive. With the Goth, all truth is an ever-living principle, whence should spring the outward expression, fluctuating, varying, according to the circumstances which call it forth: with the Roman, its organic life is petrified, frozen into inflexible forms, inert. To the one it is a perennial fountain, a living stream, which murmurs, and flows, and winds "at its own sweet will," refreshing all life within the sphere of its influence, and perpetually receiving new accessions from springs that are fed by the showers of heaven, as it hastens onward to that unfathomable ocean of divine knowledge, which is both its primeval source and its ultimate limit. To the other it is a current congealed to ice by the rigour of winter, chilling alike the landscape and the spectator, or a pool, that stagnates, putrifies, breeds its countless swarms of winged errors.

In literature and art the Goth pursues the development of a principle, the expression of a thought, the realization of an ideal; the Roman seeks to fix the attention, and excite the admiration, of the critic or the

spectator, by the material and sensuous beauties of his work.

Thus, in poetry, the Roman aims at smoothness of versification, harmonious selection and arrangement of words, and brilliancy of imagery; the Goth strives to give utterance to "thoughts that breathe, in words that burn."

In plastic and pictorial art, the Roman attracts the spectator by the grace and the voluptuous beauty of the external form, the harmony of colouring, the fitness and proportion of the accessories, the excellence of keeping; the Goth regards these but as auxiliaries, and subordinates or even sacrifices them all to the expression of the thought or passion, which dictates the action represented.

The Goth holds that government springs from the people, is instituted for their behoof, and is limited to the particular objects for which it was originally established; that the legislature is but an organ for the solemn expression of the deliberate will of the nation, that the coercive power of the executive extends only to the enforcement of that will, and that penal sanctions are incurred only by resistance to it as expressed by the proper organ. The Roman views government as an institution imposed from without, and independent of the people, and holds, that it is its vocation not to express but to control the public will; and hence, by a ready corruption, government comes to be considered as established for the private advantage of the ruler, who asserts not only a proprietary right to the emoluments of office, but an ultimate title to all the possessions, both of the state and of the individual citizen.

To the same source may be referred the poor fiction of divine indefeasible right, and that other degrading doctrine, which supposes all the powers of government, legislative, judicial and executive, to have been originally lodged in the throne, allowing to the subject such political rights only, as have been conceded to him by the sovereign; and hence too that falsest and most baneful of errors, the incubus of the British constitution, which consolidates or rather confounds church and state, conceding to the civil ruler supreme authority in spiritual matters, and ascribing temporal power to religious functionaries and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. So in spiritual things we find a like antagonism.

GEORGE P. MARSH.

Whilst muffins sit enthroned in trays, And orange-punch in winter sways The merry sceptre of my days;

And let the world laugh, an' it will.

He that the royal purple wears
From golden plate a thousand cares
Doth swallow as a gilded pill:
On feasts like these I turn my back,
Whilst puddings in my roasting-jack
Beside the chimney hiss and crack:-

And let the world laugh, an' it will.

And when the wintry tempest blows, And January's sleets and snows

Are spread o'er every vale and hill, With one to tell a merry tale O'er roasted nuts and humming ale, I sit, and care not for the gale ;

And let the world laugh, an' it will.

Let merchants traverse seas and lands, For silver mines and golden sands;

Whilst I beside some shadowy rill, Just where its bubbling fountain swells, Do sit and gather stones and shells, And hear the tale the blackbird tells ;And let the world laugh, an' it will.

fifty feet above the Hudson. These heights are rocky, very steep, and covered with small trees and tangled bushes. Under the heights, at a point half a mile from where they be gin, there is, twenty feet above the water, a grassy ledge or shelf, about six feet wide, and eleven paces long. This was the fatal spot. Except that it is slightly encumbered with underbrush, it is, at this hour, precisely what it was on the 11th of July, 1804. There is an old cedar-tree at the side, a little out of range, which must have looked then very much as it does now. The large rocks which partly hem in the place are, of course, unchanged, except that they are decorated with the initials of former visitors. One large rock, breast-high, narrows the hollow in which Hamilton stood to four feet or less.

Inaccessible to foot-passengers along the river, except at low tide, with no path down to it from the rocky heights above, no residence within sight on that side of the river, unless at a great distance, it is even now a singularly secluded scene. But fifty years ago, when no prophet had yet predicted Hoboken, that romantic shore was a nearly unbroken solitude. A third of a mile below the duelling-ground there stood a little tavern, the occasional resort of excursionists; where, too, duelling parties not unfrequently

AND BURR.

FROM LIFE OF AARON BURR.

[JAMES PARTON, born at Canterbury, England, February 9, 1822, was brought to New York in early childhood; he was educated at the Academy of White Plains where he became a teacher at the age of nineteen, subsequently

he taught school in Philadelphia and New York. He was for some time assistant editor of The Home Journal, and has been a prolific biographical writer. He mar

ried in 1856 the well-known authoress, Fanny Fern. Among his works are biographies of "Horace Greeley" (1854), “Aaron Burr” (1857), “ Andrew Jackson" (1860), “ Benjamin Butler ” (1864), “ Famous Americans" (1870), and recently "The Life of Voltaire." From his "Life of Aaron Burr 19 we extract the following.] He died 1891.]

Few of the present generation have stood upon the spot, which was formerly one of the places that strangers were sure to visit on coming to the city, and which the events of this day rendered for ever memorable. Two miles and a half above the city of Hoboken, the heights of Weehawken rise, in the picturesque form so familiar to New Yorkers, to an elevation of a hundred and

and where they sometimes returned to invigorate their restored friendship with the landlord's wine. A short distance above the ground, lived a fine-hearted old Captain, who, if he got scent of a duel, would rush to the place, throw himself between the combatants, and never give over persuading and threatening till he had established a peace or a truce between them. He was the owner of the ground, and spoke with authority. He never ceased to think that, if on this fatal morning, he had observed the approach of the boats, he could have prevented the subsequent catastrophe.

But, for the very purpose of preventing suspicion, it had been arranged that Colonel Burr's boat should arrive some time before the other. About half-past six, Burr and Van Ness landed, and leaving their boat a few yards down the river, ascended over the rocks to the appointed place. It was a warm, bright, July morning. The sun looks down, directly after rising, upon the Weehawken heights, and it was for that reason that the two men removed their coats before the arrival of the other party. There