may hope, by emulating their father's example, one day to gain their father's rank, and perhaps even to achieve some portion of their father's fame. His manners were as delightful as his character was estimable, simple, and unpretending, but elegant and graceful, such as bespoke and became his birth; and their charm was increased by a fine countenance, full of animation, and a person singularly handsome, and though not above the middle size, indicating that strength and activity to which, under Providence, he more than once owed his life. Tenderly alive to the feelings and duties of all life's relations, he sought his own happiness in that of those he loved; a good son, a good husband, a good father, and a good friend. Though unostentatious in his religious duties, it is not to be thought that he who habitually felt "in the midst of life we are in death," had not a soul solemnly alive to religion. In that he but resembled all the rest of his country's greatest heroes. Nor can we fear that we shall be blamed by any, even by those who were nearest and dearest to him, for mentioning here, that after his death, a manuscript was found, containing extracts from the Bible, especially suitable for the devotional exercises of one whose lot had lain among perpetual dangers, and prayers, "accompanied with heart-confessions," to the very last affectingly proving to one sad survivor, how humbly and penitentially that heart was disposed towards the God whose goodness guards them "that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters."

AMERICAN POETRY.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

[APRIL 1832.]

If it be seldom safe for one man to dislike, despise, or disparage another, it must always be dangerous for one nation so to regard or judge another nation, since the causes are then more numerous, and also more subtle in their workings, by which both feeling and reason may be perniciously biassed, in the formation of sentiments permanently cherished by people towards people, state towards state.

It is hard to know one's own heart, scarcely possible to know another's; and yet how rash are we, one and all, in attributing characters to individuals on imperfect knowledge even of their outward lives, in utter ignorance of their inner spirits! From certain circumstances in which we suppose we see them placed, but without understanding what produced that condition, and from a certain course of conduct which we suppose that we perceive them to pursue, but without any acquaintance with their multifarious motives, we too often confidently pass sentence on their duties and deserts, classing them in different orders of moral and intellectual worth, as we vainly believe, too, according to the commands of our conscience. But conscience, though stern and unrelenting in self-judgment, is not so when seeking to see into the impulses of the souls of our brethren; and is then indeed the sister of charity. She tells us to be less wary in bestowing our praise than our blame, our love than our hate, and that in the light of good-will we shall ever most clearly see the truth.

A very moderate experience, if accompanied with very moderate reflection, might suffice, one would think, to show us that we cannot otherwise be just. A holy caution is indeed

one of the most conspicuous characteristics of that feeling and faculty within us that judges right and wrong; and we must not grant to "well-meaning people," as the weak and narrowminded are too often called, the privilege of trying, and testing and deciding all human conduct by reference solely to what may happen to be the habitual prejudices and bigotries of their own understandings, uninstructed and unenlightened by that large, that universal sympathy, without which there can be neither virtue nor wisdom.

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Such errors, however, pass unheeded by, often with little. visible injury done, in the narrow circles of private life, haunted, as they are, by too many foolish fancies and absurd surmises, whispered in the idle and empty talk of that confidential gossiping, which, not contented with the imaginary evil it condemns, is restless till it has created a seeming reality out of mere report, and infused perhaps a drop of pestilential poison into the otherwise harmless air of rumour, that circles round the dwelling of unsuspecting innocence.

How much wilful misunderstanding and misrepresentation of character and conduct do we see and hear every day, in the case of different professions! The soldier thinks the clergyman a hypocrite, because he wears a black coat; and the clergyman thinks the soldier a profligate because he wears a red one; the cloth is thought to colour the character even to the very eye; and there is a mutual repulsion between those who by nature may be kindred and congenial spirits.

A more commonplace observation than the above never trickled from grey-goose quill; and on that account we let it trickle from ours; for extend the spirit of it from trades and professions, each of which hangs together like a small commonwealth, and is composed of a peculiar people, to kingdoms separated by seas, and each swarming with its own life, and then you will find mighty nations regarding each other with just the same sort of feelings; millions, when leagued together under different laws and institutions, as blindly and senselessly ignorant of other millions, as Mrs Grundy of the real character of Mrs Tomkins.

It is right that every people should have its own national character; and the more strongly marked the better, for in such separation there is strength. But it is also right that each people should have large sympathies with the national character

of all the rest. We speak of the good or the great;—and all are either the one or the other, who, with some vices, possess any strong and distinguishing virtues. But to have such large sympathies, there must be knowledge; and to have knowledge, we must scatter to the winds that visit us from afar, all such of our home-born and home-bred prejudices and bigotries as blind us to the perception of the same qualities in which we find our own pride and delight, when they exist in novel forms and combinations and habits in the character of the natives of other isles or continents, whether of alien, or of our own blood. If alien, to do so may be more difficult; if our own, not to do so is more mean-or base—or wicked; and now we are brought to the point-shall Englishmen and Scotchmen suffer themselves to be divided in soul, more than by seas, from their brethren the Americans-by the sullen swell or angry billows of animosity and hatred, more perilous far than all the storms that sweep the bosom of the wide Atlantic?

We are the children of one mother. Not merely of old mother Earth, though in all cases that consideration should be sufficient to inspire mutual love into the hearts of her offspring; but of the Island of the Enlightened Free and never shall we believe that great nations can help loving one another, who exult in the glory of the same origin. Many passions may burn in their hearts, as they follow the career assigned them by fate, that shall seem to set them at war. Jealously may they regard one another in the pride of their ambition. Should their mightier interests clash, fierce will be the conflict. But if these may be pursued and preserved in peace, there will be a grandeur in the guarded calm with which they regard each other's power; and mutual pride, we may be well assured, in mutual prosperity. They-our colonists-thought themselves oppressed, enslaved, and they resolved to be free. We resolved to put them down as rebels. We fought and—they conquered. We were met by our own might—and need Old England be ashamed that New England triumphed? They grudged not afterwards—though they must have envied—our victories over our and Europe's foes, at Trafalgar, Talavera, and Waterloo. Ask them, the Americans, what nation of the Old World they love best, and that stands highest in their proud esteem? The nation from whose

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loins they sprung. Alfred, Bruce, and Washington, were our three great deliverers.

There is great grandeur in the origin of the civil polity of the Americans-in its sudden and strong establishment; and it is destined, we doubt not, to long duration, and a vast accumulation of power-a boundless empire.

The growth of the human race, in the course of nature, shows us first a family, then a tribe consisting of many kindred families, then a nation consisting of many kindred. tribes. We find in the world several nations spread to a considerable extent by this natural diffusion; but in that case, the degree of union among the different tribes seems very loose, and not sufficient to prevent internal wars. Thus in Europe, in its primitive state, the Celtic, the German, and the Sclavonic nations, have extended to great numbers, occupying wide countries; and the old remembrances of consanguinity, marked in speech, and in external appearance, with some community of usages, has maintained a loose union among them. In Asia, some of the great Tartar nations, and the Arabs also, offer similar examples, having remained till this day free from admixture of blood. These show how the traces of the primitive origination of political society may remain indelibly impressed upon it, through the longest succession of time.

But to form larger, and yet stronger cemented states, other principles have been necessary, and have been employed by nature-chiefly these two, voluntary Confederacy under a common head, and Conquest.

Of the permanent states that have been formed at any time by voluntary Confederacy, the examples are not numerous, though some of them are not without splendour in the history of the world. In Italy, the Etrurian state appears to have been so formed, and it made great progress in early civilisation. Its union, too, was of considerable duration. Among the Greeks we find different occasional leagues, but none that could be called durable, except the union of the twelve Ionic cities in Asiatic Greece, a defensive league which was managed by a diet of deputies from the different towns. This, however, could not be said to constitute a state or community, since each remained governed by its own independent laws. The Amphictyonic Council, in which the delegates of