wheeled their mighty flexures along the American coast, and returned to Europe with tidings of the everlasting breakwaters which had stopped their way. But the fullness of time had not yet come. Egypt and Assyria, and Tyre and Carthage, and Greece and Rome, must flourish and fall, before the seals are broken. The ancient civilization must be weighed in a balance and found wanting. Yes, and more. Nature must unlock her rarest mysteries; the quivering steel must learn to tremble to the pole; the astrolabe must climb the arch of heaven; science must demonstrate the spheroidity of the earth, which the ancients suspected but could not prove; the press must scatter the flying rear of mediæval darkness; the creative instincts of a new political, intellectual, and social life must begin to kindle into action; and then the great Discoverer may go forth.

"He does go forth. The discovery is made; the balance of the globe is redressed. A continent nearly equal in extent to one-half the ancient hemisphere is brought to light. What momentous questions present themselves! Another world! Is it a twin sister of the ancient world? It has mountains, and rivers, and lakes, and forests; but does it contain the homes of man? of cultivated races, who have pursued, independently of their Eastern brethren, separate, perhaps higher paths of civilization? In a word, has the great cause of humanity, made an immediate gain by the wonderful event which has added so much to the geography of the world, as before known?

"The first contact answered these great questions in the

negative. The native races,—apparently incapable of assimilation, seemed doomed by a mysterious Providence to pass away. The Spaniard came upon them, borne on winged mon sters, as they thought, from beyond the sea; careering on strange quadrupeds, horse and rider, as they supposed, forming but one animal, and he advanced under cover of that fearful ordnance which they confounded with the three-bolted artillery of the skies; he came in all these terrors, and he brought them death.

"Those that escaped have borrowed little from us but the poisoned cup-the loathsome malady-the murderous weapon. The skies are mild, the soil is fertile, there is every variety of climate, a boundless theatre for human enjoyment and action, -but the appointed agent was not there. Over the greater part of the new-found continent, society, broken down by eternal wars between 'neighboring tribes, at once in its decrepitude and infancy,—had not yet risen even to the pastoral stage. Nature, in fact, had not bestowed upon man the mute but faithful partners of his toil-the horse, the ox, the sheep, and other still humbler associates, whose aid (did we but know it) lies at the basis of his civilization;—who furnish so much of his food and clothing-meat, milk, eggs, and wool, and skins, and relieve his weary muscles of their heaviest burdens. There is no civilized population to stand up and enter into equal comparison and generous rivalry with Europe. The discoverer has come; but the settler, the colonist, the conqueror, alas, that I must add, too often the oppressor and destroyer, are to follow in his train. By these various agencies

joyous and sorrowful-through these parts of triumph and woe-the culture of the old world, in the lapse of successive generations, reformed of its abuses, enriched with new arts, animated by a broader spirit of humanity,―transferred from the privileged few to the mass of the community, is to be reproduced and perfected in the West.

"I need not say to this company, assembled on the shores of the haven for which so many noble hearts on that terrible voyage throbbed with sickening expectancy-that quiet haven where the Mayflower furled her tattered sails-that a greater, a nobler work was never performed by man. Truly the opus magnum, the great work of humanity. You bid me speak of that portion of it which devolved on the Pilgrims. Would to Heaven I could find words to do justice even to my own poor conceptions, and still more that I could find conceptions not far below the august reality. A mighty work of improvement, in which (not to speak of what has been done in other portions of the continent,) the poor solitary Mayflower, so to say, has multiplied herself into the thousand vessels that bear the flag of the Union to every sea; has scattered her progeny through the land, to the number of nearly a quarter of a million for every individual in that drooping company of one hundred; and in place of the simple compact, which was signed in her cabin, has exhibited to the admiration of mankind a Constitution of Republican Government for all this growing family of prosperous States. But the work is in its infancy. It must extend throughout the length and breadth of the land; and what is not done directly by ourselves, must be

done by other governments and other races, by the light of our example. The work-the work must go on. It must reach, at the North, to the enchanted cave of the magnet, within never-melting barriers of Arctic ice; it must bow to the lord of day on the altar-peak of Chimborazo; it must look up and worship the Southern Cross. From the easternmost cliff on the Atlantic, that blushes in the kindling dawn, to the last promontory on the Pacific, which catches the parting kiss of the setting sun, it must make the outgoings of the morning and the evening to rejoice in the gladsome light of morals, and letters, and arts. Emperors, and kings, and parliaments -the oldest and the strongest governments in Europe,-must engage in this work, in some part or other of the continent, but no part of it shall be so faithfully and successfully performed as that which was undertaken on the spot where we are now gathered, by the Pilgrim Fathers of New England."

JOHN P. HALE.

JOHN P. HALE is a free-and-easy, fat-and-social man, who can relish a dish of oysters, or a good joke, as well as any member of the Senate. He has the courage of Cromwell, and the fun of Falstaff. He has a strong hand at one end of his arm, and a strong head at the other. When he shakes the former, you feel a heart throbbing in the palm; when he shakes the latter, it is the signal of a storm that will hail for the space of an hour, and every stone will be the weight of a talent.

Foote may rave and foam, and threaten to hang Hale, his genial and generous fellow senator, on the tallest tree in Mississippi; but there will be a response so apropos, so full of humor, from such a sunshiny countenance, the peppery Mississippian will be ashamed of his impotent imprecations. There is more thunder and lightning in the crack of Hale's joke, than there is punishment in the crack of Foote's pistol. The pungent wit of the former is more destructive than the exploding powder of the latter. The sarcasm and irony of the Northerner is more dreaded than the sulphur and saltpetre of the Southerner. The cool man of "Granite" is more than a match for the choleric representative of "Cotton." The small sword of wit cuts deeper than the bowie-knife of wrath.