fering and blood. The grandeur of history is represented in your act. Men have wrought with pen and tongue, and pined in dungeons, and died on scaffolds, that you might obtain this symbol of freedom, and enjoy this consciousness of a sacred individuality. To the ballot have been transmitted, as it were, the dignity of the sceptre and the potency of the sword.

And that which is so potent as a right, is also pregnant as a duty; a duty for the present and for the future. If you will, that folded leaf becomes a tongue of justice, a voice of order, a force of imperial law; securing rights, abolishing abuses, erecting new institutions of truth and love. And, however you will, it is the expression of a solemn responsibility, the exercise of an immeasurable power for good or for evil, now and hereafter. It is the medium through which you act upon your country,the organic nerve which incorporates you with its life and welfare. There is no agent with which the possibilities of the republic are more intimately involved, none upon which we can fall back with more confidence than the ballot-box.

THE REVEILLE.

T. B. HART.

ARK! I hear the tramp of thousands,

And of armed men the hum

But the drum
Answered, "Come!

Lo! a nation's hosts have gathered You must do the sum to prove it!" said the
Round the quick alarming drum,

Let me of my heart take counsel

War is not of Life the sum ;

Who shall stay and reap the harvest
When the autumn days shall come?"
But the drum

Echoed, "Come!

Death shall reap the braver harvest!" said the solemn-sounding drum.

But when won the coming battle,
What of profit springs therefrom?

What if conquest, subjugation,

Even greater ills become?"

Yankee-answering drum.

What if, 'mid the cannon's thunder,

Whistling shot and bursting bomb,
When my brethren fall around me,
Should my heart grow cold and numb?”
But the drum

Answered, "Come!

Better there in death united than in life a recreant-come!"

Thus they answered-hoping, fearing-
Some in faith, and doubting some—
Till a trumpet-voice, proclaiming,

Said, "My chosen people, come!"
Then the drum,

Lo! was dumb,

For the great heart of the nation, throbbing

answered, "Lord we come!"

Yet birds' clearest carol by fall or by swell- Poor bells! I forgive you; your good days

And bells have forgotten their old art of No listening, no longing, shall aught, augh:

AUSE not to dream of the future be- From the rough sod blows the soft-breathing

Speaks to thy soul from out Nature's great Labor is life! 'Tis the still water faileth; heart.

From the dark cloud flows the life-giving Keep the watch wound, for the dark rust as saileth;

THE TOMBS OF WESTMINSTER.

THE TOMBS OF WESTMINSTER.

621

WASHINGTON IRVING.

ROSE and prepared to leave the abbey. As I descended the flight of steps which leads into the body of the building, my eye was caught by the shrine of Edward the Confessor, and I ascended the small staircase that conducts to it, to take from thence a general survey of this wilderness of tombs. The shrine is elevated upon a kind of platform, and close around it are the sepulchres of various kings and queens. From this eminence the eye looks down between pillars and funeral trophies to the chapels and chambers below, crowded with tombs; where warriors, prelates, courtiers and statesmen, lie mouldering in their beds of darkness. Close by me stood the great chair of coronation, rudely carved of oak, in the barbarous taste of a remote and Gothic age. The scene seemed almost as if contrived, with theatrical artifice, to produce an effect upon the beholder. Here was a type of the beginning and the end of human pomp and power; here it was literally but a step from the throne to the sepulchre. Would not one think that these incongruous mementos had been gathered together as a lesson to living greatness?— to show it, even in the moment of its proudest exaltation, the neglect and dishonor to which it must soon arrive, how soon that crown which encircles its brow must pass away, and it must lie down in the dust and disgraces of the tomb, and be trampled upon by the feet of the meanest of the multitude. The last beams of day were now faintly streaming through the painted windows in the high vaults above me; the lower parts of the abbey were already wrapped in the obscurity of twilight. The chapels and aisles grew darker and darker. The effigies of the kings faded into shadows; the marble figures of the monuments assumed strange shapes in the uncertain light; the evening breeze crept through the aisles like the cold breath of the grave; and even the distant footfall of a verger, traversing the Poet's Corner, had something strange and dreary in its sound. I slowly retraced my morning's walk, and as I passed out at the portals of the cloisters, the door, closing with a jarring noise behind me, filled the whole building with echoes.

I endeavored to form some arrangement in my mind of the objects I had been contemplating, but found they were already fallen into indistinctness and confusion. Names, inscriptions, trophies, had all become confounded in my recollection, though I had scarcely taken my foot from off the threshold. What, thought I, is this vast assemblage of sepulchres but

a treasury of humiliation; a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the emptiness of renown, and the certainty of oblivion! It is, indeed, the empire of death; his great shadowy palace, where he sits in state, mocking at the relics of human glory, and spreading dust and forgetfulness on the monuments of princes. How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present, to think of the characters and anecdotes that gave interest to the past, and each age is a volume thrown aside to be speedily forgotten. The idol of to-day pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor to-morrow. "Our fathers," says Sir Thomas Brown, "find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors." History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription moulders from the tablet; the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust? What is the security of a tomb, or the perpetuity of an embalmment? The remains of Alexander the Great have been scattered to the wind, and his empty sarcophagus is now the mere curiosity of a museum. "The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth ; Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams."

What then is to insure this pile which now towers above me from sharing the fate of mightier mausoleums? The time must come when its gilded vaults, which now spring so loftily, shall lie in rubbish beneath the feet; when, instead of the sound of melody and praise, the wind shall whistle through the broken arches, and the owl hoot from the scattered tower-when the garish sunbeam shall break into these gloomy mansions of death, and the ivy twine round the fallen column; and the fox-glove hang its blossoms about the nameless urn, as if in mockery of the dead. Thus man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.