416 THE PRICE OF ELOQUENCE. We see him again, when the tempest comes on, hurrying to the least frequented parts of the Piræus or Phalerus, and while the deafening thunders roar around him, and the deep and stirring eloquence of many waters expands and fills his soul, lifting his feeble and stammering voice, and essaying to give it compass, and flexibility, and power, while he "talks with the thunder as friend to friend, and weaves his garland of the lightning's wing." We see this ardent Athenian youth again, amidst the profoundest solitudes of nature, holding communion with high and ennobling thoughts, stirred within his bosom by the spirit of the great and godlike, the sublime and beautiful, from every object of nature and of plastic art around him. At length, day after day and night after night, for months, he is seen entering a solitary cave. How is he busied in that subterranean chamber? With his head half shaven, that he may not be tempted to appear too early in society or in public, we find him poring over the tomes of rhetoricians, historians, philosophers, and poets; with his pen, also, eight times transcribing Thucydides, that he may make his own, some portion of the terseness, energy, and fire of that historian. After all this educational training of the greatest and best masters, living and dead-after all this self-imposed discipline of intellect and spirit, and when he has reached the age of ripe manhood, we go to witness his first effort in forensic eloquence. The hisses of his fastidious auditory stifle and repress for a time the kindling energy and fervor of his soul, and his still embarrassed and stammering enunciation seems to jeopardize the cause he is pleading. At length he rises in a conscious mastery of his subject and of himself, and, with the self-sustained dignity of the true orator, conciliates, convinces, moves, persuades, by the clearness, fitness, and force of his arguments, and the thrilling pathos and pungency of his appeals. This is eloquence-the eloquence of the Athenian Demosthenes -the triumph of educational skill and self-discipline, united, indeed, with great powers, and with a lofty and indomitable force of will. The meed which the concurrent suffrages of more than two thousand years, in every civilized nation of the globe, have awarded to this great orator, we readily concede to him. But in A LEGEND OF BREGENZ. 417 our admiration of the power of his eloquence, we are too willing to forget the laborious and pains-taking efforts of study and discipline by which he attained his unrivalled eminence in oratorical power. A LEGEND OF BREGENZ.-ADELAIDE PROCTER. GIR IRT round with rugged mountains the fair Lake Constance In her blue heart reflected shine back the starry skies; Midnight is there and Silence, enthroned in heaven, looks down For Bregenz, that quaint city upon the Tyrol shore, Has stood above Lake Constance a thousand years and more. Her battlements and towers, from off their rocky steep, Of how the town was saved, one night, three hundred years ago. Far from her home and kindred a Tyrol maid had fled, And every year that fleeted so silently and fast, Seemed from her to bear farther the memory of the past. She served kind, gentle masters, nor asked for rest or change; Her friends no more seemed new ones, their speech no more seemed strange; And when she led her cattle to pasture every day, She ceased to look and wonder on which side Bregenz lay. She spoke no more of Bregenz with longing and with tears; Yet, when her master's children would clustering round her stand, 418 A LEGEND OF BREGENZ. And when at morn and evening she knelt before God's throne, And so she dwelt: the valley more peaceful year by year; While farmers, heedless of their fields, paced up and down in talk. The men seemed stern and altered,-with looks cast on the ground; With anxious faces, one by one, the women gathered round; One day, out in the meadow, with strangers from the town, At eve they all assembled, then care and doubt were fled; "The night is growing darker; ere one more day is flown, Before her stood fair Bregenz; once more her towers arose; Nothing she heard around her, though shouts rang forth again; With trembling haste and breathless, with noiseless step, she sped; Horses and weary cattle were standing in the shed; A LEGEND OF BREGENZ. 419 She loosed the strong, white charger, that fed from out her hand, "Faster!" she cries, "O faster!" eleven the church-bells chime: Shall not the roaring waters their headlong gallop check? She strives to pierce the blackness, and looser throws the rein; Up the steep bank he bears her, and now they rush again Bregenz is saved! Ere daylight her battlements are manned; Three hundred years are vanished; and yet upon the hill And when, to guard old Bregenz, by gateway, street, and tower, 66 When midnight pauses in the skies, he calls the maiden's name! 420 DON'T SLOP OVER. DON'T SLOP OVER. ON'T slop over," the old man said, "DON As he placed his hand on the young man's head: "Go it by all means-go it fast; Go it while leather and horse-shoes last; Will hold together. Oh, go it, of course; But don't slop over, my dear young man. "Don't slop over! You'll find some day "Don't slop over! The wisest men "Don't slop over! Distrust yourself, wind, and strong, |