My soul, in humble hope unscar'd, FROM THE LIFE AND CHARACTER OF JAMES MADISON. This constitution, my countrymen, is the great result of the North American revolution. This is the giant stride in the improvement of the condition of the human race, consummated in a period of less than one hundred years. Of the signers of the address to George the Third in the Congress of 1774— of the signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776-of the signers of the Articles of Confederation in 1781, and of the signers of the federal and national Constitution of Government under which we live, with enjoyments never before allotted to man, not one remains in the land of the living. The last survivor of them all was he to honor whose memory we are here assembled at once with mourning and with joy. We reverse the order of sentiment and reflection of the ancient Persian king-we look back on the century gone by-we look around with anxious and eager eye for one of that illustrious host of Patriots and heroes, under whose guidance the revolution of American Independence was begun, and continued, and completed. We look around in vain. To them this crowded theatre, full of human life, in all the stages of existence, full of the glowing exultation of youth, of the steady maturity of manhood, the sparkling eyes of beauty, and the grey hairs of reverend age-all this to them is as the solitude of the sepulchre. We think of this and say, how short is human life! But then, then, we turn back our thoughts again, to the scene over which the falling curtain has but now closed upon the drama of the day. From the saddening thought that they are no more, we call for comfort upon the memory of what they were, and our hearts leap for joy, that they were our fathers. We see them, true and faithful subjects of their sovereign, first meeting with firm but respectful remonstrance, the approach of usurpation upon their rights. We see them, fearless in their fortitude, and confident in the righteousness of their cause, bid defiance to the arm of power, and declare themselves Independent States. We see them waging for seven years a war of desolation and of glory, in most unequal contest with their own unnatural stepmother, the mistress of the seas, till, under the sign-manual of their king, their Independence was acknowledged-and last and best of all, we see them, toiling in war and in peace to form and perpetuate an union, under forms of Government intricately but skilfully adjusted so as to secure to themselves and their posterity the priceless blessings of inseparable liberty and law. Their days on earth are ended, and yet their century has not passed away. Their portion of the blessings which they thus labored to secure, they have enjoyed, and transmitted to us, their posterity. We enjoy them as an inheritance-won, not by our toils-watered, not with our tears-saddened, not by the shedding of any blood of ours. The gift of heaven through their sufferings and their achievements-but not without a charge of corresponding duty incumbent upon ourselves. And what, my friends and fellow citizens-what is that duty of our own? Is it to remonstrate to the adder's ear of a king beyond the Atlantic wave, and claim from him the restoration of violated rights? No. Is it to sever the ties of kindred and of blood with the people from whom we sprang? To cast away the precious name of Britons, and be no more the countrymen of Shakspeare and Milton-of Newton and Locke-of Chatham and Burke? Or more and worse, is it to meet their countrymen in the deadly conflict of a seven years' war? No. Is it the last and greatest of the duties fulfilled by them? Is it to lay the foundation of the fairest Government and the mightiest nation that ever floated on the tide of time? No! These awful and solemn duties were allotted to them; and by them they were faithfully performed. What then is our duty? Is it not to preserve, to cherish, to improve the inheritance which they have left us-won by their toils-watered by their tears-saddened but fertilized by their blood? Are we the sons of worthy sires, and in the onward march of time have they achieved in the career of human improvement so much, only that our posterity and theirs may blush for the contrast between their unexampled energies and our nerveless impotence? between their more than Herculean labors and our indolent repose? No, my fellow citizens, far be from us, far be from you, for he who now addresses you has but a few short days before he shall be called to join the multitu le of ages past-far be from you the reproach or the suspicion of such a degrading contrast. You too have the solemn duty to perform, of improving the condition of your species, by improving your OWII. Not in the great and strong wind of a revolution, which rent the mountains and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord-for the Lord is not in the wind-not in the earthquake of a revolutionary war, marching to the onset between the battle field and the scaffold-for the Lord is not in the earthquake— not in the fire of civil dissension-in war between the members and the head-in nullification of the laws of the Union by the forcible resistance of one refractory State-for the Lord is not in the fire; and that fire was never kindled by your fathers! No! it is in the still small voice that succeeded the whirlwind, the earthquake, and the fire. The voice that stills the raging of the waves and the tumults of the people that spoke the words of peace-of harmony of union. And for that voice, may you and your children's children, "to the last syllable of recorded time," fix your eyes upon the memory, and listen with your ears to the life of JAMES MADISON. THE TRIUMPHS OF SUPERSTITION. The sun retires. Night spreads her dusky plume. The gray mist rises from the passing stream. Yon cloud, o'ershadowing, deepens all the gloom: And the heart trembles as the lightnings gleam. Pale terror wanders o'er the dewy lawn. The loud blast groans along the distant shore. The ghost, complaining, rides upon the storm. The sea rolls high: the beating surges roar. Now guilt forsakes his agonizing bed, Where conscience planted many a piercing thorn. Kind sleep has left his eye; each joy is fled: He waits, impatient for the coming morn. Full many an airy shape-dejected—pale, To his sad mind imagination paints; And as they flit across the blighted vale, He hears the breeze-they sigh; he chills and faints. Yet gentle innocence, with bosom pure, Fears not the loud wind's groan, the breeze's sigh, But walks abroad in virtue's garb secure, Nor startles as the harmless lightnings fly. Mark, as deep musing in these still retreats, No anxious pang distracts her peaceful soul; Though panting terror frowns along the vale. A portion of the poem is taken up with the story of the desecration, by a parent, of the grave of his daughter, and the burning of the remains to provide a charm for the health of their sisters which a note speaks of as an actual occurrence at Ballston. There is a pleasing reminiscence of Harris at this period, in connexion with the youth of Edward Everett. When the latter was about four years old, at his birth-place, in Dorchester, he recited the following copy of verses which Mason wrote for the child, the "little roan" referring to the color of the speaker's hair.t But, since you wish to hear my part, I'll strive for praise, with all my heart, I'll tell a tale how Farmer John Said neighbour Joe to farmer John, Said Farmer John to Neighbour Joe, To keep the tale from spoiling; I know it by your smiling. And now, my friends, please to excuse And so I'll make my manners. His pastoral duties were varied by a journey for his health in the western states and a tour in Great Britain. As a memorial of the former he published, on his return, his "Journal of a Tour into the Territory North-west of the Alleghany Mountains, made in the Spring of the year 1803, with a geographical and historical account of the State of Ohio." Its dedication is characteristic of his mood. To the candor of the Public I submit my work; to the Providence and favour of Almighty God Not of the present, but Of the future life, I resign myself. In the same year, 1803, he published a compilation, in four snall volumes, entitled the "Minor Encyclopædia," which Daniel Webster remembered as a useful work. In 1805 he delivered a Phi Beta Kappa poem "On the Patronage of Genius." In 1820 he published a "Natural History of the Bible," on which he had been long engaged, which was pirated and mutilated in England, and translated in Germany. Visiting Savannah for his health, his antiquarian inquiries led him to write his "Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia," which appeared in 1841. He also published numerous Sermons and Addresses, many of the latter in connexion with the Masonic Fraternity, of which he was a member. He also took an active part in the several historical and learned societies of his day. He died in 1842, in his seventy-fourth year. Dr. Frothingham has drawn his character, that of an amiable divine and sensitive scholar, with tenderness in his memoir in the publications of the Massachusetts Historical Society,* of which Harris was one of the original members. Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., Fourth Series, ii. 180. JOSEPH DENNIE, THE elegant essayist, the "lay preacher" of the old American journals, was born at Boston, August 10, 1768, He acquired his literature at Harvard, of the class of 1790, reading law afterwards with Benjamin West at Charleston, New Hampshire, in which state he opened an office at Walpole. Dennie made one attempt at the bar, of which a humorous account was published by his friend and early literary associate Royal Tyler.*. He spoke like an elegant scholar, with some unnecessary eloquence, on a provisory note case before a crude provincial judge, who did not appreciate his rhetoric, was discomfited by the bluntness of the bench, and did not renew his efforts. The Farmer's Museum, published at Walpole, New Hampshire, originally established by Isaiah Thomas and David Carlisle in 1793, under the editorship of Dennie, who, after having contributed to its columns, became its conductor in 1796, gathered around it one of the most brilliant corps of writers ever congregated to advance the fortunes of a similar undertaking in America. It numbered among its authors, each constantly furnishing a department, the witty lawyer Royal Tyler, a man of acute mind and well directed powers; David Everett, Thomas Green Fessenden, Isaac Story, and others, whose abilities may be traced in its elegantly arranged folio pages. The inventions of the paper were endless. Poem, essay, criticism, were served up with the skill of a French cook compounding his hundredth variation of omelette. There were the “Farrago,” the "Lay Preacher," the "Shop of Colon and Spondee,' "Peter Quince," "Sinon Spunkey," Hermit," "The Rural Wanderer,"" Peter Pendulum," "The Desk of Beri Hesden," every trick of alliteration to catch the negligent readers.† The Dennie wrote for the Museum, The Furrago, a series of essays full of warm apprehension of the poetic beauties of life and literature; the Lay Preacher, which had the fault of irreverence in taking its texts for familiar discussion from Scripture, though jarring upon the reader less in Dennie's hands from his good taste and tone of morality, and he projected The Wandering Jew, which was to close his labors in this kind. In the Port Folio the "Lay Preacher" describes himself accomplishing his series of essays, "a young man, valetudinary, without fortune, In the New England Galaxy, July 24, 1818. Quoted in Buckingham's Newspaper Literature. The mottoes of the Farmer's Museum at different times indicate its spirit: Ho, every one that thirsteth for novelty, come! From New Year's day to the last of December, which gave place to the verses, appropriate to its rural locality, from Goldsmith's Village Hither, each week, the peasant shall repair, Buckingham's Newspaper Literature, li. 174-230. Since successfully followed by the Sermons of Dow, Jun., who takes his text from the profane classic authors, and whose three volumes, though the mannerism tires in the end, are replete with good feeling and many nice though inverted poetical expressions. without a patron, without an auxiliary, without popular encouragement;"-which he could hardly mean literally, but which was all true enough of the state of literature at the time. The best talents were then gratuitously exercised for the public. The Farmer's Museum itself, with its brilliant array, was suffered to decline, while poor Dennie was calling on the public to subscribe and authors to write (for fame), as if both were under equal obligation. The paying days of American authorship had not yet dawned. Books, even small duodecimos, were published by subscription with humiliating "proposals" by sensitive authors. A very clever resident English author in the country, John Davis, writer of a lively book of travels in the United States, which he dedicated to Jefferson, offered, by an advertisement, in 1801, two novels, fruits of his winter labors, to any bookseller in the country who would publish them on the condition of receiving fifty copies. The booksellers of New York, where he lived, could not, he said, undertake them, for they were dead of the fever.* A notice to "Readers and Correspondents" in the Museum, Dec. 4, 1797, indicates its height of popularity, which it is curious to contrast with the claims of publishers fifty years later, by the million, with the area of reading enlarged to Mexico and the Pacific: "The constant swell of our subscription book suggests a theme to our gratitude and a motive to our industry. The Farmer's Museum is read by more than two thousand individuals, and has its patrons in Europe and on the banks of the Ohio." Dennie was employed upon the Museum from 1795 to 1799, when he left for Philadelphia, to edit the United States Gazette. In 1800, he commenced with the bookseller, Asbury Dickens, the publication of the Port Folio, at first a weekly miscellany in quarto, in which form it remained for five years, when it was changed to an octavo, monthly, Dennie continuing the editor till his deatht The five large quarto pages of prospectus in which Dennie announces to the world the hopes ⚫ Davis visited and resided in Georgia and Virginia as a teacher. He saw good company and enjoyed the climate, looking out upon the beauties of nature with his Horace in his hand. He wrote an Ode to the Mocking Bird, and poems on the Ashley River and the Natural Bridge. His sketches of the literary society of Philadelphia, and of American authorship generally, in his Travels, which is a book of pleasant exaggerations, is amusing. This is one of his notices on the Port Folio. "The editor of the Aurora calls the Port Folio the Portable Foolery; and his facetiousness is applauded by one party, and scorned by the other. But a better quibble on the word would be, to name it the Court Olio; for it mingles the dresses at St. James with speculations on literature. It being rumored that Mr. Dennie had been denominated by the British Reviewer, the American Addison, the following ludicrous paragraph appeared in the Aurora Gazette. ult ye white hills of New Hampshire, redoubtable Monadnock and Tuckaway! Laugh ye waters of the Winiseopee and Umbagog Lakes! Flow smooth in heroic veise ye streams of Amoonoosuck and Androscoggin, Cockhoko and Coritocook! And you merry Merrimack be now more merry!'" Ex + The several series of the Port Folio embrace in all fortyseven volumes. Its succession of editors was, Dennie, assisted by Paul Allen; Nicholas Biddle for a short period; Charles Caldwell, M.D., April 1814 to Dec. 1815; John E. Hall, Jan. 1816 to Dec. 1827. There is a general index, in the volume closing the year 1825, to Hall's twenty volumes from 1816. The work was continued for two years further, with diminished vitality, when it finally expired in 1827. and intentions of the Port Folio, are a model of editorial sanguine faith and diligence. "Prospectus of a new weekly paper, submitted to men of affluence, men of liberality, and men of letters. A young man, once known among village readers as the humble historian of the hour, the conductor of a Farmer's Museum and a Lay Preacher's Gazette, again offers himself to the public as a volunteer editor. Having, as he conceives, a right to vary at pleasure his fictitious name, he now, for higher reasons than any fickle humor might dictate, assumes the appellation of OLD SCHOOL." Dennie was followed to the Port Folio by his friend Tyler, who continued his contributions "from the shop of Messrs. Colon and Spondee" to his journal, displaying his copious and refined stores of reading, and urging many a point of well digested criticism and observation. Dennie's broken health compelled him to retire for a while from the editorship of the Port Folio in the summer and autumn of 1811, a depression which was much enhanced by the death of his father; but with the succeeding year he returned to the work, addressing the public with the hopefulness of the editor, who must always affect that virtue if he has it not. He did not long survive. The number of his periodical for January contained some mournful editorial anticipations from his pen. * TO THE PUBLIC. During the autumnal and midsummer months of the last year, which has forever fled away, on the pinions of Time, the Editor of this Journal was compelled to relinquish its duties, and to be regardless of its delights, in consequence of the furious onset of three potent adversaries, Sickness, Sorrow, and Adversity. Under the ardency of the summer solstice, and while the dog star's unpropitious ray was flaming, he was confined to the couch of Languor and Anguish; and, in the decline of autumn, he was afflicted by one of the most tremendous domestic calamities, which can agonize the Sensibility, nourish the Melancholy, and overpower the Fortitude of man. The influence of infirm health, in marring the operations, both of manual and mental industry, is familiar to every patient, as well as to every physician; and when to corporeal Pain and yawning Lassitude, the "Sickness of the Soul" is superadded, from such an abhorred alliance all the brilliant powers of Invention, and all the strong body guards of Labour keep obstinately aloof, or fly timidly away. The pen of the readiest writer corrodes in the standish; his papers and projects reposing, ingloriously, on the shelves of dust, or in the pigeon holes of oblivion. His desk is overthrown, his manuscripts are mouldy, and his vase of ink is as dry as the vessel of the gospel outcast, while wandering in the parched wilderness of Beersheba. Johnson emphatically calls the load of life, is then truly wearisome. Society presents nothing to gladden, and Solitude nothing to soothe. In vain do we fly to the sequestered shades of the country. Let all the beauties of Nature solicit our notice §-let all the diversities of Pleasure court our acceptance -let the birds carol enchantingly in the grove, and the flowers bloom odoriferously in the meadow; let the breeze whisper softly in the wood, and the sun What Whose iron scourge, and torturing hour The bad affright, afflict the best. By one, who was himself a severe sufferer, it has been remarked, with truth and eloquence, that there are, perhaps, very few conditions more to be regretted than that of an active mind, labouring under the weight of a distempered body. The time of such a man is always spent in forming schemes, which a change of wind hinders him from executing; his powers fume away in projects and in hope, and the day of action never arrives. He lies down, delighted with the thoughts of to-morrow, pleases his Ambition with the Fame he shall acquire, or his benevolence with the Good he shall impart. But in the night the skies are overcast, the temper of the air is changed, he wakes in languor, impatience and distraction, and has no longer any wish but for ease, nor any attention but to misery. It may be said that Disease generally begins that equality, which Death completes; the distinctions, which set one man so much above another, are very little perceived in the gloom of a sick chamber, where it will be vain to expect entertainment from the gay, or instruction from the wise; where all human glory is obliterated, the wit is clouded, the reasoner perplexed, and the hero subdued; where the highest and brightest of mortal beings finds nothing left him but the consciousness of innocence. On the seventh of the month in which this was published, he died suddenly, at the early age of forty-four. The obituary in the next issue of the journal speaks warmly, in a style of elegance emulous of his own, of his literary accomplishments and personal virtues. "So pure was its texture, so delicate its conceptions, that his mind seemed, if we may speak so, to have been bathed at its birth in the very essence of literature-to be daily fed with the celestial dews of learning." His conversation was the counterpart of his writings, delighting in moral topics, and graced by his fine stores of poetical reading. He was free from the jealousies of the literary profession, a happy condition for the editorial life he was called to assume. His amiability is reflected on every page of his writings, though occasionally tinged by a tone of disappointment. Buckingham, who was an apprentice to the publisher of the Museum, and carried copy from Dennie, describes his personal appearance in 1796. He was rather below than above the middling height, and was of slender frame; was attentive to fashion in his dress, appearing one May mornning at the office "in a pea-green coat, white vest, nankin small-clothes, white silk stockings, and pumps fastened with silver buckles, which covered at least half the foot from the instep to the toe." He wrote very rapidly, and like most persons connected with the press, deferred copy till the last moment. "One of the best of his lay-sermons," says Buckingham, "was written at the village tavern, directly opposite to the office, in a chamber where he and his friends were amusing themselves with cards. It was delivered to me by piece-meal, at four or five different * Cowper. times. If he happened to be engaged in a game, when I applied for copy, he would ask some one to play his hand for him, while he would give the devil his due. When I called for the closing paragraph of the sermon, he said, call again in fixe minutes. 'No,' said Tyler, I'll write the improvement for you.' He accordingly wrote a concluding paragraph, and Dennie never saw it till it was in print." Buckingham speaks of his being “a premature victim to social indulgence," and Knapp* thinks the habit was increased by the attic nights of the Philadelphia wits when the poet Moore was in their company, and that Dennie acquired a di-trust of American society, quoting Cliffton's com plaint of "the land where fancy sickens, and where genius dies." There was doubtless some cause for dissatisfaction; for it should not be forgotten that Dennie wrote laboriously and well when the rewards of literature were scanty, and the position of the writer uncertain. If he wavered in his course, his sensibility may very naturally have led him astray. Dennie's convivial tastes led him to the formation of a social gathering which was known in Philadelphia as the Tuesday Club. It included a number of the contributors to the Port Folio. Gen. Thomas Cadwallader who gave translations from Horace in the Magazine, Samuel Ewing a son of the Provost, who wrote with the signature "Jacques," Thomas Warton, Philip the son of General Hamilton, Wood the actor, Richard Rush, and Richard Peters author of the Law Reports, were members. John Quincy Adams, Gouv. Morris, Judge Hopkinson, Horace Binney, Robert Walsh, the Rev. John Blair Linn, Charles Brockden Brown, and Charles J. Ingersoll, were also contributors to the Port Folio, which, under the efficient management of the publisher, Harrison Hall, in its best days, largely occupied the attention of the reading public in its departments of literature. As an Essayist, Dennie's influence was confined to the periodical literature of his day, only two scanty collections of his papers having been published:-The Lay Preacher; or Short Sermons for Idle Readers, printed at Walpole in 1796, and a volume also of the Lay Preacher, collected and arranged by John E. Hall, in Philadelphia, in 1817. The style of the Lay Preacher in which Dennie, as he himself tells us, aimed to unite "the familiarity of Franklin with the simplicity of Sterne," does not always suggest those qualities. Its elegance is occasionally somewhat plethoric of adjectives and fine phrases, especially in the earlier series; belonging to itself. while it has a vein of ingenuity and gentle humor ON THE PLEASURES OF STUDY. "Blessed is he that readeth.”—REV. i. 1. Whenever I reflect upon my habitual attachment to books, I feel a new glow of gratitude towards that Power, who gave me a mind thus disposed, and to those liberal friends, who have allowed the utmost latitude of indulgence to my propensity. Had I beca born on a barbarous shore, denied the glorious pr:vileges of education, and interdicted an approach to * American Biography. |