rye; the kars diskount 45 miles a hour, 2 trains tri tew pass each other on the same track; it kant be did suckcessfully; the mangled and ded are kounted by skores; a searching investigashun takes place, the community iz satisfied bekause it waz “an unavoidable katastrophe." JOSH BILLINGS.

NATIONALITY.

If you would contemplate nationality as an active virtue, look around you. Is not our own history one witness and one record of what it can do? This day, and all which it stands for, did it not give us these? This glory of the fields of that war, this eloquence of that revolution, this one wide sheet of flame which wrapped tyrant and tyranny, and swept all that escaped from it away, forever and forever, the courage to fight, to retreat, to rally, to advance, to guard the young flag by the young arm and the young heart's blood, to hold up and hold on till the magnificent consummation crowned the work, - were not all these imparted as inspired by this imperial sentiment? Has it not here begun the master-work of man, the creation of a national life? Did it not call out that prodigious development of wisdom, the wisdom of constructiveness, which illustrated the years after the war, and the framing and adopting of the Constitution? Has it not, in the general, contributed to the administering of that government wisely and well since? Look at it! It has kindled us to no aims of conquest; it has involved us in no entangling alliances; it has kept our neutrality dignified and just; the victories of peace have been our prized victories, but the larger and truer grandeur of the nations, for which they are created, and for which they must one day, before some tribunal, give account, what a measure of these it has enabled us already to fulfil! It has lifted us to the throne, and has set on our brow the name of the great republic; it has taught us to demand nothing wrong, and to submit to nothing wrong; it has made our diplomacy sagacious, wary, and accomplished; it has opened the iron gate of the mountain, and planted our ensign on the great tranquil sea; it has made the desert to blossom as the rose; it has quickened to life the giant

1 Fourth of July.

brood of useful arts; it has whitened lake and ocean with the sails of a daring, new, and lawful trade; it has extended to exiles, flying as clouds, the asylum of our better liberty; it has scattered the seeds of liberty, under law and under order, broadcast; it has seen and helped American feeling to swell into a fuller flood; from many a field and many a deck, though it seeks not war and fears not war, it has borne the radiant flag all unstained; it has opened our age of lettered glory; it has opened and honored the age of the industry of the people. RUFUS CHOATE.

TACKING SHIP OFF SHORE.

THE weather-leech of the topsail shivers;

The bow-lines strain, and the lee-shrouds slacken;

The braces are taut, the lithe boom quivers,

And the waves with the coming squall-cloud blacken.

Open one point on the weather-bow.

Is the lighthouse tall on Fire Island Head?
There's a shade of doubt on the captain's brow,
And the pilot watches the heaving lead.

I stand at the wheel; and with eager eye,
To sea and to sky and to shore, I gaze,
Till the muttered order of Full and by!"
Is suddenly changed for " Full for stays!"

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The ship bends lower before the breeze,
As her broadside fair to the blast she lays;
And she swifter springs to the rising seas,
As the pilot calls, "Stand by for stays!"

It is silence all, as each in his place,
With the gathered coil in his hardened hands,
By tack and bow-line, by sheet and brace,
Waiting the watchword, impatient stands.

And the light on Fire Island Head draws near,
As, trumpet-winged, the pilot's shout,
From his post on the bowsprit's heel, I hear,
With the welcome call of "Ready! About!”

No time to spare! It is touch and go;

And the captain growls, "Down helm! hard down!" As my weight on the whirling spokes I throw,

While heaven grows black with the storm-cloud's frown

High o'er the knight-heads flies the spray,
As we meet the shock of the plunging sea;
And my shoulder stiff to the wheel I lay,
As I answer, "Ay, ay, sir! Ha-a-rd a lee!"

With the swerving leap of a startled steed
The ship flies fast in the eye of the wind;
The dangerous shoals on the lee recede,

And the headland white we have left behind.

The topsails flutter, the jibs collapse,

And belly and tug at the groaning cleats; The spanker slats, and the mainsail flaps;

And thunders the order, "Tacks and sheets!"

'Mid the rattle of blocks and the tramp of the crew, Hisses the rain of the rushing squall:

The sails are aback from clew to clew,

And now is the moment for "Mainsail haul!"

And the heavy yards, like a baby's toy,
By fifty strong arms are swiftly swung:
She holds her way, and I look with joy

For the first white spray o'er the bulwarks flung.

"Let go, and haul!" "Tis the last command, And the head-sails fill to the blast once more: Astern and to leeward lies the land,

With its breakers white on the shingly shore.

What matters the reef, or the rain, or the squall?
I steady the helm for the open sea;

The first mate clamors, "Belay there, all!"
And the captain's breath once more comes free.

And so off shore let the good ship fly;
Little care I how the gusts may blow:

In my fo'castle bunk, in a jacket dry,

Eight bells have struck, and my watch is below.

WALTER MITCHEL.

IMMORTALITY.

FIRST of all I think of the immense and noble freedom from many of the most trying and vexatious of our temptations which come to a man to whom the curtain has been lifted, and the veil rent in twain. Let me fancy myself a man who has no vision beyond this world. Let me bow myself down and shut myself in, until all the thought of my life stops short and sharp there at the grave I am going to work along here till when? Perhaps till to-morrow morning; perhaps till fifty years heuce: what matters it? Certainly for a very minute of time, and then it will be all over; what I do I must not only begin I must finish here and now. All my desires, those deep, deep wishes that are in my soul because I am a man, the desire to accomplish something, the desire to please, the desire to discover and display myself, — all of these good desires, all of them parts of my humanity, they must all be satisfied before the curtain falls, or they can never find satisfaction, for that falling of the curtain is the end of all. What a coward I become! what a poor, timid, limited, temporary thing! I must attempt nothing so large that I cannot finish it before the sun goes down. I must desire nothing that this life cannot bestow. If I want to please, whom shall I please? Only those cramped and crippled and half-judging men about me, to whom I must degrade myself to win their honor. If I want to make myself known, I must take this crude self which I am now, and hold it up, and make that self known; for it is "now or never," since the end may come at once. How superficial, restless, impatient! What a slave I come to be! Where is my independence? How the world has me down, and treads on me! - treads me into the dust and mire of the present, since I know no future world into which I can lift myself up, and run away. And now, beside me all the time, there is another man, and the difference between him and me is this: that he believes immortality. Somehow he has got hold of the truth of resurrection. To him death is a jar, a break, a deep, mysterious change, but not the end of life. I know that men may claim to believe that, and yet live on like dogs; men may claim to believe that, and yet be slaves and cowards. But this man really believes it; and see what it does for him. See how free it makes him! How it breaks his tyrannies! He can under

take works of self-culture, or the development of truth, far, far too vast for the earthly life of any Methuselah to finish, and yet smile calmly, and work on when men tell him that he will die before his work is done. Die! Shall not the sculptor sleep a hundred times before the statue he begins to-day is finished; and wake a hundred times more, ready for his work, bringing with a hundred new mornings to his work the strength and the visions that have come to him in his slumber? He can desire to please, and yet be perfectly patient as he waits for a "well done" that will fall on his ears out of Divine lips when this world and its shows are over. He can desire to show himself, and yet live in obscurity content, sure that some day- what does it matter when, to him who has eternity to live in?- God will call him, and bid men see in him the work of love and grace. Can you picture the independence of a man like this? What are my temptations to him? How he walks over them with feet that follow his far-seeing sight, like a man that strides with his firm steps and far-off sight, and never sees the pebble in the path behind which a crawling insect is blocked and hindered! Sometimes when one is travelling through a foreign country, it happens that he stops a day or two, a week or two, in some small village where every thing is local, which has little communication with the outside world; where the people are born and grow up, and grow old and die, without thinking of leaving their little nest among the mountains. The traveller shares for a little while their local life, shuts himself in to their limitations. But all the while he is freer than they are; he is not tyrannized over by the small prescriptions and petty standards that are despots to them. He knows of, and belongs to, a larger world. He is kept free by the sense of the world beyond the mountains, from which he came, and to which he is going back again And so, when a man strong in the conviction of immortality really counts himself a stranger and a pilgrim among the multitudes who know no home, no world but this, then he is free among them; free from the worldly tyrannies that bind them; free from their tempta tions to be cowardly and mean. The wall of death, beyond which they never look, is to him only a mountain that can be crossed, from whose top he shall see eternity, where he belongs. This is the freedom of the best childhood and the best old age, these two ends of life in which the sense of immor tality is realest and most true. PHILLIPS BROOKS.