Who speak the secret of impassive earth?

Who bind it to us? what is this separate Nature so unnatural?

What is this earth to our affections? (unloving earth, without a throb to answer

ours,

Cold earth, the place of graves.)

Yet soul be sure the first intent remains, and shall be carried out,

Perhaps even now the time has arrived.

After the seas are all cross'd, (as they seem already cross'd,)

After the great captains and engineers have accomplish'd their work,

After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnoiogist,

Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,

The true son of God shall come singing his songs.

W

WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY DEATH.

HISPERS of heavenly death murmur'd I hear,
Labial gossip of night, sibilant chorals,

Footsteps gently ascending, mystical breezes wafted soft and low,
Ripples of unseen rivers, tides of a current flowing, forever flowing,

(Or is it the plashing of tears? the measureless waters of human tears?)

I see, just see skyward, great cloud-masses,

Mournfully, slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing,

With at times a half-dimm'd sadden'd far-off star,

Appearing and disappearing.

(Some parturition rather, some solemn immortal birth;
On the frontiers to eyes impenetrable,

Some soul is passing over.)

JOY, SHIPMATE, JOY!

JOY, shipmate, joy!

(Pleas'd to my soul at death I cry,)
Our life is closed, our life begins,
The long, long anchorage we leave,
The ship is clear at last, she leaps!
She swiftly courses from the shore,
Joy, shipmate, joy.

VOL. VII.-33

Henry Jarvis Raymond.

BORN in Lima, N. Y., 1820. DIED in New York, N. Y., 1869.

MOTIVES AND OBJECTS OF THE DISUNION MOVEMENT.

[Disunion and Slavery. A Series of Letters to Hon. W. L. Yancey, of Alabama. 1860. ]

THE great mass of the people in the cotton-growing States are im

bued with the general conviction that their separation from the Union is desirable: and the same thing is true, though to a much less extent, of the people in the other slaveholding States. If we were to ask them what are the reasons for such a conviction,-what are the precise wrongs which they have suffered under the Union, and what the advantages they expect to secure for themselves by leaving it,—we should receive very different answers from different States. The motives which influence Disunionists in Alabama and South Carolina are not the motives which influence Disunionists in Maryland and Virginia. All would agree that their common institution-Slavery-is in some way menaced by the Government as it now exists, and especially as it will exist after it passes into the hands of the Republican party; but they would differ as to the shape which its perils assume.

This brings me to what I regard as the real motive of the disunion movement. That motive has taken precise and definite form, probably, in the minds of a comparatively small number of those who are most active in the movement itself. The great mass of those who sympathize with it and give it their aid are governed by the vague but powerful feeling that the South, as a section, having peculiar institutions and peculiar necessities, is gradually growing politically weaker and weaker in the Union; that the North is rapidly gaining a preponderance in the Federal councils; and that there is no hope that the South can ever regain the ascendency, or even a political equality, under the Constitution and within the Union. The election of Lincoln is regarded as conclusive proof that Northern supremacy is a fixed fact; and it is on this account that it has so concentrated and intensified the resentment of the Southern States. No community ever sinks down willingly into a position of inferiority. Its instinct is to struggle against it, and the struggle will be violent in proportion to the magnitude of the evils which inferiority is believed to involve. All the sectional excitements and politi cal paroxysms of the last twenty years have been but the strenuous resistance of the South to what she has felt to be the inevitable tendency of events. The annexation of Texas, the claim to California, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the fight for Kansas, the fillibus

tering in Central America, the clamor for Cuba, have been only the straws at which the slaveholding section has clutched, in the hope to save itself from being engulfed in the rising tide of Northern power. To them it was not the steady and silent rising of a peaceful sea. Its roar came to their ears upon the stormy blasts of anti-slavery fanaticism, and sounded to them like the knell of destiny-the precursor of degradation and ruin to their homes and their hopes.

I do not wonder at this alarm. I cannot blame it, or deny that it has its origin in just and patriotic sentiments. I do think that the leading intellects of the Southern States-those to whom as in every community the great mass of the people look for guidance, and by whom they are guided, whether they know it or not-ought to have foreseen this result and made up their minds long ago to act with the laws of Nature, rather than against them,-to yield to the spirit of the age, the tendencies of civilization and Christianity, instead of resisting them,-to make allies instead of enemies of those great moral principles which are proving too powerful for the mightiest monarchies of the earth, and before which it is idle to hope that despotism can make a permanent stand upon this continent. The fathers of our Republic did so. They framed the Constitution upon such a basis, and in the belief that it would be administered in such a spirit. They gave the Government they created power over the slave-trade, not doubting that, after a few years, that power would be exercised with the general assent of all the States, and that all would feel, as they felt, the necessity of providing for the gradual disappearance of slavery itself. And for a series of years the event justified this expectation. The prohibition of the slave-trade in 1807, recommended by Jefferson, was enacted with the unanimous consent of all the States, North and South, and down to 1830 there was a constant and hopeful tendency towards emancipation in nearly all the slaveholding States. But since that time the leading intellects of the South have turned back the whole current of Southern sentiment upon this subject. In your own words, "an entirely new idea has sprung up, and is now universal in the South, upon the great question of slavery, in its oper ation upon mankind and labor." Mr. Calhoun taught the South that slavery was, and must always be, the sole basis of its prosperity, and that the leading aim of the South must be to fortify, to increase, and to make it perpetual. You and others have inherited his opinions, and devoted yourselves to their propagation. And in due process of time you have come into direct collision on this subject with the spirit and the letter of the Constitution which our fathers framed; and you now find that you cannot reach the object at which you aim, without destroying that Constitution and breaking up the Union which it created.

The people of the South sympathize with the disunion movement from