must rely on yourselves; looking to statesmen only for the capacity to give you salutary counsels. And now after summing up in a word what I have to urge, I have done. I say you should levy the necessary supplies, should maintain the army on its necessary establishment-correcting whatever abuses may be found to exist, but not disbanding it altogether upon the first clamor that is raised-should send ambassadors, wherever they can be useful in informing, admonishing, or anywhere further ing the interests of this country. 9. But you should, beside all this, bring the men to punishment whose administration has been stained with corruption, and consign them to abhornce in all times and all places, to the end that those whose conduct has been temperate and pure, may be shown to have consulted at once their own interests and yours. If such shall be your course, and you no longer neglect your most important concerns, it may be that our affairs shall take a better turn. But, if you sit down inactive and confining you exertions to acclamations and applause, shrink back the moment anything is required to be done, I can conceive nc eloquence which, in the absence of every necessary effort on your part, will have the power to save the country. EXERCISE XLI. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, author of the following humorous effusion, was one of the most distinguished poets and philosophers of his time. He was born in Devonshire in the year 1772, and died in 1834. "The literary character of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," says an able critic, "resembles some vast but unfinished palace: all is gigantic, beautiful, and rich; but nothing is complete, nothing compact. He was all his days, from his youth to his death, laboring, meditating, projecting: and yet all that he left us, bears a painful character of fragmentariness and imperfection. His mind was eminently Ireamy; he was deeply tinged with that incapacity of acting, which forms the characteristic of the German intellect: his genius was multiform, manysided; and for this reason, perhaps, could not at once seize upon the right point of view. No man, probably, ever existed, who thought more, and more intensely, than Coleridge; few ever possessed a vaster treasury of learning and knowledge; and yet how little has he given us! or rather how few of his works are in any way worthy of the undoubted majesty of his genius!" ODE TO RAIN. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. COMI OSED BEFORE DAYLIGHT, ON THE MORNING appointed FOR THE DE PARTURE OF A VERY WORTHY, BUT NOT VERY PLEASANT VISITOR, WHOM IT 44 FEARED THE RAIN MIGHT DETAIN. I. I know it is dark; and though I have lain I have not once opened the lids of my eyes, You're but a doleful sound at best; O Rain! you will but take your flight, Do go, dear Rain! do go away! II. O Rain! with your dull twofold sound, You know, if you know aught, that we, O Rain! you will but take your flight, Though stomach should sicken and knees should swell, Dear Rain! if I've been cold and shy, We three you mark! and not one more ! The strong wish makes my spirit sore. We have so much to talk about, V. And this I'll swear to you, dear Rain! Be you as dull as e'er you could; (And, by the by, 'tis understood, You're not so pleasant, as you're good ;) Yet, knowing well your worth and place, Yet with kind heart, and right good will, Nor should you go away, dear Rain! The following curious piece, found in an old English collection, was written in answer to the question once put to the author-"Why turns your hair white?" It is a good example of labored alliteration, that is, the style in which the same sound is made frequently to recur in the same line; as where Milton says "Behemoth, biggest born of earth." WHY DOES YOUR HAIR TURN WHITE? I. Where seething sighs and sorrow sobs Hath slain the slips that nature set; II. W. HUNIS Where thought hath thrilled, and thrown his spears, To hurt the heart that harmeth him not; And groaning grief hath ground forth tears, Mine eye to stain, my face to spot: What wonder, then, though that you see, Upon my head, white hairs to be? III. Where pinching pain himself has placed, IV. Where wretched woe will weave her web, They be the lines that lead the length, How far my race is yet to run: They show my youth is fled with strength, And how old age is weak begun : The which I feel, and you may see, VII. They be the strings of sober sound, Whose music is harmonical: Their tunes declare what time from ground I came, and how thereto I shall: |