The wealthiest isles, the most enchanting shores,

Views not a realm so bountiful and fair,
Nor breathes the spirit of a purer air.

In every clime the magnet of his soul,
Touched by remembrance, trembles to that pole;
For in this land of heaven's peculiar grace,
The heritage of nature's noblest race,

There is a spot of earth supremely blest,
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest,
Where man, creation's tyrant, casts aside
His sword and scepter, pageantry and pride;
While in his softened looks benignly blend
The sire, the son, the husband, brother, friend.
Here woman reigns: the mother, daughter, wife,
Strew with fresh flowers the narrow way of life.
In the clear heaven of her delightful eye,
An angel guard of love and graces lie;
Around her knees domestic duties meet,
The fireside pleasures gambol at her feet.

Where shall that land, that spot of earth be found?
Art thou a man?—a patriot?-look around;
Oh, thou shalt find howe'er thy footsteps roam,
That land thy country and that spot thy home!

THE PILGRIM.

From the German of Schiller.

NOTE TO THE PUPIL. - Schiller, the great national poet of Germany, was born at Marbach in 1759. He first studied law, then medicine; then the works of Shakespeare, Rousseau, and Goethe led him to give himself to literature. He wrote the "History of the

Thirty Years' War," "Wallenstein," which is perhaps his greatest work, many dramas, of which "William Tell ́ is the most popular, and a great number of smaller works. He died in 1805.

OUTH'S gay springtime scarcely knowing,

Went I forth the world to roam,

And the dance of youth, the glowing,

Left I in my father's home.

Of my birthright- glad, believing, -
world gear took I none,

Of my
Careless as an infant, cleaving
To my pilgrim staff alone.

For I placed my mighty hope in
Dim and holy words of faith,
"Wander forth - the way is open,
Ever on the upward path-
Till thou gain the golden portal,
Till its gate unclose to thee,
There the earthly and the mortal,
Deathless and divine shall be."

Night on morning stole, and stealeth,
Never, never stand I still,

And the future yet concealeth
What I seek, and what I will.
Mount on mount arose before me,
Torrents hemmed me every side,
But I built a bridge that bore me
O'er the roaring tempest tide.

Toward the East I reached a river,
On its shores I did not rest;
Faith from danger can deliver,

And I trusted to its breast.

Drifted in the whirling motion,
Seas themselves around me roll,
Wide and wider spreads the ocean,
Far and farther flies the goal.
While I live is never given

Bridge or wave the goal to near
Earth will never meet the Heaven,
Never can the There be Here.

THE LOST ARTS

WENDELL PHILLIPS

NOTE TO THE PUPIL. Wendell Phillips was born in Boston in 1811. He graduated from Harvard College in 1831, and from its Law School in 1833. His father was the first Mayor of Boston. He was allied to many of the best families in the state. His first great speech was that denouncing the murder of Lovejoy. He was a most intense antislavery man, and succeeded Garrison as President of the Antislavery Society. He is one of the great American orators; by very many regarded as the greatest this country has ever produced. His greatest lecture is, perhaps, "The Lost Arts." Phillips died in 1884.

I

year,

for this

HAVE been somewhat criticised, year after endeavor to open up the claims of old times. I have been charged with repeating useless fables with no foundation. To-day I take the mere subject of glass. This material, Pliny says, was discovered by accident. Some sailors, landing on the eastern coast of Spain, took their cooking utensils and supported them on the sand by the stones that they found in the neighborhood; they kindled their fire, cooked the fish, finished the meal, and removed the apparatus; and glass was found to have resulted from the niter and sea sand, vitrified by the heat. Well, I have been a dozen times criticised

by a number of wise men, in newspapers, who have said that this was a very idle tale; that there never was sufficient heat in a few bundles of sticks to produce vitrificationglass making. I happened, two years ago, to meet on the prairies of Missouri, Professor Shepherd, who started from Yale College, and, like a genuine Yankee, brings up anywhere where there is anything to do. I happened to mention this ériticism to him. "Well," says he, "a little practical life Iwould have freed men from that doubt." Said he, "We stopped last year in Mexico, to cook some venison. We got down from our saddles, and put the cooking apparatus on stones we found there; made our fire with the wood we got there, resembling ebony; and when we removed the apparatus there was pure silver gotten out of the embers by the intense heat of that almost iron wood. Now," said he, "that heat was greater than any necessary to vitrify the materials of glass."

Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty, or form, we are borrowers.

You may glance around the furniture of the palaces in Europe, and you may gather all these utensils of art or use; and when you have fixed the shape and forms in your mind, I will take you into the museum of Naples, which gathers all the remains of the domestic life of the Romans, and you shall not find a single one of these modern forms of art or beauty or use that was not anticipated there. We have hardly added one single line or sweep of beauty to the antique.

All the boys' plays, like everything that amuses the child in the open air, are Asiatic. Rawlinson will show you that they came somewhere from the banks of the Ganges or the suburbs of Damascus. Bulwer borrowed the incidents of his Roman stories from legends of a thousand years before. In

deed, Dunlop, who has grouped the history of the novels of all Europe into one essay, says that in the nations of modern Europe there have been two hundred and fifty, or three hundred, distinct stories. He says at least two hundred of these may be traced, before Christianity, to the other side of the Black Sea. If this were my topic, which it is not, I might tell you that even our newspaper jokes are enjoying a very respectable old age. Take Maria Edgeworth's essay on Irish bulls, and the laughable mistakes of the Irish. Even the tale which either Maria Edgeworth or her father thought the best, is that famous story of a man writing a letter as follows: "My dear friend, I would write you in detail more minutely, if there was not an impudent fellow looking over my shoulder, reading every word." "No, you lie: I've not read a word you have written." This is an Irish bull; still it is a very old one. is only two hundred and fifty years older than the New Testament. Horace Walpole dissented from Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and thought the other Irish bull was the best, of the man who said, "I would have been a very handsome man, but they changed me in the cradle." That comes from Don Quixote, and is Spanish; but Cervantes borrowed it from the Greek in the fourth century, and the Greek stole it from the Egyptian hundreds of years back.

It

There is one story which it is said Washington has related, of a man who went into an inn and asked for a glass of drink from the landlord, who pushed forward a wine glass about half the usual size; the teacups also in that day were not more than half the present size. The landlord said, "That glass out of which you are drinking is forty years old." "Well," said the thirsty traveler, contemplating its diminutive proportions, "I think it is the smallest thing of its age I ever saw." That story as told is given as a story of Athens, three hundred and seventy-five years before Christ was born. Why! all these