mixed volumes of smoke and flame rising from burning Charlestown. The ground strewed with the dead and the dying, the impetuous charge, the steady and successful repulse, the loud call to repeated assaults, the summoning of all that is manly to repeated resistance, a thousand bosoms freely and fearlessly bared, in an instant, to whatever of terror there may be in war and death,—all these you have witnessed, but you witness them no more. 5. All is peace. The heights of yonder metropolis, its towers and roofs, which you then saw filled with wives, and children, and countrymen, in distress and terror, and looking with unutterable emotions for the issue of the combat, have presented you to-day with the sight of its whole happy population, come out to welcome and greet you with a universal jubilee. Yonder proud ships, by a felicity of position appropriately lying at the foot of this mount, and seeming fondly to cling around it, are not means of annoyance to you, but your country's own means of distinction and defense. 6. All is peace; and God has granted you this sight of your country's happiness, ere you slumber in the grave forever. He has allowed you to behold and to partake the reward of your patriotic toils; and he has allowed us, your sons and countrymen, to meet you here, and, in the name of the present generation, in the name of your country, in the name of liberty, to thank you. 7. But the scene amid which we stand, does not permit us to confine our thoughts or our sympathies to those fearless spirits, who hazarded or lost their lives on this consecrated spot. We have the happiness to rejoice here in the presence of a most worthy representation of the survivors of the whole. Revolutionary army. 8. Veterans! you are the remnant of many a well-fought field. You bring with you marks of honor from Trenton and Monmouth, from Yorktown, Camden, Bennington, and Saratoga.a. Veterans of half a century! when, in your youthful days, you put every, thing at hazard in your country's cause, good as that cause was, and sanguine as youth is, still your fondest hopes did not stretch onward to an hour like this. At a period to which you could not reasonably have expected to arrive; at a moment of national prosperity, such as you could never have foreseen,— you are now met here, to enjoy the fellowship of old soldiers, and to receive the overflowings of a universal gratitude. 9. But your agitated countenances, and your heaving breasts, inform me, that even this is not an unmixed joy. I perceive that a tumult of contending feelings rushes upon you. The images of the dead, as well as the persons of the living, throng to your embraces. The scene overwhelms you, and I turn from it. May the Father of all mercies smile upon your declining years, and bless them! 10. And when you shall here have exchanged your embraces; when you shall once more have pressed the hands which have been so often extended to give succor in adversity, or grasped in the exultation of victory, then, look abroad into this lovely land, which your young valor defended, and mark the happiness with which it is filled; yea, look abroad into the whole earth, and see what a name you have contributed to give to your country, and what a praise you have added to freedom, and then rejoice in the sympathy and gratitude which beam upon your last days, from the improved condition of mankind. • Trenton, Monmouth, Yorktown, Camden, Bennington, and Saratoga, are places where battles were fought during the American Revolution. 1. I appeal to History. Tell me, thou reverend chronicler of the grave, can all the illusions of ambition realized, can all the wealth of a universal commerce, can all the achievements of successful heroism, or all the establishments of this world's wisdom, secure to empire the permanency of its possessions? Alas! Troyb thought so once; yet the land of Priamo lives only in song! Thebes thought so once; yet her hundred gates have crumbled, and her very tombs are but as the dust they were vainly intended to commemorate! So thought Palmyra; d yet where is she? So thought the countries of Demosthenese and the Spartan; yet the land of Leonidasf is trampled by the timid slave, and Athensg insulted by the servile, mindless, and enervate Ottoman.h In his hurried march, Time has but looked at their imagined immortality; and all its vanities, from the palace to the tomb, have, with their ruins, erased the very impression of his footsteps. 2. The days of their glory are as if they had never been; and the island, that was then a speck, rude and neglected, in the barren ocean, now rivals the ubiquity of their commerce, the glory of their arms, the fame of their philosophy, the eloquence of their senate, and the inspiration of their bards. Who shall say, then, contemplating the past, that England, proud and potent as she appears, may not, one day, be what Athens is, and the young America yet soar to be what Athens was! Who shall say, that, when the European column shall a Phillips, a distinguished Irish orator. b Troy, an ancient city in Asia Minor. • Priam, a son of Laomedon, and king of Troy. 4 Palmyra, once a magnificent city in Syria, now in ruins. e Demosthenes, see p. 65. f Leonidas, a celebrated king of Lacedæmon. Athens, the capital of ancient Greece, and the seat of Grecian liter. ature. h Ottoman, a native citizen of the Turkish empire,- a Turk have moldered, and the night of barbarism obscured its very ruins, that mighty continent may not emerge from the horizon, to rule, for its time, sovereign of the ascendant! 3. Sir, it matters very little, what immediate spot may have been the birth-place of such a man as Washington. No people can claim, no country can appropriate him. The boon of Providence to the human race, his fame is eternity, and his residence, creation. Though it was the defeat of our arms, and the disgrace of our policy, I almost bless the convulsion in which he had his origin. If the heavens thundered, and the earth rocked, yet, when the storm had passed, how pure was the climate that it cleared! how bright, in the brow of the firmament, was the planet which it revealed to us! In the production of Washington, it does really appear as if nature was endeavoring to improve upon herself, and that all the virtues of the ancient world were but so many studies preparatory to the patriot of the new. 4. Individual instances, no doubt there were, splendid exemplifications of some single qualification. Cæsar was merciful, Scipio was continent, Hannibalb was patient; but it was reserved for Washington, to blend them all in one, and, like the lovely masterpiece of the Grecian artist, to exhibit, in one glow of associated beauty, the pride of every model, and the perfection of every master. 5. As a general, he marshaled the peasant into a veteran, and supplied, by discipline, the absence of experience; as a statesman, he enlarged the policy of the cabinet into the most comprehensive system of general advantage; and such was the wisdom of his views, and the philosophy of his counsels, that, to the soldier and the statesman, he almost added the character of the sage! A conqueror, he was untainted with the crime of blood; a revolutionist, he was free from any stain of Scipio, (Africanus,) see p. 108. Hannibal, see p. 108. treason; for aggression commenced the contest, and his country called him to the command. Liberty unsheathed his sword, necessity stained, victory returned it. 6. If he hal paused here, history might have doubted what station to assign him; whether at the head of her citizens, or her soldiers, her heroes, or her patriots. But the last glorious act crowns his career, and banishes all hesitation. Who like Washington, after having emancipated a hemisphere, resigned its crown, and preferred the retirement of domestic life to the adoration of a land he might be almost said to have created! Happy, proud America! The lightnings of heaven yielded to your philosophy! The temptations of earth could not seduce your patriotism! LESSON XCVII. CONSEQUENCES OF ATHEISM.-CHANNING. No 1. Few men suspect, perhaps no man comprehends the extent of the support given by religion to every virtue. man, perhaps, is aware how much our moral and social sentiments are fed from this fountain; how powerless conscience would become without the belief of a God; how palsied would be human benevolence, were there not the sense of a higher benevolence to quicken and sustain it; how suddenly the whole social fabric would quake, and with what a fearful crash it would sink into hopeless ruins, were the ideas of a Supreme Being, of accountableness, and of a future life, to be utterly erased from every mind. 2. Once let men thoroughly believe that they are the work and sport of chance; that no Superior Intelligence concerns itself with human affairs; that all their improvements perish forever at death; that the weak have no guardian, and the injured no avenger; that there is no recompense for |