while he looks about him for the meaning of such a summons he sees a general rising and moving. Some stoop down over the bed next them and lift up its tenant, the that became a corpse

corpse

while they slept, and carry it to the hatchway to be thrown into the boat and carried off for burial. He remembers the groans that kept him awake so long, and turns to the place at his side they came from. There will be no more groaning from those lips, — livid, clammy, but O how fearfully eloquent in their appeal from tyranny to God! He shudders; a chill runs over him as he thinks that perhaps not very far off there might be a mother, a wife, children, who would have deemed it a blessed privilege to press one parting kiss upon them before they were consigned forever to the silence and darkness of the grave. But he has no time for these thoughts now, though they will come back to him at night when he again lays him down in the company of the dying. Now he must repress all his natural feelings, and help carry that body to the companion-way and see it thrown headlong into

the boat.

But enough; I have exaggerated nothing; I have added nothing, although I have suppressed and omitted much. I have not dared to dip my pencil deep enough in the fearful elements of which this picture is composed to paint it in all its shocking realities. But if, with the picture such as I have it before your minds, you add that there

was not one of all these sufferers who might not have purchased instant freedom by renouncing his country, you will see what kind of spirit that was which animated the martyrs of the American Revolution. And whence was that spirit drawn but from the conviction, so deep-rooted and so clearly expressed, that they were suffering for the cause of humanity: sacrificing themselves that their children and their children's children might live united and free in a land consecrated to Freedom and Union!

G

REAT revolutions, being attended by extraordinary intellectual activity, are generally favorable to the cause of literature. When the public mind is kept in a constant state of agitation, the mind of the individual not only partakes of the general excitement, but is often roused to a degree of exertion which it would have been incapable of in times of public tranquillity. All the great landmarks of thought are lost; principles that seemed beyond the reach of doubt are called in question; immoderate hope and immoderate fear prevail by turns, often succeeding each other with inconceivable rapidity; and the mind, tossed to and fro without respite, now grasping at one phantom and now at another, is equally eager in whatever direction it turns, and as bold in its efforts to reason as in its wildest flights of imagination; and when at last the commotion ceases, and society puts on 'ts new form, the intellectual impulse still cont.nues, and the new ideas which have been brought

up from depths never reached before become the starting-points from which new generations set forth upon new inquiries.

But revolution, in order to give this impulse to literature, must receive its own impulse from those deeper sources in which thought and feeling are blended. It is only when men think with their hearts, if I may borrow an expression from the father of verse,* that their faculties are thoroughly roused. And to think with our hearts requires that the subject should be one from which, when once started, there is no escape. It must follow us wherever we go, meet us at every turn, intertwine itself with all the relations of life, and infuse its spirit into all our actions.

This complete possession of the human soul and absolute control of the human will does not belong to questions which have their beginning and their end in this life. Individuals may give themselves up to ambition or pleasure, classes may become absorbed in the pursuit of power or gain, but there are recesses in the human heart which neither the ambition of power nor the ambition of wealth can penetrate; and, until these recesses are reached, it is impossible to arouse the whole body of society to self-denial and continuous exertion.

Wickliffe was contemporary with Chaucer. The introduction of the Reformation was followed by

* Εως ὁ ταῦθ' ὥρμαινε κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν.

Iliad, I. 193.

the most original period of English literature. The deep convictions of the English Revolution glow with intense energy in the "Paradise Lost." Even that less original development which has often been called the Augustan age of English literature followed close upon the last great uprising of Protestant zeal in England in 1688 And never before in the whole course of its history did the French mind display such fertility and vigor as during its long contest with that arrogant spirit which, manifesting itself first in the domain of religious thought and then in the broader field of civil life, claimed equally in both the right of controlling man's action in the name of his Maker.

But the American Revolution, with all its earnestness of purpose, with all its strength of conviction, belongs, in its intellectual relations, to the domain of reason rather than to the domain of feeling. It was the expression of a belief founded, indeed, upon those instinctive suggestions in which the heart and mind act together, but a belief which appealed for confirmation to the deductions of rigorous logic and the facts of positive history. It was a legal contest, beginning with the statutebook, passing logically to Grotius and Puffendorff, and never, even in the hour of intensest excitement, losing sight of the acknowledged landmarks of thought. Hence, while it brought out in full light principles overlaid till then by old forms and customs, it started no new theories, opened no new