Men, who their duties know,

But know their rights; and knowing, dare maintain,
Prevent the long-aimed blow,

And crush the tyrant while they rend the chain.

These constitute a state;

And sovereign law, that state's collected will,
O'er thrones and globes elate,

Sits empress, crowning good, repressing ill:
Smit by her sacred frown,

The fiend Discretion, like a vapor, sinks,
And e'en the all-dazzling crown

Hides his faint rays, and at her bidding shrinks.

CXIII.-MARATHON.

MARATHON; the scene of a celebrated battle in the early history of Greece.

ATHENA; Athens. HELLAS; Greece. IONIAN; Grecian.

WHERE'ER we tread, 'tis haunted, holy ground,
No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mold!
But one vast realm of wonder spreads around,
And all the Muse's tales seem truly told,
Till the sense aches with gazing to behold
The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon.
Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold,
Defies the power, which crushed thy temples gone.
Age shakes Athena's tower, but spares gray Marathon.
The sun, the soil, but not the slave the same,
Unchanged in all except its foreign lord,
Preserves alike its bounds and boundless fame,
The battlefield, where Persia's victim horde
First bowed beneath the brunt of Hellas' sword,
As on the morn to distant glory dear,
When Marathon became a magic word,

Which uttered, to the hearer's eye appear

The camp, the host, the fight, the conqueror's career!
The flying Mede, his shaftless, broken bow,
The fiery Greek, his red, pursuing spear,
Mountains above, earth's, ocean's plain below,
Death in the front, destruction in the rear!
Such was the scene. What now remaineth here?

NEW EC. S.--18

What sacred trophy marks the hallowed ground,
Recording freedom's smile and Asia's tear?

The rifled urn, the violated mound,

The dust, thy courser's hoof, rude stranger! spurns around.

Yet to the remnants of thy splendor past,

Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied, throng;
Long shall the voyager, with the Ionian blast,
Hail the bright clime of battle and of song;
Long shall thine annals and immortal tongue
Fill with thy fame the youth of many a shore;
Boast of the a-ged! lesson of the young!
Which sages venerate and bards adore,

As Pallas and the Muse unvail their awful lore.

FROM BYRON.

CXIV. ATHENS.

ERASMUS, PASCAL, MIRABEAU, GALILEO, Sidney; distinguished men who were persecuted for their liberal opinions; Erasms translated the Greek Testament into Latin; Mirabeau was an early leader of the French Revolution; Galileo discovered the true relations of the heavenly bodies.

ALL the triumphs of truth and genius over prejudice and power, in every country and in every age, have been the triumphs of Athens. Whenever a few great minds have made a stand against violence and fraud, in the cause of liberty and reason, there has been her spirit in the midst of them; inspiring, encouraging, and consoling. It stood by the lonely lamp of Erasmus; by the restless bed of Pascal; in the tribune of Mirabeau; in the cell of Galileo; on the scaffold of Sidney.

But who shall estimate her influence on private happiness? Who shall say how many thousands have been made wiser, happier, and better, by those pursuits in which she has taught mankind to engage; to how many the studies which took their rise from her have been wealth in poverty; liberty in bondage; health in sickness; society in solitude. Her power is indeed manifested at the bar; in the senate; in the field of battle; in the schools of philosophy.

But these are not her glory. Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain; wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and wait for the dark house and the long sleep, there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens.

The dervise, in the Arabian tale, did not hesitate to abandon to his comrade the camels with their load of jewels and gold, while he retained the casket of that mysterious juice, which enabled him to behold at one glance all the hidden riches of the universe. Surely it is no exaggeration to say, that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye, which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world; all the hoarded treasures of the primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of the yet unexplored mines.

This is the gift of Athens to man. Her freedom and her power have for more than twenty centuries been annihilated. Her people have degenerated into timid slaves; her language, into a barbarous jargon. Her temples have been given up to the successive depredations of Romans, Turks, and Scotchmen; but her intellectual empire is imperishable.

And, when those who have rivaled her greatness, shall have shared her fate when civilization and knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant continents; when the scepter shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travelers from distant regions shall in vain labor to decipher on some moldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts; her influence and her glory will still survive, fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over which they exercise their control.

FROM MACAULAY.

CXV.-GREECE.

CLIME of the unforgotten brave!
Whose land from plain to mountain-cave
Was freedom's home, or glory's grave!
Shrine of the mighty! can it be,
That this is all remains of thee?
Approach, thou craven, crouching slave,
Say, is not this Thermopyla?

These waters blue that round you lave,
O servile offspring of the free!
Pronounce what sea, what shore is this:
The gulf, the rock, of Salamis !

These scenes, their story not unknown,
Arise, and make again your own:
Snatch from the ashes of your sires
The embers of their former fires;
And he, who in the strife expires,
Will add to theirs a name of fear,
That tyranny shall quake to hear,
And leave his sons a hope, a fame,
They too will rather die than shame;
For freedom's battle once begun,
Bequeathed by bleeding sire to son,
Though baffled oft, is ever won.

Bear witness, Greece, thy living page!
Attest it, many a deathless age!
While kings, in dusty darkness hid,
Have left a nameless pyramid,
Thy heroes, though the general doom
Hath swept the column from their tomb,
A mightier monument command,
The mountains of their native land!
There points thy muse, to stranger's eye,
The graves of those that can not die!
'T were long to tell, and sad to trace,
Each step from splendor to disgrace.
Enough, no foreign foe could quell
Thy soul, till from itself it fell.
Yes! self-abasement paved the way
To villain bonds and despot sway.
FROM BYRON.

CXVI.-THE FLIGHT OF XERXES.

XERXES, king of Persia, assembled a fleet of a thousand sail and an army of many millions, to effect the conquest of Greece. At Salamis, he was completely overthrown, and fled from the battle alone.

I SAW him on the battle eve,

When like a king he bore him;

Proud hosts, in glittering helm and greave,
And prouder chiefs before him;

The warrior, and the warrior's deeds;

The morrow,

and the morrow's meeds;

No daunting thoughts came o'er him.
He looked around him, and his eye
Defiance flashed, to earth and sky.

He looked on ocean; its broad breast
Was covered with his fleet;

On earth; and saw, from east to west,
His bannered millions meet;

While rocks, and glen, and cave, and coast,
Shook with the warcry of that host,

The thunder of their feet!
He heard the imperial echoes ring,
He heard, and felt himself a king.

I saw him next, alone. Nor camp,
Nor chief, his steps attended;
Nor banner blazed, nor courser's tramp,
With warcries proudly blended.
He stood, alone, whom fortune high
So lately seemed to deify;

He, who with heaven contended,
Fled like a fugitive and slave!
Behind, the foe; before, the wave.

He stood: fleet, army, treasure,—gone!
Alone and in despair!

But wave and wind swept ruthless on,

For they were monarchs there;

And Xerxes, in a single bark,

Where late his thousand ships were dark,

Must all their fury dare:

What a revenge, a trophy, this,

For thee, immortal Salamis!