enjoyment of rights under it. When a senator elect presents his credentials, he is not allowed to take his seat until he places his hand upon the holy evangelist, and appeals to his God for the sincerity of his vow to support the constitution. He who does this with a mental reservation, or secret intention to disregard any provision of the constitution, commits a double crime is morally guilty of perfidy to his God, and treason to his country!

If the constitution of the United States is to be repudiated upon the ground that it is repugnant to the divine law, where are the friends of freedom and Christianity to look for another and a better? Who is to be the prophet to reveal the will of God, and establish a theocracy for us?

I will not venture to inquire what are to be the form and principles of the new government, or to whom is to be intrusted the execution of its sacred functions; for, when we decide that the wisdom of our Revolutionary fathers was foolishness, and their piety wickedness, and destroy the only system of self-government that has ever realized the hopes of the friends of freedom and commanded the respect of mankind, it becomes us to wait patiently until the purposes of the Latter Day Saints shall be revealed

unto. us.

For my part, I am prepared to maintain and preserve inviolate the constitution as it is, with all its compromises; to stand or fall by the American Union, clinging with the tenacity of life to all its glorious memories of the past, and precious hopes of the future.

THE HEROISM OF THE PILGRIMS. R. Choate.

If one were called on to select the most glittering of the instances of military heroism to which the admiration of the world has been most constantly attracted, he would make choice, I imagine, of the instance of that desperate valor, in which, in obedience to the laws, Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans cast themselves headlong, at the passes of Greece, on the myriads of their Persian invaders. From the simple page of Herodotus, longer than from the Am

phyctionic monument, or the games of the commemoration, that act speaks still to the tears and praise of all the world.

Judge if, that night, as they watched the dawn of the last morning their eyes could ever see; as they heard with every passing hour the stilly hum of the invading host, his dusky lines stretched out without end, and now almost encircling them around; as they remembered their unprofaned home, city of heroes and of the mother of heroes, -judge if, watching there, in the gateway of Greece, this sentiment did not grow to the nature of madness, if it did not run in torrents of literal fire to and from the laboring heart; and when morning came and passed, and they had dressed their long locks for battle, and when, at a little after noon, the countless invading throng was seen at last to move, was it not with a rapture, as if all the joy, all the sensation of life, was in that one moment, that they cast themselves, with the fierce gladness of mountain torrents, headlong on that brief revelry of glory?

I acknowledge the splendor of that transaction in all its aspects. I admit its morality, too, and its useful influence on every Grecian heart, in that greatest crisis of Greece.

And yet, do you not think that whoso could, by adequate description, bring before you that winter of the Pilgrims, — its brief sunshine; the nights of storm, slow waning; the damp and icy breath, felt to the pillow of the dying; its destitutions, its contrasts with all their former experience in life, its utter insulation and loneliness, its death-beds and burials, its memories, its apprehensions, its hopes; the consultations of the prudent; the prayers of the pious; the occasional cheerful hymn, in which the strong heart threw off its burden, and, asserting its unvanquished nature, went up, like a bird of dawn, to the skies; do ye not think that whoso could describe them calmly waiting in that defile, lonelier and darker than Thermopylæ, for a morning that might never dawn, or might show them, when it did, a mightier arm than the Persian raised as in act to strike, would he not sketch a scene of more difficult and rarer heroism? A scene, as Wordsworth has said, "melancholy, yea, dismal, yet consolatory and full of joy;"

a scene even better fitted to succor, to exalt, to lead the forlorn hopes of all great causes, till time shall be no more !

I have said that I deemed it a great thing for a nation, in all the periods of its fortunes, to be able to look back to a race of founders, and a principle of institution, in which it might rationally admire the realized idea of true heroism. That felicity, that pride, that help, is ours. Our past, with its great eras, that of settlement, and that of independence, should announce, should compel, should spontaneously evolve as from a germ, a wise, moral, and glowing future. Those heroic men and women should not look down on a dwindled posterity. That broad foundation, sunk below frost or earthquake, should bear up something more permanent than an encampment of tents, pitched at random, and struck when the trumpet of march sounds at next daybreak. It should bear up, as by a natural growth, a structure in which generations may come, one after another, to the great gift of the social life.

THE DEATH OF O'CONNELL.-W. H. Seward.

THERE is sad news from Genoa. An aged and weary pilgrim, who can travel no further, passes beneath the gate of one of her ancient palaces, saying, with pious resignation, as he enters its silent chambers, "Well, it is God's will that I shall never see Rome. I am disappointed. But I am ready to die. It is all right." The superb though fading queen of the Mediterranean holds anxious watch, through ten long days, over that majestic stranger's wasting frame. And now death is there the Liberator

of Ireland has sunk to rest in the cradle of Columbus.

Coincidence beautiful and most sublime! It was the very day set apart by the elder daughter of the Church for prayer and sacrifice throughout the world, for the children of the sacred island, perishing by famine and pestilence in their homes and in their native fields, and on their crowded paths of exile, on the sea and in the havens, and on the lakes, and along the rivers of this far distant land. The chimes rung out by pity for his countrymen

were O'Connell's fitting knell; his soul went forth on clouds of incense that rose from altars of Christian charity; and the mournful anthems which recited the faith, and the virtue, and the endurance of Ireland, were his becoming requiem.

It is a holy sight to see the obsequies of a soldier, not only of civil liberty, but of the liberty of conscience; of a soldier, not only of freedom, but of the cross of Christ; of a benefactor, not merely of a race of people, but of mankind. The vault lighted by suspended worlds is the temple within which the great solemnities are celebrated; the nations of the earth are mourners; and the spirits of the just made perfect, descending from their golden thrones on high, break forth into songs.

Behold, now, a nation that needeth not to speak its melancholy precedence. The lament of Ireland comes forth from palaces deserted, and from shrines restored; from Boyne's dark water, witness of her desolation, and from Tara's lofty hill, ever echoing her renown. But louder and deeper yet that wailing comes from the lonely huts on mountain and on moor, where the people of the greenest island of all the seas are expiring in the midst of insufficient though world-wide charities. Well, indeed, may they deplore O'Connell; for they were his children, and he bore them

"A love so vehement, so strong, so pure,

That neither age could change nor art could cure.'

DESTINY OF AMERICA.-J. Story.

WHAT is to be the destiny of this republic? In proposing this question, I drop all thought of New England. She has bound herself to the fate of the Union. May she be true to it, now and forever; true to it, because true to herself, true to her own principles, true to the cause of religion and liberty throughout the world. I speak, then, of our common country; of that blessed mother that has nursed us in her lap, and led us up to manhood. What is her destiny? Whither does the finger of fate point? Is the career on which we have entered to be bright with ages of

onward and upward glory? Or is our doom already recorded in the past history of the earth, in the past lessons of the decline and fall of other republics ?

I would not willingly cloud the pleasures of such a day, even with a transient shade. I would not that a single care should flit across the polished brow of Hope, if considerations of the highest moment did not demand our thoughts, and give us counsel of our duties. Who, indeed, can look around him upon the attractions of this scene, upon the faces of the happy and the free, the smiles of youthful beauty, the graces of matron virtue, the strong intellect of manhood, and the dignity of age, and hail these as the accompaniments of peace and independence; who can look around him. and not at the same time feel that change is written on all the works of man, that the breath of a tyrant, or the fury of a corrupt populace, may destroy in one hour what centuries have slowly consolidated?

The Old World has already revealed to us, in its unsealed books, the beginning and end of all its own marvellous struggles in the cause of liberty. Greece, lovely Greece, "the land of scholars. and the nurse of arms," where sister republics in fair possessions chanted the praises of liberty and the gods, where, and what is she? For two thousand years the oppressor has bound her to the earth. Her arts are no more. The last sad relics of her temples are but the barracks of a ruthless soldiery; the fragments of her columns and her palaces are in the dust, yet beautiful in ruin. She fell not when the mighty were upon her. Her sons were united at Thermopyla and Marathon, and the tide of her triumph rolled back upon the Hellespont. She was conquered by her own factions. She fell by the hands of her own people. The man of Macedonia did not the work of destruction. It was already done, by her own corruptions, banishments, and dissensions. Rome, republican Rome, whose eagles glanced in the rising and setting sun, where and what is she? The eternal city yet remains, proud even in her desolation, noble in her decline, venerable in the majesty of religion, and calm as in the composure of death!

And where are the republics of modern times, which clustered