riches, strikes at the very root of liberty, and sets mankind at defiance? And shall this man escape? Fathers, it must not be! It must not be, unless you would undermine the very foundations of social safety, strangle justice, and call down anarchy, massacre and ruin on the commonwealth!

LESSON LXXV.

MT. TAMALPAIS.

BY CHARLES WARREN STODDARD.

HOW glorious thy dwelling place!

How manifold thy beauties are!

I do not reckon time or space—
I worship thy exceeding grace,
And hasten, as a flying star,
To reach thy splendor from afar.

2. The first flush of thy morning face

3.

Is dear to me; thy shadowless,

Broad noon that doth all sweets confess;

But fairer is thy even fall,

When seem to cry with airy call
Thy roses in the wilderness.
Thy deserts blithely blossoming,
Decoy me for the love of Spring.
With all thy glare and glitter spent,
Thy quiet dusk so eloquent,

Thy veil of vapors—the caress

Of Zephyrus, right cool and sweet-
I cannot wait to love thee less-
I cling to thee with full content,
And fall a dreaming at thy feet.

Anon the sudden evening gun,
Awakes me to the sinking sun
And golden glories at the Gate.

The full, strong tides, that slowly run,
Their sliding waters modulate

To indolent soft winds, that wait
And lift a long web newly spun.
I see the groves of scented bay,
And night is in their fragrant mass;
But tassel-shadows swing and sway,
And spangles flash and fade away
Upon their glimmering leaves of glass-
And there a fence of rail, quite gray,
With ribs of sunlight in the grass-
And here a branch full well arrayed
With struggling beams a moment stay'd―
Like panting butterflies afraid.

4. Lo! shadows slipping down the slope And filling every narrow vale;

The shining waters growing pale;
The mellow-burning star of Hope,
And in the wave its silver trope;

A slender shallop, feather-frail ;
A pencil mast and rocking sail;
The glooms that gather at the Gate;
The somber lines against the sky,
While dizzy gnats about me fly,
And overhead the birds go by,

Dropping a note so crystal clear,
The spirit cannot choose but hear;

The hollow moon; and, up between,
An oak with yard-long mosses, green
In sunlight, now as dull as crape ;
The mountain soften'd in its shape,
Its perfect symmetry attained,

And swathed in velvet folds, and stained
With dusty purple of the grape.

LESSON LXXVI.

THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO.

BY VICTOR M. HUGO.

Victor Marie Hugo, a celebrated French lyric poet and novelist, was born at Besançon in 1802. His first poem, on The Advantages of Study (1817), obtained an honorable mention from the French Academy. In 1822 he published his first volume of Odes and Ballads, which quickly raised Lim to the first rank among the French poets of his time. The literati of France having ranged themselves in two hostile schools, styled the Classic and the Romantic, Victor Hugo became the recognized chief of the latter. Of his dramas, Hernani and Marion Delorme (1831) proved brilliant successes. Among his most successful and popular works are Les Miserables, a novel (1862), The Toilers of the Sea (1965), and poems entitled Leaves of Autumn. He was raised to the rank of Peer in 1845. He was banished from France for his opposition to the public measures of December 2, 1852. He retired to the Isle of Guernsey, where he still resides.

Ο

PART FIRST.

N the morning of Waterloo, Napoleon was satisfied. The plan of battle which he had conceived was admirable. At the moment when Wellington drew back, Napoleon started up. He saw the plateau of Mont Saint Jean suddenly laid bare, and the front of the English army disappear. It rallied, but kept concealed. The Emperor half rose in his stirrups. The flash of victory passed into his eyes.

2. Along the crest of the plateau of Mont. St. Jean ran a deep ditch, which could not be seen from a distance. And on the day of the battle this sunken road was invisible, not to say terrible. The Emperor swept his glass over every point of the battle-field. He was reflecting; he seemed to count every bush. Suddenly he bent over and spoke in an undertone to the guide Lacoste. The guide made a negative sign, probably treacherous.

3. The Emperor rose up and reflected. Wellington had fallen back. It remained only to complete this repulse by a crushing charge. Napoleon, turning abruptly, sent off a courier at full speed to Paris to announce that the battle was won. Napoleon was one of those geniuses who rule the thunder. He had found his thunderbolt. He ordered Milhaud's cuirassiers to carry the plateau of Mont. St. Jean.

4. They were three thousand five hundred. They formed a line of half a mile. They were gigantic men on colossal horses. There were twenty-six squadrons, and they had behind them a strong support.

5. Aide-de-camp Bernard brought them the Emperor's order. Ney drew his sword and placed himself at their head. The enormous squadrons began to move. Then was seen a fearful sight. All this cavalry, with sabers drawn, banners waving, and trumpets sounding, formed in column by division, descended with an even movement and as one man—with the precision of a bronze battering-ram opening a breach. 6. On they rode, serious, menacing, imperturbable; in the intervals of the musketry and artillery could be heard the sound of this colossal tramp. Being in two divisions, they formed two columns. From a distance they would be taken for two immense serpents of steel stretching themselves toward the crest of the plateau. That ran through the battle like a prodigy.

7. It seemed as if this mass had become a monster, and had but a single mind. Each squadron undulated and swelled like the ring of a polyp. They could be seen through the thick smoke, as it was broken here and there. It was one pell-mell of casques, cries, sabers; a furious bounding of horses among the cannon, and the flourish of trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult; over all, the cuirasses, like the scales of a hydra.

8. An odd numerical coincidence, twenty-six battalions were to receive these twenty-six squadrons. Behind the crest of the plateau, under cover of the masked battery, the English infantry, formed in thirteen squares, two battalions to the square, and upon two lines-seven on the first, and six on the second-with musket to the shoulder, and eye upon their sights, waiting calm, silent, and immovable.

9. They could not see the cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers could not see them. They listened to the rising of this tide of men. They heard the increasing sound of three thousand

horses, the alternate and measured striking of their hoofs at full trot, the rattling of the cuirasses, the clicking of the sabers, and a sort of fierce roar of the coming host. There was

a moment of fearful silence, then, suddenly a long line of raised arms brandishing sabers appeared above the crest, with casques, trumpets, and standards, and three thousand faces, with gray moustaches, crying Vive l'Empereur! All this cavalry debouched on the plateau, and it was like the beginning of an earthquake.

10. All at once, tragic to relate, at the left of the English, and on our right, the head of the column of cuirassiers reared with a frightful clamor. Arrived at the culminating point of the crest, unmanageable, full of fury, and bent upon the extermination of the squares and cannons, the cuirassiers saw between themselves and the English a ditch—a grave. It was the sunken road of Chain.

11. It was a frightful moment. There was the ravine, unlooked for, yawning at the very feet of the horses, two fathoms deep between its double slope. The second rank pushed in the first, the third pushed in the second; the horses reared, threw themselves over, fell upon their backs, and struggled with their feet in the air, piling up and overturning their riders; no power to retreat; the whole column was nothing but a projectile. The force acquired to crush the English crushed the French.

12. The inexorable ravine could not yield until it was filled; riders and horses rolled in together pell-mell, grinding each other, making common flesh in this dreadful gulf, and when this grave was full of living men, the rest marched over them and passed on. Almost a third of Dubois' brigade sank into this abyss. Here the loss of the battle began. A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates, says that two thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the sunken road of Ohain. This undoubtedly comprises all the other bodies thrown into this ravine on the morrow after the battle. 13. Napoleon, before ordering this charge of Milhaud's cui