THE PILGRIMS OF THE MAYFLOWER. Methinks I see it now, that one solitary, adventurous vessel, the Mayflower, of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future state, and bound across the unknown sea. I behold it pursuing, with a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and weeks and months pass, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them. not the sight of the wished-for shore. I see them now scantily supplied with provisions, crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route, and now driven in fury before the raging tempest, on the high and giddy waves. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with engulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening weight against the staggered vessel. I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landed at last, after a five months' passage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth; weak and weary from the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, depending on the charity of their shipmaster for a draught of beer on board, drinking nothing but water on shore, without shelter, without means, surrounded by hostile tribes. Shut now the volume of history, and tell me, on any principle of human probability, what shall be the fate of this handful of adventurers? Tell me, man of military science, in how many months were they all swept off by the thirty savage tribes, enumerated within the early limits of New England? Tell me, politician, how long did this shadow of a colony, on which your conventions and treaties had not smiled, languish on the distant coast? Student of history, compare for me the baffled projects, the deserted settlements, the abandoned adventures of other times, and find the parallel of this! Was it the winter's storm, beating upon Scientific Congress with characteristic grace and wisdom; in London, entertaining the most gifted and wisely-chosen party of artists, authors, and men of rank or state, in a manner which elicits their best social sentiments, at home, in the professor's chair, in the popular assembly, in the Lyceum-hall, or to celebrate an historical occasion-giving expression to high sentiment, or memorable fact, with the finished style and thrilling emphasis of the accomplished orator."-Homes of American Authors. 467 the houseless heads of women and children? Was it hard labor and spare meals? Was it disease? Was it the tomahawk? Was it the deep malady of a blighted hope, a ruined enterprise, and a broken heart, aching in its last moments at the recollection of the loved and left, beyond the sea ? these united, that hurried this forsaken company to their melanWas it some, or all of choly fate? And is it possible that neither of these causesthat not all combined-were able to blast this bud of hope? Is it possible that, from a beginning so feeble, so frail, so worthy (not so much of admiration as of pity), there has gone forth a progress so steady, a growth so wonderful, a reality so important, a promise, yet to be fulfilled, so glorious? LUTHER. In the solemn loneliness in which Luther found himself, he called around him not so much the masters of the Greek and Latin wisdom through the study of the ancient languages, as he did the mass of his own countrymen, by his translation of the Bible. It would have been a matter of tardy impression and remote efficacy, had he done no more than awake from the dusty alcoves of the libraries the venerable shades of the classic teachers. He roused up a population of living, sentient men, his countrymen, his brethren. preached in Latin to his dying day, and the elegant Italian He might have written and scholars, champions of the church, would have answered him in Latin better than his own; and with the mass of the people, the whole affair would have been a contest between angry and loquacious priests. "Awake all antiquity from the sleep of the libraries!" He awoke all Germany and half Europe from the scholastic sleep of an ignorance worse than death. took into his hands not the oaten pipe of the classic muse; he Ile moved to his great work, not -to the Dorian mood Of flutes and soft recorders. He grasped the iron trumpet of his mother tongue-the good old Saxon from which our own is descended, the language of noble thought and high resolve-and blew a blast that shook the nations from Rome to the Orkneys. Sovereign, citizen, and peasant started at the sound; and, in a few short years, the poor monk, who had begged his bread for a pious canticle in the streets of Eisenach-no longer friendless-no longer solitary-was sustained by victorious armies, countenanced by princes, and, what is a thousand times more precious than the brightest crown in Christendom, revered as a sage, a benefactor, and a spiritual parent, at the firesides of millions of his humble and grateful countrymen. THE ETERNAL CLOCKWORK OF THE SKIES. We derive from the observations of the heavenly bodies which are made at an observatory our only adequate measures of time, and our only means of comparing the time of one place with the time of another. Our artificial timekeepersclocks, watches, and chronometers-however ingeniously contrived and admirably fabricated, are but a transcript, so to say, of the celestial motions, and would be of no value without the means of regulating them by observation. It is impossible for them, under any circumstances, to escape the imperfection of all machinery, the work of human hands; and the moment. we remove with our timekeeper east or west, it fails us. It will keep home time alone, like the fond traveller who leaves his heart behind him. The artificial instrument is of incalculable utility, but must itself be regulated by the eternal clockwork of the skies. This single consideration is sufficient to show how completely the daily business of life is affected and controlled by the heavenly bodies. It is they and not our main-springs, our expansion balances, and our compensation pendulums, which give us our time. To reverse the line of Pope 'Tis with our watches as our judgments; none But for all the kindreds and tribes and tongues of men-each upon their own meridian-from the Arctic pole to the equator, from the equator to the Antarctic pole, the eternal sun strikes twelve at noon, and the glorious constellations, far up in the everlasting belfries of the skies, chime twelve at midnighttwelve for the pale student over his flickering lamp, twelve amid the flaming wonders of Orion's belt, if he crosses the meridian at that fated hour-twelve by the weary couch of languishing humanity, twelve in the star-paved courts of the Empyrean-twelve for the heaving tides of the ocean; twelve for the weary arm of labor; twelve for the toiling brain; twelve for the watching, waking, broken heart; twelve for the meteor which blazes for a moment and expires; twelve for the comet whose period is measured by centuries; twelve for every substantial, for every imaginary thing, which exists in the sense, the intellect, or the fancy, and which the speech or thought of man, at the given meridian, refers to the lapse of time. Discourse at Albany, 1856. FLORENCE GALILEO. There is much, in every way, in the city of Florence to excite the curiosity, to kindle the imagination, and to gratify the taste. Sheltered on the north by the vine-clad hills of Fiesole, whose Cyclopean walls carry back the antiquary to ages before the Roman, before the Etruscan power, the flowery city (Fiorenza) covers the sunny banks of the Arno with its stately palaces. Dark and frowning piles of medieval structure, a majestic dome the prototype of St. Peter's, basilicas which enshrine the ashes of some of the mightiest of the dead, the stone where Dante stood to gaze on the campanile, the house of Michael Angelo still occupied by a descendant of his lineage and name-his hammer, his chisel, his dividers, his manuscript poems, all as if he had left them but yesterday-airy bridges which seem not so much to rest on the earth as to hover over the waters they span; the loveliest creations of ancient art, rescued from the grave of ages again to "enchant the world;" the breathing marbles of Michael Angelo, the glowing canvas of Raphael and Titian; museums filled with medals and coins of every age from Cyrus the younger, and gems and amulets and vases from the sepulchres of Egyptian Pharaohs coeval with Joseph, and Etruscan Lucumons that swayed Italy before the Romans; libraries stored with the choicest texts of ancient literature; gardens of rose and orange and pomegranate and myrtle; the very air you breathe languid with music and perfume-such is Florence. But among all its fascinations addressed to the sense, the memory, and the heart, there was none to which I more frequently gave a meditative hour during a year's residence than to the spot where Galileo Galilei sleeps beneath the marble floor of Santa Croce; no building on which I gazed with greater reverence than I did upon the modest mansion at Arcetri, villa at once and prison, in which that venerable sage, by command of the Inquisition, passed the sad closing years of his life; the beloved daughter on whom he had depended to smooth his passage to the grave laid there before him; the eyes with which he had discovered worlds before unknown quenched in blind ness. That was the house "where," says Milton (another of those of whom the world was not worthy), "I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old-a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking on astronomy otherwise than as the Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought." Great heavens! what a tribunal, what a culprit, what a crime! Let us thank God, my friends, that we live in the nineteenth century. Of all the wonders of ancient and modern art, statues and paintings, and jewels and manuscripts, the admiration and the delight of ages, there was nothing which I beheld with more affectionate awe than that poor rough tube, a few feet in length, the work of his own hands, that very "optic glass" through which the "Tuscan Artist" viewed the moon, "At evening from the top of Fesolé Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, that poor little spyglass (for it is scarcely more) through which the human eye first distinctly beheld the surface of the moonfirst discovered the phases of Venus, the satellites of Jupiter, and the seeming handles of Saturn-first penetrated the dusky depths of the heavens-first pierced the clouds of visual error, which from the creation of the world involved the system of the Universe. There are occasions in life in which a great mind lives years of rapt enjoyment in a moment. I can fancy the emotions of Galileo, when, first raising the newly constructed telescope to the heavens, he saw fulfilled the grand prophecy of Copernicus, and beheld the planet Venus crescent like the moon. It was such another moment as that when the immortal printers of Mentz and Strasburg received the first copy of the Bible into their hands, the work of their divine art; like that when Columbus, through the gray dawn of the 12th October, 1492 (Copernicus, at the age of eighteen, was then a student at Cracow), beheld the shores of San Salvador; like that when the law of gravitation first revealed itself to the intellect of Newton; like that when Franklin saw, by the stiffening fibres of the hempen cord of his kite, that he held the lightning in his grasp; like that when Leverrier received back from Berlin the tidings that the predicted planet was found. Yes, noble Galileo, thou art right, E pur si muove. "It does move." Bigots may make thee recant it; but it moves |