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The flag of our country, droops heavily from yonder staf -the breeze has died away along the plain of Chadd's Ford-the plain that spreads before us glistening in sun. light the heights of the Brandywine arise gloomy and grand beyond the waters of yonder stream, and all nature holds a pause of solemn silence, on the eve of the bloodshed and strife of the morrow.

"They that take the sword shall perish by the sword." And have they not taken the sword? Let the desolated plain, the blood-soddened valley, the burned farmhouse, the sacked village, and the ravaged town, an swer-let the whitening bones of the butchered farmer, strewn along the fields of his homestead answer-let the starving mother, with the babe clinging to her withered breast, that can afford no sustenance, let her answer, with the death rattle mingling with the murmuring tones that mark the last struggle for life-let the dying mother and her babe answer! It was but a day past, and our land slept in the light of peace. War was not here-wrong was not here. Fraud, and woe, and From the eter misery, and want, dwelt not among us.

nal solitude of the green woods, arose the blue smoke of the settler's cabin, and golden fields of corn peered forth from amid the waste of the wilderness, and the glad music of human voices awoke the silence of the forest. Now! God of mercy, behold the change! Under the shadow of a pretext-under the sanctity of the name of God, invoking the Redeemer to their aid, do these foreign hirelings slay our people! They throng our towns, they darken our plains, and now they encompass our posts on the lonely plain of Chadd's Ford.

"They that take the sword shall perish by the sword.” Brethren, think me not unworthy of belief when I tell you that the doom of the Britisher is near!-Think mo not vain when I tell you that beyond that cloud that now enshrouds us, I see gathering, thick and fast, the darker cloud and the blacker storm, of a Divine Retribu tion! They may conquer us to-morrow! Might and wrong may prevail, and we may be driven from this field -but the hour of God's own vengeance will come !

Aye, if in the vast solitudes of eternal space-if in the heart of the boundless universe, there throbs the being of

an awful God, quick to avenge, and sure to punish guilt, then will the man George of Brunswick, called King, feel in his brain and in his heart, the vengeance of the Eternal Jehovah! A blight will be upon his life-a withered brain, an accursed intellect a blight will be upon his children, and on his people. Great God! how dread the punishment!

A crowded populace, peopling the dense towns where the man of money thrives, while the laborer starves; want striding among the people in all its forms of terror; an ignorant and God-defying priesthood, chuckling over the miseries of millions; a proud and merciless nobility, adding wrong to wrong, and heaping insult upon robbery and fraud; royalty corrupt to the very heart, aristocracy rotten to the core; crime and want linked hand in hand, and tempting men to deeds of woe and death; these are a part of the doom and retribution that shall come upon the English throne and people. Soldiers-I look around among your familiar faces with a strange interest! Tomorrow morning we will all go forth to battle-for need I tell you, that your unworthy minister will go with you, invoking God's aid in the fight? We will march forth to battle. Need I exhort you to fight the good fight-to fight for your homesteads, for your wives and your children? My friends, I might urge you to fight by the gall ing memories of British wrong! Walton,-I might tell you of your father, butchered in the silence of midnight, on the plains of Trenton: I might picture his gray hairs, dabbled in blood: I might ring his death shriek in your

ears.

Shelmire, I might tell you of a mother butchered, and a sister outraged the lonely farm-house, the night assault, the roof in flames, the shouts of the troopers as they despatched their victims, the cries for mercy, the pleadings of innocence for pity. I might paint this all again, in the terrible colors of vivid reality, if I thought your courage needed such wild excitement. But I know you are strong in the might of the Lord. You will go forth to battle to-morrow with light hearts and determined spirits, though the solemn duty, the duty of avenging the dead, may rest heavy on your souls. And in the hour of battle when all around is darkness, lit by the lurid

cannon-glare and the piercing musket- flash, when the The wounded strew the ground, and the dead litter your path, then remember, soldiers, that God is with you. Eternal God fights for you-he rides on the battle cloud, he sweeps onward with the march of the hurricane charge. The Awful and the Infinite fights for you, and you will triumph.

"They that take the sword shall perish by the sword.” You have taken the sword, but not in the spirit of wrong and ravage. You have taken the sword for your homes, for your wives, for your little ones.

You have taken the sword for truth, for justice and right and to you the promise is, be of good cheer, for your foes have taken the sword, in defiance of all that man holds dear-in blasphemy of God; they shall perish by the sword.

And now, brethren and soldiers, I bid you all farewell. Many of us may fall in the fight of to-morrowGod rest the souls of the fallen-many of us may live to tell the story of the fight of to-morrow, and in the memory of all, will ever rest and linger the quiet scene of this autumnal night. Solemn twilight advances over the val ley; the woods on the opposite heights fling their long shadows over the green of the meadow; around us are the tents of the continental host, the half suppressed bustle of the camp, the hurried tramp of soldiers to and fro; now the confusion, and now the stillness which mark the eve of battle. When we meet again, may the long shadows of twilight be flung over a peaceful land. God in heaven grant it.

Hugh Henry Breckenridge.

THE DECLARATION.

"TWAS late, and the gay company was gone,
And light lay soft on the deserted room
From alabaster vases, and a scent
Of orange-leaves, and sweet verbena came
Through the unshutter'd window on the air,
And the rich pictures with their dark old tints,
Hung like a twilight landscape, and all things

Seem'd hush'd into a slumber. Isabel,
The dark-eyed, spiritual Isabel

Was leaning on lier harp, and I had staid
To whisper what I could not when the crowd
Hung on her look like worshippers. I knelt,
And with the fervor of a lip unused

To the cold breath of reason, told my love.
There was no answer, and I took the hand
That rested on the strings, and press'd a kiss
Upon it unforbidden-and again

Besought her, that this silent evidence
That I was not indifferent to her heart.
Might have the seal of one sweet syllable.
I kissed the small white fingers as I spoke,
And she withdrew them gently, and upraised
Her forehead from its resting-place, and look'd
Earnestly on me—She had been asleep!

N. P. Willis.

JOHN BURNS OF GETTYSBURG.

HAVE you heard the story the gossips tell
Of John Burns of Gettysburg?-No? Ah, well.
Brief is the glory that hero carns,

Briefer the story of poor John Burns;
He was the fellow who won renown-

The only man who didn't back down

When the rebels rode through his native town;

But held his own in the fight next day,

When all his townsfolk ran away.

That was in July, sixty-three,

The very day that General Lee,

The flower of Southern chivalry,

Baffled and beaten, backward reeled

From a stubborn Meade and a barren field.

I might tell how, but the day before,
John Burns stood at his cottage-door,
Looking down the village street,

Where, in the shade of his peaceful vine,
He heard the low of his gathered kine,
And felt their breath with incense sweet;
Or, I might say, when the sunset burned
The old farm gable, he thought it turned
The milk that fell in a babbling flood
Into the milk-pail, red as blood;
Or, how he fancied the hum of bees
Were bullets buzzing among the trees.

But all such fanciful thoughts as these
Were strange to a practical man like Burns,
Who minded only his own concerns,
Troubled no more by fancies fine

Than one of his calm-eyed, long-tailed kino--
Quite old-fashioned, and matter-of-fact,
Slow to argue, but quick to act.
That was the reason, as some folks say,
He fought so well on that terrible day.
And it was terrible. On the right
Raged for hours the heavy fight,
Thundered the battery's double bass―
Difficult music for men to face;

While on the left-where now the graves
Undulate like the living waves
That all the day unceasing swept
Up to the pits the rebels kept-
Round shot plowed the upland glades,
Sown with bullets, reaped with blades;
Shattered fences here and there
Tossed their splinters in the air;

The very trees were stripped and bare;
The barns that once held yellow grain
Were heaped with harvests of the slain:
The cattle bellowed on the plain,

The turkeys screamed with might ani main,
And brooding barn-fowl left their rest
With strange shells bursting in each nest.

Just where the tide of battle turns,
Erect and lonely, stood old Jolin: Burns.

How do you think the man was dressed?
He wore an ancient, long buff vest,
Yellow as saffron-but his best;
And, buttoned over his manly breast

Was a a bright blue coat with a rolling collar,
And large gilt buttons-size of a dollar-
With tails that country-folk called "swaller."
He wore a broad-brimmed, bell-crowned hat,
White as the locks on which it sat.
Never had such a sight been seen
For forty years on the village-green,
Since John Burns was a country beau,
And went to the quilting" long ago.

Close at his elbows, all that day
Veterans of the Peninsula,

Sunburnt and bearded charged away,
And striplings, downy of lip and chin,-

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