the benign recognition of that great Christian revelation, the brotherhood of man. How vain are eloquence and poetry, compared with this heaven-descended truth! Put in one scale that simple utterance, and in the other the lore of antiquity, with its accumulating glosses and commentaries, and the last will be light and trivial in the balance. Greek poetry has been likened to the song of the nightingale as she sits in the rich, symmetrical crown of the palm-trec, trilling her thick-warbled notes; but even this is less sweet and tender than the music of the human heart.

DEATH OF JOHN Q. ADAMS. - I. E. Holmes.

THE mingled tones of sorrow, like the voice of many waters, have come unto us from a sister state Massachusetts, weeping for her honored son. The state I have the honor in part to represent once endured, with her, a common suffering, battled for a common cause, and rejoiced in a common triumph. Surely, then, it is meet that in this the day of her affliction we should mingle our griefs.

When a great man falls, the nation mourns; when a patriarch is removed, the people weep. Ours, my associates, is no common bereavement. The chain which linked our hearts with the gifted spirits of former times has been suddenly snapped. The lips from which flowed those living and glorious truths that our fathers uttered are closed in death. Yes, my friends, Death has been among us! He has not entered the humble cottage of some unknown, ignoble peasant; he has knocked audibly at the palace of a nation! His footstep has been heard in the halls of state ! He has cloven down his victim in the midst of the councils of a people. He has borne in triumph from among you the gravest, wisest, most reverend head. Ah! he has taken him as a trophy who was once chief over many statesmen, adorned with virtue, and learning, and truth; he has borne at his chariot-wheels a renowned one of the earth.

How often we have crowded into that aisle, and clustered around that now vacant desk, to listen to the counsels of wisdom as they

fell from the lips of the venerable sage, we can all remember, for it was but of yesterday. But what a change! How wondrous! how sudden! 'Tis like a vision of the night. That form which

we beheld but a few days since is now cold in death!

But the last Sabbath, and in this hall he worshipped with others. Now his spirit mingles with the noble army of martyrs and the just made perfect, in the eternal adoration of the living God. With him, “this is the end of earth." He sleeps the sleep that knows no waking. He is gone and forever! The sun that ushers in the morn of that next holy day, while it gilds the lofty dome of the capitol, shall rest with soft and mellow light upon the consecrated spot beneath whose turf forever lies the PATRIOT FATHER and the PATRIOT SAGE.

THE SEVENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST BATTLE OF THE REVOLUTION.-R. Rantoul, Jr.

THE prospect before Hancock and Adams, on the ever-glorious nineteenth of April, was, to be soon proclaimed traitors; and, if the giant despotism they had provoked crushed the incipient rebellion, as the world looking on expected, that then their ghastly heads would frown from Temple Bar, and their blasted names be bequeathed to eternal infamy, both in the Old World and the New,

triumphant tyranny having silenced the voice of truth, justice, and patriotism. The "condign punishment" denounced against these champions of the constitutional rights of Englishmen involved atrocities too horrible to be alluded to here; it was an exhibition from which a heathen spectator might naturally infer that not the dove, but the vulture, was the emblem of Christianity. It had been first inflicted on an unfortunate patriot guilty of the precise crime of Hancock and Adams, — David, Prince of Wales, who, in the eleventh year of Edward I., expiated by a cruel death his fidelity to the cause of his country's independence. At a grand consultation of the peers of the realm, it was agreed that London should be graced with his head, while York and Winchester disputed for the honor of his right shoulder. In a few years other

Welsh chiefs suffered the fate of their prince. This unseemly precedent, adopted in the flush and insolence of victory, then assumed the venerable form of law, and fell next upon the undaunted William Wallace, who nobly died in defence of the liberties and independence of his country, exhibiting to the delighted city of London a terrible example of Edward's vengeance. Such was the beginning of that law of treason, which, originating in the year 1283, continued in force for more than five centuries, as if to warn mankind how easily the most execrable example may be introduced, and with what difficulty a country is purified from its debasing influence. Why should I single out illustrious victims of these rites of Moloch? The ever-hallowed names in the perennial pages of British glory, you may read them in the attainted catalogue of arrant traitors. Long after the ashes of Welsh independence were quenched in the blood of a native prince, ages after the spirit of Scottish liberty was roused, not crushed, by the ignominious butchery of Wallace,More and Fisher, learning and piety, Russell and Sidney, integrity and honor, were sacrificed upon the scaffold of treason, beneath the axe of arbitrary power. These lessons of history might have taught our Hancock and Adams that the holy cause to which they were devoted, purity of motive, and a character untouched by any shaft of calumny, were not pleas in bar to a British indictment for treason.

Why, then, was the prospect of coming perils glorious to the eye of far-seeing patriotism? For the high prize that could be won by none but souls tempered to pass through the intervening agony, who, for the joy that was set before them, could endure the cross and despise the shame, Liberty, the life of life, that gladdens the barren hill-tops of Scotland, and Switzerland, and loved New England, that makes the sun shine brightly in our cold northern sky, that makes the valleys verdant in blithesome spring, and sober autumn laugh in her golden exuberance, that nerves the arm of labor and blesses the couch of repose, that clothes with strength our sons and our daughters with beauty, - Liberty, in whose devotion they were nursed, which their fathers had bequeathed to them, a legacy to be handed down unimpaired,

through ourselves, to their and our latest posterity; to which they clung through life, and which inspired the patriotism that could freely testify to die for one's country is a joy and a glory.

Young freedom had ever been consecrated by the baptism of blood. Sparta and Athens, Holland and the mountain-girt Swiss, proud Albion and regenerated France, bought at a cheap purchase, with the lavish expense of their best lives, the rights which they enjoyed. Adams and his compatriots, on the day we have met to celebrate, knew that liberty must be, as it ever had been, a lifebought boon; that only by a mortal struggle could it be wrested from the grasp of power; and that nothing but perpetual vigilance, resolved to do and dare and suffer all things, rather than surrender it, could guarantee the long possession of the blessing afterwards. They had counted the cost, and chose the purchase.

Glorious, thrice glorious, was the morning, then, when the first shot fired at Lexington gave the signal of separation of a free and independent empire from its parent state! The nineteenth of April, and the seventeenth of June, both on the classic ground of the world's freedom, this county of Middlesex, cut out the work for the fourth of July, world-emancipating work, which the achievements of the heroes of the uprising of America, and the Titanic labors of the transatlantic sons of revolution, yet agitate and roll on towards its grand completion! Middlesex possesses this imperishable glory, before which the lustre of the brightest victories, won in battles between contending tyrants, turns pale. Her children claim a common property in the trophies of these two memorable days; they walk together in the light of these two glowing beacon-fires, kindled on that stormy coast where Liberty has taken up her eternal abode, to illuminate, with the cheering radiance of hope, her benighted pilgrims, who can look nowhere else for hope but to this western world.

It is to the county of Middlesex that the tribes of our American Israel come up to keep holy time. The Mecca and Medina of the advent of freedom are within her borders. Lexington, whose echoes answered to the signal-gun that broke the centennial slumbers of the genius of revolution, to sleep no more till he has trampled

on the fetters of the last slave, and wrapped in consuming flames the last throne; to overturn, and overturn, and overturn, until he shall make an end; - Concord, that saw the insulting foe driven back in dire confusion before the children of liberty, as the cloud squadrons of some threatening. thunder-storm melt and disperse when the full-orbed sun bursts through and overpowers them; Acton, whose Spartan band of minute-men withstood the onset and returned the fire of the minions of the tyrant; whose gallant Davis poured out his soul freely in his country's cause, at the moment when the tide of foreign aggression ebbed, at the moment when the beginning of the onward movement of his country's liberty, independence, greatness and glory, by his judgment, promptness and valor, was secured; Charlestown, the smoke of whose sacrifice mingled with the roar of the murderous artillery, while a holocaust of victims and the apotheosis of Warren consecrated her mount as the thrice holy spot of all New England's hallowed soil;

Cambridge, the head-quarters of the hero, after whom the age of transition from monarchies to republics will be called the age of Washington; in these, her towns, are the several peculiar shrines of the worship of constitutional liberty that have made the American continent not barren of historical monumental scenes. Where else, in the circuit of the revolving globe, does the sun look on such a clustered group of glories?

Over how broad a portion of the world have we extended the advantages we ourselves enjoy! Our domain unites the noblest valley on the surface of the globe, competent to grow food for human beings many more than now dwell on the face of the earth, with an eastern wing fitted for the site of the principal manufacturing and commercial power of existing Christendom, and a western flank well situated to hold the same position on the Pacific, when Asia shall renew her youth, and Australia shall have risen to the level of Europe. Bewildering, almost, is the suddenness of our expansion to fill these limits, and astounding are the phenomena that accompany this development. This day there stands before the councils of the nation, deputed to participate in their deliberations, a young man born within sight of old Concord Bridge, and educated