and worse, is it to meet their countrymen in the deadly conflict of a seven years' war? No. Is it the last and greatest of the duties fulfilled by them? Is it to lay the foundation of the fairest Government and the mightiest nation that ever floated on the tide of time? No! These awful and solemn duties were allotted to them; and by them they were faithfully performed. What then is our duty? Is it not to preserve, to cherish, to improve the inheritance which they have left us-won by their toils-watered by their tears-saddened but fertilized by their blood? Are we the sons of worthy sires, and in the onward march of time have they achieved in the career of human improvement so much, only that our posterity and theirs may blush for the contrast between their unexampled energies and our nerveless impotence? between their more than Herculean labors and our indolent repose? No, my fellow citizens, far be from us, far be from you, for he who now addresses you has but a few short days before he shall be called to join the multitu le of ages past-far be from you the reproach or the suspicion of such a degrading contrast. You too have the solemn duty to perform, of improving the condition of your species, by improving your own. Not in the great and strong wind of a revolution, which rent the mountains and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord-for the Lord is not in the wind-not in the earthquake of a revolutionary war, marching to the onset between the battle field and the scaffold-for the Lord is not in the earthquakenot in the fire of civil dissension-in war between the members and the head-in nullification of the laws of the Union by the forcible resistance of one refractory State-for the Lord is not in the fire; and that fire was never kindled by your fathers! No! it is in the still small voice that succeeded the whirlwind, the earthquake, and the fire. The voice that stills the raging of the waves and the tumults of the people-that spoke the words of peace-of harmony of union. And for that voice, may you and your children's children, "to the last syllable of recorded time," fix your eyes upon the memory, and listen with your ears to the life of JAMES MADISON. THE TRIUMPHS OF SUPERSTITION. The sun retires. Night spreads her dusky plume. Yet gentle innocence, with bosom pure, But walks abroad in virtue's garb secure, Nor startles as the harmless lightnings fly. Mark, as deep musing in these still retreats, No anxious pang distracts her peaceful soul; Though panting terror frowns along the vale. A portion of the poem is taken up with the story of the desecration, by a parent, of the grave of his daughter, and the burning of the remains to provide a charm for the health of their sisters which a note speaks of as an actual occurrence at Ballston. There is a pleasing reminiscence of Harris at this period, in connexion with the youth of Edward Everett. When the latter was about four years old, at his birth-place, in Dorchester, he recited the following copy of verses which Mason wrote for the child, the "little roan" referring to the color of the speaker's hair.† But, since you wish to hear my part, And urge me to begin it, I'll tell a tale how Farmer John Said neighbour Joe to farmer John, Arn't you a silly dolt, sir, To spend such time and care upon Said Farmer John to Neighbour Joe, To keep the tale from spoiling; I know it by your smiling. And now, my friends, please to excuse And so I'll make my manners. JOSEPH DENNIE, THE elegant essayist, the "lay preacher" of the old American journals, was born at Boston, August 10, 1768. He acquired his literature at Harvard, of the class of 1790, reading law afterwards with Benjamin West at Charleston, New Hampshire, in which state he opened an office at Walpole. Dennie made one attempt at the bar, of which a humorous account was published by his friend and early literary associate Royal Tyler.* He spoke like an elegant scholar, with some unnecessary eloquence, on a provisory note case before a crude provincial judge, who did not appreciate his rhetoric, was discomfited by the bluntness of the bench, and did not renew his efforts. The Farmer's Museum, published at Walpole, New Hampshire, originally established by Isaiah Thomas and David Carlisle in 1793, under the editorship of Dennie, who, after having contributed to its columns, became its conductor in 1796, gathered around it one of the most brilliant corps of writers ever congregated to advance the fortunes of a similar undertaking in America. It numbered among its authors, each constantly fur His pastoral duties were varied by a journey nishing a department, the witty lawyer Royal for his health in the western states and a tour in Great Britain. As a memorial of the former he published, on his return, his "Journal of a Tour into the Territory North-west of the Alleghany Mountains, made in the Spring of the year 1803, with a geographical and historical account of the State of Ohio." Its dedication is characteristic of his mood. To the candor of the Public I submit my work; to the In the same year, 1803, he published a compilation, in four small volumes, entitled the "Minor Encyclopædia," which Daniel Webster remembered as a useful work. In 1805 he delivered a Phi Beta Kappa poem "On the Patronage of Genius." In 1820 he published a "Natural History of the Bible," on which he had been long engaged, which was pirated and mutilated in England, and translated in Germany. Visiting Savannah for his health, his antiquarian inquiries led him to write his "Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia," which appeared in 1841. He also published numerous Sermons and Addresses, many of the latter in connexion with the Masonic Fraternity, of which he was a member. He also took an active part in the several historical and learned societies of his day. He died in 1842, in his seventy-fourth year. Dr. Frothingham has drawn his character, that of an amiable divine and sensitive scholar, with tenderness in his memoir in the publications of the Massachusetts Historical Society,* of which Harris was one of the original members, * Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., Fourth Series, ii. 180. Tyler, a man of acute mind and well directed powers; David Everett, Thomas Green Fessenden, Isaac Story, and others, whose abilities may be traced in its elegantly arranged folio pages. The inventions of the paper were endless. Poem, essay, criticism, were served up with the skill of a French cook compounding his hundredth variation of omelette. There were the "Farrago," the "Lay Preacher," the "Shop of Colon and Spondee," "Peter Quince," "Simon Spunkey," "The Hermit," "The Rural Wanderer," "Peter Pendulum," "The Desk of Beri Hesden," every trick of alliteration to catch the negligent readers. Dennie wrote for the Museum, The Farrago, a series of essays full of warm apprehension of the poetic beauties of life and literature; the Lay Preacher, which had the fault of irreverence in taking its texts for familiar discussion from Scripture, though jarring upon the reader less in Dennie's hands from his good taste and tone of morality, and he projected The Wandering Jew, which was to close his labors in this kind. In the Port Folio the "Lay Preacher" describes himself accomplishing his series of essays, “a young man, valetudinary, without fortune, In the New England Galaxy, July 24, 1818. Quoted in Buckingham's Newspaper Literature. The mottoes of the Farmer's Museum at different times indicate its spirit: Ho, every one that thirsteth for novelty, come! From New Year's day to the last of December, which gave place to the verses, appropriate to its rural locality, Hither, each week, the peasant shall repair, Buckingham's Newspaper Literature, li. 174-290. Since successfully followed by the Sermons of Dow, Jun who takes his text from the profane classic authors, and whose three volumes, though the mannerism tires in the end, are replete with good feeling and many nice though inverted poetical expressions. without a patron, without an auxiliary, without popular encouragement;"-which he could hardly mean literally, but which was all true enough of the state of literature at the time. The best talents were then gratuitously exercised for the public. The Farmer's Museum itself, with its brilliant array, was suffered to decline, while poor Dennie was calling on the public to subscribe and authors to write (for fame), as if both were under equal obligation. The paying days of American authorship had not yet dawned. Books, even small duodecimos, were published by subscription with humiliating "proposals" by sensitive authors. A very clever resident English author in the country, John Davis, writer of a lively book of travels in the United States, which he dedicated to Jefferson, offered, by an advertisement, in 1801, two novels, fruits of his winter labors, to any bookseller in the country who would publish them—on the condition of receiving fifty copies. The booksellers of New York, where he lived, could not, he said, undertake them, for they were dead of the fever.* A notice to "Readers and Correspondents" in the Museum, Dec. 4, 1797, indicates its height of popularity, which it is curious to contrast with the claims of publishers fifty years later, by the million, with the area of reading enlarged to Mexico and the Pacific: "The constant swell of our subscription book suggests a theme to our gratitude and a motive to our industry. The Farmer's Museum is read by more than two thousand individuals, and has its patrons in Europe and on the banks of the Ohio." Dennie was employed upon the Museum from 1795 to 1799, when he left for Philadelphia, to edit the United States Gazette. In 1800, he commenced with the bookseller, Asbury Dickens, the publication of the Port Folio, at first a weekly miscellany in quarto, in which form it remained for five years, when it was changed to an octavo, monthly, Dennie continuing the editor till his deatht The five large quarto pages of prospectus in which Dennie announces to the world the hopes *Davis visited and resided in Georgia and Virginia as a teacher. He saw good company and enjoyed the climate, looking out upon the beauties of nature with his Horace in his hand. He wrote an Ode to the Mocking Bird, and poems on the Ashley River and the Natural Bridge. His sketches of the literary society of Philadelphia, and of American authorship generally. in bis Travels, which is a book of pleasant exaggerations, is amusing. This is one of his notices on the Port Folio. "The editor of the Aurora calls the Port Folio the Portable Foolery; and his facetiousness is applauded by one party, and scorned by the other. But a better quibble on the word would be, to name it the Court Olio; for it mingles the dresses at St. James with speculations on literature. It being rumored that Mr. Dennie had been denominated by the British Reviewer, the American Addison, the following ludicrous paragraph appeared in the Aurora Gazette. ult ye white hills of New Hampshire, redoubtable Monadnock and Tuckaway! Laugh ye waters of the Winiseopee and Umbagog Lakes! Flow smooth in heroic ve.se ye streams of Amoonoosuck and Androscoggin, Cockhoko and Čoritocook! And you merry Merrimack be now more merry!'" •Ex + The several series of the Port Folio embrace in all fortyseven volumes. Its succession of editors was, Dennie, assisted by Paul Allen; Nicholas Biddle for a short period; Charles Caldwell, M.D., April 1814 to Dec. 1815; John E. Hall, Jan. 1816 to Dec. 1827. There is a general index, in the volume closing the year 1825, to Hall's twenty volumes from 1816. The work was continued for two years further, with diminished vitality, when it finally expired in 1827. and intentions of the Port Folio, are a model of editorial sanguine faith and diligence. "Prospectus of a new weekly paper, submitted to men of affluence, men of liberality, and men of letters. A young man, once known among village readers as the humble historian of the hour, the conductor of a Farmer's Museum and a Lay Preacher's Gazette, again offers himself to the public as a volunteer editor. Having, as he conceives, a right to vary at pleasure his fictitious name, he now, for higher reasons than any fickle humor might dictate, assumes the appellation of OLD SCHOOL." Dennie was followed to the Port Folio by his friend Tyler, who continued his contributions "from the shop of Messrs. Colon and Spondee" to his journal, displaying his copious and refined stores of reading, and urging many a point of well digested criticism and observation. Dennie's broken health compelled him to retire for a while from the editorship of the Port Folio in the summer and autumn of 1811, a depression which was much enhanced by the death of his father; but with the succeeding year he returned to the work, addressing the public with the hopefulness of the editor, who must always affect that virtue if he has it not. He did not long survive. The number of his periodical for January contained some mournful editorial anticipations from his pen. TO THE PUBLIC. of During the autumnal and midsummer months of the last year, which has forever fled away, on the pinions of Time, the Editor of this Journal was compelled to relinquish its duties, and to be regardless of its delights, in consequence of the furious onset of three potent adversaries, Sickness, Sorrow, and Adversity. Under the ardency of the summer solstice, and while the dog star's unpropitious ray was flaming, he was confined to the couch of Languor and Anguish; and, in the decline of autumn, he was afflicted by one of the most tremendous domestic calamities, which can agonize the Sensibility, nourish the Melancholy, and overpower the Fortitude man. The influence of infirm health, in marring the operations, both of manual and mental industry, is familiar to every patient, as well as to every physician; and when to corporeal Pain and yawning Lassitude, the "Sickness of the Soul" is superadded, from such an abhorred alliance all the brilliant powers of Invention, and all the strong body guards of Labour keep obstinately aloof, or fly timidly away. The pen of the readiest writer corrodes in the standish; his papers and projects reposing, ingloriously, on the shelves of dust, or in the pigeon holes of oblivion. His desk is overthrown, his manuscripts are mouldy, and his vase of ink is as dry as the vessel of the gospel outcast, while wandering in the parched wilderness of Beersheba. Johnson emphatically calls the load of life, is then truly wearisome. Society presents nothing to gladden, and Solitude nothing to soothe. In vain do we fly to the sequestered shades of the country. Let all the beauties of Nature solicit our notice §-let all the diversities of Pleasure court our acceptance -let the birds carol enchantingly in the grove, and the flowers bloom odoriferously in the meadow; let the breeze whisper softly in the wood, and the sun What dance gaily on the water; each rural sight, each rural sound is equally lost to him, who is under the dominion of that relentless Power, which the poet Gray energetically calls the TAMER OF THE HU MAN BREAST, Whose iron scourge, and torturing hour The bad affright, afflict the best. By one, who was himself a severe sufferer, it has been remarked, with truth and eloquence, that there are, perhaps, very few conditions more to be regretted than that of an active mind, labouring under the weight of a distempered body. The time of such a man is always spent in forming schemes, which a change of wind hinders him from executing; his powers fume away in projects and in hope, and the day of action never arrives. He lies down, delighted with the thoughts of to-morrow, pleases his Ambition with the Fame he shall acquire, or his benevolence with the Good he shall impart. But in the night the skies are overcast, the temper of the air is changed, he wakes in languor, impatience and distraction, and has no longer any wish but for ease, nor any attention but to misery. It may be said that Disease generally begins that equality, which Death completes; the distinctions, which set one man so much above another, are very little perceived in the gloom of a sick chamber, where it will be vain to expect entertainment from the gay, or instruction from the wise; where all human glory is obliterated, the wit is clouded, the reasoner perplexed, and the hero subdued; where the highest and brightest of mortal beings finds nothing left him but the consciousness of innocence. On the seventh of the month in which this was published, he died suddenly, at the early age of forty-four. The obituary in the next issue of the journal speaks warmly, in a style of elegance emulous of his own, of his literary accomplishments and personal virtues. "So pure was its texture, so delicate its conceptions, that his mind seemed, if we may speak so, to have been bathed at its birth in the very essence of literature-to be daily fed with the celestial dews of learning." His conversation was the counterpart of his writings, delighting in moral topics, and graced by his fine stores of poetical reading. He was free from the jealousies of the literary profession, a happy condition for the editorial life he was called to assume. His amiability is reflected on every page of his writings, though occasionally tinged by a tone of disappointment. Buckingham, who was an apprentice to the publisher of the Museum, and carried copy from Dennie, describes his personal appearance in 1796. He was rather below than above the middling height, and was of slender frame; was attentive to fashion in his dress, appearing one May morn ning at the office "in a pea-green coat, white vest, nankin small-clothes, white silk stockings, and pumps fastened with silver buckles, which covered at least half the foot from the instep to the toe." He wrote very rapidly, and like most persons connected with the press, deferred copy till the last moment. "One of the best of his lay-sermons," says Buckingham, "was written at the village tavern, directly opposite to the office, in a chamber where he and his friends were amusing themselves with cards. It was delivered to me by piece-meal, at four or five different * Cowper. times. If he happened to be engaged in a game, when I applied for copy, he would ask some one to play his hand for him, while he would give the devil his due. When I called for the closing paragraph of the sermon, he said, call again in five minutes. 'No,' said Tyler, I'll write the improvement for you.' He accordingly wrote a concluding paragraph, and Dennie never saw it till it was in print." Buckingham speaks of his being "a premature victim to social indulgence," and Knapp* thinks the habit was increased by the attic nights of the Philadelphia wits when the poet Moore was in their company, and that Dennie acquired a distrust of American society, quoting Cliffton's complaint of "the land where fancy sickens, and where genius dies." There was doubtless some cause for dissatisfaction; for it should not be forgotten that Dennie wrote laboriously and well when the rewards of literature were scanty, and the position of the writer uncertain. If he wavered in his course, his sensibility may very naturally have led him astray. Dennie's convivial tastes led him to the formation of a social gathering which was known in Philadelphia as the Tuesday Club. It included a number of the contributors to the Port Folio. Gen. Thomas Cadwallader who gave translations from Horace in the Magazine, Samuel Ewing a son of the Provost, who wrote with the signature "Jacques," Thomas Warton, Philip the son of General Hamilton, Wood the actor, Richard Rush, and Richard Peters author of the Law Reports, were members. John Quincy Adams, Gouv. Morris, Judge Hopkinson, Horace Binney, Robert Walsh, the Rev. John Blair Linn, Charles Brockden Brown, and Charles J. Ingersoll, were also contributors to the Port Folio, which, under the efficient management of the publisher, Harrison Hall, in its best days, largely occupied the attention of the reading public in its departments of literature. As an Essayist, Dennie's influence was confined to the periodical literature of his day, only two scanty collections of his papers having been published:-The Lay Preacher; or Short Sermons for Idle Readers, printed at Walpole in 1796, and a volume also of the Lay Preacher, collected and arranged by John E. Hall, in Philadelphia, in 1817. The style of the Lay Preacher in which Dennie, as he himself tells us, aimed to unite "the familiarity of Franklin with the simplicity of Sterne," does not always suggest those qualities. Its elegance is occasionally somewhat plethoric of adjectives and fine phrases, especially in the earlier series; belonging to itself. while it has a vein of ingenuity and gentle humor ON THE PLEASURES OF STUDY. "Blessed is he that readeth."-REV. i. 1. Whenever I reflect upon my habitual attachment to books, I feel a new glow of gratitude towards that Power, who gave me a mind thus disposed, and to those liberal friends, who have allowed the utmost latitude of indulgence to my propensity. Had I been born on a barbarous shore, denied the glorious privileges of education, and interdicted an approach to • American Biography. the rich provinces of literature, I should have been the most miserable of mankind. With a temperament of sensibility, with the nerves of a valetudinarian, with an ardent thirst for knowledge, and very scanty means for its acquisition, with a mind often clouded with care, and depressed by dejection, I should have resembled the shrinking vegetable of irritableness, and like the mimosa of the gardens, have been doomed to be at once stupid and sensitive. The courses of nature and fortune having taken a different direction, parental benignity having furnished me with the keys, and discipline and habit having conducted me through the portico of education, I have ever found, whether walking in the vestibule of science, or meditating in the groves of philosophy, or hearkening to historians and poets, or rambling with Rabelais, such excellent companions, that life has been beguiled of more than half its irksomeness. In sickness, in sorrow, in the most doleful days of dejection, or in the most gloomy seasons in the calendar, study is the sweetest solace and the surest refuge, particularly when my reading is directed to that immortal book, whence the theme of this essay is taken. In an hour of adversity, when I have caught up this precious volume, I have found, instantly, the balm of Gilead and the medieine for the mind. The darkness of despair has been succeeded by the brightest rays of cheerfulness, and in place of grim phantoms, I have found comfort, peace, and serenity. I hope that this style of speaking occasionally in the first person will be forgiven, even by the most fastidious reader, when he adverts to the custom of my predecessors. A periodical writer can hardly avoid this sort of egotism, and it is surely very harmless when its employer muffles himself in the mantle of concealment, and in the guise, whether of a shrewd Spectator or a simple Lay Preacher, walks unobtrusively abroad. Mr. Addison and Monsieur Montaigne perpetually indulge this habit; and on a very careful inspection of many editions of their esBays, I have always found, by certain infallible marks, that those speculations had been most diligently perused, which abound in little sketches of the manners, humours, and habits of their authors. We are naturally curious thus to peep through the keyhole of a study, to see a writer in his elbowchair, and to listen to his story with the fondness and familiarity of friendship. Anonymous authors have a prescription from Parnassus to paint themselves; and when by a Tatler, a Spectator, or a Connoisseur, nothing but good colours and modest tinting is employed, men look with mingled curiosity and complacency at the picture. In a speculation on the blessings derived from a studious temper, if a miniature of a lover of books is introduced, provided it be a tolerable resemblance, and viewed in a proper light, it will, by an easy association, lead the observer to reflect more intensely upon the value of literature. The utility and delight of a taste for books are as demonstrable as any axiom of the severest science. The most prosperous fortune is often harassed by various vexations. The sturdiest son of strength is sometimes the victim of disease. Melancholy will sometimes involve the merriest in her shade, and the fairest month of the year will have its cloudy days. In these dreary seasons, from which no man may hope to escape, sensual delights will not fill scarcely a nook in the gloomy void of the troubled. time. Brief as the lightning in the collied night, this sort of pleasure may flash before the giddy eyes, but then merely for a moment, and the twinkling radiance is still surrounded with the murkiest gloom. Eating, drinking, and sleeping; the song and the dance, the tabret and viol, the hurry of dissipation, the agitation of play, these resources, however husbanded, are inadequate to the claims of life. On the other hand, the studious and contemplative man has always a scheme of wisdom by which he can either endure or forget the sorrows of the heaviest day. Though he may be cursed with care, yet he is surely blessed when he readeth. Study is the dulce lenimen laborum of the Sabine bard. It is sorrow's sweet assunger. By the aid of a book, he can transport himself to the vale of Tempe, or the gar dens of Armida. He may visit Pliny at his villa, or Pope at Twickenham. He may meet Plato on the banks of Ilyssus, or Petrarch among the groves of Avignon. He may make philosophical experiments with Bacon, or enjoy the eloquence of Bolingbroke. He may speculate with Addison, moralize with Johnson, read tragedies and comedies with Shakspeare, and be raptured by the rhetoric of Burke. In many of the old romances, we are gravely informed, that the unfortunate knight in the dungeon of some giant, or fascinated by some witch or enchanter, while he sees nothing but hideousness and horror before him, if haply a fairy, or some other benignant being, impart a talisman of wondrous virtue, on a sudden our disconsolate prisoner finds himself in a magnificent palace, or a beautiful garden, in the bower of beauty, or in the arms of love. This wild fable, which abounds in the legends of knight-errantry, has always appeared to me very finely to shadow out the enchantment of study. A book produces a delightful abstraction from the cares and sorrows of this world. They may press upon us, but when we are engrossed by study we do not very acutely feel them. Nay, by the magic illusion of a fascinating author, we are transported from the couch of anguish, or the gripe of indigence, to Milton's paradise, or the elysium of Virgil. ON MEDITATION. "Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still."-PSALMS iv. 4. Having, in my last speculation, attempted to describe some of the delights of study, in this paper it is proposed to consider the true use of retirement. Between them there should be a perpetual alliance: nay, they are not only neighbouring and friendly powers, but they are familiar connexions. Amiable, interesting, and lovely sisters! if your worthy admirer be attracted by the riches of one, he will quickly be delighted with the pensiveness of the other. Study will give him all her books, and retirement conduct him to all her bowers. In no ramble will he experience more delight than when he roves through the healthful wood, or saunters through the tranquil cloister, with retirement on his right hand, and study on his left. Though their guise is exceedingly modest, though their conversation has no resemblance to loquacity, though their best attire is from no other wardrobe than that of sweet simplicity, still they will always gain more regard from the wiser than all the pageants of the pompous, and all the plumage of the vain. The royal psalmist, from whose divine odes I have transcribed my text, was himself a memorable example of the utility of retirement, reflection, and self-communion. It will be remembered that he was a warrior, a statesman, a man of business, and a man of the world. In these various characters, though he often acquitted himself excellently well, yet unfortunately, in some flagrant instances, we perceive how much he was tainted by the infection of the world. But when he shuts his eyes against the glare of ambition, and the gaze of beauty, when he ceases to touch the harp of fascination, and for |