THE LATE PRESIDENT.

GENERAL TAYLOR's life has one most striking lesson. He ascended to the highest honor of his country, by the honest staircase of unobtrusive duty, and not by the outside ladder of brilliant and crafty ambition. Where and what he was, till Glory called him, is the instructive portion of his history, The great deeds he was found ready for-when need came-take their best lustre, it seems to us, from the patient heroism with which, in a remoter and lesser sphere, he equally" endeavoured to do his duty."

From the great anthem of eulogy and mourning, pealing forth, since his death, in every shape of utterance, it seems to us that this one note should be the dwelt-upon and eternal echo-GLORY SOUGHT HIM, HE SOUGHT NOT GLORY. In this distinction-could it but be made necessary to American greatness—there would be a "divinity to hedge about the Presidents of our country, which would lift them far above kings; while, in it, at the same time, would live a principle of incalculable security to our institutions.

There seems to have been a design of Providence in the whole fitness of Taylor's character to the times he fell on. The passion for military glory, with which the nostrils of our national prosperity were inflated at the time of the conquest of Mexico, called for a hero--but never before was there such need that it should be a hero who could govern j himself. The moderation of Taylor has been of more use to us than his victories. His common sense has been mightier than his sword.

The dying words of the great and good man::-"I HAVE ENDEAVOURED TO DO MY DUTY"-contain a biography of more worth than Napoleon's; but they seem to us of a higher purport than to be weighed against another man's glory. They contain the law of conduct of which our country has most need to be kept in mind. Sound judgment and high principle are wanted at the helm of State, and for these qualities, more than for brilliant genius and practised policy, we should look, in the men to govern us.

Honour to the ashes of Taylor! But let the urn which preserves his memory be the adoption of his dying words as

MR. EVERETT'S POSITION.

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a standard; for, no measure is so fitting, for those who are to take his place, as that by which he measured his own life in leaving it—THE ENDEAVOUR TO DO HIS

DUTY.

EDWARD EVERETT.

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THAT “the root of a great name is in the dead body” is one of those old sayings based upon a principle of human nature, and likely to be always true in some variable degree ; but, either it is less true in proportion as the world civilizes, or else among the changes which are classed as things the age is ready for," is a greater liberality as to the pre-payment of posthumous fame-a rebuking of envy, jealousy and ungenerous interpretation-in short, a rendering of more justice, than of old, to living greatness. We have remarked instances of this, within the last ten years, which could not formerly have occurred—Sir Robort Peel, Wordsworth, and Hallam, in England, for instance, and Webster, Everett, Irving, and Bryant in our own country-all of whom have been nearly as much honored in life as they could be, or would justly be, in death.

Finding upon our table the two volumes of "Everett's Orations," just published by Little and Brown, of Boston, we felt ourself summoned to the bar of conscience, (as an Editor must ever be when about to speak of one to whose imprint of fame he serves as the ink,) and we were compelled, as we ever are before this tribunal, to answer the question partly answered in the paragraph above—is he appreciated by his contemporaries, or is there a tacit appreciation in the higher sanctuaries of public opinion, to which you are bound, by the possession of a journal, to give voice?

Mr. Everett has had the tribute of public honors in singular profusion and variety. After attaining the summit of distinction for learning, as Professor of the University, and for pulpit eloquence, as a clergyman, he successfully filled the offices of Member of Congress, Governor of his State, Foreign Minister and President of Harvard College, with lesser appointments and honors in great number, which could only be given to the country's most finished orator and surest master

of public occasion. Just in the prime of a statesman's lifeat the age when a statesman's career of patriotic service oftenest begins--he has more behind him than was ever won, of American distinction, in the same time; and, with his varied acquirements and experience, he has more material for greatness hereafter than was ever possessed, in this country, so on the threshold of a meridian. This is generally understood, and so certain to be expressed, where Mr. Everett is spoken of, that, taken into connection with the respect and admiration always paid him, posthumous fame could scarcely honour him

more.

We were strongly impressed, the last time we were under the spell of Mr. Everett's eloquence, with the need of such men that a Republic has-the need, in fact, that there would seem to be, of a lofty order of professed public orators, who, by mingled wisdom and eloquence, could minister to the public mind as did the oracles of old, or the prophets of Scripture. Take one of Mr. Everett's Orations, for instance, and see what was required, for its preparation, and its adaptedness to the occasion on which it was delivered! The most splendid structure of the architect is not more heaped in confusion wher the stones and mortar are first brought together, than are the events and associations from which the Orator must rear his deed-enshrining fabric. It requires first that difficult and statesmanlike faculty of generalization-of realizing the classic absurdity, that is to say, of judging of a house by a specimen of a brick-of taking the relevant and irrelevant events of a period, and building them into the century outline to which they belong. It requires a judgment capable of weighing any human action, seeing its motive and bearings, and anticipating the verdict which will be passed upon it in history. It requires both the power of seeing events with the philosopher's perspective of distance and of comprehending familiarly the character and want of the present hour-which he is called upon, with the mystery he thus reads, to enlighten and instruct. It requires profound scholarship, political sagacity, generous and bold enthusiasm, views too liberal for one sect or one party, great personal respectability, and the control of that sublimity of human speech which we call eloquence. The gifts and making of such men, are the gifts and making of a prophet; and, like prophets, they might profitably be set apart, and, sacred from other occupation, be kept for these high duties only.

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Mr. Everett has always seemed to us the ideal of such an orator as we describe. He has lived up to a consciousness of such a mission, apparently. The public understands this. Who would doubt, that, for any emergency, of public question, duty, or trust, he would exercise the highest human intelligence, and bring to bear upon it every existing light of precedent, policy, and foreseen result? Yours, &c.

EMERSON.

THE announcement that Mr. Emerson was to lecture at the Mercantile Library, a few evenings since, was a torpedo touch, even to that most exhausted and torpid thing on earth, editorial curiosity-for, though the impregnator of a whole cycle of Boston mind, and the father of thousands of lesser Emersons, he is the most unapproachably original and distinct monotype of our day; and, strange to say, we had never, to the best of our knowledge, laid eyes upon him. For this unaccountable want of recognition and signification, living in the same town, as we were, when Emerson first began to preach and write, and never taking the trouble to go and behold him as a prophet, we must own to tardy perceptions; but it was doubtless due to his belonging to a sect which we supposed had but one relish, and which led us to dismiss what we heard of him, of course, with the idea that he was but a new addition to the prevailing Boston beverage of Channing-and-water. ✔

The eye sometimes reverses, and always more or less qualifies, the judgment formed without its aid; and we were very much disappointed, on arriving at the Hall, to find the place crowded, and no chance of a near view of the speaker. The only foothold to be had was up against the farthest wall; and a row of unsheltered gas-lights blazed between us and the pulpit, with one at either ear-tip of the occupant, drowning. the expression of his face completely in the intense light a little behind it. To look at him at all was to do so with needles through the eyes, and we take the trouble to define this by way of a general protest against the unshaded gasburners of the Tabernacle, Stuyvesant Institute, and other public rooms, where an opthalmia is very likely to be added to

the bad air and hard seats with which the "evening's entertainment" is presented.

The single look we were enabled to give Mr. Emerson, as the applause announced that he had come into the pulpit, revealed to us that it was a man we had seen a thousand times, and with whose face our memory was familiar; though, in the sidewalk portrait-taking by which we had treasured his physiognomy, there was so little resemblance to the portrait taken from reading him, that we should never have put the two together, probably, except by personal identification. We remember him perfectly as a boy whom we used to see playing about Chauncey-place and Summer-street-one of those pale little moral-sublimes with their shirt collars turned over, who are recognized by Boston school-boys as having "fathers that are Unitarians"-and though he came to his first short hair about the time that we came to our first tail-coat, six or eight years behind us, we have never lost sight of him. In the visits we have made to Boston, of late years, we have seen him in the street and remembered having always seen him as a boy-very little suspecting that there walked, in a form long familiar, the deity of an intellectual altar, upon which, at that moment, burned a fire in our bosom.

Emerson's voice is up to his reputation. It has a curious contradiction, which we tried in vain to analyze satisfactorily -an outwardly repellant and inwardly reverential mingling of qualities, which a musical composer would despair of blending into one. It bespeaks a life that is half contempt, half adoring recognition, and very little between. But it is noble, altogether. And what seems strange is to hear such a voice proceeding from such a body. It is a voice with shoulders in it, which he has not-with lungs in it far larger than his— with a walk in it which the public never see-with a fist in it, which his own hand never gave him the model for—and with a gentleman in it, which his parochial and "bare necessaries-of-life" sort of exterior, gives no other betrayal of. We can imagine nothing in nature-(which seems, too, to have a type for everything)-like the want of correspondence between the Emerson that goes in at the eye, and the Emerson that goes in at the ear. We speak, (as we explained,) without having had an opportunity to study his face-acquaintance with features, as every body knows, being like the peeling of an artichoke, and the core of a face, to those who know it,