And, sir, where American Liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood, and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it; 5 if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it; if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed in separating it from that Union by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which Io its infancy was rocked; it will stretch forth its arm, with

whatever of vigor it may still retain, over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amid the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.

15

THE AMERICAN UNION

I PROFESS, Sir, in my career hitherto, to have kept steadily in view the prosperity and honor of the whole country, and the preservation of our Federal Union. It is to that Union we owe our safety at home, and our consideration and dignity abroad. It is to that Union we are chiefly 20 indebted for whatever makes us most proud of our country. That Union we reached only by the discipline of our virtues, in the severe school of adversity. It had its origin in the necessities of disordered finance, prostrate commerce, and ruined credit. Under its benign influences, these 25 great interests immediately awoke, as from the dead, and sprang forth with newness of life. Every year of its duration has teemed with fresh proofs of its utility and its blessings; and although our territory has stretched out

wider and wider, and our population spread further and further, they have not outrun its protection, or its benefits. It has been to us all a copious fountain of national, social, personal happiness. I have not allowed myself, Sir, to look beyond the Union, to see what might lie hidden 5 in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed the chances of preserving liberty, when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the precipice of disunion, to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the depth 10 of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe counsellor in the affairs of this Government whose thoughts should be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union should be best preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the People when it shall be broken up and 15 destroyed.

God 20

While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that, in my day, at least, that curtain may not rise! grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind! When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the Sun in Heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States severed, discordant, belliger- 25 ent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather, behold the gorgeous Ensign of the Republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their 30 original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, - bearing, for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as What is all this worth? nor

those other words of delusion and folly — Liberty first and Union afterwards, but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every 5 wind under the whole Heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart- Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!

WASHINGTON IRVING°

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

THE last beams of day were faintly streaming through the painted windows in the high vaults above me; the lower parts of the abbey were already wrapped in the obscurity of twilight. The chapels and aisles grew darker and darker. The effigies of the kings faded into shadows; 5 the marble figures of the monuments assumed strange shapes in the uncertain light; the evening breeze crept through the aisles like the cold breath of the grave; and even the distant footfall of a verger, traversing the Poets' corner, had something strange and dreary in its sound. 10 I slowly retraced my morning's walk, and as I passed out at the portal of the cloisters, the door, closing with a jarring noise behind me, filled the whole building with echoes.

I endeavored to form some arrangement in my mind of the objects I had been contemplating, but found they were 15 already fallen into indistinctness and confusion. Names, inscriptions, trophies had all become confounded in my recollection, though I had scarcely taken my feet from off the threshold. What, thought I, is this vast assemblage of sepulchres but a treasury of humiliation, a huge pile 201 of reiterated homilies on the emptiness of renown, and the certainty of oblivion! It is, indeed, the empire of Death; his great shadowy palace, where he sits in state, mocking at the relics of human glory, and spreading dust and forgetfulness on the monuments of princes. How 25 idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much

engrossed by the story of the present to think of the characters and anecdotes that give interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside to be speedily forgotten. The idol of to-day pushes the hero of yesterday 5 out of our recollection, and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of to-morrow. "Our fathers," says Sir Thomas Browne, "find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors.'

History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with 10 doubt and controversy; the inscription moulders from the tablet; the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand, and their epitaphs but characters written in the dust? What is the security of a tomb, or the perpetuity of an embalm15 ment? The remains of Alexander the Great have been scattered to the wind, and his empty sarcophagus is now the mere curiosity of a museum. "The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth; Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold 20 for balsams."

What, then, is to insure this pile, which now towers above me, from sharing the fate of mightier mausoleums? The time must come when its gilded vaults, which now spring so loftily, shall lie in rubbish beneath the feet; 25 when, instead of the sound of melody and praise, the wind shall whistle through the broken arches, and the owl hoot from the shattered tower, when the garish sunbeam shall break into these gloomy mansions of death, and the ivy twine round the fallen column, and the fox-glove hang 30 its blossoms about the nameless urn, as if in mockery of the dead. Thus man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollections; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.