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Though life's stormy ocean shall threaten with dangers,
My soul shall repose in the sunshine of truth.
While streams to their own native ocean are tending,
And forest-oaks, swept by the tempest, are bending,
My soul shall exult, as she's proudly defending
The graves of my sires, and the land of my

birth.

LESSON LXIII.

THE SHIP ARIEL AMONG THE SHOALS.- COOPER.

[The reader may determine the character of this piece, and tell how it should be read.]

1. "Now is the pinch," said the pilot, "and if the ship behaves well, we are safe; but if otherwise, all we have yet done will be useless." The veteran seaman whom he addressed, left the chains at this portentous notice, and, calling to his first lieutenant, required of the stranger an explanation of his warning. "See you yon light on the southern headland?" returned the pilot; "you may know it from the star near it,— by its sinking, at times, in the ocean. observe the hommock, a little north of it, looking like a shadow in the horizon; - 't is a hill far inland. If we keep that light open from the hill, we shall do well; but if not, we surely go to pieces."

Now

The

2. "Let us tack again!" exclaimed the lieutenant. pilot shook his head, as he replied, "There is no more tacking or boxhauling to be done to-night. We have barely room to pass out of the shoals on this course." "If we had beaten out the way we entered," exclaimed Griffith, "we should have done well." "Say, also, if the tide would have let us do so," returned the pilot calmly. "Gentlemen, we must be prompt; we have but a mile to go, and the ship

appears to fly. That topsail is not enough to keep her up to the wind; we want both jib and mainsail.”

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3. "Tis a perilous thing to loosen canvas in such a tempest!" observed the doubtful captain. "It must be done," returned the collected stranger; we perish without — see! the light already touches the edge of the hommock; the sea casts us to leeward!" "It shall be done!" cried Griffith, seizing the trumpet from the hand of the pilot.

4. The orders of the lieutenant were executed almost as soon as issued, and every thing being ready, the enormous folds of the mainsail were trusted loose to the blast. There was an instant when the result was doubtful; the tremendous threshing of the heavy sails seeming to bid defiance to all restraint, shaking the ship to her center; but art and strength prevailed, and gradually the canvas was distended, and, bellying as it filled, was drawn down to its usual place by the power of a hundred men.

But

5. The vessel yielded to this immense addition of force, and bowed before it like a reed bending to a breeze. the success of the measure was announced by a joyful cry from the stranger, that seemed to burst from his inmost soul. "She feels it! she springs her luff! observe," he said, “the light opens from the hommock already; if she will only bear her canvas, we shall go clear!"

6. A report like that of a cannon interrupted his exclamation, and something resembling a white cloud was seen drifting before the wind from the head of the ship, till it was driven into the gloom far to leeward. ""T is the jib blown from the bolt-ropes," said the commander of the frigate. "This is no time to spread light duck,—but the mainsail may stand it yet." "The sail would laugh at a tornado," returned the lieutenant; "but that mast springs like a piece of steel." "Silence all!" cried the pilot. "Now, gentlemen, we shall soon know our fate. Let her luff - luff you

can!"

7. This warning effectually closed all discourse, and the hardy mariners, knowing that they had already done all in the power of man to insure their safety, stood in breathless anxiety awaiting the result. At a short distance ahead of them, the whole ocean was white with foam; and the waves, instead of rolling on in regular succession, appeared to be tossing about in naval gambols. A single streak of dark billows, not half a cable's length in width, could be discerned running into this chaos of water; but it was soon lost to the eye amid the confusion of the disturbed element.

8. Along this narrow path the vessel moved more heavily than before, being brought so near the wind as to keep her sails touching. The pilot silently proceeded to the wheel, and, with his own hands, he undertook the steerage of the ship. No noise proceeded from the frigate to interrupt the horrid tumult of the ocean, and she entered the channel among the breakers, with the silence of a desperate calmness. Twenty times, as the foam rolled away to leeward, the crew were on the eve of uttering their joy, as they supposed the vessel past the danger; but breaker after breaker would still rise before them, following each other into the general mass to check their exultation.

At

9. Occasionally, the fluttering of the sails would be heard; and when the looks of the startled seamen were turned to the wheel, they beheld the stranger grasping its spokes, with his quick eye glancing from the water to the canvas. length, the ship reached a point where she appeared to be rushing directly into the jaws of destruction, when suddenly her course was changed, and her head receded rapidly from the wind. At the same instant the voice of the pilot was heard shouting-"Square away the yards!- in mainsail!"

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10. A general burst from the crew echoed, Square away the yards!" and quick as thought the frigate was seen gliding along the channel before the wind. The eye had

hardly time to dwell on the foam, which seemed like clouds driving in the heavens, before the gallant vessel issued from her perils, and rose and fell on the heavy waves of the open sea.

LESSON LXIV.

SPEECH ON THE EAST INDIA BILL. — Fox.*

1. The honorable gentleman charges me with abandoning that cause, which, he says in terms of flattery, I had once so successfully asserted. I tell him, in reply, that if he were to search the history of my life, he would find that the period of it in which I struggled most for the real, substantial cause of liberty, is this very moment that I am addressing you.

2. Freedom, according to my conception of it, consists in the safe and sacred possession of a man's property, governed by laws defined and certain; with many personal privileges, natural, civil, and religious, which he cannot surrender without ruin to himself, and of which, to be deprived by any other power, is despotism. This bill, instead of sub

V

rting, is destined to establish these principles; instead of narrowing the basis of freedom, it tends to enlarge it; instead of suppressing, its object is to infuse and disseminate the spirit of liberty.

3. What is the most odious species of tyranny? Preeisely that which this bill is meant to annihilate. That a

* Fox, (Charles James,) was born in January, 1749. In 1768, he became a member of Parliament, and died in September, 1806. This speech, relating to the affairs of the British East India Company, was delivered in Parliament in 1783. A volume of nearly one thousand pages of parliamentary speeches, has recently been compiled by Chauncey A. Goodrich, D. D., Professor in Yale College, and published by Harper & Brothers. It is a work of great value for those who desire to study models of forensic and parliamentary eloquence.

handful of men, free themselves, should exercise the most base and abominable despotism over millions of their fellowcreatures; that innocence should be the victim of oppression; that industry should toil for rapine; that the harmless laborer should sweat, not for his own benefit, but for the luxury and rapacity of tyrannic depredation; in a word, that thirty millions of men, gifted by Providence with the ordinary endowments of humanity, should groan under a system of despotism, unmatched in all the histories of the world.

4. What is the end of all government? Certainly, the happiness of the governed. Others may hold different opinions; but this is mine, and I proclaim it. What then are we to think of a government, whose good fortune is supposed to spring from the calamities of its subjects, whose aggrandizement grows out of the miseries of mankind? This is the kind of government exercised under the East India Company upon the natives of Hindoostan; and the subversion of that infamous government, is the main object of the bill in question.

LESSON LXV.

KNOWLEDGE VERSUS GOLD. - EVERETT.

1. If we look only to material prosperity, to physical welfare, nothing is now more certain than that they are most powerfully promoted by every thing which multiplies and diffuses the means of education. We live in an age in which cultivated mind is becoming more and more the controlling influence of affairs. Like that mysterious magnetic influence, whose wonderful properties have been lately brought from the scientific lecture-room into the practical

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