In a little less than forty leagues, the canoes floated past the Ohio,which was then, and long afterwards, called the Wabash. Its banks were tenanted by numerous villages of the peaceful Shawnees, who quailed under the incursions of the Iroquois.

The thick canes begin to appear so close and strong, that the buffalo could not break through them; the insects become intolerable; as a shelter against the suns of July, the sails are folded into an awning. The prairies vanish; and forests of whitewood, admirable for their vastness and height, crowd even to the skirts of the pebbly shore. It is also observed that, in the land of the Chickasas, the Indians have guns.

Near the latitude of thirty-three degrees, on the western bank of the Mississippi, stood the village of Mitchigamea, in the region that had not been visited by Europeans since the days of De Soto. "Now," thought Marquette, "we must, indeed, ask the aid of the Virgin." Armed with bows and arrows, with clubs, axes, and bucklers, amidst continual whoops, the natives, bent on war, embark in vast canoes made out of the trunks of hollow trees; but, at the sight of the mysterious peace-pipe held aloft, God touched the hearts of the old men, who checked the impetuosity of the young; and, throwing their bows and quivers into the canoes, as a token of peace, they prepared a hospitable welcome.

The next day, a long, wooden canoe, containing ten men, escorted the discoverers, for eight or ten leagues to the village of Akansea, the limit of their voyage. They had left the region of the Algonquins, and, in the midst of the Sioux and Chickasas, could speak only by an interpreter. A half league above Akansea, they were met by two boats, in one of which stood the commander, holding in his hand the peace-pipe, and singing as he drew near. After offering the pipe, he gave bread of maize. The wealth of his tribe consisted in buffalo skins; their weapons were axes of steel,a proof of commerce with Europeans.

Thus had our travellers descended below the entrance of the Arkansas, to the genial climes that have almost no winter but rains, beyond the bound of the Huron and Algonquin languages, to the vicinity of the Gulf of Mexico, and to tribes of Indians that had obtained European arms by traffic with Spaniards or with Virginia.

So, having spoken of God, and the mysteries of the Catholic faith; having become certain that the Father of Rivers went not to the ocean east of Florida, nor yet to the Gulf of California, Marquette and Joliet left Akansea, and ascended the Mississippi.

At the thirty-eighth degree of latitude, they entered the River Illinois, and discovered a country without its paragon for the fertility of its beautiful prairies, covered with buffaloes and stags,-for the loveliness of its rivulets, and the prodigal abundance of wild duck and swans, and of a species of parrots and wild turkeys. The tribe of Illinois, that tenanted its banks, entreated Marquette to come and reside among them. One of their chiefs, with their young men, conducted the party, by way of Chicago, to Lake Michigan; and, before the end of September, all were safe in Green Bay.

Joliet returned to Quebec to announce the discovery, of which the fame, through Talon, quickened the ambition of Colbert; the unaspiring Marquette remained to preach the gospel to the Miamis, who dwelt in the north of Illinois, round Chicago. Two years afterward, sailing from Chicago to Mackinaw, he entered a little river in Michigan. Erecting an altar, he said mass after the rites of the Catholic church; then, begging the men who conducted his canoe to leave him alone for a half hour,

"in the darkling wood,
Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down,
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks
And supplication."

At the end of the half-hour, they went to seek him,
and he was no more. The good missionary, dis-
coverer of a world, had fallen asleep on the margin
of the stream that bears his name. Near its mouth,
the canoemen dug his grave in the sand. Ever
after, the forest rangers, if in danger on Lake
Michigan, would invoke his name.
The people
of the west will build his monument.

CHARACTER OF FRANKLIN,

FROM THE SAME.

WITH placid tranquillity, Benjamin Franklin lcoked quietly and deeply into the secrets of nature. His clear understanding was never perverted by passion, or corrupted by the pride of theory. The son of a rigid Calvinist, the grandson of a tolerant Quaker, he had from boyhood been familiar not only with theological subtilties, but with a catholic respect for freedom of mind. Skeptical of tradition as the basis of faith, he respected reason rather than authority; and, after a momentary lapse into fatalism, escaping from the mazes of fixed decrees and free will, he gained, with increasing years, an increasing trust in the overruling providence of God. Adhering to none "of all the religions" in the colonies, he yet devoutly, though without form, adhered to religion. But though famous as a disputant, and having a natural aptitude for metaphysics, he obeyed the tendency of his age, and sought by observation to win an insight into the mysteries of being. Loving truth, without prejudice and without bias, he discerned intuitively the identity of the laws of nature with those of which humanity is conscious; so that his mind was like a mirror, in which the universe, as it reflected itself, revealed her laws. He was free from mysticism, even to a fault. His morality, repudiating ascetic severities, and the system which enjoins them, was indulgent to appetites of which he abhorred the sway; but his affections were of a calm intensity; in all his career, the love of man gained the mastery over personal interest. He had not the imagination which inspires the bard or kindles the ora tor; but an exquisite propriety, parsimonious of ornament, gave ease of expression and graceful simplicity even to his most careless writings. In life, also, his tastes were delicate. Indifferent to the pleasures of the table, he relished the delights of music and harmony, of which he enlarged the instruments. His blandness of temper, his modesty,

the benignity of his manners, made him the favourite of intelligent society; and, with healthy cheerfulness, he derived pleasure from books, from philosophy, from conversation,-now calmly administering consolation to the sorrower, now indulging in the expression of light-hearted gayety. In his intercourse, the universality of his perceptions bore, perhaps, the character of humour; but, while he clearly discerned the contrast between the grandeur of the universe and the feebleness of man, a serene benevolence saved him from contempt of his race, or disgust at its toils. To superficial observers, he might have seemed as an alien from speculative truth, limiting himself to the world of the senses; and yet, in study, and among men, his mind always sought, with unaffected simplicity, to discover and apply the general principles by which nature and affairs are controlled,-now deducing from the theory of caloric improvements in fireplaces and lanterns, and now advancing human freedom by firm inductions from the inalienable rights of man. Never professing enthusiasm, never making a parade of sentiment, his practical wisdom was sometimes mistaken for the offspring of selfish prudence; yet his hope was steadfast, like that hope which rests on the Rock of Ages, and his conduct was as unerring as though the light that led him was a light from heaven. He never anticipated action by theories of self-sacrificing virtue; and yet, in the moments of intense activity, he, from the high-❘ est abodes of ideal truth, brought down and applied to the affairs of life the sublimest principles of goodness, as noiselessly and unostentatiously as became the man who, with a kite and hempen string, drew the lightning from the skies. He separated himself so little from his age, that he has been called the representative of materialism; and yet, when he thought on religion, his mind passed beyond reliance on sects to faith in God; when he wrote on politics, he founded the freedom of his country on principles that know no change; when he turned an observing eye on nature, he passed always from the effect to the cause, from individual appearances to universal laws; when he reflected on history, his philosophic mind found gladness and repose in the clear anticipation of the progress of humanity.

THE YOUTH OF WASHINGTON.

FROM THE SAME.

AFTER long years of strife, of repose, and of strife renewed, England and France solemnly agreed to be at peace. The treaties of Aix la Chapelle had been negotiated, by the ablest statesmen of Europe, in the splendid forms of monarchical diplomacy. They believed themselves the arbiters of mankind, the pacificators of the world,-reconstructing the colonial system on a basis which should endure for ages, confirming the peace of Europe by the nice adjustment of material forces. At the very time of the congress of Aix la Chapelle, the woods of Virginia sheltered the youthful George Washington, the son of a widow. Born by the side of the Potomac, beneath the roof of a Westmoreland

farmer, almost from infancy his lot had been the lot of an orphan. No academy had welcomed him to its shades, no college crowned him with its honours: to read, to write, to cipher—these had been his degrees in knowledge. And now, at sixteen years of age, in quest of an honest maintenance, encountering intolerable toil; cheered onward by being able to write to a schoolboy friend, “Dear Richard, a doubloon is my constant gain every day, and sometimes six pistoles;"" himself his own cook, having no spit but a forked stick, no plate but a large chip;" roaming over spurs of the Alleghenies, and along the banks of the Shenandoah ; alive to nature, and sometimes" spending the best of the day in admiring the trees and richness of the land;" among skin-clad savages, with their scalps and rattles, or uncouth emigrants, "that would never speak English;" rarely sleeping in a bed; holding a bearskin a splendid couch; glad of a resting-place for the night upon a little hay, straw, or fodder, and often camping in the forests, where the place nearest the fire was a happy luxury;-this stripling surveyor in the woods, with no companion but his unlettered associates, and no implements of science but his compass and chain, contrasted strangely with the imperial magnificence of the congress of Aix la Chapelle. And yet God had selected, not Kaunitz, nor Newcastle, not a monarch of the house of Hapsburg, nor of Hanover, but the Virginia stripling, to give an impulse to human affairs, and, as far as events can depend on an individual, had placed the rights and the destinies of countless millions in the keeping of the widow's son.

PURITAN INTOLERANCE.

FROM THE SAME.

To the colonists the maintenance of their religious unity seemed essential to their cordial resistance to English attempts at oppression. And why, said they, should we not insist upon this union ? We have come to the outside of the world for the privilege of living by ourselves; why should we open our asylum to those in whom we can repose no confidence? The world cannot call this persecution. We have been banished to the wilderness; is it an injustice to exclude our oppressors, and those whom we dread as their allies, from the place which is to shelter us from their intolerance? Is it a great cruelty to expel from our abode the enemies of our peace, or even the doubtful friend? Will any man complain at being driven from among banished men, with whom he has no fellowship; of being refused admittance to a gloomy place of exile? The wide continent of America invited colonization; they claimed their own narrow domains for "the brethren." Their religion was their life; they welcomed none but its adherents; they could not tolerate the scoffer, the infidel, or the dissenter; and the presence of the whole people was required in their congregation. Such was the system inflexibly established and regarded as the only adequate guarantee of the rising liberties of Massachusetts.

GEORGE P. MARSH, now envoy of the United States at Constantinople, was born in the pleasant village of Woodstock, in that state, in the month of March, 1801, and was educated at Dartmouth college, in New Hampshire, where he graduated with a high reputation for natural abilities and scholarship, in 1820. He soon after removed to Burlington, in Vermont, (the seat of the University of that state, of which his cousin, the late learned and reverend James Marsh,* was soon after made president,) and entered upon the study of the law; and since his admission to the bar he has resided there, in the successful practice of his profession, except when attending to the duties which have been devolved upon him from time to time in the state and national legislatures. He has been a representative in Congress since 1842.

Mr. Marsh is known as a scholar of profound and various erudition, and as a writer of strongly marked individuality and nationality. His sympathies are with the Goths, whose presence he recognizes in whatever is grand and pecu

* James Marsh, D. D., who has been several times referred to in this volume, was born at Hartford in Vermont in 1794, was graduated at Dartmouth College in 1817, and soon after entered the seminary at Andover, where he studied divinity, about one year, at the end of which time he accepted an invitation to return to Hanover as a tutor. He again went to Andover in 1820, to complete his professional studies, and while there wrote a few articles for the North American Review, one of which is that on Italian Literature, in the thirty-sixth number. From 1823 to 1826 he was Professor of Languages in Hampden Sydney College in Virginia. In the latter year he was appointed President of the University of Vermont, but afterward resigned this office to accept that of Professor of Philosophy. He published at Burlington in 1829 the first American edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, with an elaborate Preliminary Essay, which attracted a great deal of attention among thinking men by its lucid and powerful exposition and assertion of the highest principles in philosophy. In 1830 he published Selections from Old English Writers on Practical Theology; in 1833 his translation of Herder on the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, and at various times many articles on religion and philosophy in the periodicals. He died in the forty-eighth year of his age, in 1842. His Remarks on Psychology, Discourses on Sin, Conscience, and some other subjects, with a selection from his tracts and letters, were published in Boston in 1843. He was undoubtedly the first of our metaphysi cians except Edwards.

liar in the characters of the founders of New England, and in whatever gives promise of her integrity, greatness, and permanence. He is undoubtedly better versed than any American in the fresh and vigorous literature of the north of Europe, and perhaps is so also in that fruit of a new birth of genius and virtue, the Puritan literature of Great Britain and continental Europe. In the Goths in New England, (published in 1836,) he has contrasted in a striking manner the characters of the Goths and the Romans, and traced the presence and influence of the former in the origin and growth of this republic; and in a Discourse recently delivered before the New England Society of the city of New York, he enters again upon the subject, and points to the growth among us, of the Roman element which is as antagonistical to freedom as it is to Gothicism.

In New England, more than in any other part of the country, the popular character is distinctive and may be regarded as settled. The seed from the May Flower fell upon good ground, and sprung up, and the new fruit, modified by climate, and other influences, constitutes a variety by itself. No one seems to have been so successful as Mr. Marsh, in resolving the New England character into its elements, and in discerning in it what is transient and what is permanent; or with so sharp and well instructed a vision to have seen so much to justify hope of the future destinies of the country.

Mr. Marsh's acquaintance with the fine arts is very extensive and accurate, and we have few better linguists. Among the fruits of his devotion to Gothic learning are A Compendious Grammar of the Old Northern or Icelandic Language, (modestly announced on the title page as "compiled and translated from the grammar of Rask," though it is in many respects an original work,) and various essays, literary and historical, relating to the Goths, and their connexion with this country.

Mr. Marsh is of the whig party in politics, and is of a highly respectable rank as a statesman; one of that number whose course is invariably governed by avowed principles.

THE GOTH AND THE ROMAN.

FROM THE GOTHS IN NEW ENGLAND.

I SHALL do my audience the justice to suppose, that they are too well instructed to be the slaves of that antiquated and vulgar prejudice, which makes Gothicism and barbarism synonymous. The Goths, the common ancestors of the inhabitants of North Western Europe, are the noblest branch of the Caucasian race. We are their children. It was the spirit of the Goth that guided the MayFlower across the trackless ocean; the blood of the Goth that flowed at Bunker's Hill.

Nor were the Goths the savage and destructive devastators that popular error has made them. They indeed overthrew the dominion of Rome, but they renovated her people; they prostrated her corrupt government, but they respected her monuments; and Theodoric the Goth not only spread but protected many a precious memorial, which Italian rapacity and monkish superstition have since annihilated. The old lamentation, Quod non fererunt barbari, fecere Barberini, contains a world of truth, and had not Rome's own sons been her spoilers, she might have shone at this day in all the splendour of her Augustan age.

England is Gothic by birth, Roman by adoption. Whatever she has of true moral grandeur, of higher intellectual power, she owes to the Gothic mother; while her grasping ambition, her material energies, her spirit of exclusive selfishness, are due to the Roman nurse.

The Goth is characterized by the reason, the Roman by the understanding; the one by imagination, the other by fancy; the former aspires to the spiritual, the latter is prone to the sensuous. The Gothic spirit produced a Bacon, a Shakspeare, a Milton; the Roman, an Arkwright, a Brindley, and a Locke. It was a Roman, that gathered up the coals on which St. Lawrence had been broiled; a Goth, who, when a fellow disciple of the great Swiss reformer had rescued his master's heart from the enemy, on the field where the martyr fell, snatched that heart from its preserver, and hurled it, yet almost palpitating with life, into the waters of a torrent, lest some new superstition should spring from the relics of Zwingli.

Rome, it is said, thrice conquered the world; by her arms, by her literature and art, by her religion. But Rome was essentially a nation of robbers. Her territory was acquired by unjust violence. She plundered Greece of the choicest productions of the pencil and the chisel, and her own best literature and highest art are but imperfect copies of the master-pieces of the creative genius of the Greek. She not only sacked the temples, but removed to the imperial city the altars, and adopted the Gods of the nations she conquered. Tiberius even prepared a niche for the Christian Saviour among the heathen idols in the Pantheon, and when Constantine made Christianity the religion of the state, he sanctioned the corruptions which Rome had engrafted upon it, and handed it down to his successors, contaminated with the accumulated superstitions of the whole heathen world.

The Goth has thrice broken her sceptre. The Goth dispelled the charm that made her arms invincible. The Goth overthrew her idolatrous altar, and the Goth is now surpassing her proudest works in literature and in art.

The cardinal distinction between these conflicting elements, as exemplified in literature and art, government, and religion, may be thus stated. The Roman mistakes the means for the end, and subordinates the principle to the form. The Goth, valuing the means only as they contribute to the advancement of the end, looks beneath the form, and seeks the in-dwelling, life-giving principle, of which he holds the form to be but the outward expression. With the Goth, the idea of life is involved in the conception of truth, and though he recognises life as an immutable principle, yet he perceives that its forms of expression, of action, of suffering, are infinitely diversified, agreeing however in this, that all its manifestations are characterized by development, motion, progress. To him truth is symbolized by the phenomena of organic life. The living plant or animal, that has ceased to grow, has already begun to die. Living truth, therefore, though immutable in essence, he regards as active, progressive in its manifestations; and he rejects truths which have lost their vitality, forms divorced from their spirituality, symbols which have ceased to be expressive. With the Goth, all truth is an everliving principle, whence should spring the outward expression, fluctuating, varying, according to the circumstances which call it forth; with the Roman, its organic life is petrified, frozen into inflexible forms, inert. To the one it is a perennial fountain, a living stream, which murmurs, and flows, and winds "at its own sweet will," refreshing all life within the sphere of its influence, and perpetually receiving new accessions from springs that are fed by the showers of heaven, as it hastens onward to that unfathomable ocean of divine knowledge, which is both its primeval source and its ultimate limit. To the other, it is a current congealed to ice by the rigour of winter, chilling alike the landscape and the spectator, or a pool, that stagnates, putrefies, breeds its countless swarms of winged errors.

In literature and art the Goth pursues the development of a principle, the expression of a thought, the realization of an ideal; the Roman seeks to fix the attention, and excite the admiration, of the critic or the spectator, by the material and sensuous beauties of his work.

Thus, in poetry, the Roman aims at smoothness of versification, harmonious selection and arrangement of words, and brilliancy of imagery; the Goth strives to give utterance to "thoughts that breathe, in words that burn."

In plastic and pictorial art, the Roman attracts the spectator by the grace and the voluptuous beauty of the external form, the harmony of colouring, the fitness and proportion of the accessories, the excellence of keeping; the Goth regards these but as auxiliaries, and subordinates or even sacrifices them all to the expression of the thought or passion, which dictates the action represented.

The Goth holds that goverment springs from the