Our numerous waterfalls and the enchanting beauty of our lakes afford many objects of the most picturesque character; while the inland seas, from Superior to Ontario, and that astounding cataract, whose roar would hardly be increased by the united murmurs of all the cascades of Europe, are calculated to inspire vast and sublime conceptions. The effects, too, of our climate, composed of a Siberian winter and an Italian summer, furnish new and peculiar objects for description. The circ.u.mstances of remote regions are here blended, and strikingly opposite appearances witnessed, in the same spot, at different seasons of the year. In our winters, we have the sun at the same alt.i.tude as in Italy, shining on an unlimited surface of snow, which can only be found in the higher lat.i.tudes of Europe, where the sun, in the winter, rises little above the horizon. The dazzling brilliancy of a winter"s day and a moonlight night, in an atmosphere astonishingly clear and frosty, when the utmost splendor of the sky is reflected from a surface of spotless white, attended with the most excessive cold, is peculiar to the northern part of the United States. What, too, can surpa.s.s the celestial purity and transparency of the atmosphere in a fine autumnal day, when our vision and our thought seem carried to the third heaven; the gorgeous magnificence of the close, when the sun sinks from our view, surrounded with various ma.s.ses of clouds, fringed with gold and purple, and reflecting, in evanescent tints, all the hues of the rainbow.

LIBERTY HAS A CONTINENT OF HER OWN.

HORACE WALPOLE, fourth Earl of Oxford, a famous English literary gossip, amateur, and wit. Born in London, October, 1717; died, March, 1797.

Liberty has still a continent to exist in.

LOVE OF AMERICA.

DANIEL WEBSTER, the celebrated American statesman, jurist, and orator. Born at Salisbury, N. H., January 18, 1782; died at Marshfield, Ma.s.s., October 24, 1852.

I profess to feel a strong attachment to the liberty of the United States; to the const.i.tution and free inst.i.tutions of the United States; to the honor, and I may say the glory, of this great Government and great country.

I feel every injury inflicted upon this country almost as a personal injury. I blush for every fault which I think I see committed in its public councils as if they were faults or mistakes of my own.

I know that, at this moment, there is no object upon earth so attracting the gaze of the intelligent and civilized nations of the earth as this great Republic. All men look at us, all men examine our course, all good men are anxious for a favorable result to this great experiment of republican liberty. We are on a hill and can not be hid. We can not withdraw ourselves either from the commendation or the reproaches of the civilized world. They see us as that star of empire which, half a century ago, was predicted as making its way westward. I wish they may see it as a mild, placid, though brilliant orb, making its way athwart the whole heavens, to the enlightening and cheering of mankind; and not a meteor of fire and blood, terrifying the nations.

GENIUS OF THE WEST.

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, the distinguished American poet. Born at Haverhill, Ma.s.s, December 17, 1807. From his poem, "On receiving an eagle"s quill from Lake Superior." By permission of Messrs.

Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Publishers, Boston.

I hear the tread of pioneers, Of nations yet to be; The first low wash of waves, where soon Shall roll a human sea.

The rudiments of empire here Are plastic yet and warm; The chaos of a mighty world Is rounding into form.

Each rude and jostling fragment soon Its fitting place shall find-- The raw material of a state, Its muscle and its mind.

And, westering still, the star which leads The New World in its train Has tipped with fire the icy spears Of many a mountain chain.

The snowy cones of Oregon Are kindling on its way; And California"s golden sands Gleam brighter in its ray.

G.o.d SAVE AMERICA.

ROBERT C. WINTHROP, an American statesman and orator. Born in Boston, Ma.s.s., May 12, 1809. From his "Centennial Oration,"

delivered in Boston, 1876.

Instruments and wheels of the invisible governor of the universe! This is indeed all which the greatest men ever have been, or ever can be. No flatteries of courtiers, no adulations of the mult.i.tude, no audacity of self-reliance, no intoxications of success, no evolutions or developments of science, can make more or other of them. This is "the sea-mark of their utmost sail," the goal of their farthest run, the very round and top of their highest soaring. Oh, if there could be to-day a deeper and more pervading impression of this great truth throughout our land, and a more prevailing conformity of our thoughts and words and acts to the lessons which it involves; if we could lift ourselves to a loftier sense of our relations to the invisible; if, in surveying our past history, we could catch larger and more exalted views of our destinies and our responsibilities; if we could realize that the want of good men may be a heavier woe to a land than any want of what the world calls great men, our centennial year would not only be signalized by splendid ceremonials, and magnificent commemorations, and gorgeous expositions, but it would go far toward fulfilling something of the grandeur of that "acceptable year," which was announced by higher than human lips, and would be the auspicious promise and pledge of a glorious second century of independence and freedom for our country. For, if that second century of self-government is to go on safely to its close, or is to go on safely and prosperously at all, there must be some renewal of that old spirit of subordination and obedience to divine, as well as human, laws, which has been our security in the past. There must be faith in something higher and better than ourselves. There must be a reverent acknowledgment of an unseen, but all-seeing, all-controlling Ruler of the Universe. His word, His house, His day, His worship, must be sacred to our children, as they have been to their fathers; and His blessing must never fail to be invoked upon our land and upon our liberties. The patriot voice, which cried from the balcony of yonder old State House, when the declaration had been originally proclaimed, "stability and perpetuity to American independence," did not fail to add, "G.o.d save our American States." I would prolong that ancestral prayer. And the last phrase to pa.s.s my lips at this hour, and to take its chance for remembrance or oblivion in years to come, as the conclusion of this centennial oration, and as the sum and summing up of all I can say to the present or the future, shall be: There is, there can be, no independence of G.o.d; in Him, as a nation, no less than in Him, as individuals, "we live, and move, and have our being!" G.o.d SAVE OUR AMERICAN STATES!

A VOICE OF WARNING.

From "Things that Threaten the Destruction of American Inst.i.tutions," a sermon by T. DE WITT TALMAGE, delivered in Brooklyn Tabernacle, October 12, 1884.

What! can a nation die? Yes; there has been great mortality among monarchies and republics. Like individuals, they are born, have a middle life and a decease, a cradle and a grave. Sometimes they are a.s.sa.s.sinated and sometimes they suicide. Call the roll, and let some one answer for them. Egyptian civilization, stand up! Dead, answer the ruins of Karnak and Luxor. Dead, respond in chorus the seventy pyramids on the east side the Nile. a.s.syrian Empire, stand up! Dead, answer the charred ruins of Nineveh. After 600 years of opportunity, dead. Israelitish Kingdom, stand up! After 250 years of miraculous vicissitude, and Divine intervention, and heroic achievement, and appalling depravity, dead.

Phoenicia, stand up! After inventing the alphabet and giving it to the world, and sending out her merchant caravans to Central Asia in one direction, and her navigators into the Atlantic Ocean in another direction, and 500 years of prosperity, dead. Dead, answer the "Pillars of Hercules" and the rocks on which the Tyrian fishermen spread their nets. Athens--after Phidias, after Demosthenes, after Miltiades, after Marathon--dead. Sparta--after Leonidas, after Eurybiades, after Salamis, after Thermopylae--dead.

Roman Empire, stand up and answer to the roll-call! Once bounded on the north by the British Channel and on the south by the Sahara Desert of Africa, on the east by the Euphrates and on the west by the Atlantic Ocean. Home of three civilizations. Owning all the then discovered world that was worth owning. Gibbon, in his "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire," answers, "Dead." And the vacated seats of the ruined Coliseum, and the skeletons of the aqueduct, and the miasma of the Campagna, and the fragments of the marble baths, and the useless piers of the bridge Triumphalis, and the silenced forum, and the Mamertine dungeon, holding no more apostolic prisoners; and the arch of t.i.tus, and Basilica of Constantine, and the Pantheon, lift up a nightly chorus of "Dead! dead!"

Dead, after Horace, and Virgil, and Tacitus, and Livy, and Cicero; after Horatius of the bridge, and Cincinnatus, the farmer oligarch; after Scipio, and Ca.s.sius, and Constantine, and Caesar. Her war-eagle, blinded by flying too near the sun, came reeling down through the heavens, and the owl of desolation and darkness made its nest in the forsaken aerie.

Mexican Empire, dead! French Empire, dead! You see it is no unusual thing for a government to perish. And in the same necrology of nations, and in the same cemetery of expired governments, will go the United States of America unless some potent voice shall call a halt, and through Divine interposition, by a purified ballot-box and an all-pervading moral Christian sentiment, the present evil tendency be stopped.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STATUE OF COLUMBUS, ST LOUIS, MO. First Bronze Statue to Columbus in America (See page 279.)]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 60: Copyright, by permission of Messrs. Lippincott.]

[Footnote 61: By permission of The Matthews-Northrup Co., Publishers.]