unspeakable, is now unseen and unfelt. Greater objects have taken possession of his soul. His imagination has been dazzled by visions of diadems, of stars and garters, and titles of nobility. He has been taught to burn with restless emulation at the names of great heroes and conquerors. His enchanted island is destined soon to relapse into a wilderness; and in a few months we find the peaceful and tender partner of his bosom, whom he lately "permitted not the winds of" summer "to visit too roughly," we find her shivering at midnight on the winter banks of the Ohio and mingling her tears with the torrents that froze as they fell. Yet this unfortunate man, thus deluded from his interest and his happiness, thus seduced from the paths of innocence and peace, thus confounded in the toils that were deliberately spread for him, and overwhelmed by the mastering spirit and genius of another this man, thus ruined and undone, and made to play a subordinate part in this grand drama of guilt and treason, this man is to be called the principal offender, while he by whom he was thus plunged in misery is comparatively innocent, a mere accessory! Is this reason? Is it law? Is it humanity? Sir, neither the human understanding will bear a perversion so monstrous and absurd! so shocking to the soul! so revolting to reason! Let Aaron Burr, then, not shrink from the high destination which he has courted, and having already ruined Blannerhassett in fortune, character, and happiness forever, let him not attempt to finish the tragedy by thrusting that ill-fated man between himself and punishment.

XXV.-DOOM OF THE INDIANS.

JOSEPH STORY.

THERE is, in the fate of these unfortunate beings, much to awaken our sympathy, and much to disturb the sobriety of our judgment; much which may be urged to excuse their own atrocities; much in their characters, which betrays us into an involuntary admiration. What can be more melancholy than their history? By a law of their nature, they em destined to a slow, but sure extinction. Everywhere, the approach of the white man, they fade away. We hear

DOOM OF THE INDIANS.

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the rustling of their footsteps, like that of the withered leaves of autumn, and they are gone forever. They pass mournfully by us, and they return no more. Two centuries ago, the smoke of their wigwams and the fires of their councils rose in every valley, from Hudson's Bay to the farthest Florida, from the ocean to the Mississippi and the lakes. The shouts of victory and the war dance rang through the mountains and the glades. The thick arrows and the deadly tomahawk whistled through the forests; and the hunter's trace and dark encampment startled the wild beasts in their lairs. The warriors stood forth in their glory. The young listened to the songs of other days. The mothers played with their infants, and gazed on the scene with warm hopes of the future. The aged sat down; but they wept not. They should soon be at rest in fairer regions, where the Great Spirit dwelt, in a home prepared for the brave, beyond the western skies. Braver men never lived; truer men never drew the bow. They had courage, and fortitude, and sagacity, and perseverance, beyond most of the human race. They shrank from no dangers, and they feared no hardships. If they had the vices of savage life, they had the virtues also. They were true to their country, their friends, and their homes. If they forgave not injury, neither did they forget kindness. If their vengeance was terrible, their fidelity and generosity were unconquerable also. Their love, like their hate, stopped not on this side of the grave.

But where are they? Where are the villagers, and warriors, and youth; the Sachems and their tribes; the hunters and their families? They have perished. They are consumed. The wasting pestilence has not alone done the mighty work. No, nor famine, nor war. There has been a mighty power, a moral canker, which has eaten into their heartcores a plague, which the touch of the white man communicated—a poison, which betrayed them into a lingering ruin. The winds of the Atlantic fan not a single region, which they may now call their own. Already the last feeble remnants of the race are preparing for their journey beyond the Mississippi. I see them leave their miserable homes, the aged, the helpless, the women, and the warriors, "few and faint, yet fearless still." The ashes are cold on their native hearths. The smoke no longer curls round their lowly cabins. They move on with a slow, unsteady step. The white man is upon their heels, for terror, or despatch;

but they heed him not. They turn to take a last look of their deserted villages. They cast a last glance upon the graves of their fathers. They shed no tears; they utter no cries; they heave no groans. There is something in their hearts which passes speech. There is something in their looks, not of vengeance or submission; but of hard necessity, which stifles both; which chokes all utterance; which has no aim or method. It is courage absorbed in despair. They linger but for a moment. Their look is onward. They have passed the fatal stream. It shall never be repassed by them,-no, never. Yet there lies not between us and them an impassable gulf. They know and feel that there is for them still one remove further, not distant, nor unseen. It is to the general burialground of their race.

XXVI-VIRGINIA.

H. BEDINGER.

I KNOW that it is customary with those who lack the taste to select or the ability to handle a more becoming theme, to discharge their tiny artillery at Southern character and Southern institutions; and especially does Virginia come in for a full share of the pointless arrows of these gentlemen, whose efforts constantly remind me of those very ambitious persons whose names are to be seen, inscribed by their own hands, on every edifice or monument of art, and who hope, by thus disfiguring or defiling it, they may render their own paltry memoirs as lasting as the building itself.

Now, whether Virginia has deteriorated or not, whether her palmiest days have passed by, and her energies are in the sere and yellow leaf;" whether her present sons are dwarfs, in comparison with her elder born; whether the sceptre of intellect has departed from her, and in the race of glory and of greatness she is no longer first; whether the plucking of Northern cupidity has drained her of her wealth, or her own unbounded and unwise liberality exhausted her resources, I will not at present attempt to determine; but this I will boldly assert, and that without the fear of contradiction, that in her regard for law and order-in her love of justice, and her strict obedience to all its dictates-in the careful observ

ance of the rights and privileges of all, manifested by her citizens, in piety, morality, and sobriety-and in her sacred observance of the plighted word of her government, the mother of States need fear no comparison with any of her progeny, or with any of her sisters.

Massachusetts is a great State, Sir,-a very great State, indeed, is Massachusetts. She could not well be anything else, sir, for she has Boston, and Bunker Hill, and the Rock of Plymouth! There the Mayflower landed the Pilgrims; and there witches and Indians and Quakers and Catholics, and other such heretics, were in the brave days of old, burned, literally, by the cord! She is unquestionably, sir, a great State, and some of her Representatives on this floor seem to know it; and in the plenitude of their merciful hearts, they pour out a deal of compassion and surplus pity upon poor old Virginia! They not unfrequently raise their sanctified eyes to Heaven, and thank the Lord they are not like that poor publican!

XXVII.-MASSACHUSETTS.

J. G. PALFREY.

WHEN the gentleman, calling up affecting reminiscences of the past, appealed to us of Massachusetts to be faithful to the obligations of patriotism, I repeat, that I trust his language fell profitably as well as pleasantly on my ear. He has reminded us of our stern but constant ancestry. I hope we shall be true to their great mission of Freedom and Right, and all the more true for having listened to his own impressive exhortation. The gentleman remembers the declaration of Hume, that “it was to the Puritans that the people of England owed its liberties." May their race never desert that work, as long as any of it is left to do! Sir, as I come of a morning to my duties here, I am apt to stop before the picture in your Rotundo, of the departure from Delft Haven of that vessel, "freighted with the best hopes of the world," and refresh myself by looking in the faces of four ancestors of my own, depicted by the limner in the group on that dismal deck-the brave and prudent leader of the company, his head and knee bowed in prayer ;-his faithful partner, blending in

her mild but care-worn countenance the expression of the wife, the parent, the exile, and the saint ;-the young maiden and the youth, going out to the wide sea and the wide world, but already trained to masculine endurance and "perfect peace" by the precious faith of Christ. Not more steadfast than those forlorn wanderers were the men, who in the tapestried chambers of England's great sway, with stout sword on thigh, and a stouter faith in the heart, and the ragged flags of Cressy, and Agincourt, and the Armada above their heads,

-"Sat with Bibles open, around the council board,

And answered a king's missive, with a stern

"Thus saith the Lord.""

Sir, the spirit of that stubborn race, if somewhat softened by the change in manners and the lapse of time, is not yet extinct in their children. The gentleman is welcome, for me, to have very little respect for any who, in his language, have "made capital" of one kind or another out of human slavery. But I ask him, did the Roundhead ever flinch when battle was to be done for freedom? Sir, I live in the midst of his last bloody struggles for that cause. Humble as I am, I am honored to represent the men who till the earliest battle-fields of American Independence. As I sit in my door of a still summer evening, I hear the bells from Lexington Common. The shaft over the sacred ashes of Bunker Hill rises within three miles of my windows; I leave my home, and in an hour I stand by the ruined abutments of old Concord Bridge, and the green graves of the first two British victims in the hecatombs of the Revolution. Representing, however feebly, such a people in lineage and in office -warned by the lessons and the purest monuments of such a history is it for me to think of helping to extend the foul cause of slavery over another foot of God's fair earth? No, "here I stand, I can do no otherwise; may God help me.' I boast no courage; I fear I might turn out to be no better than a fearful man; but I do trust that every drop of thin blood in these old veins of mine, would be freely given to stain the scaffold, or boil and bubble at the stake, before, by any act of my doing, the slavery of my brother man should take another forward step on free American soil.