BUNKER-HILL MONUMENT. (See Engraving.) Translated from the German of Myer's Universum. BY MELANIE. AMERICA! star in the darkness of night, staff for millions of breaking hearts, the last living hope when all others are destroyed, and borne to their graves; land of promise for men and nations; for the civilization of the old world, for the breaking up of the last vestiges of barbarism, behold this retreat! America! were I Solomon I would sing thee a song of glory, and were I David, I would dedicate to thee a psalm. In the European nations there lived a great wISH which was never satisfied; an undefined desire, without its fulfillment; an eternal longing, with the prospect of eternal privation. It was more than anything that I could name to you:-the joy of possessing it was more than all other joy, and the pain of its denial was more than all other pain. This great wish is the living current in the life of civilized nations. It permits them to come to no rest; it pours the wormwood into every goblet of happiness; it stations discontent like a sentinel at the door of every cottage, and at the gate of every palace. It is the heavenly mother of every inconvenience which forces the fellowship of the world onward from revolution to revolution: it is the architect who restlessly fabricates of the sorrows of the people, a ladder to heaven, on which you place your ascending steps. One feels this wish as soon as another has risen against it, but no extent of words can entirely describe it; nothing can fully portray our thoughts. The best word itself is, compared to it, only as a temple to the high temple of nature, as the stars of evening to the morning sun, as sleep to death, as time to eternity. This wish lies like a presentiment in every heart; it attracts the people after it, as the mountains do the thunder clouds. In the best and noblest men, it rules the strongest ; now it bows them down in the deep est woe, again it wafts them upward to a heaven full of hope: sometimes it scathes the heart and seizes it with burning fangs: again it cools the passionate breast, and leads man upward until it makes him worthy of the smiles of God. Give it what name you will. Call it the desire for Freedom, for Happiness, or for Advancement, it is there, it is living and ruling over all, and where we are not fully conscious of it, there it acts like some foreboding. But among the Europeans, the fact was just as firmly established that the strength of the European party was marshaled forth in a hostile opposition to this desire. The aged continually seek after repose, and agreeably to nature, follow their long-accustomed vocations like princes of stability. They would prefer the preservation of existing rules to the expense of a change. They would prefer immobility to the expense of action; they would choose dead formality to the expense of real vitality. This antagonism had at last become so powerful, and had so fully disturbed all proportion, that all felt that it could not continue.Every one who reflected upon the subject, carried this conviction in his heart," Any progress among the old conservatives of the European party is impossible." Every one perceived the approach to a catastrophe, standing like an immoveable presence before his gaze, for he knew that the laws of nature demanded catastrophes for the regeneration of disordered organisms. As from the decline of the classic world, and the beginning of the period of the administration of the united powers of Greece and Rome, the tide of population flooded all that part of the globe, so it again occurs. The East is separated from the West, and the Atlantic is the highway upon which the exile must pass to his new home. The newly incited emigrants thus remove from their old homes to the distant occident. Hundreds of thousands are following the millions, the poor are following the rich, the artist and scholar with those who toil for their daily bread, forsake their homes, and help to crowd the pathway. And when they saw life in America, environed with its high and precious endowments, each one sought, with spirited interest, for his sphere of sovereignty, and the new civilization was unfolded into a joyful life. On this side the waters, The fiery chariot of the prophet was conducted across the waters, the return of which prophesied a golden harvest. there was apparently nothing more to hope for. of the globe permitted the last iron link to slip through his fingers: what followed was the work of the wild demon power, destruction and death. A new life was now born. It lay in the bosom of the new world, who smiled upon it like a fair young bride endowed and adorned from the Creator's hand, with gifts hitherto unknown. Behold it! Has not the Prince of the world bestowed upon it all his hoarded treasures, and where does Nature's art unfold itself in more beautiful forms? In America do not the most glorious dreams of your childhood become a reality? Must not every thing there that is not hid in the depths of the earth look upward to the living light? Illimitable! That is the right word to apply to the natural gifts of the American nation in all their richness, and this abundance was placed before the eyes of the distressed human kind in the old world, and the God of love seemed to stand over it with outstretched arms, crying "Come and take freely of these my treasures." The old world had languished, for it was weighed down beneath God's judgments, and its errors were apparent to all men. An asylum was opened, large, wide, and prepared to receive all; and all came to it, or at least millions came. The quartermasters were emigration sat upon the already there, and the real propaganda to thrones of the old world. But no one should have expected to find it a part of heaven instead of a part of earth; nor should he have expected to find in it his native land. Yet, here he enjoyed, to all appearance, just the right equilibrium-the balance. of uniformity, in proportion, which was reflected upon the soil, people and institutions. Behold it!-how peaceful, how powerful, how quietly great and undisturbed our continent lies, lodged between the two oceans! On the one side, an exhausted cultivation, crushed to fragments like the planks that remain after a shipwreck; and upon the other side, one in the cradle like young Hercules, and around it, like so many gates, the beautiful harbors that indent its shores. Behold the massive formations of the surface which appear in its two great chains of moun tains-upon the side of one, the quiet Pacific-by the other, the roaring Atlantic; and in their midst, the vast continent of the West, penetrated by its majestic rivers, and embracing all the climates of the earth. This great continent, swept by no devastating simoon, and which, after hundreds of years, still retains surplus energy enough to lavish on prairie grass and luxuriant forests, hides beneath its surface all the treasures which riches and power could desire. Upon this soil, the most fertile of all the world, and seemingly so by an ordinance of the Most High, every one involuntarily pauses and exclaims: How widely, O Lord, do thy gracious arms extend !" And since our age is the age of materialism-the age for diligence, for industry, for commerce-what climate is more wholesome, what nation more susceptible, what institutions better adapted to it, than this? [TO BE CONTINUED.] The advocate for torture would wish to see the strongest hand joined to the basest heart, and the weakest head. Engendered in intellectual, and carried on in artificial darkness, torture is a trial, not of guilt, but of nerve, not of innocence, but of endurance; it perverts the whole order of things, for it compels the weak to affirm that which is false, and determines the strong to deny that which is true; it converts the criminal into the evidence, the judge into the executioner, and makes a direr punishment than would follow guilt, precede it. When under the cloak of religion, and the garb of an ecclesiastic, torture is made an instrument of accomplishing the foulest schemes of worldly ambition, it then becomes an atrocity that can be described or imagined, only where it has been seen and felt. It is consolatory to the best sympathies of our nature, that the hydra head of this monster has been broken, and a triumph over her, as bright as it is bloodless, obtained, in that very country whose aggravated wrongs had well nigh made vengeance a virtue, and clemency a crime. |