Myrtle shall our brows entwine
While the muse your fame shall tell;
'Twas at Pallas' sacred shrine,

At your feet the tyrant fell.

Then in Athens all was peace,
Equal laws and liberty;

Nurse of arts and eye of Greece,

People valiant, firm and free!"

It was an ardent patriotism, thus cherished, thus expressed, and thus inculcated, which made Greece what she afterwards became. It breathed that indomitable energy into her armies, before which the millions of Asia fled in dismay on the plains of Marathon and Platea, and made her by turns, small as she appeared upon the map of the earth, alternately the admiration and the terror of the world.

There is, beside the love of country, a sentiment deep rooted within us, of sympathy with our kind, which cannot perhaps, be better denominated than by the name of humanity. The best expression which this sentiment has ever found was by a Roman, himself a poet. "I am a man, and nothing which concerns humanity fails deeply to move my heart." is this secret sympathy, which is one of the

It

principal causes of our delight in literature. For what is all literature but the presentation to the human mind of the actions, the condition, the thoughts, feelings, sufferings, the joys and sorrows of our fellow men? It is not so much the gratification of mere curiosity, or the increase of practical knowledge, as it is the pleasure of sympathy, which leads us to read of the distant and the past. This is the reason of the absorbing interest we always feel in a personal narrative, perhaps above every other species of composition. We feel, that however long ago, or however remote the actor or the sufferer lived, he was our brother. A mother's bosom pillowed his infancy as well as ours. To him, home, and life, and hope were dear. The same sun lighted him, the same earth cherished him, and his prospect was shut in by the same surrounding sky. It is not Robinson Crusoe, the English sailor, that the boy follows to his desolate island, and reads of with such breathless interest through many a glimmering page, it is himself identified with Robinson Crusoe. So great is the power of sympathy, that when that lone adventurer finds himself the only inhabitant of that solitary isle, cut off from the world, and

all intercourse with his species, the beating heart of the little reader is almost as much concerned, as if he were there himself; and when, after gazing day after day in vain upon the unchanging expanse of the all-surrounding sea, and listening to the monotony of its sullen roar, a sail at last gladdens the sight of the exile, the little sympathizer is almost as much relieved as if he, and not his hero, were about to step upon her deck.

This strong sympathy with our species is the cause of much of the pleasure we experience in reading history. We cannot avoid, even if we would, identifying ourselves with the various actors in the scene. We engage in their enterprises with almost as much ardor as if it were still uncertain whether they should succeed. We fight their battles as bravely as if it were still undecided who should be victorious. This interest is increased just in proportion to the particularity of the narrative, to the minuteness of the delineation of characters, persons, costumes and manners. The beauty and flowing locks of Absalom, profligate and parricide as he was, interest us more powerfully in his fate, in spite of our moral judgments, than we are capable of becoming

in a much better man, whose name alone, written in the Sacred Records, presents us only with a dim abstraction. Poetry, which dwells in particulars instead of the generals of history, supplies this defect, and can take a bare event of history which has but a slight hold of the feelings, and by a few descriptive touches, make it highly sublime or pathetic. Thus the meagre outline of the apparition of Samuel to Saul on the eve of the fatal battle becomes, in the hands of Byron, a picture to harrow up the soul.

'Thou whose spell can raise the dead,

Bid the prophet's form appear.

'Samuel, raise thy buried head!

King, behold the phantom seer!'

"Earth yawn'd; he stood the centre of a cloud: Light changed its hue, retiring from his shroud: Death stood all glassy in his fixed eye;

His hand was wither'd and his veins were dry;
His foot, in bony whiteness, glitter'd there,
Shrunken and sinewless, and ghastly bare:
From lips that moved not and unbreathing frame,
Like cavern'd winds, the hollow accents came.
Saul saw, and fell to earth, as falls the oak,
At once, and blasted by the thunder-stroke."

We read in the Jewish history, that under the reign of Hezekiah, Jerusalem was besieged by Sennacherib, king of Assyria, with an army of overwhelming numbers. The inhabitants were in the greatest consternation, but received assurances of the protection of Jehovah. By some Divine visitation they were all destroyed in one night, and the event is thus briefly described; "And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out and smote the camp of the Assyrians, an hundred and four score and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead men." This event in the few words of the simple narrative is impressive, but in the hands of high poetic genius it becomes one of the most magnificent pictures in all literature.

"The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

"Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green, That host with their banners at sunset were seen; Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown, That host on the morrow lay wither'd and strown.