Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 098, February, 1876

Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents and the list of illustrations were added by the transcriber.
THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.
UP THE THAMES.
SKETCHES OF INDIA.
THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.
by MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF PATRICIA KEMBALL.
AT THE OLD PLANTATION.
OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.


From showing the world's right to the epoch of '76, and sketching the progress of the century in its wider aspect, a natural transition is to the part played in illustrating the period by the people from whose political birth it dates, and who have made the task of honoring it their own. They have reached their first resting-place, and pardonably enjoy the opportunity of looking back at the road they have traversed. They pause to contemplate its gloomy beginning, the perilous precipices along which it wound, and the sudden quagmires that often interrupted it, all now softened by distance and by the consciousness of success. Opening with a forest-path, it has broadened and brightened into a highway of nations.
So numerous and various were the influences, formative and impellent, which combined to bring the colonies up to the precise ripening-point of their independence, as to make it difficult to assign each its proper force. In the concentric mass, however, they stand out sharp and clear, and the conjoint effect seems preordained. That the event should have come when it did, and not before or after, is as obvious as any of history's predictions after the fact. Looking through the glasses of to-day, we find it hard to realize that the Continental Congress renewed its expressions of loyalty to the king three weeks after the battle of Bunker Hill, so distinct before us rises the completed and symmetrical edifice of separation ready for its capstone, from its foundations growing steadily through the past.