ready to take the impression of the first lazy wish that comes over you. No, your brain says resolutely, "I will arise," and lo! a victory!—and no small one either. In this way, true firmness is made. It is a growth. Beware of the insects which beset the lordly tree, withering its leaves and driving its sap into the earth.
"Let us put a cable under the ocean," says Cyrus Field. "Tarry a while," says Slow. "Let us put the cities within actual speaking distance!" say Bell, and Gray and Edison. "Tarry a while," says Slow. "Let us print thirty thousand newspapers in an hour, and give them out of the press folded, and pasted, and cut!" say Potter, and Hoe, and Kahler. "Tarry a while" says Slow. And yet, in spite of Slow and Sleepyhead, wonders have accumulated upon wonders, until the Arabian Nights and Gulliver's Travels are only the creations of a poor fancy, while the intimations which the future affords us stagger the understanding and make us almost idolatrous in our admiration of the quiet, keen-acting men who have dared out into fairy-land and returned laden like the spies coming from Canaan.
Our whole history is one of discipline. And what has it made of us? A nation that has sung
THE DEATH-KNELL OF THE KINGS OF THE EARTH.
I think a good deal of these lines of James Russell Lowell:
This land o' ourn, I tell ye's gut to be
A better country than man ever see;
I feel my sperit swellin with a cry
That seems to say: "Break forth and prophesy."
O strange New World, that yet wast never young,
Whose youth from thee by gripin' want was wrung,
Brown foundlin' o' the woods, whose baby bed
Was prowled round by the Injun's cracklin' tread,
An' who grewst strong thru' shifts, and wants, an' pains.
Nursed by stern men, with empires in their brains!
Another sweet poet has sung:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
There can be no question that wealth is fast accumulating. Let fathers, and mothers, and preceptors spur the rising generation to that love of accuracy, of "right dress," as the soldiers say, which puts each man in his place, certain to stay there as long as he has agreed to, and certain to act when the fitting time arrives.
THE ORGAN AND ITS PIPES AND REEDS.