It is time, Senators, that there should be an open and manly avowal on all sides as to what is intended to be done. If the question is not now settled, it is uncertain whether it ever can hereafter be; and we as the representatives of the States of this Union, regarded as governments, should come to a distinct understanding as to our respective views in order to ascertain whether the great questions at issue can be settled or not. If you who represent the stronger portion cannot agree to settle them on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace. If you are unwilling we should part in peace, tell us so, and we shall know what to do when you reduce the question to submission or resistance. If you remain silent you will compel us to infer by your acts what you intend. In that case California will become the test question. If you admit her, under all the difficulties that oppose her admission, you compel us to infer that you intend to exclude us from the whole of the acquired territories, with the intention of destroying irretrievably the equilibrium between the two sections. We would be blind not to perceive in that case that your real objects are power and aggrandizement; and infatuated not to act accordingly.
I have now, Senators, done my duty in expressing my opinions fully, freely, and candidly, on this solemn occasion. In doing so I have been governed by the motives which have governed me in all the stages of the agitation of the slavery question since its commencement. I have exerted myself during the whole period to arrest it, with the intention of saving the Union if it could be done; and if it could not, to save the section where it has pleased Providence to cast my lot, and which I sincerely believe has justice and the Constitution on its side. Having faithfully done my duty to the best of my ability, both to the Union and my section, throughout this agitation, I shall have the consolation, let what will come, that I am free from all responsibility.
CALLIMACHUS
(Third Century b.c.)
Callimachus, the most learned of poets, was the son of Battus and Mesatme of Cyrene, and a disciple of Hermocrates, who like his more celebrated pupil was a grammarian, or a follower of belles-lettres, says Suidas. It is in this calling that we first hear of Callimachus, when he was a teacher at Alexandria. Here he counted among his pupils Apollonius Rhodius, author of the 'Argonautica,' and Eratosthenes, famous for his wisdom in science, who knew geography and geometry so well that he measured the circumference of the earth. Callimachus was in fact one of those erudite poets and wise men of letters whom the gay Alexandrians who thronged the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus called "The Pleiades." Apollonius Rhodius, Aratus, Theocritus, Lycophron, Nicander, and Homer son of Macro, were the other six. From his circle of clever people, the king, with whom he had become a prime favorite, called him to be chief custodian over the stores of precious books at Alexandria. These libraries, we may recall, were the ones Julius Cæsar partially burned by accident a century later, and Bishop Theophilus and his mob of Christian zealots finished destroying as repositories of paganism some three centuries later still. The collections said to have been destroyed by Caliph Omar when Amru took Alexandria in 640 a.d., on the ground that if they agreed with the Koran they were superfluous and if they contradicted it they were blasphemous, were later ones; but the whole story is discredited by modern scholarship. The world has not ceased mourning for this untold and irreparable loss of the choicest fruits of the human spirit.
Of all these precious manuscripts and parchments, then, Callimachus was made curator about the year b.c. 260. Aulus Gellius computes the time in this wise:—"Four-hundred-ninety years after the founding of Rome, the first Punic war was begun, and not long after, Callimachus, the poet of Cyrene in Alexandria, flourished at the court of King Ptolemy." At this time he must have been already married to the wife of whom Suidas speaks in his 'Lexicon,' a daughter of a Syracusan gentleman.
The number of Callimachus's works, which are reported to have reached eight hundred, testifies to his popularity in the Alexandrian period of Greek literature. It contradicts also the maxim ascribed to him, that "a great book is a great evil." Among the prose works which would have enriched our knowledge of literature and history was his history of Greek literature in one hundred and twenty books, classifying the Greek writers and naming them chronologically. These were the results of his long labors in the libraries. Among them was a book on the Museum and the schools connected with it, with records of illustrious educators and of the books they had written.