MAJOR RISING INFLECTION.
1. Would the influence of the Bible, even if it were not the record of a divine revelation, be to render princes more tyrannical, or subjects more ungovernable; the rich more insolent, or the poor more disorderly? Would it make worse parents or children, husbands or wives, masters or servants, friends or neighbors?
2. But why pause here? Is so much ambition praiseworthy, and more criminal? Is it fixed in nature that the limits of this empire should be Egypt on the one hand, the Hellespont and Euxine on the other? Were not Suez and Armenia more natural limits? Or hath empire no natural limit, but is broad as the genius that can devise, and the power that can win?
3. Shine they for aught but earth,
These silent stars?
And, when they sprang to birth,
Who broke the bars
And let their radiance out
To kindle space,
When rang God's morning shout
O'er the glad race?
Are they all desolate,
These silent stars;
Hung in their spheres by fate,
Which nothing mars?
Or are they guards of God,
Shining in prayer,
On the same path they've trod
Since light was there?
MAJOR FALLING INFLECTIONS.
1. Stand up erect! Thou hast the form
And likeness of thy God: who more?
A soul as dauntless mid the storm
Of daily life, a heart as warm
And pure, as breast e'er wore.
2. Methinks I hear hither your husband's drum;
See him pluck Aufidius down by the hair,
As children from a bear, the Voices shunning him;
Methinks I see him stamp thus, and call thus,—
Come on, you cowards! you were got in fear,
Though you were born in Rome: his bloody brow
With his mailed hand then wiping, forth he goes,
Like to a harvest-man that's tasked to mow
Or all, or lose his hire.
3. Mahomet still lives in his practical and disastrous influence in the East. Napoleon still is France, and France is almost Napoleon. Martin Luther's dead dust sleeps at Wittenberg; but Martin Luther's accents still ring through the churches of Christendom. Shakspeare, Byron, and Milton, all live in their influence,—for good or evil. The apostle from his chair, the minister from his pulpit, the martyr from his flame-shroud, the statesman from his cabinet, the soldier in the field, the sailor on the deck, who all have passed away to their graves, still live in the practical deeds that they did, in the lives they lived, and in the powerful lessons that they left behind them.
MINOR RISING INFLECTIONS.