higher order. Those men who were at the head of the colonial councils, who had been engaged for years in the previous stages of the quarrel with England, and who had been accustomed to look forward to the future, were well apprised of the magnitude of the events likely to hang on the business of that day. They saw in it not only a battle, but the beginning of a civil war of unmeasured extent and uncertain issue. All America and all England were likely to be. deeply concerned in the consequences. The individuals themselves, who knew full well what agency they had in bringing affairs to this crisis, had need of all their courage,― not that disregard of personal safety in which the vulgar suppose true courage to consist, but that high and fixed moral sentiment, that steady and decided purpose, which enables men to pursue a distant end, with a full view of the difficulties and dangers before them, and with a conviction that, before they must arrive at the proposed end, should they ever reach it, they must pass through evil report as well as good report, and be liable to obloquy as well as to defeat. Spirits that fear nothing else fear disgrace; and this danger is necessarily encountered by those who engage in civil war. Unsuccessful resistance is not only ruin to its authors, but is esteemed, and necessarily so, by the laws of all countries,

treasonable. This is the case, at least, till resistance becomes so general and formidable as to assume the form of regular war. But who can tell when resistance commences whether it will attain even to that degree of success? Some of those persons who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, described themselves as signing it "as with halters about their necks." If there were grounds for this remark in 1776, when the cause had become so much more general, how much greater was the hazard when the battle of Bunker Hill was fought! These considerations constituted, to enlarged and liberal minds, the moral sublimity of the occasion, while to the outward senses, the movement of armies, the roar of artillery, the brilliancy of the reflection of a summer's sun from the burnished armor of the British columns, and the flames of a burning town, made up a scene of extraordinary grandeur.

THE AFRICAN CHIEF.

Chained in the market-place he stood,
A man of giant frame,
Amid the gathering multitude

That shrunk to hear his name -
All stern of look and strong of limb,
His dark eye on the ground;
And silently they gazed on him,
As on a lion bound.

Vainly, but well, that chief had fought,
He was a captive now,

Yet pride, that fortune humbles not,
Was written on his brow.

The scars his dark, broad bosom wore
Showed warrior true and brave;
A prince among his tribe before,
He could not be a slave.

Then to his conqueror he spake : "My brother is a king;

Undo this necklace from my neck,

And take this bracelet ring,

And send me where my brother reigns, And I will fill thy hands

With store of ivory from the plains,

And gold-dust from the sands."

"Not for thy ivory nor thy gold
Will I unbind thy chain;
That bloody hand shall never hold
The battle-spear again.

A price thy nation never gave
Shall yet be paid for thee;

For thou shalt be the Christian's slave, In lands beyond the sea."

Then wept the warrior chief, and bade
To shred his locks away;

And, one by one, each heavy braid
Before the victor lay.

Thick were the platted locks, and long,
And closely hidden there

Shone many a wedge of gold among
The dark and crispèd hair.

"Look, feast thy greedy eye with gold
Long kept for sorest need:

Take it thou askest sums untold—
And say that I am freed.

Take it my wife the long, long day,

Weeps by the cocoa-tree,

And my young children leave their play And ask in vain for me.'

"I take thy gold, but I have made Thy fetters fast and strong,

And ween that by the cocoa-shade
Thy wife will wait thee long."
Strong was the agony that shook
The captive's frame to hear,
And the proud meaning of his look
Was changed to mortal fear.

His heart was broken-crazed his brain:
At once his eye grew wild;
He struggled fiercely with his chain,
Whispered and wept and smiled;
Yet wore not long those fatal bands,
And once, at shut of day,

They drew him forth upon the sands,
The foul hyena's prey.

-William Cullen Bryant.

HIGH TIDE AT LINCOLNSHIRE.

The old mayor climbed the belfry tower, The ringers ran by two, by three. "Pull, if ye never pulled before,

Good ringers, pull your best," quoth he. "Play up, play up, O Boston bells! Ply all your changes, all your swells: Play up 'The Brides of Enderby'!"