her starry throne in the heavens, light the student to any discovery or invention in any manner applicable to the wants of his fellow-creatures,-if Genius prompt the lofty thought,-if love of God or of man inspire the generous design, no matter how the novelty may astonish for the moment, no matter what prejudices may be shocked, no matter what interests may be alarmed and band themselves against the innovator, let him go on undismayed; he advances to certain victory. GULIAN C. VERPLANCK. 138. PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP. IT may well be that there are some meditations so subtile and unreal, some branches of learning so remote from use, some laborious arts of refinement requiring for their successful cultivation such silent abstraction and unremitting, undivided labor for years, that they can find no room amid the strife and bustle, the fumum, strepitumque, the railroad noise and rapidity of this work-day world of America. But if awed by that veneration the scholar naturally feels for those who consecrate their days and nights to learning, alternating only between books and the pen, you hesitate to allow the superiority conferred by this variety and versatility over the man of one solitary study, let me appeal to the unvarying testimony of literary history for the proof. The great men of antiquity, the models of eloquence, the fathers of poetry, the teachers of ethical wisdom, the founders of that ancient jurisprudence, that still rules the greater part of the civilized world, were none of them solitary scholars; none of them were contented with the “half wisdom of books" alone. They performed well all the duties of war and peace; and their immortal works, beautiful in the severe simplicity of truth and nature, still remain "eternal monuments' as Thucydides, in the calm consciousness of genius, has said of his own majestic history-eternal monuments for the good of after ages, of things which they had themselves seen and done. GULIAN C. VERPLANCK. 139. INDEPENDENCE OF THOUGHT IN AMERICA. EVERY thing here is propitious to honest independence of thought. Such an independence is the presiding genius of all our institutions; it is the vital spirit that gives life to the whole. Without this, our constitutions and laws, our external forms of equality, our elections, our representation, our boasted liberty of speech and of conscience, are but poor and beggarly elements, shadows without substance, dead and worthless carcasses, from which the living soul, the grace, the glory, the strength, have forever fled. That restlessness of enterprise, which alike nerves the frontier settler to the toils and adventures of the wilderness, and kindles the young dreams of the political aspirant, which whitens the ocean with our canvas, drives the railroad through the desert, and startles the moose at his watering-place, or scares the eagle from his high solitary perch with the sudden beat of the steamboat's wheels-that one and the same ardent, restless spirit ruling our whole people, can have little communion with that abject prostration of intellect, that makes man crouch before his fellow, submitting his reason and his conscience to another's will. It is our happy fate to know nothing personally of the severer tyranny of power over the conscience. History can alone teach us what this is, and how to estimate duly our political advantages in this respect. What then is the history of human opinions but a long record of martyrdom for truth, for religion, for private conscience, for public liberty? Every monument of antiquity in the Old World, like that one of "London's lasting shame," "The Traitor's Gate, miscalled, through which of yore every vestige of the past recalls some remembrance of the the seat of worldly empire, or else is enthroned still more regally in the hearts of millions. GULIAN C. VERPLANCK. 140. AMERICAN SCHOLARS NOT DEPENDENT UPON PRIVILEGED ORDERS. In other lands, pecuniary dependence is too often connected with reverence for rank, so that they produce together the most complete vassalage. The market for intellectual labor is overstocked. Nature's rich banquet is crowded with titled and hereditary guests; "the table is full." To emerge from the crowd of menials, and obtain some share of the feast, the unbidden scholar must attach himself to the train of a patron, and feed on the alms his niggard bounty may bestow. Such has been the degrading history of literary men, poets, authors, and, I blush to add, philosophers, throughout the world, for many centuries. The facility with which a sure and comfortable subsistence may be obtained in this country, and the certainty with which educated talent, directed by ordinary discretion and industry, may obtain to a decent competency, are such as to exclude all temptation, much more all necessity, to follow in this respect the humiliating example of European learning. To such evils "the lack of means need never drive us." If dazzled by the false glitter of office, if bribed by the doles of political patronage, or by such paltry boons as private interest can bestow, the American scholar is ever weak enough to sell his conscience, or bow down his independence before a master, he falls a voluntary victim. The sin is his own: his own be the shame. Let him not seek to divide it with his country. Is it not then a glorious privilege to be wholly free from the necessity of such dependence, never to be forced by the tyrannous compulsion of need to man-worship, the meanest of all idolatries? Far no bler, far happier, than kings can make him, is the lot of him who dedicates his life and his intellect to instruct and delight the people; who looks to them, not for alms or bounty, but for a just compensation in honor and in profit, for the pleasure or the instruction he affords them; who seeks to serve them as a friend, not to fawn on them as a flatterer-to please them or to teach them, yet as having a higher master and knowing the solemn responsibility of one who acts upon the happiness or the morals of many. Happy he who, in the discharge of such du ties, leads none into dangerous error, lulls none into careless or contemptuous negligence of right, nor ever sullies the whiteness of an innocent mind. Happier, still happier, he who has scattered abroad into many hearts those moral seeds whence benevolent and heroic actions spring up, who has "given ardor to virtue and confidence to truth," or, in more sacred language, "has turned many unto righteousness." Such genius, fired from heaven's own light, will continue to the end of time to burn and spread, kindling congenial flames far and wide, until they lift up their broad united blaze on high, enlightening, cheering, and gladdening the nations of the earth. GULIAN C. VERPLANCK. 141. THE INFLUENCE OF FREE INSTITUTIONS ENNOBLING. IT has been said by shrewd though unfriendly observers, that in America the practical and the profitable swallow up every other thought. There, say they, fancy withers, art languishes, taste expires; there the mind looks only to the material and the mechanical, and loses its capacity for the ideal and the abstract. But while the intelligent American citizen is surrounded by the strongest temptations to devote himself solely to selfish pursuits, he is at the same time everywhere invited to conform his own spirit to that of our liberal institutions, and instructed to uplift his mind to the consideration of large principles, and to regard himself as being but a small part of the vast whole which claims his best affections. With such a choice before him, pitiable indeed is the lot of him who turns from the nobler and manlier side, to think, to live, and to drudge for himself alone. He cuts himself off from the best delights of the heart, its endearing charities and its elevating sympathies. He paralyzes his own intellect by suffering it to become half dead through inaction, and that in its nobler parts. The mighty ladder of thought and reason, reaching from the visible to the invisible-from the crude knowledge gained through the senses to the sublimest inferences of the pure reason from the earth to the very footstool of God's own throne is before him and invites his ascent. But he bends his eyes obstinately downwards upon the glittering ores at his feet, until he loses the wish or the hope for any thing better. That such grovelling materiality, such mean selfishness, is not the necessary, nor the constant, no, nor the frequent result of our ardent industry in the affairs of life, let the discoveries of Franklin, and the magnificent far-drawn speculations of Edwards-let the grand philosophy, and the poetic thought, flashing quick and thick through the cloudy atmosphere of political discussion in our senate-house-let the open-handed charity, the more than princely munificence, the untiring personal labors of benevolence, exhibited by our most devoted and successful men of business, bear splendid testimony. GULIAN C. VERPLANCK. 142. THE EVILS OF POLITICAL PARTIES. IN our popular form of government, the existence of organized parties for the promotion of any system of policy, for the success of any principles of administration on which opinions are divided, and even for local objects and questions that must be decided ultimately by the ballot-boxes and legislative action, seems to be unavoidable, and when confined to their legitimate sphere, not only harmless but salutary. But no dispassionate man, who examines the character of all our political parties for the last few years, can fail to perceive that there is something in their organization threatening to defeat the primary object of their own formation, and injurious to personal honor and independence. By means of this organization, the true liege-men of faction. learn to move together with the discipline and blind obedience of a regular army, and to regard those who do not act with them, not as republican fellow-citizens who differ from them in opinion on some secondary though important points, but as aliens and enemies. The first who suffer the just punishment of this moral treason, for such it is, against republican principles, are the successful leaders themselves. They deprive themselves at once of the honest enthusiasm, the cheerful confidence that ever accompany the zealous support of principles. They become the timid, temporizing slaves of expediency, looking at every step, not to its justice or wisdom, but to its probable popularity. Their own policy prevents them from relying for respect and support upon the broad judgment of all honest and enlightened men, and when age or adversity arrives, when "interest calls off all her sneaking train," they are left helpless and contemptible. Such being the pitiable condition of the magnates of faction, what must be that of him who follows at their |