Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair

As is the smile upon thy face:

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds;
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong.

To humbler functions, awful Power!
I call thee: I myself commend
Unto thy guidance from this hour;
Oh, let my weakness have an end!
Give unto me, made lowly wise,
The spirit of self-sacrifice;

The confidence of reason give;

And in the light of truth thy Bondman let me live!

BROTHERLY LOVE.

GIVE me thy hand, brother-give me thy hand,
But not as thy fathers did, dripping with gore;
Dash down the gauntlet, and shiver the brand,

But not in the fashion they did so of yore;
Throw away war's array, and let us prove
Which has the heart that is strongest in love.

Art thou of France, where the vine-blossoms cluster,
Bathed in the dewy shower, kissed by the sun?
Art thou of France, where the fair maidens muster,
To dance with their swains when their labour is
done?

Then give me thy hand, for my heart can agree
To bless all that's good in thy nation with thee.

Oh, say, wert thou nurtured on Uri's wild hills,
Where the dark pine trees wave by the cottage of
Tell;

Or didst thou first bathe in Geneva's bright rills,
And gather the foxglove and fern on its fells?
Then give me thy hand, and the heath-flower in mine,
Shall a love-token bloom on that bonnet of thine.

Dost thou come from Columbia, afar o'er the deep,
Where the forest its requiem sings in the storm;
Where the bison and elk o'er the broad prairie sweep,
And the hero of labour has conquered a farm?
Ah, then come away, as a brother should come,
For our fathers had birth in the same island-home.

Dost thou come from the west, where the zephyr at

eve,

Sighs over the plains that are laden with balm; Dost thou come from the east, where the pariahs grieve,

In their outcast retreats, 'neath the leaves of the palm?

In the bright sunny south, or in Borean night;
Say, brother, where smileth thy home of delight?

Oh, I care not whence come you, or whither you dwell,

In the west or the east, in the south or the north; Be thy skin of the darkest-thy home on the fellI care not, I only know manhood and worth. Then thy hand, brother man; and, oh, let us prove Whose heart is the strongest in "brotherly love."

MADAME DE STAEL.

A YOUNG, but already influential, female had lent to the constitutional party the prestige of her youth, her genius, and her enthusiasm-it was Madame de Stael. Necker's daughter, she had inspired politics from her birth. Her mother's salon had been the coenaculum of the philosophy of the eighteenth century. Voltaire, Rousseau, Buffon, D'Alembert, Diderot, Raynal, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Condorcet, had played with this child, and fostered her earliest ideas. Her cradle was that of the Revolution. Her father's popularity had played about her lips, and left there an inextinguishable thirst for fame. She sought it in the storms of the populace, in calumny, and death. Her genius was great, her soul pure, her

heart deeply impassioned. A man in her energy, a woman in her tenderness, that the ideal of her ambition should be satisfied, it was necessary for her to associate in the same character genius, glory, and love.

Her

Nature, education, and fortune rendered possible this triple dream of a woman, a philosopher, and a hero. Born in a republic, educated in a court, daughter of a minister, wife of an ambassador, belonging by birth to the people, to the literary world by talent, to the aristocracy by rank, the three elements. of the Revolution mingled or contended in her. genius was like the antique chorus, in which all the great voices of the drama unite in one tumultuous concord. A deep thinker by inspiration, a tribune by eloquence, a woman in attraction, her beauty, unseen by the million, required intellect to be admired, and admiration to be felt. Hers was not the beauty of form and features, but visible inspiration and the manifestation of passionate impulse. Attitude, gesture, tone of voice, look-all obeyed her mind, and created her brilliancy. Her black eyes, flashing with fire, gave out from beneath their long lids as much tenderness as pride. Her look, so often lost in space, was followed by those who knew her, as if it were possible to find with her the inspiration she sought. That gaze, open, yet profound as her understanding, had as much serenity as penetration. We felt that the light of her genius was only the reverberation of a mine of tenderness of heart. Thus there was a

secret love in all the admiration she excited; and she, in admiration, cared only for love. Love with her was but enlightened admiration.

Events rapidly ripened; ideas and things were crowded into her life: she had no infancy. At twenty-two years of age she had maturity of thought with the grace and softness of youth. She wrote like Rousseau, and spoke like Mirabeau. Capable of bold conceptions and complicated designs, she could contain in her bosom at the same time a lofty idea and a deep feeling. Like the women of old Rome who agitated the republic by the impulses of their hearts, or who exalted or depressed the empire with their love, she sought to mingle her feelings with her politics, and desired that the elevation of her genius should elevate him she loved. Her sex precluded her from that open action which public position, the tribune, or the army only accord to men in public governments; and thus she compulsorily remained unseen in the events she guided. To be the hidden destiny of some great man, to act through and by him, to grow with his greatness, be eminent in his name, was the sole ambition permitted to her an ambition tender and devoted, which seduces a woman whilst it suffices to her disinterested genius. She could only be the mind and inspiration of some political man; she sought such a one, and in her delusion believed she had found him.