to May, with Ben Jonson's Lily, Herrick's Daffodils, or Wordsworth's Daisy; but it is genuine poetry. Nor less so are the verses to the Hurricane, to Neversink Heights, to St. Catherina, or to The Dying Indian, with the motto "Debemur morti nos, nostraque." Freneau is peculiarly successful in his efforts to embody the sentiments and revive the traditions of the old races of the land. Duyckinck has pointed out that O'Connor's Child derives one of its best lines from our author's Indian Burying-Ground. Campbell writes—

"Now on the grass green turf he sits,

His tassell'd horn beside him laid:
Now o'er the hills in chase he flits,

The hunter and the deer a shade."

Freneau certainly anticipates him in the stanza—

"By midnight moons o'er moistening dews,

In vestments for the chase arrayed,

The hunter still the deer pursues,

The hunter and the deer-a shade."

Similarly Scott's Marmion from the same source adopts—

"And snatched the spear, but left the shield."

The famous death-song beginning—

"The sun sets at night and the stars shun the day,"

with the refrain

"For the son of Alknomook can never complain,"

have been claimed by Mrs. Edgeworth for Mrs. Hunter, but I believe them to be Freneau's: they in any case are the keynote of the last words of the Oneida chief in Gertrude of Wyoming. Our author's satire is, at its best, in the verses on the New England Puritans, with two of which

Henry Clay, in his great speech on the Seminole war of 1819, so quotes it, and he ought to have known the authorship.

we must close this attempt to revive a memory unduly

neglected

"There exiles were formed in a whimsical mould,

And were awed by their priests, like the Hebrews of old,
Disclaimed all pretences to jesting and laughter,

And sighed their lives through to be happy hereafter.

On a crown immaterial their thoughts were intent,
They looked towards Zion wherever they went,
Did all things in hope of a future reward,

And worried mankind-for the sake of the Lord."

POLITICS AND ORATORY.

97

CHAPTER IV.

AMERICAN POLITICS AND ORATORY.

"THE curse of this country," remarked an American statesman, "is eloquent men." The West has long been noted for fluency-often superfluency-of speech. The period immediately succeeding the Revolution is illustrated by a body of oratory which, unlike that concerned with the war itself, has been preserved as the most interesting record of the first steps. in the progress of the newly-established nation. To give a full account of these would be to write the early history of the United States. Our limits and design permit only such reference to the leading events of the age as will make partially intelligible its most conspicuous intellectual efforts. Every good citizen felt himself called to play some part in raising the superstructure on the foundations which had been laid. The great debate of 1788, in which the claims of the central authority were upheld by Hamilton, Madison, and Marshall, against the extreme view of State Rights advocated with the last eloquence of Patrick Henry,1 having resulted in the adoption, in the following year, of the Constitution by all the States, a new set of differences began to emerge. In 1794

1 In the course of his speech the following image illustrates the strong prejudice against the Federalists :-"This constitution is said to have beautiful features, but, among other deformities, it has an awful squinting— it squints towards monarchy."

H

there followed the first of a long series of discussions on the laws of trade and the imposition of custom duties: in 1796 we come to an exciting passage of arms (in which, as we have seen, Fisher Ames was for the last time publicly conspicuous) on the obligations imposed by the British Treaty. The inaugural addresses of Adams and Jefferson were designed to calm the troubled waters; but (1803) they were again stirred to storm by the controversies about the navigation of the Mississippi, ending in the purchase of Louisiana from France. We come next to the remarkable group of speeches directly or indirectly relative to the second rupture with Great Britain in 1812. The elements of this crisis began to manifest themselves soonafter the death of Hamilton, and, during the term of Jefferson's Presidency, took a threatening shape. In the seemingly internecine struggle of the two great powers of the Old World, weaker States ran the risk of being ground between "the incensed points of mighty opposites." It was as hard for outsiders to be neutral as to a citizen of Solon's Athens those who assumed an impartial attitude were exposed to the aggressions of either side,-aggressions which bore with special severity on a young commercial nation. By the Berlin decrees and the "Orders in Council," the ships of the Union were all but swept from the seas, grass grew on the streets of the shore cities, and the highhanded enforcement of the right of search by the attack (outside Hampton Roads) of the "Leopard" on the "Chesapeake," united all parties in a demand for reparation. The recall of the British admiral who authorised the outrage allayed the feeling, but the grievance remained; and Congress was, in retaliation, driven to what was known as the "Restrictive System," i.e. placing an embargo on their own vessels, or confining them to port, with a view to protect them from the dangers of a practical piracy. Against this measure we have on record an outburst of New England

oratory from Josiah Quincy, one of the new powers in the House of Representatives, in which his State was already beginning to strive with Virginia for political pre-emin

ence :

"The decrees of France prohibit us from trading with Great Britain. The orders of Great Britain prohibit us from trading with France. And what do we? Why, in direct subserviency to the edicts of each, we prohibit our citizens from trading with either. We do more; as if unqualified submission was not humiliating enough, we descend to an act of supererogation in servility—we abandon trade altogether. . . . An embargo liberty was never cradled in Massachusetts. Our liberty was not so much a mountain as a sea-nymph. She was free as the air. She could swim or she could run. Our fathers met her as she came, like the goddess of liberty, from the waves. They caught her as she was sporting on the beach. They courted her as she was spreading her nets upon the rocks. But an embargo liberty, a hand-cuffed liberty, a liberty in fetters, a liberty traversing between the four sides of a prison and beating her hand against the walls, is none of our offspring. Its parentage is all inland."

These old harangues are more interesting than modern novels, for many reasons. They come back to us as new, because undeservedly forgotten: we are not made weary of them in "Reviews :" they deal with realities: they are typical not only of the individual speakers, but of the larger interests they in the main honestly strove to represent. In the above we have evidence of the zeal for a State conflicting with zeal for the aggregate community which distinguishes the bulk of Transatlantic eloquence, and there is a distinct trace of the classical ornament with which that of New England has been frequently overlaid. It seems natural that the speaker, scion of an illustrious academic race, should have terminated his public career in 1845 as President of Harvard University. Quincy opposed the annexation of Louisiana, sharing with several, especially northern, politicians of the time the belief that the Union could not endure in excess of its primitive bounds. This mistake was counterbalanced by his truer insight into the disasters likely to befall his country from