CHOICE 100 SELECTIONS. No. 7. CHEER UP. Cheer up and bear up! life should be gay, Cheer up, and remember for one who is brave, Earth has no sorrow this side of the grave; Cheer up and bear up! friends may deceive you, But bravely bear up, and Heaven her child Then cheer up and bear up, and laugh at old Fate; With noble and fearless forbearance await Every blow, every loss, every ill. Hope on, and remember the dreariest way Has nothing of sadness or sorrow For the brave heart that smiles at the ills of to-day, BY THE SHORE OF THE RIVER.-C. P. CRANCH. Through the gray willows the bleak winds are raving Bathed in the sunshine of Orient lands; Here, all alone on the rocks I am sitting, Over the surf with its sorrowful moan, Wife and children and friends were around me; Silently came a black boat o'er the billows; Rustling footsteps were heard through the willows, Suns that were brightest and skies that were bluest, Lonely and old in the dusk I am waiting, To gardens and homes that are shining forever! Atlantic Monthly ELOQUENCE AND LOGIC.-W. C. PRESTON. Our popular institutions demand a talent for speaking, and create a taste for it. Liberty and eloquence are united, in all ages. Where the sovereign power is found in the public mind and the public heart, eloquence is the obvious approach to it. Power and honor, and all that can attract ardent and aspiring natures, attend it. The noblest instinct is to propagate the spirit,-"to make our mind the mind of other men," and wield the sceptre in the realms of passion. In the art of speaking, as in all other arts, a just combination of those qualities necessary to the end proposed, is the true rule of taste. Excess is always wrong. Too much ornament is an evil, too little, also. The one may impede the progress of the argument, or divert attention from it, by the introduction of extraneous matter; the other may exhaust attention, or weary by monotony. Elegance is in a just medium. The safer side to err on, is that of abundance,—as profusion is better than poverty; as it is better to be detained by the beauties of a landscape than by the weariness of a desert. It is commonly, but mistakenly supposed, that the enforcing of truth is most successfully effected by a cold and formal logic; but the subtleties of dialectics and the forms of logic may play as fantastic tricks with truth, as the most potent magic of Fancy. The attempt to apply mathematical precision to moral truths is always a failure, and generally a dangerous one. If man, and especially masses of men, were purely intellectual, then cold reason alone would be influential to convince; but our nature is most complex, and many of the great truths which it most concerns us to know, are taught us by our instincts, our sentiments, our impulses, and our passions. Even in regard to the highest and holiest of all truth, to know which concerns us here and hereafter, we are not permitted to approach its investigation in the confidence of proud and erring reason, but are taught to become as little children, before we are worthy to receive it. It is to this complex nature that the speaker addresses himself, and the degree of power with which all the elements are evoked, is the criterion of the orator. His business, to be sure, is to convince, but more to persuade; and, most of all, to inspire with noble and generous passions. It is the cant of criticism, in all ages, to make a distinction between logic and eloquence, and to stigmatize the latter as declamation. Logic ascertains the weight of an argument, eloquence gives it momentum. The difference is between the vis inertice of a mass of metal, and the same ball hurled from the cannon's mouth. Eloquence is an argument alive and in motion,—the statue of Pygmalion inspired with vitality. YARN OF THE "NANCY BELL."-W. S. GILBERT. Twas on the shores that round the coast That I found alone, on a piece of stone, His hair was weedy, his heard was long, And I heard this wight on the shore recite "Oh, Lam a cook and a captain bold, And he shook his fists and he tore his hair, For I couldn't help thinking the man had been drinking, And so I simply said: "Oh, elderly man, it's little I know "At once a cook and a captain bold, Then he gave a hitch to his trowsers, which And having got rid of a thumping quid, ""Twas on the good ship Nancy Bell, "And pretty nigh all of the crew was drowned, And only ten of the Nancy's men "There was me and the cook and the captain bold, And the mate of the Nancy brig, And the bo'sun tight, and the midshipmite, And the crew of the captain's gig. "For a month we'd neither wittles nor drink, Till a hungry we did feel, So we drawed a lot, and accordin' shot The captain for our meal. "The next lot fell to the Nancy's mate, Then our appetite with the midshipmite "And then we murdered the bo'sun tight, Then we wittled free, did the cook and me, "Then only the cook and me was left, "For I loved that cook as a brother, I did, And the cook he worshipped me; But we'd both be blowed if we'd either be stowed In the other chap's hold, you see. "I'll be eat if you dines off me,' says Tom; 'Yes, that,' says I, 'you'll be,— 'I'm boiled if I die, my friend,' quoth I, And 'Exactly so,' quoth he. |