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It was twelve by the village-clock,

When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.

He heard the crowing of the cock,

And the barking of the farmer's dog,

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And felt the damp of the river-fog,
That rises when the sun goes down.

It was one by the village-clock,
When he rode into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock

Swim in the moonlight as he passed,

And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare, Gaze at him with a spectral glare,

As if they already stood aghast

At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village-clock,

When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,

And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning-breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.

And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read

How the British regulars fired and fled,
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard-wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere ;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,

A cry of defiance, and not of fear,

A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore !
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,

In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beat of that steed,
And the midnight-message of Paul Revere.

XXXIII. THE CHARACTER OF GRATTAN.

SYDNEY SMITH.

SYDNEY SMITH, a clergyman of the Church of England, was born at Woodford, in the county of Essex, England, in 1771, and died in 1845. He was one of the founders of the "Edinburgh Review," a periodical journal which has exerted, and is continuing to exert, so great an influence over the literature and politics of Great Britain; and for many years he was a constant contributor to its pages. Among all the writers of his time, he is remarkable for his brilliant wit and rich vein of humor, which give a peculiar and pungent flavor to everything that falls from his pen. But his wit and humor rested upon a foundation of sound common-sense, and were always under the control of a warm and good heart. In reading him, we feel first that he is a wise man, and then a witty man. He was a courageous and consistent friend of civil and religious liberty; and in the various articles which he contributed to the "Edinburgh Review," on social and political reform, he shows the enlarged views of an enlightened statesman, and the benevolent feeling of a Christian philanthropist.

HANK God that all is not profligacy and corruption

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in the history of that devoted people, and that the name of Irishman does not always carry with it the idea of the oppressor or the oppressed, the plunderer or the plundered, the tyrant or the slave.

Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time. What Irishman does not feel proud that he has lived in the days of Grattan? Who has not turned to him for comfort, from the false friends and open enemies of Ireland? Who did not remember him in the

days of its burnings and wastings and murders? No government ever dismayed him, the world could not bribe him; he thought only of Ireland, lived for no other object, dedicated to her his beautiful fancy, his elegant wit, his manly courage, and all the splendor of his astonishing eloquence.

He was so born and so gifted, that poetry, forensic skill, elegant literature, and all the highest attainments of human genius, were within his reach; but he thought the noblest occupation of a man was to make other men happy and free; and in that straight line he went on for fifty years, without one sidelook, without one yielding thought, without one motive in his heart which he might not have laid open to the view of God and man. He is gone! but there is not a single day of his honest life of which every good Irishman would not be more proud, than of the whole political existence of his countrymen, - the annual deserters and betrayers of their native land.

XXXIV. FINITE AND INFINITE.

R. C. WINTHROP.

ROBERT CHARLES WINTHROP was born in Boston, May 12, 1809, and graduated at Harvard College in 1828. He was admitted to the bar in 1831, but never engaged in the practice of the profession. In 1834 he was elected to the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, and re-elected during five successive years, during the last three of which he served as Speaker. In the autumn of 1840 he was chosen to the House of Representatives in Congress, and continued a member of that body during the next ten years, with the exception of a brief interval. From December, 1847, to March, 1849, he was Speaker of the House. In 1856 he served a short time in the Senate of the United States, by appointment of the governor of Massachusetts. During his public life Mr. Winthrop was a leading member of the Whig party. He spoke frequently upon the great questions of the day, and his speeches always commanded attention from their well-considered arguments and propriety of tone. A volume of his addresses and speeches was published in 1852, since which time he has published several lectures and public discourses.

ET men lift their vast reflectors or refractors to the

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skies, and detect new planets in their hiding-places. Let them waylay the fugitive comets in their flight, and compel them to disclose the precise period of their orbits, and to give bonds for their punctual return. Let them drag out reluctant satellites from "their habitual concealments." Let them resolve the unresolvable nebulæ of Orion or Andromeda. They need not fear. The sky will not fall, nor a single star be shaken from its sphere.

Let them perfect and elaborate their marvelous processes for making the light and the lightning their ministers, for putting "a pencil of rays" into the hand of art, and providing tongues of fire for the communication of intelligence. Let them foretell the path of the whirlwind, and calculate the orbit of the storm. Let them hang out their gigantic pendulums, and make the earth do the work of describing and measuring her own motions. Let them annihilate human pain, and literally "charm ache with air, and agony with ether." The blessing of God will attend all their toils, and the gratitude of man will await all their triumphs.

Let them dig down into the bowels of the earth. Let them rive asunder the massive rocks, and unfold the history of creation as it lies written on the pages of their piled-up strata. Let them gather up the fossil fragments of a lost Fauna, reproducing the ancient forms which inhabited the land or the seas, bringing them together, bone to his bone, till Leviathan and Behemoth stand before us in bodily presence and in their full proportions, and we almost tremble lest these dry bones should live again! Let them put Nature to the rack, and torture her, in all her forms, to the betrayal of her inmost secrets and

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