McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader Part 24

Lo! while we are gazing, in swifter haste Stream down the snows, till the air is white, As, myriads by myriads madly chased, They fling themselves from their shadowy height.

The fair, frail creatures of middle sky, What speed they make, with their grave so nigh; Flake after flake To lie in the dark and silent lake.

I see in thy gentle eyes a tear; They turn to me in sorrowful thought; Thou thinkest of friends, the good and dear, Who were for a time, and now are not; Like these fair children of cloud and frost, That glisten a moment an then are lost, Flake after flake,-- All lost in the dark and silent lake.

Yet look again, for the clouds divide; A gleam of blue on the water lies; And far away, on the mountain side, A sunbeam falls from the opening skies.

But the hurrying host that flew between The cloud and the water no more is seen; Flake after flake At rest in the dark and silent lake.

XXVIII. CHARACTER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. (143)

Charles Phillips, 1787-1859, an eminent barrister and orator, was born in Sligo, Ireland, and died in London. He gained much of his reputation as an advocate in criminal cases. In his youth he published some verses; later in life he became the author of several works, chiefly of biography.

He is fallen! We may now pause before that splendid prodigy, which towered among us like some ancient ruin, whose power terrified the glance its magnificence attracted. Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat upon the throne a sceptered hermit, wrapt in the solitude of his own originality. A mind, bold, independent, and decisive; a will, despotic in its dictates; an energy that distanced expedition; and a conscience, pliable to every touch of interest, marked the outlines of this extraordinary character--the most extraordinary, perhaps, that in the annals of this world ever rose, or reigned, or fell.

Flung into life in the midst of a revolution that quickened every energy of a people who acknowledged no superior, he commenced his course, a stranger by birth, and a scholar by charity. With no friend but his sword, and no fortune but his talents, he rushed into the lists where rank, and wealth, and genius had arrayed themselves, and compet.i.tion fled from him, as from the glance of destiny.

He knew no motive but interest; acknowledged no criterion but success; he worshiped no G.o.d but ambition; and, with an eastern devotion, he knelt at the shrine of his idolatry. Subsidiary to this, there was no creed that he did not profess, there was no opinion that he did not promulgate: in the hope of a dynasty, he upheld the crescent; for the sake of a divorce, he bowed before the cross; the orphan of St. Louis, he became the adopted child of the Republic; and, with a parricidal ingrat.i.tude, on the ruins both of the throne and the tribune, he reared the throne of his despotism.

A professed Catholic, he imprisoned the Pope; a pretended patriot, he impoverished the country; and in the name of Brutus, he grasped without remorse, and wore without shame, the diadem of the Caesars.

The whole continent trembled at beholding the audacity of his designs, and the miracle of their execution. Skepticism bowed to the prodigies of his performance; romance a.s.sumed the air of history; nor was there aught too incredible for belief, or too fanciful for expectation, when the world saw a subaltern of Corsica waving his imperial flag over her most ancient capitals. All the visions of antiquity became commonplace in his contemplation: kings were his people; nations were his outposts; and he disposed of courts, and crowns, and camps, and churches, and cabinets, as if they were the t.i.tular dignitaries of the chessboard! Amid all these changes, he stood immutable as adamant. It mattered little whether in the field, or in the drawing-room; with the mob, or the levee; wearing the Jacobin bonnet, or the iron crown; banishing a Braganza, or espousing a Hapsburg; dictating peace on a raft to the Czar of Russia, or contemplating defeat at the gallows of Leipsic he was still the same military despot.

In this wonderful combination, his affectations of literature must not be omitted. The jailer of the press, he affected the patronage of letters; the proscriber of books, he encouraged philosophy; the persecutor of authors, and the murderer of printers, he yet pretended to the protection of learning; the a.s.sa.s.sin of Palm, the silencer of De Stael, and the denouncer of Kotzebue, he was the friend of David, the benefactor of De Lille, and sent his academic prize to the philosopher of England.

Such a medley of contradictions, and, at the same time, such an individual consistency, were never united in the same character. A royalist, a republican, and an emperor; a Mohammedan, a Catholic, and a patron of the synagogue; a subaltern and a sovereign; a traitor and a tyrant; a Christian and an infidel; he was, through all his vicissitudes, the same stern, impatient, inflexible original; the same mysterious, incomprehensible self; the man without a model, and without a shadow.

NOTES.--St. Louis (b. 1215, d. 1270), a wise and pious king of France, known as Louis IX. Napoleon was appointed to the Military School at Brienne, by Louis XVI. Brutus, Lucius Junius, abolished the royal office at Rome (509 B. C.), and ruled as consul for two years.

Jacobin Bonnet.--The Jacobins were a powerful political club during the first French Revolution. A peculiar bonnet or hat was their badge.

Braganza, the name of the royal family of Portugal. Maria of Portugal, and her father, Charles IV. of Spain, were both expelled by Napoleon.

Hapsburg, the name of the royal family of Austria. Napoleon's second wife was Maria Louisa, the daughter of the Emperor. Czar.--The treaty of Tilsit was agreed to between Bonaparte and the Czar Alexander on the river Memel.

Leipsic.--Napoleon was defeated by the allied forces, in October, 1813, at this city.

Palm, a German publisher, shot, in 1806, by order of Napoleon, for publishing a pamphlet against him. De Stael (pro. De Stal), a celebrated French auth.o.r.ess, banished from Paris, in 1802, by Napoleon. Kotzebue, an eminent German dramatist. David, the leading historical painter of his times in France. De Lille, an eminent French poet and professor.

XXIX. NAPOLEON AT REST. (146)

John Pierpont, 1785-1866, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, and graduated from Yale College in 1804. The next four years he spent as a private tutor in the family of Col. William Allston, of South Carolina. On his return, he studied law in the law school of his native town. He entered upon practice, but soon left the law for mercantile pursuits, in which he was unsuccessful. Having studied theology at Cambridge, in 1819 he was ordained pastor of the Hollis Street Unitarian Church, in Boston, where he continued nearly twenty years. He afterwards preached four years for a church in Troy, New York, and then removed to Medford, Ma.s.sachusetts. At the age of seventy-six, he became chaplain of a Ma.s.sachusetts regiment; but, on account of infirmity, war soon obliged to give up the position. Mr. Pierpont published a series of school readers, which enjoyed a well-deserved popularity for many years.

His poetry is smooth, musical, and vigorous. Most of his pieces were written for special occasions.

His falchion flashed along the Nile; His hosts he led through Alpine snows; O'er Moscow's towers, that blazed the while, His eagle flag unrolled,--and froze.

Here sleeps he now, alone! Not one Of all the kings, whose crowns he gave, Bends o'er his dust;--nor wife nor son Has ever seen or sought his grave.

Behind this seagirt rock! the star, That led him on from crown to crown, Has sunk; and nations from afar Gazed as it faded and went down.

High is his couch;--the ocean flood, Far, far below, by storms is curled; As round him heaved, while high he stood, A stormy and unstable world.

Alone he sleeps! The mountain cloud, That night hangs round him, and the breath Of morning scatters, is the shroud That wraps the conqueror's clay in death.

Pause here! The far-off world, at last, Breathes free; the hand that shook its thrones, And to the earth its miters cast, Lies powerless now beneath these stones.

Hark! comes there from the pyramids, And from Siberian wastes of snow, And Europe's hills, a voice that bids The world he awed to mourn him? No: The only, the perpetual dirge That's heard there is the sea bird's cry,-- The mournful murmur of the surge,-- The cloud's deep voice, the wind's low sigh.

NOTE.--Seagirt rock, the island of St. Helena, is in the Atlantic Ocean, nearly midway between Africa and South America. Napoleon was confined on this island six years; until 1821, when he died and was buried there. In 1841, his remains were removed to Paris.

x.x.x. WAR. (148)

Charles Sumner. 1811-1874, was born in Boston. He studied at the Latin school in his native city, graduated from Harvard University at the age of nineteen, studied law at the same inst.i.tution, and was admitted to practice in 1834. He at once took a prominent position in his profession, lectured to the law cla.s.ses at Cambridge for several successive years, wrote and edited several standard law books, and might have had a professorship in the law school, had he desired it. In his famous address on "The True Grandeur of Nations," delivered July 4, 1815, before the munic.i.p.al authorities of Boston, he took strong grounds against war among nations. In 1851 he was elected to the United States Senate and continued in that position till his death. As a jurist, as a statesman, as an orator, and as a profound and scholarly writer, Mr. Sumner stands high in the estimation of his countrymen. In physical appearance, Mr. Sumner was grand and imposing; men often turned to gaze after him, as he pa.s.sed along the streets of his native city.

I need not dwell now on the waste and cruelty of war. These stare us wildly in the face, like lurid meteor lights, as we travel the page of history. We see the desolation and death that pursue its demoniac footsteps. We look upon sacked towns, upon ravaged territories, upon violated homes; we behold all the sweet charities of life changed to wormwood and gall. Our soul is penetrated by the sharp moan of mothers, sisters, and daughters--of fathers, brothers, and sons, who, in the bitterness of their bereavement, refuse to be comforted. Our eyes rest at last upon one of these fair fields, where Nature, in her abundance, spreads her cloth of gold, s.p.a.cious and apt for the entertainment of mighty mult.i.tudes--or perhaps, from the curious subtlety of its position, like the carpet in the Arabian tale, seeming to contract so as to be covered by a few only, or to dilate so as to receive an innumerable host.

Here, under a bright sun, such as shone at Austerlitz or Buena Vista--amidst the peaceful harmonies of nature--on the Sabbath of peace--we behold bands of brothers, children of a common Father, heirs to a common happiness, struggling together in the deadly fight, with the madness of fallen spirits, seeking with murderous weapons the lives of brothers who have never injured them or their kindred. The havoc rages.

The ground is soaked with their commingling blood. The air is rent by their commingling cries. Horse and rider are stretched together on the earth. More revolting than the mangled victims, than the gashed limbs, than the lifeless trunks, than the spattering brains, are the lawless pa.s.sions which sweep, tempest-like, through the fiendish tumult.

Horror-struck, we ask, wherefore this hateful contest? The melancholy, but truthful answer comes, that this is the established method of determining justice between nations!

The scene changes. Far away on the distant pathway of the ocean two ships approach each other, with white canvas broadly spread to receive the flying gales. They are proudly built. All of human art has been lavished in their graceful proportions, and in their well compacted sides, while they look in their dimensions like floating happy islands on the sea. A numerous crew, with costly appliances of comfort, hives in their secure shelter. Surely these two travelers shall meet in joy and friendship; the flag at the masthead shall give the signal of friendship; the happy sailors shall cl.u.s.ter in the rigging, and even on the yardarms, to look each other in the face, while the exhilarating voices of both crews shall mingle in accents of gladness uncontrollable. It is not so. Not as brothers, not as friends, not as wayfarers of the common ocean, do they come together; but as enemies.

The gentle vessels now bristle fiercely with death-dealing instruments. On their s.p.a.cious decks, aloft on all their masts, flashes the deadly musketry. From their sides spout cataracts of flame, amidst the pealing thunders of a fatal artillery. They, who had escaped "the dreadful touch of merchant-marring rocks"--who had sped on their long and solitary way unharmed by wind or wave--whom the hurricane had spared--in whose favor storms and seas had intermitted their immitigable war--now at last fall by the hand of each other. The same spectacle of horror greets us from both ships. On their decks, reddened with blood, the murderers of St.

Bartholomew and of the Sicilian Vespers, with the fires of Smithfield, seem to break forth anew, and to concentrate their rage. Each has now become a swimming Golgotha. At length, these vessels--such pageants of the sea--once so stately--so proudly built--but now rudely shattered by cannon b.a.l.l.s--with shivered mast's and ragged sails--exist only as unmanageable wrecks, weltering on the uncertain waves, whose temporary lull of peace is now their only safety. In amazement at this strange, unnatural contest--away from country and home--where there is no country or home to defend--we ask again, wherefore this dismal duel? Again the melancholy but truthful answer promptly comes, that this is the established method of determining justice between nations.

NOTES.--Austerlitz, a small town in Austria, seventy miles north from Vienna. It is noted as the site of a battle, in December, 1805, between the allied Austrian and Russian armies, and the French under Napoleon. The latter were victorious. Buena Vista, a small hamlet in eastern Mexico, where, in 1847, five thousand Americans, under Gen. Taylor, defeated twenty thousand Mexicans, under Gen. Santa Anna.

Dreadful touch.--Quoted from Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene II.

St. Bartholomew.--A terrible ma.s.sacre took place in France, on St.

Bartholomew's day, August 24, 1572. It has been estimated that twenty thousand persons perished.

Sicilian Vespers, a revolt and uprising against the French in Sicily, March 30, 1282, at the hour of vespers.

Smithfield, a portion of London noted as a place for execution during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

x.x.xI. SPEECH OF WALPOLE IN REPROOF OF MR. PITT. (151)

Sir Robert Walpole, 1676-1745, was educated at Eton and Cambridge. He entered Parliament in 1700, and soon became a good debater and skillful tactician. He was prime minister of Great Britain from 1721 to 1742, in the reigns of George I. and George II. He was an able statesman; but has been accused of employing corruption or bribery on a large scale, to control Parliament and accomplish his purposes.