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And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone!

Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years

Which keep in trust your storied tombs,
Behold! your sisters bring their tears,
And these memorial blooms.

Small tributes! but your shades will smile
More proudly on these wreaths to-day
Than when some cannon-moulded pile
Shall overlook this bay.

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground

Than where defeated valor lies,
By mourning beauty crowned!

DEMOCRACY.

JAMES RUSSELL Lowell.

I Do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. Things in possession have a very firm grip. One of the strongest cements of society is the conviction of mankind that the state of things into which they are born is part of the order of the universe, as natural, let us say, as that the sun should go round the earth. It is a conviction that they will not surrender except upon compulsion, and a wise society

should look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them.

For the individual man there is no radical cure outside of human nature itself for the evils to which human nature is heir. The rule will always hold good that you must

"Be your own palace or the world's your gaol."

But for artificial evils, for evils that spring from want of thought, thought must find a remedy somewhere. There has been no period of time in which wealth has been more sensible of its duties than now. It builds hospitals, it establishes missions among the poor, it endows schools. But all these remedies are partial and palliative merely. It is as if we should apply plasters to a single pustule of the small-pox with a view to driving out the disease. The true way is to discover and to extirpate the germs. As society is now consolidated, these are in the air it breathes, in the water it drinks, in things that seem and which it has always believed to be the most innocent and healthful. The evil elements it neglects corrupt these in their springs and pollute them in their courses.

Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come. The world has outlived much, and will outlive a great deal more. It has shown the strength of its constitution in nothing more than in surviving the quack medicines it has tried. In the scales of destinies brawn will never weigh so much as brain. Sure heal

ing is not in the storm, or in the whirlwind; it is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity.

THE CONFEDERATE SOLDIER.

HENRY W. GRADY.

You of the North have had drawn for you with a master's hand the picture of your returning armies. You have heard how, in the pomp and circumstance of war, they came back to you, marching with proud and victorious tread, reading their glory in a nation's eyes! Will you bear with me while I tell you of another army that sought its home at the close of the late war—an army that marched home in defeat and not in victory, in pathos and not in splendor, but in glory that equalled yours, and to hearts as loving as ever welcomed heroes home? Let me picture to you the footsore Confederate soldier, as, buttoning up in his faded gray jacket the parole which was to bear testimony to his children of his fidelity and faith, he turned his face southward from Appomattox in April, 1865. Think of him as ragged, half-starved, heavy-hearted, enfeebled by want and wounds; having fought to exhaustion, he surrenders his gun, wrings the hands of his comrades in silence, and lifting his tear-stained and pallid face for the last time to the graves that dot the old Virginia hills, pulls his gray cap over his brow and begins the slow and

painful journey. What does he find - let me ask you, who went to your homes eager to find in the welcome you had justly earned, full payment for four years' sacrifice what does he find when, having followed the battle-stained cross against overwhelming odds, dreading death not half so much as surrender, he reaches the home he left so prosperous and beautiful? He finds his house in ruins, his farm devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barns empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless; his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away; his people without law or legal status, his comrades slain, and the burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very traditions are gone; without money, credit, employment, material, or training; and beside all this, confronted with the gravest problem that ever met human intelligence the establishing of a status for the vast body of his liberated slaves.

What does he do- this hero in gray with a heart of gold? Does he sit down in sullenness and despair? Not for a day. Surely God, who had stripped him of his prosperity, inspired him in his adversity. As ruin was never before so overwhelming, never was restoration swifter. The soldier stepped from the trenches into the furrow; horses that had charged Federal guns marched before the plough, and fields that ran red with blood in April were green with the harvest in June ; Never was nobler duty confided to human hands than the uplifting and upbuilding of the prostrate and bleeding South, misguided, perhaps, but beautiful in her suf

fering; and honest, brave, and generous always. In the record of her social, industrial, and political evolution we await with confidence the verdict of the world.

BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC.

JULIA WARD HOWE.

MINE eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword;

His truth is marching on.

I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling

camps;

They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.

His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:

"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace

shall deal;

Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with

his heel,

Since God is marching on."

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