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than he seems able to bear, the dose of Bromide may be increased to thirty or even forty grains; or, be taken more frequently in the original prescription.

After the third day, there will be marked improvement, the skin will assume a natural hue and sensation, he will be able to eat with some appetite, to sit up, and to move about, firmly though feebly; but the great change will be in his brain.

There will come to him new thoughts with a vividness and force that will cause him to laugh aloud with delight.

His ideas will arrange themselves clearly and logically, where before all was chaotic and confused.

As his appetite grows, and his system begins to feel the strength, food-given, his muscles will strengthen, his will become elastic in his movements, and strength will come to him as by a miracle.

There can be nothing in earth's warfare that can give that sublime consciousness of well-doing, which is so intensely felt after those days of terrible suffering.

He is respected; his utterances are regarded with their due consideration; his friends and those who understand through what a "Valley of the Shadow of Death" he has passed, respect him; and even his former boon companions appreciate a courage and fortitude which they have not the faith in themselves to imitate.

In his daily duties, be they professional, artistic, or business, he will find that he is gifted with new vigor and judgment. His imagination is stimulated far beyond the power of alcohol, because it is natural now, and a part of "the Divinity within.”

And finally, the demoralization of the soul, that always follows, and forever debases the habitual inebriate, is gone forever. His ideas of right, justice, and virtue have ceased to be perverted. Deeds which he would have performed, and scenes in which he would willingly have acted a part, but a few short weeks ago, he now looks upon with scorn and

abhorrence. And in rectitude of intention and act, and the supremest effort of his intellectual and physical capacity, he may now live his life,-if? yes, if

If he do not go back.

There will be no need of it.

He will have no craving for liquor. On the contrary, he will have formed for himself an absolute hatred and detestation of it.

It is not this against which he must guard himself.

It is, first, against the efforts of drinkers who may endeavor to induce him to join them. Second, against giving way to petty annoyances and disappointments, and seeking to drown care.

Third, against overwork.

Let him remember that the years of dissipation, in which his system has been going through a condition of partial destruction of the nerve-fibre and the tissues and the brain matter, must require years in which to recuperate.

He must not overwork himself. He can now do more work in two hours than he did before in eight, so let him not work six.

Let him deal with life, and especially his own life, philosophically, and having done a fair amount of work, accept the needed boon of rest.

And should he find head or brain failing him at any moment, let him cease work altogether, and take relaxation in the open air, in music, or in the society of friends!

And, above all, let him never, under any circumstances whatsoever, by the inducement of friends, by the advice of a physician, or on account of any need or temptation that may assail him, suffer himself to be betrayed into taking the first glass!

For therein the secret lies; and as we said in the beginning, the willing and the strong man, if he follow these rules, may, by the grace of God, be his " Own Inebriate Asylum." And so he may step again into the arena of life, armed and equipped anew for its daily struggles; with the serene consciousness of his weakness and his strength to guide him

and to guard him in the future; and the soul-stirring conviction, moreover, as an incentive for exertion, and for continuance in the course he has chosen,

that he has displayed his truest manhood and supremest nobility of character and strength of will-power, by fighting it out himself.

1

OUR EARLIEST ANNALIST.

As I was sitting, this morning, in my library, indulging myself in the halfhour's dreaminess with which one sometimes runs over the thoughts and the work of a week that is ended, before he girds himself up to the work of the week that is beginning, my eye instinctively fell upon the shelves on which the histories of the United States stand side by side, with a suggestiveness of harmony not always realized in the lives of their authors. Their number, indeed, is not large; and yet, perhaps, full as large as might have been expected from a national life so short as ours has been, when compared with the lives of the historic nations of the Old World. It is only when the road which we are travelling begins to grow plain before us, that we find pleasure in turning to look upon the part which we have already passed over. And then, for nations, as for individuals, the gazing is often of that kind to which Dante likens his own at the entrance of his mysterious journey:

E come quei che con lena affannata
Uscito fuor del pelago alla riva

Si volge all 'acqua porigliosa e guata: "And even as he, who, with distressful breath, Forth issuing from the sea upon the shore, Turns to the water perilous and gazes." For it is in the record of the strugglings and wild tossings upon this "water perilous " that the great charm of history lies; and it is in the successful "issuing" from it, or in the hopeless shipwreck on it, that her lessons of encouragement or of warning are found. We now have lessons to give as well as to receive those two shelves hold the record of all of them but this last and greatest, whose end is still in the future. It is a checkered story, with an evershifting play of light and shade, with

grand figures moving about in it, and faces, some stern and some thoughtful, and some fair and lovely, and some fiendlike and hateful, looking out upon us from it. It is our past-the past wherein the lives from which we hold our lives, began-the duties from which our duties spring were shaped out for us-the hopes grew which we have seen pass into realities, and other hopes made possible which shall, one day, become realities for our children.

But it is not for these lessons that my eye lingers upon these volumes now. It is of their authors that I am thinkingthe men who made this record the work of their lives, and built upon it their hopes of usefulness and fame. What manner of men were they? What led them to do this work, and what kind of a spirit did they bring to the doing of it? Let me give an hour to them, before I go back to my own.

First come two solid octavos, clad in black, as their author went clad through his long and laborious life. "Holmes' Annals of America" is printed in pale gilt letters on their backs; and, as I read the name, they suddenly shoot up into huge elms; the green carpet of my study-floor becomes the soft green turf of Cambridge Common; and before me stands a quaint old house, with comprehensive gamble roof and two sober stories, with a modest side-door looking towards the Common, and a front door of somewhat more pretension, opening upon a spacious yard. From one doorstep you look by the colleges down into the heart of the village-the very road over which the British troops marched to Lexington six weeks ago. From the other you look across the Common to the stately elm under which Whitefield once preached, and Washington, before

another six weeks are passed, will draw his sword, for the first time, as commander-in-chief of the armies of the United Colonies. Before each door paces a sentinel in homespun, with a fowling-piece on his shoulder instead of a musket, and an old brass-hilted hanger at his side instead of a bayonet. His cartouche-box is an ox-horn, neatly polished like the goat-horn bow of Pandarus, and he carries his bullets in a leather pouch. As he paces to and fro, he hums a sober air "entuned in his nose," like the "service devyne" of Chaucer's Prioress. And now I hear a clattering of hoofs: four men in uniform ride up to the door, dismount, and enter-generals, all of them, with the burthen of a great creation resting on them, and giving a certain dignity to their bearing; but, despite their swords and epaulettes, the military air is wanting; they are civilians still; as, despite their holsters and housings, their horses are farm-horses still. The sentinels stop short in their walk as they see them come, and make an awkward attempt at a salute as they pass into the house. Their answer is but little better. That broad and brawny-shouldered man, with a face burnt brown by exposure, is Israel Putnam. All the little boys in the admiring group on the square have heard the story of his fight with the wolf, and look up to him with envious wonder. There is more pretension in the air and bearing of the man at his side; he has evidently read more books and seen better society, and thinks none the less of himself for it. That is Heath; and the one next to him is Thomas, for whom the small-pox is lying in wait in Canada. Last of all comes a man with clear blue eyes, lambent with light from within, and a spacious forehead covering a brain that seldom rests, and lips that seemed formed to bear the play of a pleasant smile, or compress into the firm utterance of prompt and immovable decision. That is the Quaker anchor-smith, Nathanael Greene. The blue and buff and the silver epaulettes still look strangely on those shoulders, accustomed from childhood to the

peaceful drab; and in his gait there is an unmilitary halt. An early death is in wait for him also, but not until the work that called him from his forge on the banks of the pleasant Potowomut is done. What brings these men together on this 5th of June, 1775? It is the first council of war of the Revolution; and General Ward, who has made his headquarters here, is waiting within for his brother-generals.

Eleven days pass, and another council is held here, and the committee of safety meet with them. Greene is in Rhode Island, but Warren is here; and, after the council, there is an ominous hurrying to and fro, and men gather hastily on the little square at beat of drum. Bunker Hill battle is hanging over the heads of these fathers and husbands and brothers, and from this very house the signal comes. In which of its rooms did Warren lay his aching head, for the last time, on a bloodless pillow?

Then, all the vision passes as suddenly as it came-generals and sentinels and soldiers and anxious crowd; all but the quaint old house. And now I see a man in black go daily in and out at that door, and sometimes he holds by the hand a little boy. The father is thoughtfully revolving some Scripture text for next Sunday's sermon, or working out in thought some question of American history. But with what is that boy, with eye already glancing from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven, feeding his young mind? What does he see that makes him break out into that sudden laugh? Of what is he thinking, that calls up that sudden tear? Ah! the sacred gift has already begun its work in his young brain, and is stirring his young heart in its mysterious depths. By-and-by both brain and heart will find utterance in sweet verse.

And, if we study well the father's face, we shall find in that, also, the traces of a life worth recording. Measure it by outside facts, indeed, and there is not much to tell. A few sentences may be made to hold all this part of it. Let us try.

His name was Abiel Holmes, and

they who prize such things will not fail to remind us that Divinitatis Doctor should be added to it. He was born at Woodstock, in Connecticut, in 1764; lost his father in 1779; graduated at Yale in 1783; went to Georgia for his health, and, in 1785, became pastor of the Congregationalist church at Midway. The search of health drove him North again in 1791, and, the year following, he was called to the First Congregationalist church in Cambridge, where he remained till a doctrinal division separated him from part of his parishioners, in 1832. On the 4th of June, 1837, he died. He was married twice, and left four children. Thirty printed sermons and disquisitions, a "Life of President Stiles," and the "Annals of America," show how industriously his seventy-three years were spent. A meagre life, this side of it, you will say; but is this the only side?

Born in 1764. Why, this was the beginning of a new epoch in our colonial history. The treaty of Paris had just been signed, giving peace to the thirteen colonies, and telling Puritan New England and Catholic Canada that they were henceforth to live together like sisters. Our tender mother, too, was looking to us for the means of paying her debts, and our paternal sovereign was looking to us for the means of building himself a palace fit for the king of three kingdoms and countless miles of colonies, to live in. The right to levy stamp-duties was voted on the 10th of March; the sugar act on the 5th of April. In May, Sam Adams wrote the Massachusetts Protest, under the form of instructions from the town of Boston to her representatives. James Otis published his "Rights of the British Colonies." The episcopal question, under the guise of a controversy between Apthorpe and Mayhew, was in its second year. What a turbid and ominous season for an historian to be born in!

And then, just in the very flush of youth, just in the age when that Lapland song proves truest,

"A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,"

the battle of Lexington was fought. And next, just as he was coming, at Yale, under the eye of his future fatherin-law, President Stiles, his own father died, leaving him for legacy the record of honorable service as surgeon in the army of the Revolution. The footprints of Dwight and Trumbull and Humphreys and Barlow, were still fresh in the halls of this early nurse of American genius. The "Conquest of Canaan" was daily growing under the eye of its aspiring author. Merry peals of approving laughter had already greeted the first cantos of McFingal. Barlow was meditating the "Vision of Columbus;" and fond friends were confidently claiming a sprig from the young laurel for the genial Humphreys.

Had these things nothing to do with the growth of this unfolding mind-no part in the shaping of its aspirations and hopes? Was there no subtle thread binding them all together, and connecting a great success with one questionable and one unquestionable failure? Did young Holmes never think, as he listened to the praises of the three-and their praises were on many lips in those days-"The poet's place is taken; who shall take the historian's?"

Mystery of the human heart, impene trable, unfathomable! Laurels of Miltiades! how many sleepless nights have you cost the Miltiades of every age and of every field of human endeavor!

But there was another influence, and an acknowledged and accepted one.

Among the great names of that period of our colonial history, which runs into the beginning of our national history, there was none greater in the world of letters than the name of Ezra Stiles. Born under the "blue laws," he accepted their rigorous interpretation of Christian duty; but born, too, with a thirst for knowledge and a sincere reverence for all its forms, his vigorous mind soon outgrew the uncongenial restraint, and the stern theologian became the true Christian. How wide the

range of his inquiries, how comprehensive the grasp of his intellect, how varied his reading, and how profound his researches, his pupil has told us in his first essay in historical composition. Oriental learning was in its dawn amongst us, but Stiles made himself master of Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, and Arabic, and addressed to Sir William Jones written inquiries upon the Sanscrit. Franklin sent him a Fahrenheit thermometer, and he immediately began a course of observations with it, which he continued through a series of years. Knowledge for knowledge sake, a passionate longing to trace the history and penetrate to the reason of things, seems to have directed the employment of all his leisure hours; the others were given, during the first part of his life, to his pulpit and his parishioners, and, when he became President of Yale, to his pupils. Forty manuscript volumes bear witness to his industry. Were these stores of learning, and this assiduous gathering of them, of no account in the daily intercourse of teacher and pupil ?

But there was another treasure under the venerable President's control, whose influence upon the pupil's mind could not be called in question. He had daughters, and the exact when, whether as junior or senior, or candidate for orders, we do not know-the young student could not look upon Mary Stiles without saying to himself that it would be a great thing to be the son-in-law of such a man and the husband of such a maiden. Long or short, there must have been some pleasant scenes in the courtship, some efforts, on the part of the young student, to listen respectfully to the father's disquisitions on Hebrew and Syriac and Arabic, all of which, he confidently asserted, could be learnt in less time than a single modern language, and to read the while-Arabic was nothing to it-the secret meaning that lurked in the eye of the daughter. But perhaps the Doctor remembered that, although old now, he had once been young, and withdrew considerately to his study. However this may be, he

smiled upon the lovers. "I have married my daughter Mary," he writes, in his reflections on his sixty-fourth birthday, "to the Rev. Mr. Holmes, and parted with them both for the distant and dangerous climate of Georgia." Is there not a touch of professional pride in the Reverend? There surely is of pathos in the "parted with them both;" and, as I read the "distant and dangerous," as connected with Georgia, I can hardly help thinking that Goldsmith's

"Thro' torrid tracts with fainting steps they go Where wild Altamah murmurs to their woe"

was running in the good man's head, and adding the strength of a vivid picture to the pious ejaculation with which the paragraph closes: "I commend them to the grace of God."

And thus responsible life was fairly begun: a wife to love and provide for, a congregation to watch over and guide. How the heart must have sent out its tendrils under the hourly influence of such inspirations! This Georgia life must have had its share in the growth of his mind. The negro and cotton were already in the half-peopled State, and he must often have heard the planter say, "Shall we ever be able to get that little black seed out of the cottonpod fast enough to make our negroes and our broad fields profitable?" And even now, on the banks of the Savannah, under the roof under which the Rhode Island Greene died, a Connecticut boy, who had followed close upon Holmes' footprints at Yale, had heard the anxious question, and was working out the answer. The young clergyman saw the struggle between the productive power of nature and the controlling power of man; saw the current of agriculture and commerce suddenly turned by the application of a simple machine, which the dullest intellect could understand and the most awkward hand could manage. Could he see it without connecting it with the revolution produced by Arkwright and Hargreaves and Crompton, and seeing the whole question of man's conquest and control of the physical world rise up before his

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