These principles of grammar applied to the study of poetical selections are of great value in making their meaning clear.

The beauties of poetry can never be fully appreciated until the grammatical constructions, as herein outlined, are somewhat familiar to the pupils.

Each teacher will use these selections for the kind of study best suited to develop the power of the class. The theme for study may be the real merit of short sentences easily understood; the more involved thought of long sentences, requiring considerable study; the value of a single paragraph by itself, or in its relation to other paragraphs in the selection; the grouping of sentences or of paragraphs; or a selection as a whole. In every case the unity of the sentence should be made prominent. Although some of the most beautiful sentences in our language are long, and somewhat involved, it must be borne in mind that young writers seldom have occasion to use sentences of great length.

CXXXVIII.- ELOQUENCE OF O'CONNELL.

Broadly considered, O'Connell's eloquence has never been equalled in modern times, certainly not in English speech. Do you think I am partial? I will vouch John Randolph of Roanoke, himself an orator of no mean level. Hearing O'Connell, he exclaimed: "This is the man, these are the lips, the most eloquent that speak the English tongue in my day!" I think he was right. I

remember the solemnity of Webster, the grace of Everett, the rhetoric of Choate; I know the eloquence that lay in the iron logic of Calhoun; I have melted beneath the magnetism of Sergeant S. Prentiss of Mississippi, who wielded a power few men ever had; it has been my fortune to sit at the feet of the great speakers of the English tongue on the other side of the ocean; but I think all of them together never surpassed, and no one of them ever equalled, O'Connell.

Never,

Nature intended him for our Demosthenes. since the great Greek, has she sent forth any one so lavishly gifted for his work as a tribune of the people. In the first place, he had a magnificent presence, impressive in bearing, massive, like that of Jupiter. Webster himself hardly outdid him in the majesty of his proportions. To be sure, he had not Webster's craggy face and precipice of brow, nor his eyes glowing like anthracite coal. Nor had he the lion roar of Mirabeau. But his presence filled the eye. A small O'Connell would hardly have been an O'Connell at all. So it was with O'Connell; there was something majestic in his presence before he spoke, and he added to it what Webster had not, but Clay might have lent, grace. Lithe as a boy, at seventy, every attitude a picture, every gesture a grace, he was still all nature, nothing but nature seemed to speak all over him. With the slightest possible Irish brogue, he would tell a story, while all Exeter Hall shook with laughter. The next moment, tears in his voice like a Scotch song, five thousand men wept.

WENDELL PHILLIPS.

CXXXIX. - FROM "THE DESERTED VILLAGE.”

Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,

Where health and plenty cheer'd the laboring swain,

Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,

And parting summer's lingering blooms delay'd;
Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,
Seats of my youth, when every sport could please,
How often have I loiter'd o'er thy green,

Where humble happiness endear'd each scene!
How often have I paus'd on every charm,

The shelter'd cot, the cultivated farm,
The never-failing brook, the busy mill,

The decent church that topt the neighboring hill,
The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,
For talking age and whispering lovers made!
How often have I blest the coming day,
When toil remitting lent its turn to play,
And all the village train, from labor free,
Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree;
While many a pastime circled in the shade,
The young contending as the old survey'd;
And many a gambol frolick'd o'er the ground,
And sleights of art and feats of strength went round;
And still, as each repeated pleasure tir'd,
Succeeding sports the mirthful band inspir'd;
The dancing pair that simply sought renown,
By holding out, to tire each other down;
The swain mistrustless of his smutted face,
While secret laughter titter'd round the place;
The bashful virgin's sidelong looks of love,

The matron's glance that would those looks reprove: These were thy charms, sweet village! sports like these, With sweet succession, taught e'en toil to please;

These round thy bowers their cheerful influence shed, These were thy charms, but all these charms are fled.

Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the plain!

Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn ;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green;

One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain.
No more thy glassy brook reflects the day,
But choked with sedges works its weedy way;
Along thy glades, a solitary guest,

The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest;
Amidst thy desert-walks the lapwing flies,
And tires their echoes with unvaried cries.
Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,
And the long grass o'ertops the mouldering wall;
And, trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's hand,
Far, far away thy children leave the land.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroy'd, can never be supplied.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

CXL. EXTRACT FROM DANIEL WEBSTER'S BUNKER HILL ORATION.

"VENERABLE MEN! you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives, that you might behold this joyous day. You are now where you stood fifty years ago, this very hour, with your brothers and your neighbors, shoulder to shoulder, in the strife for your country. Behold, how altered! The same heavens are indeed over your heads; the same ocean rolls at your feet; but all else how changed! You hear now no roar of hostile cannon, you see no mixed volumes of smoke and flame rising from burning Charlestown. The ground strewed with the dead and dying; the impetuous charge; the steady and successful repulse; the loud call to repeated assault; the summoning of all that is manly to repeated resistance; a thousand bosoms freely and fearlessly bared in an instant to whatever of terror there may be in war and death, all these you have witnessed, but you witness them no All is peace."

more.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.