gave the word of command by the voice of Buttrick, at Concord, and was in the bosom of Parker at Lexington. It was South Carolina whose lightning stroke smote the invader by the arm of Marion and whose wisdom guided the framers of the Constitution through the lips of Rutledge and Gadsden and Pinckney.

The citizen on great occasions knows and obeys the voice of his country as he knows and obeys an individual voice, whether it appeal to a base or ignoble or to a generous or noble passion. "Sons

of France, awake to glory," told the French youth what was the dominant passion in the bosom of France and it awoke a corresponding sentiment in his own. Under its spell he marched through Europe and overthrew her kingdoms and empires and felt in Egypt that forty centuries were looking down on him from the Pyramids. But at last, one June morning in Trafalgar Bay, there was another utterance, more quiet in its tone, but speaking also with a personal and individual voice, "England expects every man to do his duty."

At the sight of Nelson's immortal signal, dutyloving England and glory-loving France met as they have met on many an historic battlefield before and since, and the lover of duty proved the stronger. The England that expected every man

to do his duty was as real a being to the humblest sailor in Nelson's fleet as the mother that bore him.

The title of our American States to their equality under this admirable arrangement depends not on area or upon numbers but upon character and upon personality. Fancy a league or a confederacy in which Athens or Sparta were united with Persia or Babylon or Nineveh and their political power were to be reckoned in proportion to their numbers or their size.

I have sometimes fancied South Carolina and Massachusetts, those two illustrious and heroic sisters, instead of sitting apart, one under her palm trees and the other under her pines, one with the hot gales from the tropics fanning her brow and the other on the granite rocks by her icebound shores, meeting together and comparing notes and stories as sisters born of the same mother compare notes and stories after a long separation. How the old estrangements, born of ignorance of each other, would have melted away.

GENIUS

ORVILLE DEWEY

Orville Dewey, minister, lecturer, and writer, was born in Sheffield, Mass., March 28, 1794, and died there March 21, 1882. His diction is refined, rich, and ennobling, and as a speaker he was successful both in the pulpit and on the

platform. His thoughts are beautifully expressed by words that flow freely, and convey the meaning instantly and clearly.

THE

HE favorite idea of a genius among us, is of one who never studies, or who studies, nobody can tell when at midnight, or at odd times and intervals and now and then strikes out, at a heat, as the phrase is, some wonderful production. This is a character that has figured largely in the history of our literature, in the persons of our Fieldings, our Savages, and our Steeles "Loose fellows about town," or loungers in the country, who slept in ale-houses and wrote in barrooms, who took up the pen as a magician's wand to supply their wants, and when the pressure of necessity was relieved, resorted again to their carousals.

Your real genius is an idle, irregular, vagabond sort of personage, who muses in the fields or dreams by the fireside; whose strong impulses that is the cant of it must needs hurry him into wild irregularities or foolish eccentricities; who abhors order, and can bear no restraint, and eschews all labor: such a one, for instance, as Newton or Milton! What! they must have been irregular, else they were no geniuses!

"The young man," it is often said, "has genius

enough, if he would only study." Now the truth is, as I shall take the liberty to state it, that genius will study, it is that in the mind which does study; that is the very nature of it. I care not to say

that it will always use books.

All study is not reading, any more than all reading is study. Study, says Cicero, is the voluntary and vigorous application of the mind to any subject.

Such study, such intense mental action, and nothing else, is genius. And so far as there is any native predisposition about this enviable character of mind, it is a predisposition to that action. This is the only test of the original bias; and he who does not come to that point, though he may have shrewdness, and readiness, and parts, never had a genius.

No need to waste regrets upon him, as that he never could be induced to give his attention or study to anything; he never had that which he is supposed to have lost. For attention it isthough other qualities belong to this transcendent power attention is it, that is the very soul of genius: not the fixed eye, not the poring over a book, but the fixed thought. It is, in fact, an action of the mind which is steadily concentrated upon one idea or one series of ideas, which collects in one point the rays of the soul till they

search, penetrate, and fire the whole train of its thoughts.

And while the fire burns within, the outward man may indeed be cold, indifferent, and negligent, absent in appearance; he may be an idler, or a wanderer, apparently without aim or intent; but still the fire burns within. And what though "it burst forth" at length, as has been said, "like volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, native force? " It only shows the intenser action of the elements beneath. What though it breaks like lightning from the cloud? The electric fire had been collecting in the firmament through many a silent, calm, and clear day.

What though the might of genius appears in one decisive blow, struck in some moment of high debate, or at the crisis of a nation's peril? That mighty energy, though it may have heaved in the breast of a Demosthenes, was once a feeble infant's thought. A mother's eye watched over its dawning. A father's care guarded its early growth. It soon trod with youthful steps the halls of learning, and found other fathers to wait and to watch for it, even as it finds them here.

It went on; but silence was upon its path, and the deep strugglings of the inward soul marked its progress, and the cherishing powers of nature