but approached by both with doubt, these are the conditions. Henry W. Grady. 22. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous, and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants generations hence. I see an old woman weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honored and held sacred in the other's soul than I was in the souls of both. I see that child who bore my name, a man, winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine; winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it faded away. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known. Charles Dickens. 23. They moved right on like soldiers in their ranks, stopping at nothing and straggling for nothing; they carried a broad furrow or wheal all across the country, black and loathsome, while it was as green and smiling on each. side of them and in front as it had been before they came. Before them, in the language of the prophets, was a paradise, and behind them a desert. They are daunted by nothing; they surmount walls and hedges, and enter enclosed gardens or inhabited houses. A rare and experimental vineyard has been planted in a sheltered grove. The high winds of Africa will not commonly allow the light trellis or the slim pole; but here the lofty poplar of Campania has been possible, on which the vine plant mounts so many yards into the air, that the poor grape gatherers bargain for a funeral pile and a tomb as one of the conditions of their engagement. The locusts have done what the winds and lightning could not do, and the whole promise of the vintage, leaves and all, is gone, and the oleander stems are laid bare. John Henry Newman. 24. Take one day; share it into sections; to each section appropriate its task; leave no stray, unemployed quarter of an hour, ten minutes, five minutes; include all; do each piece of business in its turn with method, with rigid regularity. The day will close almost before you are aware it has begun; and you will be indebted to no one for helping you to get rid of one vacant moment; you had to seek no one's company, consolation, sympathy, forbearance; you have lived, in short, as an independent being ought to do. - Charlotte Brontë. 25. All the triumphs of truth and genius over prejudice and power, in every country and in every age, have been the triumphs of Athens. Wherever a few great minds have made a stand against violence and fraud, in the cause of liberty and reason, there has been her spirit in the midst of them; inspiring, encouraging, consoling; by the lonely lamp of Erasmus; by the restless bed of Pascal; in the tribune of Mirabeau; in the cell of Galileo; on the scaffold of Sidney. But who shall estimate her influence on private happiness? Who shall say how many thousands have been made wiser, happier, and better, by those pursuits in which she has taught mankind to engage; to how many the studies which took their rise from her have been wealth in poverty, -liberty in bondage, health in sickness, society in solitude? Her power is indeed manifested at the bar, in the senate, in the field of battle, in the schools of philos ophy. But these are not her glory. Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain, - wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep, there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens. And when those who have rivaled her greatness shall have shared her fate; when civilization and knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant continents; when the scepter shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travelers from distant regions shall in vain labor to decipher on some moldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol, over the ruined dome of our proudest temple; and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts; her influence and her glory will still survive, - fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over which they exercised their control. -Thomas Babington Macaulay. APPENDIX I. HISTORICAL OUTLINE SKETCH OF THE Languages are the pedigree of nations. Dr. Johnson. WHEN first we hear of Britain it is inhabited by a people called Celts, speaking a language called Celtic. This early Celtic speech, in more or less modernized forms, is still used among the descendants of the Celts in Wales, in the highlands of Scotland, the Isle of Man, and in some parts of Ireland and Brittany. These Celts, we are told, were rude in appearance, savage in practices, and crude in the arts of civilization, but they revered their priestly rulers, were devoted to their native land, and had a passion for poetry, color, and rhythmic music. Celts. Celtic. Fifty-five years before the Christian era, Julius Roman Cæsar led his conquering Roman legions into Britain, Invasion. met the warlike but untrained Celts, and became their partial conqueror and their first historian. Neither Julius Cæsar, however, nor any of his Roman successors, were ever able to conquer the whole of the island of Britain. After suffering repeated defeats at the hands of the Romans, some of the Celts withdrew to mountain fast Roman Rule. |