cing to backsliders. This much I should
have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and
stones, and had none to cry to but with the prophet, 'O earth, earth,
earth!' to tell the very soil itself what its perverse inhabitants are
deaf to; nay, though what I have spoken should prove (which Thou suffer
not, who didst make mankind free; nor Thou next, who didst redeem us
from being servants of sin) to be the last words of our expiring
liberties."

THE CITY OF A DAY.

The writer, when residing in Lowell, in 1843 contributed this and the
companion pieces to 'The Stranger' in Lowell.

This, then, is Lowell,--a city springing up, like the enchanted palaces
of the Arabian tales, as it were in a single night, stretching far and
wide its chaos of brick masonry and painted shingles, filling the angle
of the confluence of the Concord and the Merrimac with the sights and
sounds of trade and industry. Marvellously here have art and labor
wrought their modern miracles. I can scarcely realize the fact that a
few years ago these rivers, now tamed and subdued to the purposes of man
and charmed into slavish subjection to the wizard of mechanism, rolled
unchecked towards the ocean the waters of the Winnipesaukee and the
rock-rimmed springs of the White Mountains, and rippled down their falls
in the wild freedom of Nature. A stranger, in view of all this
wonderful change, feels himself, as it were, thrust forward into a new
century; he seems treading on the outer circle of the millennium of
steam engines and cotton mills. Work is here the patron saint.
Everything bears his image and superscription. Here is no place for
that respectable class of citizens called gentlemen, and their much
vilified brethren, familiarly known as loafers. Over the gateways of
this new world Manchester glares the inscription, "Work, or die".
Here

"Every worm beneath the moon
Draws different threads, and late or soon
Spins, toiling out his own cocoon."

The founders of this city probably never dreamed of the theory of
Charles Lamb in respect to the origin of labor:--

"Who first invented work, and thereby bound
The holiday rejoicing spirit down
To the never-ceasing importunity
Of business in the green fields and the town?

"Sabbathless Satan,--he who his unglad
Task ever plies midst rotatory burnings
For wrat