its; when deprest the most,
By great, enthusiastic impulse driven
To deeds of highest daring.

WRAPPED IN A VISION GLORIOUS.

The Rev. JOHN LORD, LL. D., a popular American lecturer and
Congregational minister. Born in Portsmouth, N. H., December 27,
1810.

Wrapped up in those glorious visions which come only to a man of
superlative genius, and which make him insensible to heat and cold and
scanty fare, even to reproach and scorn, this intrepid soul, inspired by
a great and original idea, wandered from city to city, and country to
country, and court to court, to present the certain greatness and wealth
of any state that would embark in his enterprise. But all were alike
cynical, cold, unbelieving, and even insulting. He opposes overwhelming
universal and overpowering ideas. To have surmounted these amid such
protracted opposition and discouragment constitutes his greatness; and
finally to prove his position by absolute experiment and hazardous
enterprise makes him one of the greatest of human benefactors, whose
fame will last through all the generations of men. And as I survey that
lonely, abstracted, disappointed, and derided man--poor and unimportant;
so harassed by debt that his creditors seized even his maps and charts;
obliged to fly from one country to another to escape imprisonment;
without even listeners and still less friends, and yet with
ever-increasing faith in his cause; utterly unconquerable; alone in
opposition to all the world--I think I see the most persistent man of
enterprise that I have read of in history. Critics ambitious to say
something new may rake out slanders from the archives of enemies and
discover faults which derogate from the character we have been taught to
admire and venerate; they may even point out spots, which we can not
disprove, in that sun of glorious brightness which shed its beneficent
rays over a century of darkness--but this we know, that whatever may be
the force of detraction, his fame has been steadily increasing, even on
the admission of his slanderers, for three centuries, and that he now
shines as a fixed star in the constellation of the great lights of
modern times, not only because he succeeded in crossing the ocean when
once embarked on it, but for surmounting the moral difficulties which
lay in his way before he could embark upon it, and for being finally
instrumental in conferring the greatest boon that our world has received
from any mort