hought so once; yet the land of Priam lives
only in song. Thebes thought so once; yet her hundred gates have
crumbled, and her very tombs are but as the dust they were vainly
intended to commemorate. So thought Palmyra; where is she? So thought
the countries of Demosthenes and the Spartan; yet Leonidas is trampled
by the timid slave, and Athens insulted by the servile, mindless, and
enervate Ottoman. In his hurried march, Time has but looked at their
imagined immortality, and all its vanities, from the palace to the tomb,
have, with their ruins, erased the very impression of his footsteps.
The days of their glory are as if they had never been; and the island
that was then a speck, rude and neglected, in the barren ocean, now
rivals the ubiquity of their commerce, the glory of their arms, the fame
of their philosophy, the eloquence of their senate, and the inspiration
of their bards. Who shall say, then, contemplating the past, that
England, proud and potent as she appears, may not one day be what Athens
is, and the young America yet soar to be what Athens was. Who shall say,
when the European column shall have moldered, and the night of barbarism
obscured its very ruins, that that mighty continent may not emerge from
the horizon, to rule, for its time, sovereign of the ascendant.

LAND OF LIBERTY.

WENDELL PHILLIPS, "the silver-tongued orator of America," and
anti-slavery reformer. Born in Boston, Mass., November 29, 1811;
died, February 2, 1884.

The Carpathian Mountains may shelter tyrants. The slopes of Germany may
bear up a race more familiar with the Greek text than the Greek phalanx.
For aught I know, the wave of Russian rule may sweep so far westward as
to fill once more with miniature despots the robber castles of the
Rhine. But of this I am sure: God piled the Rocky Mountains as the
ramparts of freedom. He scooped the Valley of the Mississippi as the
cradle of free States. He poured Niagara as the anthem of free men.

THE SHIP COLUMBIA.

EDWARD G. PORTER. In an article entitled "The Ship Columbia and the
Discovery of Oregon," in the _New England Magazine_, June, 1892.

Few ships, if any, in our merchant marine, since the organization of
the republic, have acquired such distinction as the Columbia.

By two noteworthy achievements, 100 years ago, she attracted the
attention of the commercial world and rendered a service to the United
States unparalleled in our history. _She was