iving fire--
When He beholds on earth so strange a wonder,
All peoples kneeling to a common Sire!

Prophets and priests have from primeval ages
Drenched all mankind in seas of human gore;
Jurists and statesmen, orators and sages,
Have deepened gulfs, which boundless were before;
_The merchant sails, where'er an ocean rages,
Bridges its depths, and throws the Rainbow o'er!_

All hail! ye founders of Pacific's glory,
Who serve bold Commerce at his mightiest shrine:
Your names shall live in endless song and story,
When black Oblivion flings her pall o'er mine;
And when these walls shall totter, quaint and hoary,
Bards still shall sing, your mission was Divine!

[Decoration]

[Decoration]

III.

_THE DESERTED SCHOOLHOUSE._

"Oh! never may a son of thine,
Where'er his wand'ring steps incline,
Forget the sky which bent above
His childhood, like a dream of love."

--WHITTIER.

There is no silence like that sombre gloom which sometimes settles down
upon the deserted playgrounds, the unoccupied benches, and the voiceless
halls of an old schoolhouse. But if, in addition to abandonment, the
fingers of decay have been busy with their work; if the moss has been
permitted to grow, and the mould to gather; if the cobwebs cluster, like
clouds, in all the corners, and the damp dust incrusts the window-panes
like the frosts of a northern winter; if the old well has caved in, and
the little paths through the brushwood been smothered, and the fences
rotted down, and the stile gone to ruin, then a feeling of utter
desolation seizes upon the soul, which no philosophy can master, no
recollections soothe, and no lapse of time dissipate.

Perchance a lonely wanderer may be observed, traversing the same scenes
which many years ago were trodden by his ungrown feet, looking pensively
at each tree which sheltered his boyhood, peeping curiously under the
broken benches on which he once sat, and turning over most carefully
with his cane every scrap of old paper, that strangely enough had
survived the winds and the rains of many winters.

Such a schoolhouse now stands near the little village of Woodville, in
the State of North Carolina, and such a wanderer was I in the autumn of
1852.

Woodville was the scene of my first studies, my earliest adventures, and
my nascent loves. There I was taught t