Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor's tread,
Or know the conquered knee ;
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea.

Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave!
Her thunders shook the mighty deep
And there should be her grave.
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,

And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!

RIGHT OF FREE DISCUSSION.

DANIEL WEbster.

It is the ancient and constitutional right of this people to canvass public measures, and the merits of public men. It is a home-bred right, -a fireside privilege. It has ever been enjoyed in every house, cottage, and cabin in the nation. It is as undoubted as the right of breathing the air and walking on the earth.

This high constitutional privilege I shall defend and exercise within this House and without this House, and

in all places, in time of war, in time of peace, and at all times. Living, I will assert it; dying, I will assert it; and, should I leave no other legacy to my children, by the blessing of God, I will leave them the inheritance of free principles, and the example of a manly, independent, and constitutional defence of them!

MASSACHUSETTS.

DANIEL WEbster.

There she is -be

There is her history

MR. PRESIDENT, I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts-she needs none. hold her and judge for yourselves. -the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, fallen in the great struggle for independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every state, from New England to Georgia; and there they will lie forever.

And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood, and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it; if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it; if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed to separate it from that Union by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the

side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; it will stretch forth its arm with whatever of vigor it may still retain, over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amid the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.

ANDRE'S LAST REQUEST.

NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.

IT is not the fear of death
That damps my brow;
It is not for another breath
I ask thee now;

I can die with a lip unstirred,
And a quiet heart-

Let but this prayer be heard
Ere I depart.

I can give up my mother's look -
My sister's kiss ;

I can think of love-yet brook

A death like this!

I can give up the young fame

I burned to win;

All but the spotless name
I glory in.

Thine is the power to give,

Thine to deny,

Joy for the hour I live,
Calmness to die.

By all the brave should cherish,
By my dying breath,

I ask that I may perish

By a soldier's death.

THE NEWS FROM LEXINGTON.

GEORGE Bancroft.

DARKNESS closed upon the country and upon the town; but it was no night for sleep. Heralds on swift. relays of horses transmitted the war-message from hand to hand, till village repeated it to village; the sea to the backwoods; the plains to the highlands; and it was never suffered to droop till it had been borne North. and South and East and West throughout the land. It spread over the bays that receive the Saco and the Penobscot. Its loud reveille broke the rest of the trappers of New Hampshire, and, ringing like buglenotes from peak to peak, overleapt the Green Mountains, swept onward to Montreal, and descended the ocean river, till the responses were echoed from the cliffs of Quebec.

The hills along the Hudson told to one another the tale. As the summons hurried to the South, it was one day at New York; in one more at Philadelphia; the next it lighted a watchfire at Baltimore; thence it waked an answer at Annapolis. Crossing the Potomac

near Mount Vernon, it was sent forward without a halt to Williamsburg. It traversed the Dismal Swamp of Nansemond, along the route of the first emigrants to North Carolina. It moved onward and still onward, through boundless groves of evergreen, to Newbern and to Wilmington. "For God's sake, forward it by day and by night!" wrote Cornelius Harnett by the express which sped for Brunswick. Patriots of South Carolina caught up its tones at the border, and dispatched it to Charleston and through pines and palmettoes and mossclad live oaks still further to the South, till it resounded among the New England settlements beyond the Savannah. Hillsborough and the Mecklenburg district of North Carolina rose in triumph now that their wearisome uncertainty had an end. The Blue Ridge took up the voice, and made it heard from one end to the other of the valley of Virginia. The Alleghanies, as they listened, opened their barriers that the "loud call" might pass through to the hardy riflemen in the Holston, the Watauga, and the French Broad. Ever renewing its strength, powerful enough even to create a commonwealth, it breathed its inspiring word to the first settlers of Kentucky; so that hunters who made their halt in the matchless valley of the Elkhorn commemorated the nineteenth day of April by naming their encampment "LEXINGTON."