RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE,

ABOUT ten the next morning I called upon Mr. Randolph, and was

admitted to his bedchamber. He was sitting in flannel dressinggown and slippers, looking very thin, but with a strange fire in his swarthy face. He seemed more like a spiritual presence than a man adequately clothed in flesh and blood.

Before I visited Mr. Randolph again, I had listened with admiration to his wonderful improvisations in the Senate, and had determined to get at his views about the oratory of Patrick Henry, of which I had heard John Adams speak in terms of some disparagement. I accordingly put a question which I supposed would call out a panegyric upon the orator of Virginia. I asked who was the greatest orator he had ever heard. The reply was startling, from its unexpectedness. "The greatest orator I ever heard," said Randolph, "was a woman. She was a slave. She was a mother, and her rostrum was the auctionblock." He then rose and imitated with thrilling pathos the tones with which this woman had appealed to the sympathy and justice of the bystanders, and finally the indignation with which she denounced them. "There was eloquence!" he said. "I have heard no man speak like that. It was overpowering!" He sat down and paused for some moments; then, evidently feeling that he had been imprudent in expressing himself so warmly before a visitor from the North, he entered upon a defence of the policy of Southern statesmen in regard to slavery. "We must concern ourselves with what is," he said, " and slavery exists. We must preserve the rights of the States, as guaranteed by the Constitution, or the negroes are at our throats. The question of slavery, as it is called, is to us a question of life and death. Remember, it is a necessity imposed on the South; not a Utopia of our own seeking. You will find no instance in history where two distinct races have occupied the soil except in the relation of master and slave." I brought away only these few fragments of an elaborate defence of the course which he and other Southerners felt compelled to pursue; but they give its nature with sufficient clearness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

BORN in Boston, Mass., 1803. DIED at Concord, Mass., 1882.

THE PROBLEM.

[Poems. Revised Edition. Edited by J. E. Cabot. 1884.]

Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought;
Never from lips of cunning fell

The thrilling Delphic oracle;

Out from the heart of nature rolled

The burdens of the Bible old;

The litanies of nations came,

Like the volcano's tongue of flame,

Up from the burning core below,—

The canticles of love and woe:

The hand that rounded Peter's dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity;

Himself from God he could not free;

He builded better than he knew;

The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Know'st thou what wove yon wood bird's nest
Of leaves, and feathers from her breast?

Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,
Painting with morn each annual cell?
Or how the sacred pine-tree adds
To her old leaves new myriads?
Such and so grew these holy piles,
Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
As the best gem upon her zone,
And Morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky,
As on its friends, with kindred eye;

For out of Thought's interior sphere
These wonders rose to upper air;
And Nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,

And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.

These temples grew as grows the grass;
Art might obey, but not surpass.
The passive Master lent his hand

To the vast soul that o'er him planned;

And the same power that reared the shrine
Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.

Ever the fiery Pentecost

Girds with one flame the countless host,
Trances the heart through chanting choirs,
And through the priest the mind inspires.
The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told,
In groves of oak, or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost.
I know what say the fathers wise,-
The Book itself before me lies,
Old Chrysostom, best Augustine,
And he who blent both in his line,
The younger Golden Lips or mines,
Taylor, the Shakespeare of divines.
His words are music in my ear,
I see his cowled portrait dear;
And yet, for all his faith could see,
I would not the good bishop be.

A

NATURE.

[Prose Works. 1880.]

A DEFINITION.

LL science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment,

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