PART II. SELECT PIECES FOR READING AND DECLAMATION. LESSON I. COUNSEL AND ADVICE TO YOUNG MEN.-WISE. [Didactic. This piece will also exemplify the pause of suspension, Rule 6, page 95.] 1. Every young man is now a sower of seed on the field of life. These bright days of youth are the seed-time. Every thought of your intellect, every emotion of your heart, every word of your tongue, every principle you adopt, every act you perform, is a seed, whose good or evil fruit will be the bliss or bane of your after life. 2. As is the seed, so will be the crop. Indulge your appetites, gratify your passions, neglect your intellect, foster wrong principles, cherish habits of idleness, vulgarity, dissipation, and, in the after years of manhood, you will reap a plentiful crop of corruption, degradation, and remorse. But if you control your appetites, subdue your passions, firmly adopt and rigidly practice right principles, form habits of purity, propriety, sobriety, and diligence, your harvest will be one of honor, health, and happiness. for 3. That you have reached the period of youth, is, therefore, you, a very serious fact. Great destinies lie shrouded in your swiftly passing hours; great responsibilities stand in the passages of every-day life; great dangers lie hidden in the by-paths of life's great highway; and sirens, whose song is as charming as the voice of Calypso,a are there to allure you to destruction. 4. Great uncertainty hangs on your future history. God has given you existence, with full power and opportunity to improve it, and be happy. He has given you equal power to despise the gift, and be wretched. Which you will do, is the grand problem to be solved by your choice and conduct. To you, so young, so inexperienced, so susceptible of evil, so capable of good, so full of strong feelings, so unsettled in opinion, is committed the awful trust of your future happiness. Your bliss, or misery, in two worlds, hang poised in the balance. The manner in which you spend your youth, will turn the scale for weal or woe. 5. Verily, it has been well said, that the season of youth is a critical period. Critical, indeed! And I would, if possible, engrave the thought in ineffaceable letters on your susceptible heart, and make you feel how much the fashioning of your destiny, which, hitherto, has been more in the hands of others than your own, is now confided to your discretion. 6. As boys, at home, you have sailed upon the calm waters of a quiet river, in a bark carefully furnished by a mother's love, and safely guided by a father's skill. Now, you are sailing through the winding channels, the rocky straits, the rapid, rushing currents, at the river's mouth, into the great sea of active life. And here, for the first time, you are in command of the vessel. 7. On your skill, and caution, depends the safety of the passage. Neglect the rules laid down on the chart of experience a Calypso, a daughter of Atlas. She inhabited the woody island, Ogygia, situated deep in the ocean, and lived remote from all intercourse with gods or men. by previous navigators, take passion for your pilot, place folly at the helm, and your bark will shortly lie a pitiable wreck on the rocks, or be so damaged as to peril your safety on the coming voyage. But study well the intricacies and dangers of your course, take counsel of experience, let caution be your pilot, and, without doubt, you will escape rock, current, eddy, and whirlpool, and, with streamered masts and big white sail, float gaily forth to dare and conquer the perils of the sea beyond. LESSON II. CHARACTER OF PITT. ROBERTSON. [An exercise for reading in concert.] 1. The secretary stood alone; | modern degeneracy ad not reached him. | Original, and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. | His august mind overawed majesty; | and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, | in order to be relieved from his superiority. | No state chicanery, | no narrow system of vicious politics, | no idle contest for ministerial victories, | sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; | but, overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his ambition was fame. [ 2. Without dividing, he destroyed party; | without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous. | France sunk beneath him. | With one hand he smote the house of Bourbon,” | and wielded in the other, the democracy of England. | The sight of his mind was infinite; | and his schemes were to affect, | not a Pitt, (William, or Lord Chatham, was born in November, 1708. At the age of twenty-six, he became a member of the English parliament. He died in May, 1778. The name of Chatham is the representative, in our language, of whatever is bold and commanding in eloquenee. b Bourbon, (house of,) a royal family in France. England, not the present age only, | but Europe, and posterity. | Wonderful were the means by which these schemes were accomplished,- | always seasonable, | always adequate, | the suggestions of an understanding animated by ardor and enlightened by prophecy. | 3. The ordinary feelings which make life amiable, and indolent, were unknown to him. | No domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness reached him; | but, aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, | and unsullied by its intercourse, | he came, occasionally, into our system, to counsel, and to decide. | 4. A character so exalted, | so strenuous, so various, | so authoritative astonished a corrupt age; and the treasury trembled at the name of Pitt, | through all her classes of venality. | Corruption imagined, indeed, . that she had found defects in this statesman, ❘ and talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, | and much of the ruin of his victories; | but the history of his country | and the calamities of the enemy, | answered, and refuted her. 5. Nor were his political abilities his only talents; | his eloquence was an era in the senate, peculiar, and spontaneous, familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments, and instinctive wisdom; not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully; | it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music of the spheres. | Like Murray, he did not conduct the understanding | through the painful subtlety of argumentation; | nor was he, like Townshend,b | forever on the rack of exertion; | but rather lightened upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of the mind, which, like those of his eye, | were felt, but could not be followed. I Murray, (William,) the same as Lord Mansfield, one of the most distinguished jurists of England. He died in 1793. Townshend, (Charles,) a most eloquent parliamentary speaker. 6. Upon the whole, there was in this man | something that would create, subvert, | or reform; | an understanding, | a spirit, and an eloquence, to summon mankind to society, | or to break the bonds of slavery asunder; | something to rule the wilderness of free minds with unbounded authority; | something that could establish, | or overwhelm empire, | and strike a blow in the world, ❘ that should resound through the universe. LESSON III. ADDRESS TO THE OCEAN.-PROCTOR. 1. O thou vast Ocean!-ever-sounding sea! Thou thing, that windest round the solid world 2. The earth hath naught of this; nor chance nor change Ruffles its surface. Ever the same, it hath no ebb, no flow; But in their stated round the seasons come, And pass like visions to their viewless home, And come again, and vanish; the young spring Looks ever bright with leaves and blossoming, |