bim so,

One comfort is left him to sweeten despair,
He counts his beloved ones' heads, and lo!
Not one dear head is awanting there.
Now 'tis lodged within the ground,

The mould is finely filled! Ah, will
The bell come forth complete and sound,
To recompense our toil and skill?

Has the cast gone right?

Has the mould held tight?
Ah, while we still are hopeful, thus
Mischance perhaps has stricken us!

To holy earth's dark womb do we
Intrust the work our hands have made;
The sower intrusts the seed, that he
Hopes forth will shoot in leaf and blade,
So heaven ordain, that this may be:
Savily a seed more precious still

We hide within earth's darkling womb,
And hope that from the grave it will
Into a brighter being bloom.

From the steeple

Booms the bell,

Dill and slow,

The funeral knell.

Sad escort are these tones that mourn
To one on life's last journe, borne.
Ah, it is the wife beloved!
Ah, it is the faithful mother,

Whom the Shades' dark prince doth wrest
From a doting husband's breast,
From the group of children, whom
She bore him in her early bloom,
Whom she beheld with mother's pride
Grow up and flourish by her side!
Ab, rent is that sweet bond of home,
And never can again be knit!
For in the Shadow-land she dwells,
Whose love maternal ordered it.
No more her gentle sway is known,
No more her wakeful care and pains;
Within those widowed chambers lone

A stranger, hard and loveless, reigns.

From our anxious toil may rest. Free as happy bird on bough,

Each may do as likes him best.
At set of sun,

His duty done,

The 'prentice hears the vesper toll,
But rest there is none for the master's soul.

The wanderer, far in the forest wild,
Quickens his pace, as he hears it knell,
To the cottage home, that he loves so well.
The sleep draw homeward bleating,'
And the cattle, trooping in,
Broad of forehead, sleek of skin,
Lowing loud, as evening falls,
Fill their old accustomed stalls.
The creaking wain

Staggers in with its load of grain;
See on the sheaves
The chaplet lie,
Bright with flowers
Of every dye!

And off to the dance the young reapers fly.
Market and street grow hushed and still;
Round lamp's and hearth-fire's social flame
The houses' inmates gather,

And grating harsh the town-gate shuts.
Earth shrouds her then
In black; but night
To the citizen

Brings no affight,

Night, that from their darkling den, Rouses the wicked, their prowl to make; For the eye of Law is ever awake.

Holy Order, with every kind

Of blessing fraught, who like doth bind
To like by ties, g 11 not nor fray,
Who did of towns the foundations lay,
And into them from wood and wild
The savage, that shuns his kind, beguiled;
Entered the hovels of men, and taught
The virtues by gentle manners wrought,
And wove, of all ties the dearest, pride
In the land where our forefathers died.

Alas for their weal on that woful day! Woe, when in cities, smouldering under,

Fire spreads and spreads with silent force, And the people, tearing their chains asunder,

In self-deliverance seek recourse.
Then, tumult tugging the ropes, the bell
Peals on the ear like some madman's yell,
And what was vowed only to peaceful
things

To ravage and rapine the summons rings.
Liberty and Equality! High
Through street and alley swells the cry!
The peaceful citizen flies to arms,

With gathering crowds street, market

swarms.

And ruffian bands, that erst shunned the

day,

Come trooping about, as they scent their prey.

Then women turn to hyenas there,

And make of horrors a scoff, a jest, And rend with panther-teeth and tear The heart yet warm from some hated breast.

Nothing is sacred more; flung loose

Is every tie of restraint and shame; The Good gives place to the Bad, and all The Vices run riot, uncurbed by blame. To rouse the lion in jungle bedded

Is perilous, fell is the tiger's tooth, But of all dread things to be chiefly dreaded Is man, divested of reason and ruth. Woe to those, who hand light's heavensent torch

To the purblind fool! Its kindly ray Is no light for him, it can only scorch. And cities and countries in ashes lay.

God unto me great joy has given.

Behold! Like any golden star, From its shell the metal kernel riven Shows clean and smooth, not a flaw to mar. From crown to rim it gleams, Bright as the bright sun's beams; The scutcheons, clear and sharp also, The skill of the hand that limned them show. Now, comrades all, this way, this way! Close up your ranks, that so we may Baptize and consecrate the Bell. Its name shall be CONCORDIA! Let her to all our townsmen say, "In unity and loving concord dwell." And this be the vocation still, The Master framed her to fulfill! With heaven's blue canopy above her,

High o'er our toils and struggles here, Shall she, the thunder's neighbor, hover, And border on the starry sphere; A voice she shall be from above,

Even like the shining starry throng.
That, moving, praise their Maker's love,
And lead the circling year along.
To solemn things, and only such,
Let her metallic music chime,
And let her, swiftly swinging, touch,
Each hour, the flying skirts of time!
Let her to fate an utterance lend,

Herself without a heart to feel,
And on life's change and chance attend

With evermore recurring peal.
And, as the clang dies out, that, riding
Far on the breezes, loudly boomed,
So may she teach, nought is abiding,
All things of earth to death are doomed.

Now tackle to the ropes and prise

The bell up from the pit, that so
She to the realm of sound may rise,
High up aloft, where the breezes blow!

Pull, pull, lads! See,
She waves, swings free!

WASHINGTON'S IDEA OF A NATIONAL UNIVERSITY.* ·

One year before Washington was chosen President of the United States, he was elected Chancellor of the College of William and Mary by the Board of Visitors. This was an ancient and venerable office which had been held by the Bishops of London continuously from the foundation of the College in 1693 down to the American Revolution. Washington was the first American elected to take up the historical succession to this old English ecclesiastical headship of the college. It was pre-eminently an honorary position, for besides the Chancellor, there was always a practical executive called the President, or Rector.

This was the beginning of George Washington's official connection with the cause of liberal education in America. He was now the acknowledged head of the only college in Virginia, the college which had given him his first local office many years before. Washington's Chancellorship of William and Mary antedated his Presidency of the United States and continued until the day of his death. The institution which first recognized his merits enjoyed the honor of his last public service. Although the duties of the Chancellorship were

*The following article is a portion of an extended paper on "The College of William and Mary," at Williamsburg, Virginia, by Prof. Herbert B. Adams, head of the Department of History and Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and printed by direction of the U. S. Secretary of the Interior, in the "Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education," No. I, 1887.-ED. LIB. MAG.

was an

never burdensome they were nevertheless sufficiently honorable and distinguished to turn Washington's attention, even while President of the United States, to the thought of representing for the the entire country what he already represented for Virginia. He was the actual Mæcenas or patron of learning in his native State; what more natural than that he should advance from the local to the national in his ideas of education? This process had been characteristic of his development in relation to economics, war, and politics. It was in the same way that he came to the larger idea of his relation to science. In his mind, the College of William and Mary, which already in 1781 Washington had called a "University," historical stepping-stone from the idea of charity-schools in Virginia to the higher thought of a national university in the Federal City. Men's minds always move along lines of individual experience and of least resistance. There was absolutely no other experimental way by which Washington could have risen from his original purpose to his educational ideal save through his connection with the Chancellorthip of William and Mary. The duties of this office were indeed trifling as compared with Washing ton's larger political career, but the two lines of presidential activity ran parallel with one another, and the very subordination of the one office may have suggested to Washington, in the other, the possibility of utilizing for a great national purpose the idea of higher education which William and Mary represented to him and to all Virginians. Thomas Jefferson obtained his first idea of the Uni

versity of Virginia from his Alma Mater at Williamsburg, and Washington undoubtedly drew his national thought of education from the same local source.

It is a fact not sufficiently or generally understood that the first form of Jefferson's university idea was that of transforming the College of William and Mary into a State University. In 1779 he reported to the General Assembly of Virginiathree bills for the establishment of a general system of education in his native State. The first bill provided for two grades of instruction: (1) Elementary schools, for the children of rich and poor alike; (2) Colleges for a middle degree of instruction to students in easy circumstances. The second bill proposed a university; the third, a library.

This general plan, of remarkable scope, deserves a more detailed examination, for it is the historical basis of all that Jefferson subsequently accomplished for the educational cause in Virginia. It is closely allied to his cherished scheme for local self-government in smaller units than the county. He proposed that every county should be subdivided into hundreds, wards, or townships, five or six miles square, and that in the center of each local division there should be a free English school, in which reading, writing, and arithmetic should be taught.

This was the idea of common school education, free to all children in the ward or township, and supported by local taxation under State authority. This part of Jefferson's great plan was actually adopted by the General Assembly in 1796, although the execu-. tion of the law was left optional with

For the promotion of college education, Jefferson's bill provided that the whole State should be divided into ten or more districts, in each of which a college should be planted for teaching the classics, grammar, geography, geography, surveying, and other useful subjects. The college, as Jefferson conceived it, was to be a classical academy or gymnasium, preparatory to the university. It was an expansion of the same idea as that of the colonial free school, which was free merely in the sense of teaching the liberal arts. This form of the free school should be historically distinguished from the free English or common school, proposed for elementary education. The college was to be the Latin school, with the addition of a few practical or modern studies. This part of Jefferson's plan, although not actually adopted in the form proposed, remained one of his favorite ideas, to which he returned again and again in later life.

The roof and crown of the entire educational system of Virginia was to be the old College of William and Mary, transformed into a new and higher seminary of learning, with all preparatory work relegated to the fitting schools. Jefferson distinctly states that his second bill "proposed to amend the constitution of William and Mary College, to enlarge its sphere of science, and to make it in fact a university." In his autobiography Jefferson explains why this, the best part of his plan, failed to succeed. "The College of William and Mary was an establishment purely of the Church of

to be all of that Church; the professors, to subscribe to the thirty-nine articles; its students, to learn the catechism; and one of its fundamental objects was declared to be to raise up ministers for that Church. The religious jealousies, therefore, of all the dissenters took alarmi lest this might give an ascendency to the Anglican sect, and refused acting on that bill. Its local eccentricity, too, and unhealthy autumnal climate lessened the general inclination toward it." For these and other reasons the College of William and Mary failed to become the State university of Virginia.

Washington had already heard of Jefferson's project of Swiss professors from John Adams. To both Adams and Jefferson the President communicated his unfavorable opinion of the Swiss proposition. To Jefferson he gave a specific statement of his views to the effect that (1) The plan for a national university was not sufficiently matured to justify any encouragement to the Swiss professors; (2) The propriety of transplanting the entire body of them them was questionable, for they might not all he good characters or sufficiently acquainted with the English language; (3) The Swiss professors had been at variance with the popular party at home, and their introduction to America might be considered an aristocratic movement; (4) Such an invitation to the Swiss "might preclude some of the first professors in other countries from a participation" in the national university. Washington suggests that "some of the most celebrated characters in Scotland, in this line, might be obtained."