Mark that monster, that mother, that shame and that curse; See the child hang dead-drunk at the breast of its nurse! As it drops from her arm, mark her stupefied stare! Then she wakes with a yell, and a shriek of despair. Drink, Erin! drink deep from this crystalline round, Till the tortures of self-recollection be drowned; Till the hopes of thy heart be all stiffened to stone-- Then sit down in the dirt like a queen on her throne. No phrensy for Freedom to flash o'er the brain; Thou shalt dance to the musical clank of the chain; A crown of cheap straw shall seem rich to thine eye And peace and good order shall reign in the sky! Nor boast that no track of the viper is seen, To stain thy pure surface of Emerald green: For the Serpent will never want poison to kill, While the fat of your fields feeds the worm of the still! MAN'S CONNECTION WITH THE INFINITE. That is to every thing created pre-eminently useful, which enables it rightly and fully to perform the functions appointed to it by its Creator. Therefore, that we may determine what is chiefly useful to man, it is necessary first to determine the use of man himself. Man's use and function is to be the witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness. Whatever enables us to fulfill this function is, in the pure and first sense of the word, useful to us. Pre-eminently, therefore, what sets the glory of God more brightly before us. But things that only help us to exist are, in a secondary and mean sense, useful, or rather, if they be looked for alone, they are useless and worse, for it would be better that we should not exist, than that we should guiltily disappoint the purposes of existence. And yet people speak in this working age, when they speak from their hearts, as if houses, and lands, and food, and raiment were alone useful; and as if sight, thought, and admiration were all profitless, so that men insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables: men who think that the meat is more than the life, and the raiment than the body; who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vine-dressers as husbandmen, who love the corn they grind, and the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew and the water they draw, are better than the pine forests that cover the mountains like the shadow of God, and than the great rivers that move like his eternity. And so comes upon us that woe of the preacher, that, though God "hath made every thing beautiful in his time, also he hath set the world in their hearts, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end."