In leaving this subject, I cannot help suggesting, at the hazard of being thought whimsical, that a literature of such writings as these, embodying the romance of the whole revolutionary and ante-revolutionary history of the United States, might do something to perpetuate the Union itself. The influence of a rich literature of passion and fancy upon society must not be denied merely because you cannot measure it by the yard or detect it by the barometer. Poems and romances which shall be read in every parlor, by every fireside, in every school-house, behind every counter, in every printing-office, in every lawyer's office, at every weekly evening club, in all the States of this confederacy, must do something, along with more palpable if not more powerful agents, towards moulding and fixing that final, grand, complex result,--the national character. A keen, well instructed judge of such things said, if he might write the ballads of a people, he cared little who made its laws. Let me say, if a hundred men of genius would extract such a body of romantic literature from our early history as Scott has extracted from the history of England and Scotland, and as Homer extracted from that of Greece, it perhaps would not be so alarming if demagogues should preach, or governors practice, or executives tolerate nullification. Such a literature would be a common property of all the States,--a treasure of common ancestral recollections,--more noble and richer than our thousand million acres of public land; and, unlike that land, it would be indivisible. It would be as the opening of a great fountain for the healing of the nations. It would turn back our thoughts from these recent and overrated diversities of interest,--these controversies about negro-cloth, coarse-wooled sheep, and cotton bagging,--to the day when our fathers walked hand in hand together through the valley of the Shadow of Death in the War of Independence. Reminded of our fathers, we should remember that we are brethren. The exclusiveness of State pride,--the narrow selfishness of a mere local policy and the small jealousies of vulgar minds, would be merged in an expanded comprehensive, constitutional sentiment of old, family, fraternal regard. It would reässemble, as it were, the people of America in one vast congregation. It would rehearse in their hearing all things which God had done for them in the old time; it would proclaim the law once more; and then it would bid them join in that grandest and most affecting solemnity,--a national anthem of thanksgiving for the deliverance, of honor for the dead, of proud prediction for the future! R. Choate. XX. THE LOVE OF READING.