General Banks, in his late order, welcoming the return of our brave soldiers from their two years' captivity in Texas, after recounting their heroic history, gives utterance to the following noble sentiment: 'They refused to substitute the misguided ambition of a vulgar, low-bred provincialism, for the hallowed hopes of a national patriotism.' A great truth, like 'a thing of beauty, is a joy forever.' We feel it as the wine of life in our spiritual organisms, quickening thought, ennobling our aims, fortifying virtue, and expanding our immortal statures. Such a truth is contained in that pointed antithesis: 'A vulgar, low-bred provincialism, and the hallowed hopes of a national patriotism.' The human soul, in its process of development, grows from the centre to the circumference, from a part to the whole, from a unit to the universe. Its first conception is that of self-consciousness, and its first emotion that of self-love. As it expands its immortal germs, it becomes conscious of its relation to objects outside of self; it seeks new outlets of sympathy in love of parents and kindred--then of political communities, nations, and races; ever expanding the grand circle of its sympathies as it grows more and more into a perfect image of the divine spirit of the universe. This tendency of the soul to the universal is a sure index of its highest moral and intellectual culture; it is one of the divine instincts of our nature, and shines out as God's autograph upon the great representative minds of all ages. In Marcus Curtius, William Tell, Garibaldi, and our own loved Washington, it makes the cream of history and the highest poetry of nations. Its perfect manifestation is seen in that grandest of all epics, 'Christ on the Cross,' wherein we behold a most complete absorption of the self of the individual in the universal self of the race. There are men with little, narrow souls, that never radiate beyond the centre of self; they have no conception of pure, fixed, absolute principles, but are wholly governed by their local surroundings, provincial prejudices, and the lower instincts of their nature. The large, liberal mind of the true patriot, however, can never be dwarfed down to mere sectional standards, but, true to the law of its attraction, will ever point to the Pole-star of national unity and national brotherhood.