I have just returned from Canada. I have gazed for the first time upon free land. Would you believe it? the tears sprang to my eyes, and I wept. It was a glorious sight to gaze, for the first time, on the land where a poor slave, flying from our land of boasted liberty, would in a moment find his fetters broken and his shackles loosed. Whatever he was in the land of Washington, in the shadow of Bunker Hill Monument, or even upon Plymouth Rock, _here_ he becomes "a man and a brother." I had gazed on Harper's Ferry, or rather the Rock at the Ferry, towering up in simple grandeur, with the gentle Potomac gliding peacefully at its feet; and I felt that it was God's masonry. My soul expanded while gazing on its sublimity. I had heard the ocean singing its wild chorus of sounding waves, and the living chords of my heart thrilled with ecstasy. I have since seen the rainbow-crowned Niagara, girdled with grandeur and robed with glory, chanting the choral hymn of omnipotence; but none of these sights have melted me, as did the first sight of free land. Towering mountains, lifting their hoary summits to catch the first faint flush of day, when the sunbeams kiss the shadows from morning's drowsy face, may expand and exalt your soul; the first view of the ocean may fill you with strange delight; the great, the glorious Niagara may hush your spirit with its ceaseless thunder,--it may charm you with its robe of crested spray, and with its rainbow crown: but the land of freedom has a lesson of deeper significance than foaming waves and towering mountains. It carries the heart back to that heroic struggle in Great Britain for the emancipation of the slaves, in which the great heart of the people throbbed for liberty, and the mighty pulse of the nation beat for freedom, till eight hundred thousand men, women, and children in the West Indies arose redeemed from bondage and freed from chains. EMANCIPATION IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, APRIL 16, 1862. BY JAMES MADISON BELL. Unfurl your banners to the breeze! Let Freedom's tocsin sound amain, Until the islands of the seas Re-echo with the glad refrain! Columbia's free! Columbia's free! Her teeming streets, her vine-clad groves, Are sacred now to Liberty, And God, who every right approves. Thank God, the Capital is free! The slaver's pen, the auction-block, The gory lash of cruelty, No more this nation's pride shall mock; No more, within those ten miles square, Shall men be bought and women sold; Nor infants, sable-hued and fair, Exchanged again for paltry gold. To-day the Capital is free! And free those halls where Adams stood To plead for man's humanity, And for a common brotherhood; Where Sumner stood, with massive frame, Whose eloquent philosophy Has clustered round his deathless name Bright laurels for eternity;