everything in America that could excite rivalry and add a sting to passion. He left them in a feverish and bloody infancy; he has returned in their peaceful and majestic manhood. He left them worn, divided, and impoverished; he has found them strong, unanimous, and rich. He has come to see the grain quietly waving over the fields of slaughter; to find their once vacant harbors crowded with a gallant navy; their unsheltered beaches secured by impregnable works; their swampy forests swarming with a gay and growing population. And he can say, what no living leader can say with him, ‘This is partly my work; in the heart of a corrupted state I digested the manual of freedom; hemmed round by the blandishments of luxury, I preserved the spirit of independence; I forsook the court for the sword; I adopted danger for ease; and here are my rewards!’ It was the younger Scaliger, we believe, who would have preferred the honor of writing a single ode of Horace, to the empire of Germany, and he was right. But what are the honors of all the odes of all the Horaces that ever lived, to this pride of a patriot’s bosom, to the outbursting of a nation’s gratitude? After all, there is much more in these things than the merit or the praise of any one person, or any one set of persons. It is not man individually, but man collectively, that is here chiefly concerned. These rewards and these deservings are, in fact, the recognition by Nature of her own nobility. They form the evidence which she bears to the eternity of her own character; they are the proud effusions of her thankfulness to the power which impressed that character upon her.” CHAPTER XIII.