toward the classic shores of Greece, and Athens, the ‘mother of the arts,’ opens her splendors before us. The stately Parthenon, sublime in its proportions and chastely beautiful in its Doric simplicity, still surmounts the summit of the Acropolis. We roam with Plato through the shades of Academia; we stray with Socrates along the banks of the Ilissus; we enter the crowded forum, and listen to the soul-thrilling eloquence of the ‘prince of orators.’ We need not waste words to prove, that to the man of sensibility, there is a rich repast of intellectual luxuries in such exercises of the imagination. But rich as it is, there is one thing which can bestow a still higher flavor. It is only when the orator rises in the kindling majesty of virtue, when the soul of a patriot lightens in the flashing eye, when the wrongs of the oppressed pour the flush of noble indignation over his brow, and a nation’s voice is heard in the thunders of his eloquence, that we can know the full power of his appeals, and receive our most exquisite gratification. For by the very constitution of our mind, our deepest sympathies can be excited only when the holier and lovelier sensibilities of our being are awakened by the exhibition of moral beauty. There is something so commanding, so godlike, in this subservience of great talents to high and noble ends, that while the graces and the fire of the orator delight the fancy and the taste, all our better feelings are enlisted in the purity and exaltation of his purpose. Thus also with the poet--it is only when a spirit from above has breathed the inspiration over him, and his harp is tuned to the minstrelsy of Holiness,--when in the glories of antiquity, the ravages of time, and the mighty revolutions of empires, he leads us, with tender sublimity of feeling, to trace the wonder workings of that wisdom which ‘sees the end from the beginning’--that the imagination revels in the fullness of its enjoyment. C. COLUMBIA’S BANNER. Bright banner of Columbia, A fragment of the sky, Torn down with all thy glitt’ring stars-- Angelic blazonry! Stream onward, like the fiery cloud That hung o’er Egypt’s sea, Terror and darkness to the proud, A light to guide the free. Bright banner of Columbia! Thou glory’st not in blood; Yet, if the foe invade our land, The foe shall be withstood; A death-grasp shall his welcome be, A bloody turf his pillow, And on the battle-wave he’ll find A tomb in every billow. Dark banner of oppression, Droop o’er thy millions slain! All stained with floods of human gore, Thou ne’er shalt wave again; Save when the wail of misery, The orphan’s plaintive cry, And the widow’s moan amid thy folds, Shall breathe in agony.