trous revolutions. Even poetry and eloquence lend their 

 aid to theabuse of every tbins; modern, Tbe orator, a- 

 midst t'le ruins of Rome awakens generous sympalbies 

 for her fate, and recalls the age of her Scipio and Mar- 

 cellus. The Foet, at Marathon, narrates in plaintive 

 verse the beauty oftlie Instituto is of Greece, and utters 

 mournful judgments upon her oppressors. They forget, 

 that the germ of a new being reposes in every perishing 

 husk. The nations, the institutions, tbe men of one 

 age, are but dead bodies to t!ie souls of succeeding 

 times. Death is the sleep from which another exis- 

 tence wakes up. Like the green Ivy, which reaches its 

 utmost height only through time-broken cre^dces, each 

 era lives and advances upon the ruins of the last. The 

 flame which burned so brilhantly on the altars of the 

 Grecian, it is true, is extinguished there ; but it en- 

 liorhtens lands boastino- a more rational and wide- 

 ly diffused liberty. The towers of the nodding Illion, 

 it is true, cannot be traced by the traveler, and the 

 Rome of Augustus is no more ; but the verse of 

 Homer and of Virgil, and the history of the Gracchi 

 and of Socrates survive: The Senate house and the 

 hill of Mars no more sound to the voices of Demos- 

 thenes and Cicero ; but their language still imparts 

 lessons of eloquence, and excites eternal enmity to ty- 

 ranny. The monument of art which once hailed the 

 morning sun in mysterious tones, echoes now but to the 

 labors of a Champollion and Rossellini ; but still it re- 

 cords the vanity of man, and exists as the vindicator 

 of the awful providences of God. It is folly, my friends, 

 to regard as calamities, events, which give impulses tp 

 religion, morals, the arts, and the sciences. In the his- 

 tory of nations and men destroyed and dead, truth 



