For those no death-bed’s lingering shade;
  At Honor’s trumpet-call,
With knitted brow and lifted blade
  In Glory’s arms they fall.

For these no clashing falchions bright,
  No stirring battle-cry;
The bloodless stabber calls by night,—­
  Each answers, “Here am I!”

For those the sculptor’s laurelled bust,
  The builder’s marble piles,
The anthems pealing o’er their dust
  Through long cathedral aisles.

For these the blossom-sprinkled turf
  That floods the lonely graves,
When Spring rolls in her sea-green surf
  In flowery-foaming waves.

Two paths lead upward from below,
  And angels wait above,
Who count each burning life-drop’s flow,
  Each falling tear of Love.

Though from the Hero’s bleeding breast
  Her pulses Freedom drew,
Though the white lilies in her crest
  Sprang from that scarlet dew,—­

While Valor’s haughty champions wait
  Till all their scars are shown,
Love walks unchallenged through the gate
  To sit beside the Throne!

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY.

There was no apologue more popular in the Middle Ages than that of the hermit, who, musing on the wickedness and tyranny of those whom the inscrutable wisdom of Providence had intrusted with the government of the world, fell asleep and awoke to find himself the very monarch whose abject life and capricious violence had furnished the subject of his moralizing.  Endowed with irresponsible power, tempted by passions whose existence in himself he had never suspected, and betrayed by the political necessities of his position, he became gradually guilty of all the crimes and the luxury which had seemed so hideous to him in his hermitage over a dish of water-cresses.

The American Tract Society from small beginnings has risen to be the dispenser of a yearly revenue of nearly half a million.  It has become a great establishment, with a traditional policy, with the distrust of change and the dislike of disturbing questions (especially of such as would lessen its revenues) natural to great establishments.  It had been poor and weak; it has become rich and powerful.  The hermit has become king.

If the pious men who founded the American Tract Society had been told that within forty years they would be watchful of their publications, lest, by inadvertence, anything disrespectful might be spoken of the African Slave-trade,—­that they would consider it an ample equivalent for compulsory dumbness on the vices of Slavery, that their colporteurs could awaken the minds of Southern brethren to the horrors of St. Bartholomew,—­that they would hold their peace about the body of Cuffee dancing to the music of the cart-whip, provided only they could save the soul of Sambo alive by presenting him a pamphlet, which he could not read, on the depravity of the double-shuffle,—­that