Wake in our breasts the living fires,
  The holy faith that warmed our sires;
  Thy hand hath made our Nation free;
  To die for her is serving Thee.

  Be Thou a pillared flame to show
  The midnight snare, the silent foe;
  And when the battle thunders loud,
  Still guide us in its moving cloud.

  God of all Nations!  Sovereign Lord! 
  In Thy dread name we draw the sword,
  We lift the starry flag on high
  That fills with light our stormy sky.

  From treason’s rent, from murder’s stain
  Guard Thou its folds till Peace shall reign,—­
  Till fort and field, till shore and sea
  Join our loud anthem, PRAISE TO THEE!

* * * * *

THE PICKENS-AND-STEALIN’S REBELLION.

Had any one ventured to prophesy on the Fourth of March that the immediate prospect of Civil War would be hailed by the people of the Free States with a unanimous shout of enthusiasm, he would have been thought a madman.  Yet the prophecy would have been verified by what we now see and hear in every city, town, and hamlet from Maine to Kansas.  With the advantage of three months’ active connivance in the cabinet of Mr. Buchanan, with an empty treasury at Washington, and that reluctance to assume responsibility and to inaugurate a decided policy, the common vice of our politicians, who endeavor to divine and to follow popular sentiment rather than to lead it, it seemed as if Disunion were inevitable, and the only open question were the line of separation.  So assured seemed the event, that English journalists moralized gravely on the inherent weakness of Democracy.  While the leaders of the Southern Rebellion did not dare to expose their treason to the risk of a popular vote in any one of the seceding States, the “Saturday Review,” one of the ablest of British journals, solemnly warned its countrymen to learn by our example the dangers of an extended suffrage.

Meanwhile the conduct of the people of the Free States, during all these trying and perilous months, had proved, if it proved anything, the essential conservatism of a population in which every grown man has a direct interest in the stability of the national government.  So abstinent are they by habit and principle from any abnormal intervention with the machine of administration, so almost superstitious in adherence to constitutional forms, as to be for a moment staggered by the claim to a right of secession set up by all the Cotton States, admitted by the Border Slave-States, which had the effrontery to deliberate between their plain allegiance and their supposed interest, and but feebly denied by the Administration then in power.  The usual panacea of palaver was tried; Congress did its best to add to the general confusion of thought; and, as if that were not enough, a Convention of Notables called simultaneously to thresh the straw of debate anew, and to convince thoughtful persons that men