Pizarro, hear me!  Hear me, chieftains!  And thou, All-powerful! whose thunder can shiver into sand the adamantine rock, whose lightnings can pierce the core of the riven and quaking earth, oh let thy power give effect to thy servant’s words, as thy Spirit gives courage to his will!  Do not, I implore you, chieftains,—­do not, I implore, you, renew the foul barbarities your insatiate avarice has inflicted on this wretched, unoffending race.  But hush, my sighs! fall not, ye drops of useless sorrow! heart-breaking anguish, choke not my utterance. 
                                                     —­E.  B. Sheridan.

Note.—­Examples of series.  See p. 28.

III.  ACTION AND REPOSE. (131)

John Ruskin, 1819 —–­, is a distinguished English art critic and author.  From 1869 to 1884, he was Professor of the Fine Arts at Oxford University.  His writings are very numerous, and are noted for their eloquent and brilliant style. ###

About the river of human life there is a wintry wind, though a heavenly sunshine; the iris colors its agitation, the frost fixes upon its repose.  Let us beware that our rest become not the rest of stones, which, so long as they are tempest-tossed and thunderstricken, maintain their majesty; but when the stream is silent and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them, and are plowed into the dust.

IV.  TIME AND CHANGE. (131)

Sir Humphry Davy, 1778-1829, was an eminent chemist of England.  He made many important chemical discoveries, and was the inventor of the miner’s safety lamp. ###

Time is almost a human word, and Change entirely a human idea; in the system of nature, we should rather say progress than change.  The sun appears to sink in the ocean in darkness, but it rises in another hemisphere; the ruins of a city fall, but they are often used to form more magnificent structures:  even when they are destroyed so as to produce only dust, Nature asserts her empire over them; and the vegetable world rises in constant youth, in a period of annual successions, by the labors of man—­providing food, vitality, and beauty—­upon the wrecks of monuments which were raised for the purposes of glory, but which are now applied to objects of utility.

V. THE POET. (132)

William Ellery Channing, 1780-1842, was a distinguished clergyman and orator.  He took a leading part in the public affairs of his day, and wrote and lectured eloquently on several topics. ###

It is not true that the poet paints a life which does not exist.  He only extracts and concentrates, as it were, life’s ethereal essence, arrests and condenses its volatile fragrance, brings together its scattered beauties, and prolongs its more refined but evanescent joys; and in this he does well, for it is good to feel that life is not wholly usurped by cares for subsistence and physical gratifications, but admits, in measures which may be indefinitely enlarged, sentiments and delights worthy of a higher being.