“See where the mountains rise: 
   Where thundering torrents foam;
   Where, veiled in towering skies,
   The eagle makes his home: 
   Where savage nature dwells,
   My God is present, too: 
   Through all her wildest dells
   His footsteps I pursue: 
He reared those giant cliffs, supplies that dashing stream,
Provides the daily food which stills the wild bird’s scream.

“Look on that world of waves,
Where finny nations glide;
Within whose deep, dark caves
The ocean monsters hide: 
His power is sovereign there,
To raise, to quell the storm;
The depths his bounty share,
Where sport the scaly swarm: 
Tempests and calms obey the same almighty voice,
Which rules the earth and skies, and bids far worlds rejoice.” 
—­Joseph Hutton.

XXXVIII.  LAFAYETTE AND ROBERT RAIKES. (163)

Thomas S. Grimke’, 1786-1834, an eminent lawyer and scholar, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, graduated at Yale in 1807, and died of cholera near Columbus, Ohio.  He descended from a Huguenot family that was exiled from France by the revocation of the edict of Nantes.  He gained considerable reputation as a politician, but is best known as an advocate of peace, Sunday Schools, and the Bible.  He was a man of deep feeling, earnest purpose, and pure life.  Some of his views were very radical and very peculiar.  He proposed sweeping reforms in English orthography[1], and disapproved of the classics and of pure mathematics in any scheme of general education.  The following is an extract from an address delivered at a Sunday-school celebration. ###

[Transcriber’s Footnote 1:  Orthography:  Spelling using established usage.]

It is but a few years since we beheld the most singular and memorable pageant in the annals of time.  It was a pageant more sublime and affecting than the progress of Elizabeth through England after the defeat of the Armada; than the return of Francis I. from a Spanish prison to his own beautiful France; than the daring and rapid march of the conqueror at Austerlitz from Frejus to Paris.  It was a pageant, indeed, rivaled only in the elements of the grand and the pathetic, by the journey of our own Washington through the different states.  Need I say that I allude to the visit of Lafayette to America?

But Lafayette returned to the land of the dead, rather than of the living.  How many who had fought with him in the war of ’76, had died in arms, and lay buried in the grave of the soldier or the sailor!  How many who had survived the perils of battle, on the land and the ocean, had expired on the deathbed of peace, in the arms of mother, sister, daughter, wife!  Those. who survived to celebrate with him the jubilee of 1825, were stricken in years, and hoary-headed; many of them infirm in health; many the victims of poverty, or misfortune, or affliction.  And, how venerable that patriotic company; how sublime their gathering through all the land; how joyful their welcome, how affecting their farewell to that beloved stranger!