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natural embellishment, the facts presented may be regarded as a fair specimen of the adventures which constitute so great a portion of the romance of a whaler's life; a life which, viewing all the incidents that seem inevitably to grow out of the enterprise peculiar to it, can be said to have no parallel. Yet vast as the field is, occupied by this class of our resolute seamen, how little can we claim to know of the particulars of a whaleman's existence! That our whale ships leave port, and usually return, in the course of three years, with full cargoes, to swell the fund of national wealth, is nearly the sum of our knowledge concerning them. Could we comprehend, at a glance, the mighty surface of the Indian or Pacific seas, what a picture would open upon us of unparalleled industry and daring enterprise! What scenes of toil along the coast of Japan, up the straits of Mozambique, where the dangers of the storm, impending as they may be, are less regarded than the privations and sufferings attendant upon exclusion from all intercourse with the shore! Sail onward, and extend your view around New-Holland, to the coast of Guinea; to the eastern and western shores of Africa; to the Cape of Good Hope; and south, to the waters that lash the cliffs of Kergulan's Land, and you are ever upon the whaling-ground of the American seaman. Yet onward, to the vast expanse of the two Pacifics, with their countless summer isles, and your course is still over the common arena and highway of our whalers. The varied records of the commercial world can furnish no precedent, can present no comparison, to the intrepidity, skill, and fortitude, which seem the peculiar prerogatives of this branch of our marine. These characteristics are not the growth of forced exertion; they are incompatible with it. They are the natural result of the ardor of a free people; of a spirit of fearless independence, generated by free institutions. Under such institutions alone, can the human mind attain its fullest expansion, in the various departments of science, and the multiform pursuits of busy life.

 

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LACONICS PARAPHRASED.

 I.What is fame, when the spade our last bed hath designed,But a tune to the deaf, or a torch to the blind;An ovation decreed, though the hero be dead:Like the archangel's trump, it is blown o'er the dead;But unlike that dread blast, none but fools it amazes,And you 'll find, when too late, it nor rouses nor raises. II.Pain, thou sole perfect thing to earth assigned,The body take, but spare, oh! spare the mind!Wrecked on thy rocks, or on thy billows tossed,Oh, save the compass, though the bark be lost!Hero Reason's self not without fear presides,And, like the needle, trembles while she guides. III.That promise autumn pays, which spring began,And what the school-boy was, such is the man:The sap and tender bud in childhood shoot,And youth the blossom gives—but age the fruit.