AMERICAN LITERATURE.
141
| Ruffle the thousand broad sheets of the land, |
| Filled with the people’s breath of potency. |
| A thousand images the hour will take, |
| From him who strikes, who rules, who speaks, who sings, |
| Many within the hour their grave to make, |
| Many to live, far in the heart of things. |
| A dark-dyed spirit he, who coins the time, |
| To virtue’s wrong, in base disloyal lies, |
| Who makes the morning’s breath, the evening’s tide, |
| The utterer of his blighting forgeries. |
| How beautiful who scatters, wide and free, |
| The gold-bright seeds of loved and loving truth! |
| By whose perpetual hand, each day supplied, |
| Leaps to new life the empire’s heart of youth. |
| To know the instant and to speak it true, |
| Its passing lights of joy, its dark, sad cloud, |
| To fix upon the unnumbered gazers’ view, |
| Is to thy ready hand’s broad strength allowed. |
| There is an inwrought life in every hour, |
| Fit to be chronicled at large and told. |
| ’Tis thine to pluck to light its secret power, |
| And on the air its many-colored heart unfold. |
| The angel that in sand-dropped minutes lives, |
| Demands a message cautious as the ages, |
| Who stuns, with dusk-red words of hate his ear, |
| That mighty power to boundless wrath enrages. |
This feeling of the dignity of his office, honour and power in fulfilling it, are not common in the journalist, but, where they exist, a mark has been left fully correspondent to the weight of the instrument. The few editors of this country who, with mental ability and resource, have combined strength of purpose and fairness of conduct, who have never merged the man and the gentleman in the partisan, who have been willing to have all sides fully heard, while their convictions were clear on one, who have disdained groundless assaults or angry replies, and have valued
