but by their effect in advancing or retarding human knowledge, in
overthrowing or establishing despotism, in extending or destroying human
happiness.

When the traveller pauses on the plains of Marathon, what are the emotions
which most strongly agitate his breast? What is that glorious recollection,
which thrills through his frame and suffuses his eyes? Not I imagine that
Grecian skill and Grecian valor were here most signally displayed; but that
Greece herself was here saved. It is because to this spot, and to the event
which has rendered it immortal, he refers all the succeeding glories of the
republic. It is because if that day had gone otherwise, Greece had
perished. It is because he perceives that her philosophers and orators, her
poets and painters, her sculptors and architects, her governments and free
institutions, point backward to Marathon, and that their future existence
seems to have been suspended on the contingency, whether the Persian or the
Greek banner should wave victorious in the beams of that day's setting sun.
And as his imagination kindles at the retrospect, he is transported back to
the interesting moment, he counts the fearful odds of the contending hosts,
his interest for the result overwhelms him; he trembles, as if it were
still uncertain, and seems to doubt whether he may consider Socrates and
Plato, Demosthenes, Sophocles, and Phidias, as secure, yet, to himself and
to the world.
D. Webster.


CXX.

THE FUTURE OF AMERICA.

Fellow-citizens, the hours of this day are rapidly flying, and this