deaf to; nay, though what I have spoken should prove (which Thou suffer
not, who didst make mankind free; nor Thou next, who didst redeem us
from being servants of sin) to be the last words of our expiring
liberties."






THE CITY OF A DAY.

The writer, when residing in Lowell, in 1843 contributed this and the
companion pieces to 'The Stranger' in Lowell.

This, then, is Lowell,--a city springing up, like the enchanted palaces
of the Arabian tales, as it were in a single night, stretching far and
wide its chaos of brick masonry and painted shingles, filling the angle
of the confluence of the Concord and the Merrimac with the sights and
sounds of trade and industry. Marvellously here have art and labor
wrought their modern miracles. I can scarcely realize the fact that a
few years ago these rivers, now tamed and subdued to the purposes of man
and charmed into slavish subjection to the wizard of mechanism, rolled
unchecked towards the ocean the waters of the Winnipesaukee and the
rock-rimmed springs of the White Mountains, and rippled down their falls
in the wild freedom of Nature. A stranger, in view of all this
wonderful change, feels himself, as it were, thrust forward into a new
century; he seems treading on the outer circle of the millennium of
steam engines and cotton mills. Work is here the patron saint.
Everything bears his image and superscription. Here is no place for