Page images
PDF
EPUB

wards the rocks. Cable after cable was spliced on, yet still she surged heavily land ward. He then cut away the foremast, when the anchor probably catching in a rock brought the ship round. That good anchor held like the hand of fate, and though the vessel jerked at every blow of the billows as if she would rend everything apart, yet still she lay chained amid the chaos of waters. At length the main-mast fell with a crash against the mizen-mast, carrying that away also, and the poor Ariel, swept to her decks, lay a perfect wreck on the waves. In this position she acted like a mad creature chained by the head to a ring that no power could sunder. She leaped and plunged and rolled from side to side, as if striving with all her untamed energy to rend the link that bound her and madly rush on the rocks over which the foam rose like the spray from the foot of a cataract. For two days and three nights did Jones thus meet the full terror of the tempest. At last it abated and he was enabled to return to port. The coast was strewed with wrecks, and the escape of the Ariel seemed almost a miracle. But Jones was one of those fortunate beings, who though ever seeking the storm and the tumult are destined finally to die in their beds.

Early the next year he reached Philadelphia and received a vote of thanks from Congress. After vexatious delays in his attempts to get the command of a large vessel he at length joined the French fleet in its expedition to the West Indies. Peace soon after being proclaimed he returned to France, and failing in a projected expedition to the North-West coast, sailed again for the United States. Congress voted him a gold medal, and he was treated with distinction wherever he went. Failing again in his efforts to get command of a large vessel, he returned to France. Years had now passed away and Jones was forty years of age. He had won an imperishable name, and the renown of his deeds had been spread throughout the world. The title of Chevalier had been given him by the French king, but he was at an age when it might be supposed he would repose on his laurels. But Russia, then at war with Turkey, sought his services and made brilliant offers, which he at last accepted, and prepared to depart for St. Petersburg. On reaching Stockholm he found the Gulf of Bothnia so blocked with ice that

it was impossible to cross it, but impatient to be on his way he determined to sail round the ice to the southward in the open Baltic. Hiring an open boat about thirty feet long he started on his perilous expedition. He kept the boatmen ignorant of his plans, knowing that they would refuse to accompany him, until he got fairly out to sea. Then drawing his pistol, he told them to stretch out into the open Baltic. The poor fellows, placed between Scylla and Charybdis, obeyed, and the frail craft was soon tossing in the darkness. Escaping every danger he at length on the fourth day reached Revel, and set off for Petersburg amid the astonishment of the people, who looked upon his escape almost as a miracle. He was received with honor by the Empress, who immediately conferred on him the rank of rear-admiral. A brilliant career now seemed before him. Nobles and foreign ambassadors thronged his residence, and there appeared no end to the wonder his adventurous life had created. He soon after departed for the Black Sea and took command of a squadron under the direction of Prince Potemkin, the former lover of the Empress, and the real czar of Russia. Jones fought gallantly under this haughty prince, but at length disgusted with the annoyances to which he was subjected he came to an open quarrel, and finally returned to St. Petersburg. Here he for a while fell into disgrace on account of some unjust accusations against his moral character, but finally, through Count Segur, the French Ambassador, was restored to favor.

Our limits forbid us to follow Jones throughout his entire career, filled as it was with constant adventures both on sea and land. In 1792 he was taken sick at Paris and gradually declined. He had been making strenuous efforts in behalf of the American prisoners in Algiers, but never lived to see his benevolent plans carried out. On the 18th of July, 1792, he made his will, and his friends after witnessing it bade him good evening and departed. His physician coming soon after perceived his chair vacant, and on going to his bed found him stretched upon it dead. A few days after a dispatch was received from the United States appointing him commissioner to treat with Algiers for the ransom of the American prisoners in captivity there. The National Assembly of France decreed that twelve of its mem

sea.

bers should assist at the funeral ceremonies of 66 Admiral Paul Jones," and a eulogium was pronounced over his tomb. Thus died Paul Jones, at the age of forty-five-leaving a name that shall live as long as the American navy rides the In person Jones was slight, being only five feet and a half high. A stoop in the shoulders diminished still more his stature. But he was firmly knit, and capable of enduring great fatigue. He had dark eyes, and a thoughtful, pensive look when not engaged in conversation, but his countenance lighted up in moments of excitement, and in battle became terribly determined. His lips closed like a vice, while his brow contracted with the rigidity of iron. The tones of his voice were then haughty in the extreme, and his words had an emphasis in them which those who heard never forgot. That he was brave as courage itself no one will doubt. He seemed unconscious of fear, and moved amid the storm of battle and trod the deck of his shattered and wrecked vessel like one above the power of fate. I do not believe he ever entertained the thought of surrendering his vessel to any force. It was a contingency he was unprepared for, and he acted as if convinced that his own iron will and resolute courage could overcome every obstacle. Thus, in his fight with the Serapis, he was fairly beaten several times, but did not seem to know it, and no doubt had resolved to sink with his flag flying. His boldness and success appear the more strange when one remembers what kind of vessels he commanded, of what materials his crews were composed, and the well-manned and ably-commanded vessels of his adversary. He would cruise without fear in a single sloop right before the harbors of England, and sail amid ships double the size of his

own.

But with all his fierceness in the hour of battle, he had as kind a heart as ever beat. His sympathy seemed almost like sentimentality. To see him in a hot engagement, covered with the smoke of cannon, himself working the guns, while the timbers around him were constantly ripping with the enemy's shot, or watch him on the deck of his dismasted vessel over which the hurricane swept and the sea rolled, one would have thought him destitute of emotion. But his reports of these scenes afterwards resembled the descriptions of an excited spectator

unaccustomed to scenes of carnage and terror. He was an old Roman soldier in danger, but a poet in his after accounts of it.

Jones had great defects of character, but most of them sprung from his want of early education. He was haughty to his under officers, and frequently overbearing to his superiors. But his chief fault was his unbounded vanity. He would admit no superior, and hence never acknowledged that he received his deserts. He was constantly pushing his claims till he wearied out his friends and sometimes disgusted his admirers. He was as bombastic as he was brave--a contradiction of character seldom exhibited. There was something of the charlatan about him, which reminds one frequently of Bernadotte, and he never hesitated to puff himself, and dilate eloquently on his own achievements. Out of this same vanity grew his inordinate love of pomp and display. In this respect he aped the nobles with whom he associated. money was frequently wanted to carry out his extravagant notions, and hence he became unscrupulous in the means he used to obtain it. He was chivalric in his admiration of women--writing poetry and making love to some one in every port where he stopped-and frequently became involved in intrigues that lessen our respect for his character. He was a restless being, and his brain constantly teemed with schemes, all of which he deemed practicable, and hence became querulous and fault-finding when others disagreed with him. Many of his plans for the improvement of our Marine were excellent, and it only wanted funds to render them worthy of immediate attention by our government. This restlessness grew out of his amazing energy

But

he was constantly seeking something on which to expend himself, and this was the reason he joined the Russian service after peace was proclaimed in the United States. It was this alone that carried him from his low condition through so many trials, and over so many obstacles to the height of fame he at last reached.

He was not a mere adventurer-owing his elevation to headlong daring-he was a hard student as well as hard fighter, and had a strong intellect as well as strong arm. He wrote with astonishing fluency considering the neglect of his early education. He even wrote eloquently at times, and always with force.

[blocks in formation]

The greatest merit of a great many people is that they do as other people do. Such persons cannot tolerate any departure from established modes of action. They move round and round in a circle, and because they keep moving, as it is somewhere observed, they fancy they reminded of their error, even when they are making progress; and they are never discover, after much motion, that they are but a short distance from their start

Observers may be considered as formed of two classes-the gazers and the gapers of those who look with an intelligent eye upon things around them, and of those who merely stare at them with listless curiosity or indifference. These lasting are pupils of experience to no purpose. Schoolmaster Experience finds them very inapt scholars. If all life is a schooling, as has been said, then these gapers come into and go out of the great college of the world without taking any degrees. Perhaps the distinction between ordiobservers and those of a higher ornary der, is nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in their different modes of estimating character. The former take cognizance only of striking features; the latter regard the character in all its parts, even to the mose delicate shades of thought and feeling.

The faculty of observing is one susceptible of cultivation more than any other, and there is also an infinite variety of objects on which it may be exercised.

66

I can wonder at nothing more," says Bishop Hall," than how a man can be idle. How numberless are the books which men have written of arts, of tongues. How endless is that volume which God hath written of the world; where every creature is a letter, every day a new page."

point.

down as a rule, that where there is a In despite of this class it may be laid great amount of character there will be a great amount of misunderstood action, and usually translated, but most unjustly, which is commonly called eccentricity, to mean-folly. I grant it is well, as Lord Brougham expresses it, to do common things in the common way, but this principle of imitation in everything; and is distinct from a servile adoption of the no man of intellect, much less a man of Progressive energies, will submit to walk only in the footpaths made by the many. It is one of the conditions upon which its efficiency, or the success or failure of its efforts, depends, that the mind shall cast off, when necessary, the restraint of act with freedom, and be permitted to rules founded merely on custom, and having no basis in right.

LANGUAGE.

It is common to hear persons complain of a want of language. They should rather complain of a want of ideas. They forget that the tongue is subordinate to the intellect. Their want of con

versation, to borrow a figure from Locke, is caused by their supposing that the mind is like Fortunatus' purse, and will always furnish them without their ever putting anything into it.

"The strong hours conquer us," says Bulwer.

I know of nothing more saddening to the spirits than to meet, after the lapse of years, with one-now sobered by time and family cares into a grave and steady matron-whom we had parted with in the flush, and bloom and heyday of beautiful girlhood. The heart is pained to observe the change wrought in that face, once so radiant with hope and joy. We read in the subdued expression of the eye, in the still white but more marked expanse of brow, the history of many varied hours.

And then, too, as we take upon our laps the timid, smiling, bashful evidences of her nuptial joys-the beautiful reflections of her own early self-as we kiss their pretty lips, and listen to their artless prattle, we are reminded, oh, how painfully, that they also are subjects of change!

CIRCUMSTANCE.

We often hear the remark made, that men are the creatures of circumstance. It is equally true that they are the masters of circumstance, if so they will only cope with it. For one to be wholly the creature of circumstance is assurance enough that he is either worthless or imbecile. Circumstance is the material out of which we may mould our destinies it is not altogether an agency by which our course of life is formed. To admit this would be to make us the slaves of a dumb, inanimate power, and but little superior to the brutes, who obey only their instincts, and are the only true creatures of circumstance. The noblest of all warfares is of the mind with circumstance: it is a war waged everywhere, and he is the greatest hero who accomplishes the most in it.

POETS.

I would rather read the poets than know them. I would not willfully misrepresent that class whose high calling it is to keep alive in the world the worship of the beautiful and the good, but the records of their lives show that they seldom make either firm friends or agree

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

Women are better than men. What sacrifices are they not capable of making; how unselfish are they in their affections; how abiding is their love! They enchant us by their beauty, and charm us by their conversation. They add grace and a softer coloring to life, and assist us to bear with its asperities. In our youth they are our instructors; in sorsweet beguilers of our misery. Whatrow, our comforters; in sickness, the ever is rough in us they refine. Whatever of ruggedness there is in our natures they polish or remove. They are the only divinities on earth. Alas, that so many of them are fallen divinities. But who is it that makes them so? Who is it that takes advantage of their weakness, when that weakness should be their best claim to protection? Let him answer who abuses them.

Among the various beautiful traits of their beautiful natures, that of maternal

love should be noticed with peculiar admiration. I have heard of women-haters, and am told that such a class of beings do exist. But surely they who hold the sex lightly, and who are accustomed to speak of them in terms of reproach, can never have been spectators of the watch ful tenderness, the anxious solicitude, displayed in a thousand touching incidents, of a mother for a child. They can never have witnessed her self-sacrificing devotion to her offspring, her patient and even cheerful performance of the many laborious offices of educational training, or their tongues would falter in the utterance of one word of detraction.

LIFE OF THE MIND.

The spiritual existences of poets must be more stormy than that of all other men, as they must feel and be moved by all the passions they describe.

LOVE'S LANGUAGE.

None but those who have loved can be supposed to understand the oratory of the eye, the mute eloquence of a look, or the conversational powers of the face. Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken: the full heart knows no rhetoric of words, and resorts to the pantomime of sighs and glances.

BOOK MAKING.

Where is book making to end? The

present itch for scribbling seems to point to a period when every man will have enough to do to read his own productions. Verily, the era of warfare has passed away, the era of speech has commenced, but the era of thought and few words is yet distant and to come.

ECCENTRIC MEN OF TALENT.

There is a class of observers who

never profit by their observations; whose wisdom is of the abstract kind which is never exhibited in action. Always in error, yet shrewd in detecting it; keenly alive to the ridiculous, yet always themselves ridiculous; they live but to mourn their follies, which they unerringly discover only when it is too late to remove them. For their eccentricities they are esteemed fools by some and enigmas by others; while their virtues are acknowledged, and their irregularities accounted for, only by the more discerning few.

The three events which cause us to think most seriously and to feel most profoundly, and which make the most decided impression upon the character, are unsuccessful love, thwarted ambition, and the approach of death.

Vanity will sometimes make a very indifferent man a very good friendmoving him to kindness to another from a desire of obtaining his esteem.

MARCHING SONG OF THE "TEUTONIC RACE."

ON, still on, the worlds are speeding

Through the heavens with step sublime;

On, still on, the nations leading,

March we through the deeps of Time!

Through the shadow of the Ages,
Onward, upward, lies our way—
Till we reach the morning-edges,
Climbing to the climbing Day!

Round us, piled in desolation,
Ghostly shapes of ruin rise;
Gloomy Terrors, hoary Errors,
Tombs of buried Centuries.

« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »