Her vigorous arm is round a younger and less solemn form, a form of wildering beauty, whose gold hair glitters like a nimbus in the level rays of morning; with an irresistible impulse we take her into the innermost folds of our hearts, we feel her to be our own; our banner in her right hand sways and tosses on the fresh breeze, its stars, round which new suns are ever clustering, throw their dazzling light upon her, and the young eagles turning from the sun throng around her to drink the splendor from her brighter brow. The long streamers from her girdle float athwart the sky, their wavy lines, red, white, and blue, quiver with delight as the wild zephyrs caress them, thrilling the air with shifting play of passionate color. Ha! what miracle is this?—whatsoever light may fall upon them, under what angle soever we may see them, as were it magically woven into their warp and woof, we read the word now graven on our hearts—Union! Her left hand holds closely clasped to her heart a great urn, glowing as it were an immense ruby—ah! we need no words to tell us what the young spirit clasps so fondly to her breast—we feel it is the dust of the holy dead, who gave their lives on the red battle field that she might live: their very ashes glow with living fire! Her white feet rest on the sacred graves of Shiloh, Antietam, Murfreesboro', Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Lookout Mountain, the Wilderness, Atlanta, Winchester, and Cedar Creek, from which she has newly risen in her young strength and ever-growing glory.

She is the brilliant Spirit of our Nation! the new hope of all People! Her career is ever onward with the Genius of Humanity into the enchanted realm of the happy Future. No chains are in her white hands now. The tired laborer rests as she smiles upon him; the bay of the bloodhound and sharp crack of the lash cease in the white cotton field; the Indian buries his tomahawk, no longer wounding the still ear of the forest with his shrill war whoop; the maiden walks fearlessly free, for all men are now her brothers; shielding her sanctity; the wife is happy, for the husband has won her esteem, and it is no shame to crown him with her love; and cherub-children sport around, lovely and happy as the heaven-seraphs.

Peace to our glorious dead! Eternal honor to the martyrs of freedom! From the sharp agonies of their true hearts springs now first to conscious birth the vigorous Spirit of our Nation. We never knew aright how very dear to us she was until the traitors tried to tear her limb from limb because her heart was open to all made in the image of their God—because she knew the sacred worth of man.

How near those Christmas chimes peal on the frosty air!

And if we will but think of it, a Nationality is always of slow growth, of gradual development. It, like man himself, is born in pain and anguish. It is indeed a living member of the Grand Man of which Humanity is composed. Since the forty years wandering of the children of Israel in the desert, how much suffering has been endured to hold it sacred! The history of the present time is but a record of fierce struggles to achieve or hold a Nationality. Poland has hung on the cross of her great enemy for centuries rather than yield its sanctity. He has torn and scattered its quivering members, blotted it out in blood from the names known on earth, it has been murdered, and fed upon by three great Christian Powers ('Oh, the pity of it!')—Catholic Austria, Protestant Prussia and Greek-Churched Russia—but it is not dead: it lives in all the energy of self-abnegating suffering on the mountains of Causasus, the steppes of Asia, the frozen plains of Siberia, in the depths of Russian mines, the darkness of Russian prisons, and it still will live until the last Pole is laid in the last grave of his heroic but unfortunate race. Such is its vitality when once truly born. Denmark turns pale and shivers as she feels it may be torn from her; 'Italia, with the fatal gift of beauty for her dower,' the fair land where fairer Juliets breathe the enamored air, art—crowned and genius-gifted, writhes in agony until it may be her own; Greece long bled for it; and the brave and haughty Magyar, to whom a courser fleet and the free air are necessities of daily life, braves and bears prisons, chains, and poverty, in the hope of its attainment. What is this precious Nationality? Like all basic elements, it is difficult to define. It is not a State, a Constitution, nor is it made by man at all. An able writer in The North American Review for October says: 'It may be said, in general, to be the sum of the differences, geographical, historical, political, and moral, which separate a people as a community from every other—of those differences which modify the character of each individual, and the results of which are combined in the traits of national character. The consciousness of its existence is developed slowly, and it is long before the sentiment of Nationality—the true foundation of patriotism—gains force over the hearts and convictions of a people. But this sentiment, when it has once taken root, is one of the most powerful of those by which human conduct is affected. It is a sentiment of the highest order, lifting men out of narrow and selfish individualism into a region where they behold their duties as members one of another, as partakers of the general life of humanity—the inheritors of the past, the trustees of the future.'

'What is planetary humanity?' says Krasinski. 'It is the entirety and unity of all the powers and capacities of the human spirit expressed visibly on the earth through harmony and concord, the love of its members, that is of the various nationalities. As all the members of the human body are the visible and various parts of the invisible human I, which connects and rules them all, so the visible nationalities must in their variety and harmonious unity become in some future time the living members of a universal humanity. The world knows to-day to what point its history is tending: it knows it is governed by the wisdom of God, and that its end is the Humanity, the entire universality brought into perfect accord with the will of God, knowing and executing the laws given it by God. But the means to this end, the instruments, the living members, are the Nationalities, in which all the varieties of the human race have their fairest bloom, their most precious flower. What the tones are in the musical chord they are in humanity, eternal variety in eternal harmony and concord. It is impossible to conceive Humanity without them; it would then be unity without variety, consequently no proper unity at all, a mere lifeness oneness. States are of human creation, an aggregative collection of small parts; but nationalities are made by God alone, and therefore not states without nationalities, but states forming nationalities, belong to the coming union of universal humanity, and pass into the Christian order. States have risen before this to destroy a nationality, dividing and quartering it for the profit of some selfish ideal, tearing asunder a living, palpitating organism, murdering a visible member of the Universal Humanity. He is but a child who calls this merely a political crime: it is a crime of the very deepest dye, a crime against the Humanity itself, against religion, where the daring criminals, striding over all lower spheres, break into the circles of the living God. To tear asunder a state of merely human creation, generated only by human interests and passions, would be a political crime, but to wish to dismember and murder a God-given nationality, when the realization of the idea of humanity on the planet cannot be filled without it, is a rebellion against the eternal truth of God—it is a sacrilege! The recognition of such violation were participation; opposition to such impiety is religion!'

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