l harvest,--and the autumnal Sun
Stayed long above,--and ever at the board,
Peace, white-robed angel, held the high seat given,
And War far off withdrew his visage dun.

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.

It is the misfortune of American biography that it must needs be more or
less provincial, and that, contrary to what might have been predicted,
this quality in it predominates in proportion as the country grows
larger. Wanting any great and acknowledged centre of national life and
thought, our expansion has hitherto been rather aggregation than growth;
reputations must be hammered out thin to cover so wide a surface, and
the substance of most hardly holds out to the boundaries of a single
State. Our very history wants unity, and down to the Revolution the
attention is wearied and confused by having to divide itself among
thirteen parallel threads, instead of being concentred on a single clew.
A sense of remoteness and seclusion comes over us as we read, and we
cannot help asking ourselves, "Were _not_ these things done in a
corner?" Notoriety may be achieved in a narrow sphere, but fame demands
for its evidence a more distant and prolonged reverberation. To the
world at large we were but a short column of figures in the corner of a
blue-book, New England exporting so much salt-fish, timber, and Medford
rum, Virginia so many hogshead of tobacco, and buying with the proceeds
a certain amount of English manufactures. The story of our early
colonization had a certain moral interest, to be sure, but was
altogether inferior in picturesque fascination to that of Mexico or
Peru. The lives of our worthies, like that of our nation, are bare of
those foregone and far-reaching associations with names, the
divining-rods of fancy, which the soldiers and civilians of the Old
World get for nothing by the mere accident of birth. Their historians
and biographers have succeeded to the good-will, as well as to the
long-established stand, of the shop of glory. Time is, after all, the
greatest of poets, and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being
the heirs of Fame. The philosophic poet may find a proud solace in
saying,

"Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
Trita solo";

but all the while he has the splendid centuries of Greece and Rome
behind him, and can begin his poem with invoking a goddess from whom
legend derived the planter of his race. His eyes looked out on a
landscape saturated with gl