and excitement of a hotly-contested general election, may be most fitly devoted to prevent a recurrence of the scenes through which we have but just passed.

This paper has been already extended too far to allow us to develop at this time our views respecting the remedy which we should propose. We may recur to it hereafter. Suffice it for the present to say that the patronage of the government should be diminished; that the action of the State itself should be confined within its appropriate limits, and permitted to interfere less with private concerns; that there should be a juster view of the nature of public office, and a better understanding of the rightful claims of party upon its members.

There must also be an utter rejection of the wicked and detestable maxim that "all is fair in politics." On this point there must be a complete purification of public sentiment, or nothing else can save us. There is not, in the history of all the frauds by which men have been cheated of their happiness, a more fatal maxim than this. If adopted and acted upon, it would convert the partisan into a rogue, and a rogue once is likely to be a rogue always. The right would ever be postponed to the expedient, and the expediency would be the expediency not of an age or of years, but of the moment. Farewell to the peaceful order of former times, to virtuous legislation, to the honest conduct of public affairs, to the purity of private morals, to the heroic sentiment of honor, if this poisonous maxim is suffered to take root in the minds of this people!

There are few men among us who are not, in some sense, party men. The connection may be more or less strict, but the instances are very rare in which it does not exist at all. Some such cases there may be. We have known some studious, busy, or over-sensitive men, who had no party affinities whatever; but they were very few, and they made a great mistake.

Every man, who wishes to have any influence in the political concerns of the country (and who, that soberly reflects on the stake he himself has in the working of our system, does not wish it?), must act with one party or the other. He can not stand aloof, or he will be heard by neither. It is not necessary that he should sacrifice his independence; and, least of all, that

he should compromise his moral principles. On the contrary, he may do much, by his influence with his associates, to moderate their violence and guide their judgment.

All party men have serious duties to perform. To preserve their faith toward their party, and at the same time their self-respect and the purity of their principles, is not always an easy task. Men of honor may well hesitate when the question of separation from a party comes before them. The step is not to be taken without great consideration. Yet there are occasions when such a step is honorable, when not to take it should cover one with dishonor. Every member, as we have shown, is called upon to make some sacrifices of feeling and opinion, in deference to the will of others, just as in a community an individual sacrifices some rights to secure the rest. These sacrifices to party have, however, a limit. They may be made in matters of expediency, but never in those of principle. Slight differences ought certainly not to produce rupture; and a wise man will scarcely separate from his brethren on a question of mere expediency. But a question of principle admits of no compromise.

We all have an interest in mitigating the fierceness of party contests, in quelling the fury of party spirit, in checking its interference with private concerns, in refusing to mere partisans the public stations, and in discontinuing the practice of making every public question a question of party. The rage for office must be abated; men must be placed there for public not party reasons; because they are fit for it, not because they have earned it by partisan labors. All this must be done, and done speedily, if we would preserve to our institutions the health and the beauty of their origin.

THE JOURNEY OF A DAY;

OR, A SEQUEL OF THE BERKSHIRE JUBILEE.

In the summer of 1844 there was a great meeting at Pittsfield, in the county of Berkshire, Massachusetts, of sons and daughters of the county, as well those who had their homes there, as those who had gone abroad to seek other homes, but had come back to see once more the old homesteads, and rejoice with their still resident brethren at this gathering. Mark Hopkins, President of Williams College, made an address, which gave rise to the following paper, written by Mr. Field in August, 1844.

"Most of us read at school the little poem entitled the 'Journey of a Day.' I have often thought that no more beautiful day's journey could be made than through this county, beginning at Greylock in the morning, and ending with the setting sun at the Eagle's Nest."

Passage from President HOPKINS's sermon at the Berkshire Jubilee.

THIS passage, which we give as near as we can from recollection, fastened itself on our minds, and we resolved to make the journey ourselves. The entire length of the county, from north to south, is fifty miles, and if the ascent of the Greylock was made the evening before, so that the journey should begin from the top at sunrise, it was possible in thirteen hours to pass down through the valley, ascend the Dome of the Taconac, and get a last view of the setting sun from the "Eagle's Nest."

The county, as is well known, covers the western part of Massachusetts, stretching across the entire breadth of the State. Separated from the other counties by the Hoosac chain of mountains, a branch of the Green Mountains of Vermont, and from New York by a branch of the Taconac, it has been until lately very little known, except to its own people. Now, since the opening of the Western Railway, it is on the great highway between Boston and the West, and is as easy of access as any part of the country. At the extreme north and south, stand two gigantic mountains, like sentinels at the gates of the valley, the Greylock on the north and the Taconac on the

south. Between these points, at an average breadth of twenty miles, is spread out one of the finest regions that the sun shines upon; a valley of various aspect, filled with gentle hills

"Broad, round, and green, that in the summer sky,
With garniture of waving grass and grain,
Orchards and beechen forests basking lie,

While deep the sunless glens are scooped between,
Where brawl o'er shallow beds the streams unseen."

Here, too, we venture to say, is American rural life in its best aspect. Here is a hardy population, neither rich nor poor, accustomed to labor, generally intelligent and virtuous, and engaged principally in agriculture. Farmers they are called; but we have never liked that word; it does not express the true condition and character of our freeholding cultivators of the soil. Farmer really signifies a tenant, an intermediate person between the land-owner and the laborer; an inferior to the higher person, the landholder. Neither "farmer," nor "yeoman," can be properly applied to our American cultivators and owners of the soil. Land-owner or planter is a better word, and designates more accurately the occupation and character of the man.

The evening before the day fixed for the journey, we passed up from Pittsfield to North Adams, on the eastern side of the Greylock, through the valley of the Hoosac (where, bythe-way, there was rich scenery enough to reward one for a week's labor), and ascended the mountain on the northeast. The ascent was fatiguing enough to make us sleep soundly, though our eagerness brought us up the next morning by daybreak, that we might see the sun rise. The morning was clear. The brightest stars were still twinkling in the heavens. The stillness was intense. As we sat upon the observatory, watching the dawn, we heard the beating of our own hearts. There was scarce a breath of air. The trees stood still as if they, like ourselves, were watching for the morning. One after another the stars went out, light streamed up the horizon, the long jagged ridge of the easternmost mountains became distinct, then the tops of the nearer hills, then the valleys, until the sun shot up from behind the great mountain-wall seventy miles off. The effect, as the sun came forth in the clear sky, first

brightening the mountain-tops through the circle of a hundred and fifty miles diameter, then throwing light down their sides and into the valleys, and over the lakes and rivers, was indescribable. If any lover of Nature desires to see her in her most magnificent aspect, let him go to the top of such a mountain as the Greylock and see the sun rise in a clear morning.

The mountain consists of three ridges, running north and south. The middle one is the highest, where stands the observatory, twenty-eight hundred feet above the plain, and thirty-six hundred above tide-water. Vast as is the prospect, the mountain itself, as you look down upon it, is scarcely less striking, with its immense proportions, the sea of forest which swells over it, the dark ravines into which you look, particularly the Hopper, a deep gorge, a thousand feet down. It is frightful to look into. The sweep of the eye from the observatory takes in a tract of not less than fifteen thousand square miles, embracing parts of Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, New York, as far as the Adirondack chain, west of Champlain, and even, it is said, a part of New Hampshire.

Half an hour after sunrise, we left the observatory, and made our way down the mountain. An hour brought us to the valley of Williamstown. This is an irregular valley, walled in by high mountains. The Hoosac comes in at the southeast, and passes off to the northwest, through a part of Vermont, toward the Hudson. In the midst of the valley, there rise three hills, in and around which are the village and the colleges. Imagine three high ridges approaching each other to within four miles, one from the south, another from the west, and the third from the northeast; then three hills in the center of the valley, a bright river coming in from the southeast, winding at the bottom of the central hills, and going out in the opposite direction; then imagine these hills crowned with college buildings, and the white houses of a New England village, and you have Williamstown. It has chanced to us to wander far in our day, and to see many seminaries of learning in our own and foreign lands, but we have never seen one in so beautiful a seat as this.

Williams College has been founded fifty years, and, though from its situation the number of students has not been so great