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The Poems are inscribed to Dr. Channing in the following

lines.

TO WILLIAM E. CHANNING.

THE pages of thy book I read,
And as I closed each one,
My heart, responding, ever said,
"Servant of God! well done!"

Well done! thy words are great and bold;
At times they seem to me,
Like Luther's, in the days of old,
Half-battles for the free.

Go on, until this land revokes
The old and chartered Lie,

The feudal curse, whose whips and yokes
Insult humanity.

A voice is ever at thy side

Speaking in tones of might,
Like the prophetic voice, that cried
To John in Patmos, "Write!"

Write! and tell out this bloody tale;
Record this dire eclipse,

This Day of Wrath, this Endless Wail,
This dread Apocalypse!

CURWEN'S JOURNAL AND LETTERS.

We are sufficiently familiar through our local and general histories, and many other publications of a more ephemeral character, with the feelings and principles of our revolutionary ancestors. Of late, especially, in the volumes of letters which have proceeded from the Adams family, have we been made acquainted with the mind in all its various phases of our rebel fathers and mothers, as well as with their outward circumstances. Men in public life and private, seekers after honor, and those who had found it, husbands, wives, and daughtersthere is hardly a shade of feeling or of thought that may at any time have found a place in their bosoms, but, having naturally been recorded at the time in memoir, letter, or journal, it has descended to our day, and introduced us into the very heart of those stirring times. There is not a lesson of resistance necessary to the management of a successful rebellion, which we have not got by heart a thousand times, and, if the same scenes were to be enacted over again, could carry into action, we doubt not, to the general admiration of the world. We have not been permitted to forget, moreover, the sufferings of our brave forefathers, their sacrifices, self-devotion, and losses — their labors in the camp and in the cabinet, their perplexities, doubts, and fears. Many times every year, beside through the books we read, are our sympathies stirred up and kept awake by lecture, or oration, or sermon, on Sundays and on week days, on religious and secular holy-days, fourth of Julys, Thanksgivings, Fasts. The last thing an American citizen of the present day is in the least danger of forgetting is his obligations to the men and women of '76 — may it be among the last he ever shall forget. But this is no good reason why we should forget every thing else. It is no good reason why especially we should forget that large number of our ancestors, who, for reasons satisfactory to themselves, as honest too in their judgements we may suppose as the patriots could see no sufficient ground for the proposed resistance; doubted whether any form of government, any condition of society could arise, out of the blood and uproar of a revolution, with all the causes of domestic jealousy and contention its termination would bring along with it, that would afford so many and so signal advantages, as, with all the acknowledged injustice and unkindness, they experienced in

their connexion with England. And then there was, as they would think, the almost certainty of defeat in any open contest with the first power of the world-an issue so probable in any impartial survey of the respective parties, that it can be ascribed only to that blindness, with which the gods sometimes visit men whom they wish to save, as well as to destroy, that they dared so unequal a strife. The unanimity of the country is the most astonishing feature of the revolution.

But few as the loyalists were behind those properly so called, we cannot doubt, there were large multitudes quietly seated on the fence, ready to jump off on the king's side when the time came,they certainly deserve our sympathy and our respect. They were the few against the many,a handful against a nation, yet they spoke their opinions openly and boldly, and sooner than yield them, renounced country, kindred, home, and self-banished, past their lives, at least the seven years of the war, as exiles in foreign lands;-many of them, their property being confiscated, in absolute dependence upon the bounty of the English Government, who before had enjoyed independence and wealth, and might have done to their dying day, by simply holding their peace. These traits of honesty and courage are matter of honorable mention wherever we find them. There was hardly any kind of privation or suffering of a personal kind endured by the revolutionists, the army excepted, which was not borne equally by the refugee loyalists. They were insulted, ridiculed, persecuted in a thousand ways; their property seized, and themselves banished. All this was in the very nature of the case inevitable; the confiscation and banishment necessary. Even in the case of the worthy citizen of Salem, of whose memoirs we propose to give some account, respectable and harmless an individual as he seems to have been,-the country was made too hot for him, and very properly so. For who can assure us, that this very Curwen, modest and harmless as he appeared to be, had he been permitted to dwell here during the war, would not have shot up from his little height into a full grown Arnold, and carried on treasonable correspondence with the enemy? We do not mean to bring any imputation upon the memory of this excellent person. He was at heart, we think, his toryism notwithstanding, a real sound American. What we have said of him, the same thing of course should we say of all the loyalists. It was quite right that the country should be rid of them. Many of them we may suppose were

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bitter enough toward the revolutionists and their movement, and would seize gladly on any occasion of doing them an ill turn. Violent and vindictive as many of the Patriots were, such some of the loyalists must have been. But all this does not hinder that their sufferings and privations for conscience' sake, if an American republican will allow a conscience to a revolutionary tory may have been great and most truly deserving of our sympathy of our sympathy for their suffering, our honor for the spirit in which it was borne.

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*

But this is all aside from our present purpose, which is merely to offer some interesting extracts from a volume lately published, containing the journal and letters of Samuel Curwen, Esq., a loyalist refugee, and resident in London during the seven years' war. The work is edited by a descendant of Mr. Curwen, George A. Ward, Esq., of New York, who has performed his part of the labor in a manner deserving of the highest praise. The journal and letters are introduced by a brief account of the early life of Mr. Curwen, and followed by biographical sketches of more than a hundred and sixty of the loyalists and other prominent persons of the revolution. These additions we owe to the industry, research, and talent of the Editor, and they constitute a very valuable part of the volume. In some instances he has drawn his material from other sources but they are few.

As the volume derives its principal interest for us, in the record it presents of the feelings and opinions of a loyalist refugee during the revolutionary struggle, we shall say but a few words of Mr. Curwen's early life, and proceed at once to his journal. He was a native of Salem, born in 1715; was graduated at Cambridge in 1735. He was a merchant by profession; but accidentally, for a time, a soldier, joining as Captain of a company the famous expedition against Louisburgh. On his return, at the termination of that spirited affair, he again became a man of business, and so continued, till the breaking out of the revolution drove him from his counting

* Journal and Letters of the late Samuel Curwen, Judge of Admiral ty, etc., an American Refugee in England, from 1775 to 1784, comprising remarks on the prominent men and measures of that period, to which are added biographical notices of many American Loyalists and other eminent persons; by GEORGE ATKINSON WARD, member of the New-York Historical Society. New-York: C. S. Francis and Co., 252 Broadway. Boston: J. H. Francis, 128 Washington Street. 1842.

VOL. XXXIII

-3D s. VOL. XV. NO. III.

46

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