American Citizen

A BEAUTIFUL EXTRACT.

The following is from a lecture delivered,

some fifteen years ago, by Rev. John

Newland Maffitt:

"Phoenix, fabled bird of antiquity,

when it felt the chill advances of age

built its own funeral urn, and fired its

pyre by means which Nature's instinct

taught it.

"All plumage, and its form of beauty

became ashes; but ever would rise the

young—beautiful from the urn of death

and chambers of decay would the fledgling

soar, with eyes turned toward the

sun, and essaying its dark velvet wings

sprinkled with gold and fringed with silver,

on the balmy air, raising a little

higher—until at length, in the full confidence

of flight, it gives a cry of joy, and

soon becomes a glittering speck in the

deep bosom of aerial ocean. Lovely voyager

of earth, bound on its heavenward

journey to the sun!

"So rises the spirit from the ruins of

the body, the funeral urn which its Maker

built, and death fired. So towers it away to

its home, in the pure elements of spirituality,

the intellectual Phoenix, to dip its

proud wings in the fountain of everlasting

bliss.

"So shall dear, precious humanity

survive from the ashes of a burning world.

So beautiful shall he unchanged soar

within the disc of Eternity's great luminary

with undazzled eye and untouched

wings—the Phoenix of immortality—taken

to its rainbow home and cradled on the

beating bosom of eternal love."