ness of his future attainment. Your power will begin in 1888. Take Time by the forelock; remember, it is the cradle of Fame, but the grave of Ambition; the stern corrector of fools, the salutary counsellor of the wise; Wisdom walks before it, Opportunity with it, and Repentance limps behind. See that his life be not an arrant spendthrift, and that Fame and Ambition die not bankrupts to Destiny."
In his dream, the student thought he recognized the presence of the Parcæ, and yet they seemed not the daughters of Night, to whom was allotted the decision of Fate. They wore neither chaplets of wool nor flowers of Narcissus.
The sleeper awoke to find the unsubstantial pageantry of dreamland faded, and, like Ferdinand before Prospero's cell, he thought it a most majestic vision, and magically charming. The actors of the political tragedy seemed like spirits who before the dawn of day had "melted into air, into thin air." So real was his dream that when he awoke the student wished he might sleep again, and in that gorgeous imagery, behold anew the sweet nymph and those weird women who seemed the fellows and ministers of the Fates.
In these days of thought and anxious interest he often entered nature's temple, and under her archways of silence and solitude which made the edifice more striking, as he gazed upon her magnificence in the most splendid regions of her boundless dominions he reflected upon the Constitution and these Amendments. They appeared to him to have no other exemplar than the shining luminary of day, that flowing, living fount of light, shedding its rays over shoreless seas, where through abysmal depths plummet-line could find no bottom, and lighting up the darkest corner of the most distant world.
While awaiting the deliberations of the sages of the press respecting the legal status of the civil rights of the citizens of the United States of African descent, he could but reflect upon the significant horoscope of the future parties which the great political astrologer of the press had cast; and in his solitary musings he, for the first time, realized that in the unfoldings of the future the colored vote might prove, in the evolution of parties, a most significant factor in the destiny of America.
