The Project Gutenberg EBook of Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI., by Various

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Title: Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics.

Author: Various

Release Date: July 15, 2004 [EBook #12023]

Language: English

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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XI.—APRIL, 1863.—NO. LXVI.

ON THE VICISSITUDES OF KEATS'S FAME.

[Joseph Severn, the author of the following paper, scarcely needs introduction to the readers of the "Atlantic Monthly"; but no one will object to reperusing, in connection with his valuable contribution, this extract from the Preface to "Adonais," which Shelley wrote in 1821:—

"He [Keats] was accompanied to Rome and attended in his last illness by Mr. Severn, a young artist of the highest promise, who, I have been informed, 'almost risked his own life, and sacrificed every prospect, to unwearied attendance upon his dying friend.' Had I known these circumstances before the completion of my poem, I should have been tempted to add my full tribute of applause to the more solid recompense which the virtuous man finds in the recollection of his own motives. Mr. Severn can dispense with a reward from 'such stuff as dreams are made of.' His conduct is a noble augury of the success of his future career. May the unextinguished spirit of his illustrious friend animate the creations of his pencil, and plead against oblivion for his name!"

Mr. Severn is residing in Rome at the present time, from which city he transmits this paper.]

I well remember being struck with the clear and independent manner which Washington Allston, in the year 1818, expressed his opinion of John Keats's verse, when the young poet's writings first appeared, amid the ridicule of most English readers, Mr. Allston was at that time the only discriminating judge among the strangers to Keats who were residing abroad, and he took occasion to emphasize in my hearing his opinion of the early effusions of the young poet in words like these:—"They are crude materials of real poetry, and Keats is sure to become a great poet."

It is a singular pleasure to the few in personal friends of Keats in England (who may still have to defend him against the old and worn-out slanders) that in America he has always had a solid fame, independent of the old English prejudices.

Here in Rome, as I write, I look back through forty years of worldly changes to behold Keats's dear image again in memory. It seems as if he should be living with me now, inasmuch as I never could understand his strange and contradictory death, his falling away so suddenly from health and strength. He had that fine compactness of person which we regard as the promise of longevity, and no mind was ever more exultant in youthful feeling. I cannot summon a sufficient reason why in one short year he should have been thus cut off, "with all his imperfections on his head." Was it that he lived too soon,—that the world he sought was not ready for him?

For more than the year I am now dwelling on, he had fostered a tender and enduring love for a young girl nearly of his own age, and this love was reciprocal, not only in itself, but in all the worldly advantages arising from it of fortune on her part and fame on his. It was encouraged by the sole parent of the lady; and the fond mother was happy in seeing her daughter so betrothed, and pleased that her inheritance would fall to so worthy an object as Keats. This was all well settled in the minds and hearts of the mutual friends of both parties, when poor Keats, soon after the death of his younger brother, unaccountably showed signs of consumption; at least, he himself thought so, though the doctors were widely undecided about it. By degrees it began to be deemed needful that the young poet should go to Italy, even to preserve his life. This was at last accomplished, but too late; and now that I am reviewing all the progress of his illness from his first symptoms, I cannot but think his life might have been preserved by an Italian sojourn, if it had been adopted in time, and if circumstances had been improved as they presented themselves. And, further, if he had had the good fortune to go to America, which he partly contemplated before the death of his younger brother, not only would his life and health have been preserved, but his early fame would have been insured. He would have lived independent of the London world, which was striving to drag him down in his poetic career, and adding to the sufferings which I consider the immediate cause of his early death.

In Italy he always shrank from speaking in direct terms of the actual things which were killing him. Certainly the "Blackwood" attack was one of the least of his miseries, for he never even mentioned it to me. The greater trouble which was ingulfing him he signified in a hundred ways. Was it to be wondered at, that at the time when the happiest life was presented to his view, when it was arranged that he was to marry a young person of beauty and fortune, when the little knot of friends who valued him saw such a future for the beloved poet, and he himself, with generous, unselfish feelings, looked forward to it more delighted on their account,—was it to be wondered at, that, on the appearance of consumption, his ardent mind should have sunk into despair? He seemed struck down from the highest happiness to the lowest misery. He felt crushed at the prospect of being cut off at the early age of twenty-four, when the cup was at his lips, and he was beginning to drink that draught of delight which was to last his mortal life through, which would have insured to him the happiness of home, (happiness he had never felt, for he was an orphan,) and which was to be a barrier for him against a cold and (to him) a malignant world.

He kept continually in his hand a polished, oval, white carnelian, the gift of his widowing love, and at times it seemed his only consolation, the only thing left him in this world clearly tangible. Many letters which he was unable to read came for him. Some he allowed me to read to him; others were too worldly,—for, as he said, he had "already journeyed far beyond them." There were two letters, I remember, for which he had no words, but he made me understand that I was to place them on his heart within his winding-sheet.

Those bright falcon eyes, which I had known only in joyous intercourse, while revelling in books and Nature, or while he was reciting his own poetry, now beamed an unearthly brightness and a penetrating steadfastness that could not be looked at. It was not the fear of death,—on the contrary, he earnestly wished to die,—but it was the fear of lingering on and on, that now distressed him; and this was wholly on my account. Amidst the world of emotions that were crowding and increasing as his end approached, I could always see that his generous concern for me in my isolated position at Rome was one of his greatest cares. In a little basket of medicines I had bought at Gravesend at his request there was a bottle of laudanum, and this I afterwards found was destined by him "to close his mortal career," when no hope was left, and to prevent a long, lingering death, for my poor sake. When the dismal time came, and Sir James Clark was unable to encounter Keats's penetrating look and eager demand, he insisted on having the bottle, which I had already put away. Then came the most touching scenes. He now explained to me the exact procedure of his gradual dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon the danger to my life, and certainly to my fortunes, from my continued attendance upon him. One whole day was spent in earnest representations of this sort, to which, at the same time that they wrung my heart to hear and his to utter, I was obliged to oppose a firm resistance. On the second day, his tender appeal turned to despair, in all the power of his ardent imagination and bursting heart.

From day to day, after this time, he would always demand of Sir James Clark, "How long is this posthumous life of mine to last?" On finding me inflexible in my purpose of remaining with him, he became calm, and tranquilly said that he was sure why I held up so patiently was owing to my Christian faith, and that he was disgusted with himself for ever appearing before me in such savage guise; that he now felt convinced how much every human being required the support of religion, that he might die decently. "Here am I," said he, "with desperation in death that would disgrace the commonest fellow. Now, my dear Severn, I am sure, if you could get some of the works of Jeremy Taylor to read to me, I might become really a Christian, and leave this world in peace." Most fortunately, I was able to procure the "Holy Living and Dying." I read some passages to him, and prayed with him, and I could tell by the grasp of his dear hand that his mind was reviving. He was a great lover of Jeremy Taylor, and it did not seem to require much effort in him to embrace the Holy Spirit in these comforting works.

Thus he gained strength of mind from day to day just in proportion as his poor body grew weaker and weaker. At last I had the consolation of finding him calm, trusting, and more prepared for his end than I was. He tranquilly rehearsed to me what would be the process of his dying, what I was to do, and how I was to bear it. He was even minute in his details, evidently rejoicing that his death was at hand. In all he then uttered he breathed a simple, Christian spirit; indeed, I always think that he died a Christian, that "Mercy" was trembling on his dying lips, and that his tortured soul was received by those Blessed Hands which could alone welcome it.[A]

[Footnote A: Whilst this was passing at Rome, another scene of the tragedy was enacting in London. The violence of the Tory party in attacking Keats had increased after his leaving England, but he had found able defenders, and amongst them Mr. John Scott, the editor of the "Champion," who published a powerful vindication of Keats, with a denunciation of the party-spirit of his critics. This led to a challenge from Mr. Scott to Mr. Lockhart, who was then one of the editors of "Blackwood." The challenge was shifted over to a Mr. Christie, and he and Mr. Scott fought at Chalk Farm, with the tragic result of the death of Keats's defender,—and this within a few days of the poet's death at Rome. The deplorable catastrophe was not without its compensations, for ever after there was a more chastened feeling in both parties.]

After the death of Keats, my countrymen in Rome seemed to vie with one another in evincing the greatest kindness towards me. I found myself in the midst of persons who admired and encouraged my beautiful pursuit of painting, in which I was then indeed but a very poor student, but with my eyes opening and my soul awakening to a new region of Art, and beginning to feel the wings growing for artistic flights I had always been dreaming about.

In all this, however, there was a solitary drawback: there were few Englishmen at Rome who knew Keats's works, and I could scarcely persuade any one to make the effort to read them, such was the prejudice against him as a poet; but when his gravestone was placed, with his own expressive line, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water," then a host started up, not of admirers, but of scoffers, and a silly jest was often repeated in my hearing, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water, and his works in milk and water"; and this I was condemned to hear for years repeated, as though it had been a pasquinade; but I should explain that it was from those who were not aware that I was the friend of Keats.

At the first Easter after his death I had a singular encounter with the late venerable poet, Samuel Rogers, at the table of Sir George Beaumont, the distinguished amateur artist. Perhaps in compliment to my friendship for Keats, the subject of his death was mentioned by Sir George, and he asked Mr. Rogers if he had been acquainted with the young poet in England. Mr. Rogers replied, that he had had more acquaintance than he liked, for the poems were tedious enough, and the author had come upon him several times for money. This was an intolerable falsehood, and I could not restrain myself until I had corrected him, which I did with my utmost forbearance,—explaining that Sir. Rogers must have mistaken some other person for Keats,—that I was positive my friend had never done such a thing in any shape, or even had occasion to do it,—that he possessed a small independence in money, and a large one in mind.

The old poet received the correction, with much kindness, and thanked me for so effectually setting him right. Indeed, this encounter was the groundwork of a long and to me advantageous friendship between us. I soon discovered that it was the principle of his sarcastic wit not only to sacrifice all truth to it, but even all his friends, and that he did not care to know any who would not allow themselves to be abused for the purpose of lighting up his breakfast with sparkling wit, though not quite, indeed, at the expense of the persons then present. I well remember, on one occasion afterwards, Mr. Rogers was entertaining us with a volley of sarcasms upon a disagreeable lawyer, who made pretensions to knowledge and standing not to be borne; on this occasion the old poet went on, not only to the end of the breakfast, but to the announcement of the very man himself on an accidental visit, and then, with a bland smile and a cordial shake of the hand, he said to him, "My dear fellow, we have all been talking about you up to this very minute,"—and looking at his company still at table, and with a significant wink, he, with extraordinary adroitness and experienced tact, repeated many of the good things, reversing the meaning of them, and giving us the enjoyment of the double-entendre. The visitor was charmed, nor even dreamed of the ugliness of his position. This incident gave me a painful and repugnant impression of Mr. Rogers, yet no doubt it was after the manner of his time, and such as had been the fashion in Walpole's and Johnson's days.

I should be unjust to the venerable poet not to add, that notwithstanding what is here related of him, be oftentimes showed himself the generous and noble-hearted man. I think that in all my long acquaintance with him he evinced a kind of indirect regret that he had commenced with me in such an ugly attack on dear Keats, whose fame, when I went to England in 1838, was not only well established, but was increasing from day to day, and Mr. Rogers was often at the pains to tell me so, and to relate the many histories of poets who had been less fortunate than Keats.

It was in the year of the Reform Bill, 1830, that I first heard of the Paris edition (Galignani's) of Keats's works, and I confess that I was quite taken by surprise, nor could I really believe the report until I saw the book with the engraved portrait from my own drawing; for, after all the vicissitudes of Keats's fame which I had witnessed, I could not easily understand his becoming the poet of "the million." I had now the continued gratification in Rome of receiving frequent visits from the admirers of Keats and Shelley, who sought every way of showing kindness to me. One great cause of this change, no doubt, was the rise of all kinds of mysticism in religious opinions, which often associated themselves with Shelley's poetry, and I then for the first time heard him named as the only really religious poet of the age. To the growing fame of Keats I can attribute some of the pleasantest and most valuable associations of my after-life, as it included almost the whole society of gifted young men at that time called "Young England." Here I may allude to the extraordinary change I now observed in the manners and morals of Englishmen generally: the foppish love of dress was in a great measure abandoned, and all intellectual pursuits were caught up with avidity, and even made fashionable.

The most remarkable example of the strange capriciousness of Keats's fame which fell under my personal observation occurred in my later Roman years, during the painful visit of Sir Walter Scott to Rome in the winding-up days of his eventful life, when he was broken down not only by incurable illness and premature old age, but also by the accumulated misfortunes of fatal speculations and the heavy responsibility of making up all with the pen then trembling in his failing hand.

I had been indirectly made known to him by his favorite ward and protégée, the late Lady Northampton, who, accustomed to write to him monthly, often made mention of me; for I was on terms of friendship with all her family, an intimacy which in great part arose from the delight she always had in Keats's poetry, being herself a poetess, and a most enlightened and liberal critic.

When Sir Walter arrived, he received me like an old and attached friend; indeed, he involuntarily tried to make me fill up the terrible void then recently created by the death of Lady Northampton at the age of thirty-seven years. I went at his request to breakfast with him every morning, when he invariably commenced talking of his lost friend, of her beauty, her singularly varied accomplishments, of his growing delight in watching her from a child in the Island of Mull, and of his making her so often the model of his most successful female characters, the Lady of the Lake and Flora MacIvor particularly. Then he would stop short to lament her unlooked-for death with tears and groans of bitterness such as I had never before witnessed in any one,—his head sinking down on his heaving breast. When he revived, (and this agonizing scene took place every morning,) he implored me to pity him, and not heed his weakness,—that in his great misfortunes, in all their complications, he had looked forward to Rome and his dear Lady Northampton as his last and certain hope of repose; she was to be his comfort in the winding-up of life's pilgrimage: now, on his arrival, his life and fortune almost exhausted, she was gone! gone! After these pathetic outpourings, he would gradually recover his old cheerfulness, his expressive gray eye would sparkle even in tears, and soon that wonderful power he had for description would show itself, when he would often stand up to enact the incident of which he spoke, so ardent was he, and so earnest in the recital.

Each morning, at his request, I took for his examination some little picture or sketch that might interest him, and amongst the rest a picture of Keats, (now in the National Portrait Gallery of London,) but this I was surprised to find was the only production of mine that seemed not to interest him; he remained silent about it, but on all the others he was ready with interesting comments and speculations. Observing this, and wondering within myself at his apathy with regard to the young lost poet, as I had reason to be proud of Keats's growing fame, I ventured to talk about him, and of the extraordinary caprices of that fame, which at last had found its resting-place in the hearts of all real lovers of poetry.

I soon perceived that I was touching on an embarrassing theme, and I became quite bewildered on seeing Miss Scott turn away her face, already crimsoned with emotion. Sir Walter then falteringly remarked, "Yes, yes, the world finds out these things for itself at last," and taking my hand, closed the interview,—our last, for the following night he was taken seriously ill, and I never saw him again, as his physician immediately hurried him away from Rome.

The incomprehensibleness of this scene induced me to mention it on the same day to Mr. Woodhouse, the active and discriminating friend of Keats, who had collected every written record of the poet, and to whom we owe the preservation of many of the finest of his productions. He was astonished at my recital, and at my being ignorant of the fact that Sir Walter Scott was a prominent contributor to the Review which through its false and malicious criticisms had always been considered to have caused the death of Keats.

My surprise was as great as his at my having lived all those seventeen years in Rome and been so removed from the great world, that this, a fact so interesting to me to know, had never reached me. I had been unconsciously the painful means of disturbing poor old Sir Walter with a subject so sore and unwelcome that I could only conclude it must have been the immediate cause of his sudden illness. Nothing could be farther from my nature than to have been guilty of such seemingly wanton inhumanity; but I had no opportunity afterwards of explaining the truth, or of justifying my conduct in any way.

This was the last striking incident connected with Keats's fame which fell within my own experience, and perhaps may have been the last, or one of the last, symptoms of that party-spirit which in the artificial times of George IV. was so common even among poets in their treatment of one another,—they assuming to be mere politicians, and striving to be oblivious of their heart-ennobling pursuit.

It only remains for me to speak of my return to Rome in 1861, after an absence of twenty years, and of the favorable change and the enlargement during that time of Keats's fame,—not as manifested by new editions of his works, or by the contests of publishers about him, or by the way in which most new works are illustrated with quotations from him, or by the fact that some favorite lines of his have passed into proverbs, but by the touching evidence of his silent grave. That grave, which I can remember as once the object of ridicule, has now become the poetic shrine of the world's pilgrims who care and strive to live in the happy and imaginative region of poetry. The head-stone, having twice sunk, owing to its faulty foundation, has been twice renewed by loving strangers, and each time, as I am informed, these strangers were Americans. Here they do not strew flowers, as was the wont of olden times, but they pluck everything that is green and living on the grave of the poet. The Custode tells me, that, notwithstanding all his pains in sowing and planting, he cannot "meet the great consumption." Latterly an English lady, alarmed at the rapid disappearance of the verdure on and around the grave, actually left an annual sum to renew it. When the Custode complained to me of the continued thefts, and asked what he was to do, I replied, "Sow and plant twice as much; extend the poet's domain; for, as it was so scanty during his short life, surely it ought to be afforded to him twofold in his grave."

Here on my return to Rome, all kinds of happy associations with the poet surround me, but none so touching as my recent meeting with his sister. I had known her in her childhood, during my first acquaintance with Keats, but had never seen her since. I knew of her marriage to a distinguished Spanish patriot, Señor Llanos, and of her permanent residence in Spain; but it was reserved for me to have the felicity of thus accidentally meeting her, like a new-found sister, in Rome. This city has an additional sacredness for both of us as the closing scene of her illustrious brother's life, and I am held by her and her charming family in loving regard as the last faithful friend of the poet. That I may indulge the pleasures of memory and unite them with the sympathy of present incidents, I am now engaged on a picture of the poet's grave, and am treating it with all the picturesque advantages which the antique locality gives me, as well as the elevated associations which this poetic shrine inspires. The classic story of Endymion being the subject of Keats's principal poem, I have introduced a young Roman shepherd sleeping against the head-stone with his flock about him, whilst the moon from behind the pyramid illuminates his figure and serves to realize the poet's favorite theme in the presence of his grave. This interesting incident is not fanciful, but is what I actually saw on an autumn evening at Monte Tertanio the year following the poet's death.

* * * * *

A SPASM OF SENSE.

The conjunction of amiability and sense in the same individual renders that individual's position in a world like this very disagreeable. Amiability without sense, or sense without amiability, runs along smoothly enough. The former takes things as they are. It receives all glitter as pure gold, and does not see that it is custom alone which varnishes wrong with a shiny coat of respectability, and glorifies selfishness with the aureole of sacrifice. It sets down all collisions as foreordained, and never observes that they occur because people will not smooth off their angles, but sharpen them, and not only sharpen them, but run them into you. It forgets that the Lord made man upright, but he hath sought out many inventions. It attributes all the confusion and inaptitude which it finds to the nature of things, and never suspects that the Devil goes around in the night, thrusting the square men into the round places, and the round men into the square places. It never notices that the reason why the rope does not unwind easily is because one strand is a world too large and another a world too small, and so it sticks where it ought to roll, and rolls where it ought to stick. It makes sweet, faint efforts with tender fingers and palpitating heart to oil the wheels and polish up the machine, and does not for a moment imagine that the hitch is owing to original incompatibility of parts and purposes, that the whole machine must be pulled to pieces and made over, and that nothing will be done by standing patiently by, trying to soothe away the creaking and wheezing and groaning of the laboring, lumbering thing, by laying on a little drop of sweet-oil with a pin-feather. As it does not see any of these things that are happening before its eyes, of course it is shallowly happy. And on the other hand, he who does see them and is not amiable is grimly and Grendally happy. He likes to say disagreeable things, and all this dismay and disaster scatter disagreeable things broadcast along his path, so that all he has to do is to pick them up and say them. Therefore this world is his paradise. He would not know what to do with himself in a world where matters were sorted and folded and laid away ready for you when you wanted them. He likes to see human affairs mixing themselves up in irretrievable confusion. If he detects a symptom of straightening, it shall go hard but he will thrust in his own fingers and snarl a thread or two. He is delighted to find dogged duty and eager desire butting each other. All the irresistible forces crashing against all the immovable bodies give him no shock, only a pleasant titillation. He is never so happy as when men are taking hold of things by the blade, and cutting their hands, and losing blood. He tells them of it, but not in order to relieve so much as to "aggravate" them; and he does aggravate them, and is satisfied. Oh, but he is an aggravating person!

It is you, you who combine the heart of a seraph with the head of a cherub, who know what trouble is. You see where the shoe pinches, but your whole soul relucts from pointing out the tender place. You see why things go wrong, and how they might be set right; but you have a mortal dread of being thought meddlesome and impertinent, or cold and cruel, or restless and arrogant, if you attempt to demolish the wrong or rebel against the custom. When you draw your bow at an abuse, people think you are trying to bring down religion and propriety and humanity. But your conscience will not let you see the abuse raving to and fro over the earth without taking aim; so, either way, you are cut to the heart.

I love men. I adore women. I value their good opinion. There is much in them to applaud and imitate. There is much in them to elicit faith and reverence. If, only, one could see their good qualities alone, or, seeing their vapid and vicious ones, could contemplate them with no touch of tenderness for the owner, life might indeed be lovely. As it is, while I am at one moment rapt in enthusiastic admiration of the strength and grace, the power and pathos, the hidden resources, the profound capabilities of my race, at another, I could wish, Nero-like, that all mankind were concentrated in one person and all womankind in another, that I might take them, after the fashion of rural schoolmasters, and shake their heads together. Condemnation and reproach are not in my line; but there is so much in the world that merits condemnation and reproach and receives indifference and even reward, there is so much acquiescence in wrong doing and wrong thinking, so much letting things jolt along in the same rut wherein we and they were born, without inquiring whether, lifted into another groove, they might not run more easily, that, if one who does see the difficulty holds his peace, the very stones will cry out. However gladly one would lie on a bed of roses and glide silken-sailed down the stream of life, how exquisitely painful soever it may be to say what you fear and feel may give pain, it is only a Sybarite who sets ease above righteousness, only a coward who misses victory through dread of defeat.

There are many false ideas afloat regarding womanly duties. I do not design now to open anew any vulgar, worn-out, woman's-rightsy question. Every remark that could be made on that theme has been made—but one, and that I will take the liberty to make now in a single sentence and close the discussion. It is this: the man who gave rubber-boots to women did more to elevate woman than all the theorizers, male or female, that ever were born.

But without any suspicious lunges into that dubious region which lies outside of woman's universally acknowledged "sphere," (a blight rest upon the word!) there is within the pale, within the boundary-line which the most conservative never dreamed of questioning, room for a great divergence of ideas. Now divergence of ideas does not necessarily imply fighting at short range. People may adopt a course of conduct which you do not approve; yet you may feel it your duty to make no open animadversion. Circumstances may have suggested such a course to them, or forced it upon them; and perhaps, considering all things, it is the best they can do. But when, encouraged by your silence, they publish it to the world, not only as relatively, but intrinsically, the best and most desirable,—when, not content with swallowing it themselves as medicine, they insist on ramming it down your throat as food,—it is time to buckle on your armor and have at them.

A little book, published by the Tract Society, called "The Mother and her Work," has been doing just this thing. It is a modest little book. It makes no pretensions to literary or other superiority. It has much excellent counsel, pious reflection, and comfortable suggestion. Being a little book, it costs but little, and it will console, refresh, and instruct weary, conscientious mothers, and so have a large circulation, a wide influence, and do an immense amount of mischief. For the Evil One in his senses never sends out poison labelled "POISON." He mixes it in with great quantities of innocent and nutritive flour and sugar. He shapes it in cunning shapes of pigs and lambs and hearts and birds and braids. He tints it with gay hues of green and pink and rose, and puts it in the confectioner's glass windows, where you buy—what? Poison? No, indeed! Candy, at prices to suit the purchasers. So this good and pious little book has such a preponderance of goodness and piety that the poison in it will not be detected, except by chemical analysis. It will go down sweetly, like grapes of Beulah. Nobody will suspect he is poisoned; but just so far as it reaches and touches, the social dyspepsia will be aggravated.

I submit a few atoms of the poison revealed by careful examination.

"The mother's is a most honorable calling. 'What a pity that one so gifted should be so tied down!' remarks a superficial observer, as she looks upon the mother of a young and increasing family. The pale, thin face and feeble step, bespeaking the multiplied and wearying cares of domestic life, elicit an earnest sympathy from the many, thoughtlessly flitting across her pathway, and the remark passes from mouth to mouth, 'How I pity her! What a shame it is! She is completely worn down with so many children.' It may be, however, that this young mother is one who needs and asks no pity," etc.

"But the true mother yields herself uncomplainingly, yea, cheerfully, to the wholesome privation, solitude, and self-denial allotted her…..Was she fond of travelling, of visiting the wonderful in Nature and in Art, of mingling in new and often-varying scenes? Now she has found 'an abiding city,' and no allurements are strong enough to tempt her thence. Had society charms for her, and in the social circle and the festive throng were her chief delights? Now she stays at home, and the gorgeous saloon and brilliant assemblage give place to the nursery and the baby. Was she devoted to literary pursuits? Now the library is seldom visited, the cherished studies are neglected, the rattle and the doll are substituted for the pen. Her piano is silent, while she chants softly and sweetly the soothing lullaby. Her dress can last another season now, and the hat—oh, she does not care, if it is not in the latest mode, for she has a baby to look after, and has no time for herself. Even the ride and the walk are given up, perhaps too often, with the excuse, 'Baby-tending is exercise enough for me.' Her whole life is reversed."

The assumption is that all this is just as it should be. The thoughtless person may fancy that it is a pity; but it is not a pity. This is a model mother and a model state of things. It is not simply to be submitted to, not simply to be patiently borne; it is to be aspired to as the noblest and holiest state.

That is the strychnine. You may counsel people to take joyfully the spoiling of their goods, and comfort, encourage, and strengthen them by so doing; but when you tell them that to be robbed and plundered is of itself a priceless blessing, the highest stage of human development, you do them harm; because, in general, falsehood is always harmful, and because, in particular, so far as you influence them at all, you prevent them from taking measures to stop the wrong-doing. You ought to counsel them to bear with Christian resignation what they cannot help; but you ought with equal fervor to counsel them to look around and see if there are not many things which they can help, and if there are, by all means to help them. What is inevitable comes to us from God, no matter how many hands it passes through; but submission to unnecessary evils is cowardice or laziness; and extolling of the evil as good is sheer ignorance, or perversity, or servility. Even the ills that must be borne should be borne under protest, lest patience degenerate into slavery. Christian character is never formed by acquiescence in or apotheosis of wrong.

The principle that underlies these extracts, and makes them ministrative of evil, is the principle that a woman can benefit her children by sacrificing herself. It teaches, that pale, thin faces and feeble steps are excellent things in young mothers,—provided they are gained by maternal duties. We infer that it is meet, right, and the bounden duty of such to give up society, reading, riding, music, and become indifferent to dress, cultivation, recreation, to everything, in short, except taking care of the children. It is all just as wrong as it can be. It is wrong morally; it is wrong socially; wrong in principle, wrong in practice. It is a blunder as well as a crime, for it works woe. It is a wrong means to accomplish an end; and it does not accomplish the end, after all, but demolishes it.

On the contrary, the duty and dignity of a mother require that she should never subordinate herself to her children. When she does so, she does it to their manifest injury and her own. Of course, if illness or accident demand unusual care, she does well to grow thin and pale in bestowing unusual care. But when a mother in the ordinary routine of life grows thin and pale, gives up riding, reading, and the amusements and occupations of life, there is a wrong somewhere, and her children shall reap the fruits of it. The father and mother are the head of the family, the most comely and the most honorable part. They cannot benefit their children by descending from their Heaven-appointed places, and becoming perpetual and exclusive feet and hands. This is the great fault of American mothers. They swamp themselves in a slough of self-sacrifice. They are smothered in their own sweetness. They dash into domesticity with an impetus and abandonment that annihilate themselves. They sink into their families like a light in a poisonous well, and are extinguished.

One hears much complaint of the direction and character of female education. It is dolefully affirmed that young ladies learn how to sing operas, but not how to keep house,—that they can conjugate Greek verbs, but cannot make bread,—that they are good for pretty toying, but not for homely using. Doubtless there is foundation for this remark, or it would never have been made. But I have been in the East, and the West, and the North, and the South; I know that I have seen the best society, and I am sure I have seen very bad, if not the worst; and I never met a woman whose superior education, whose piano, whose pencil, whose German, or French, or any school-accomplishments, or even whose novels, clashed with her domestic duties. I have read of them in books; I did hear of one once; but I never met one,—not one. I have seen women, through love of gossip, through indolence, through sheer famine of mental pabulum, leave undone things that ought to be done,—rush to the assembly, the lecture-room, the sewing-circle, or vegetate in squalid, shabby, unwholesome homes; but I never saw education run to ruin. So it seems to me that we are needlessly alarmed in that direction.

But I have seen scores and scores of women leave school, leave their piano and drawing and fancy-work, and all manner of pretty and pleasant things, and marry and bury themselves. You hear of them about six times in ten years, and there is a baby each time. They crawl out of the farther end of the ten years, sallow and wrinkled and lank,—teeth gone, hair gone, roses gone, plumpness gone,—freshness, and vivacity, and sparkle, everything that is dewy, and springing, and spontaneous, gone, gone, gone forever. This our Tract-Society book puts very prettily. "She wraps herself in the robes of infantile simplicity, and, burying her womanly nature in the tomb of childhood, patiently awaits the sure-coming resurrection in the form of a noble, high-minded, world-stirring son, or a virtuous, lovely daughter. The nursery is the mother's chrysalis. Let her abide for a little season, and she shall emerge triumphantly, with ethereal wings and a happy flight."

But the nursery has no business to be the mother's chrysalis. God never intended her to wind herself up into a cocoon. If He had, He would have made her a caterpillar. She has no right to bury her womanly nature in the tomb of childhood. It will surely be required at her hands. It was given her to sun itself in the broad, bright day, to root itself fast and firm in the earth, to spread itself wide to the sky, that her children in their infancy and youth and maturity, that her husband in his strength and his weakness, that her kinsfolk and neighbors and the poor of the land, the halt and the blind and all Christ's little ones, may sit under its shadow with great delight. No woman has a right to sacrifice her own soul to problematical, high-minded, world-stirring sons, and virtuous, lovely daughters. To be the mother of such, one might perhaps pour out one's life in draughts so copious that the fountain should run dry; but world-stirring people are extremely rare. One in a century is a liberal allowance. The overwhelming probabilities are, that her sons will be lawyers and shoemakers and farmers and commission-merchants, her daughters nice, "smart," pretty girls, all good, honest, kind-hearted, commonplace people, not at all world-stirring, not at all the people one would glory to merge one's self in. If the mother is not satisfied with this, if she wants them otherwise, she must be otherwise. The surest way to have high-minded children is to be high-minded yourself. A man cannot burrow in his counting-room for ten or twenty of the best years of his life, and come out as much of a man and as little of a mole as he went in. But the twenty years should have ministered to his manhood, instead of trampling on it. Still less can a woman bury herself in her nursery, and come out without harm. But the years should have done her great good. This world is not made for a tomb, but a garden. You are to be a seed, not a death. Plant yourself, and you will sprout. Bury yourself, and you can only decay. For a dead opportunity there is no resurrection. The only enjoyment, the only use to be attained in this world, must be attained on the wing. Each day brings its own happiness, its own benefit; but it has none to spare. What escapes to-day is escaped forever. To-morrow has no overflow to atone for the lost yesterdays.

Few things are more painful to look upon than the self-renunciation, the self-abnegation of mothers,—painful both for its testimony and its prophecy. Its testimony is of over-care, over-work, over-weariness, the abuse of capacities that were bestowed for most sacred uses, an utter waste of most pure and life-giving waters. Its prophecy is of early decline and decadence, forfeiture of position and power, and worst, perhaps, of all, irreparable loss and grievous wrong to the children for whom all is sacrificed.

God gives to the mother supremacy in her family. It belongs to her to maintain it. This cannot be done without exertion. The temptation to come down from her throne and become a mere hewer of wood, and drawer of water is very strong. It is so much easier to work with the hands than with the head. One can chop sticks all day serenely unperplexed. But to administer a government demands observation and knowledge and judgment and resolution and inexhaustible patience. Yet, however uneasy lies the head that wears the crown of womanhood, that crown cannot be bartered away for any baser wreath without infinite harm. In both cases there must be sacrifice; but in the one case it is unto death, in the other unto life. If the mother stands on high ground, she brings her children up to her own level; if she sinks, they sink with her.

To maintain her rank, no exertion is too great, no means too small. Dress is one of the most obvious things to a child. If the mother wears cheap or shabby or ill-assorted clothes, while the children's are fine and harmonious, it is impossible that they should not receive the impression that they are of more consequence than their mother. Therefore, for her children's sake, if not for her own, the mother should always be well-dressed. Her baby, so far as it is concerned in the matter, instead of being an excuse for a faded bonnet, should be an inducement for a fresh one. It is not a question of riches or poverty; it is a thing of relations. It is simply that the mother's dress—her morning and evening and street and church dress—should be quite as good as, and if there is any difference, better than her child's. It is of no manner of consequence how a child is clad, provided only its health be not injured, its taste corrupted, or its self-respect wounded. Children look prettier in the cheapest and simplest materials than in the richest and most elaborate. But how common is it to see the children gayly caparisoned in silk and feathers and flounces, while the mother is enveloped in an atmosphere of cottony fadiness! One would take the child to be mistress and the mother a servant. "But," the mother says, "I do not care for dress, and Caroline does. She, poor child, would be mortified not to be dressed like the other children." Then do you teach her better. Plant in her mind a higher standard of self-respect. Don't tell her you cannot afford to do for her thus and thus; that will scatter premature thorns along her path; but say that you do not approve of it; it is proper for her to dress in such and such a way. And be so nobly and grandly a woman that she shall have faith in you.

It is essential also that the mother have sense, intelligence, comprehension.

As much as she can add of education and accomplishments will increase her stock in trade. Her reading and riding and music, instead of being neglected for her children's sake, should for their sake be scrupulously cultivated. Of the two things, it is a thousand times better that they should be attended by a nurserymaid in their infancy than by a feeble, timid, inefficient matron in their youth. The mother can oversee half a dozen children with a nurse; but she needs all her strength, all her mind, her own eyes, and ears, and quick perceptions, and delicate intuition, and calm self-possession, when her sturdy boys and wild young girls are leaping and bounding and careering into their lusty life. All manner of novel temptations beset them,—perils by night and perils by day,—perils in the house and by the way. Their fierce and hungry young souls, rioting in awakening consciousness, ravening for pleasure, strong and tumultuous, snatch eagerly at every bait. They want then a mother able to curb, and guide, and rule them; and only a mother who commands their respect can do this. Let them see her sought for her social worth,—let them see that she is familiar with all the conditions of their life,—that her vision is at once broader and keener than theirs,—that her feet have travelled along the paths they are just beginning to explore,—that she knows all the phases alike of their strength and their weakness,—and her influence over them is unbounded. Let them see her uncertain, uncomfortable, hesitating, fearful without discrimination, leaning where she ought to support, interfering without power of suggesting, counselling, but not controlling, with no presence, no bearing, no experience, no prestige, and they will carry matters with a high hand. They will overrule her decisions, and their love will not be unmingled with contempt. It will be strong enough to prick them when they have done wrong, but not strong enough to keep them from doing wrong.

Nothing gives a young girl such vantage-ground in society and in life as a mother,—a sensible, amiable, brilliant, and commanding woman. Under the shelter of such a mother's wing, the neophyte is safe. This mother will attract to herself the wittiest and the wisest. The young girl can see society in its best phases, without being herself drawn out into its glare. She forms her own style on the purest models. She gains confidence, without losing modesty. Familiar with wisdom, she will not be dazed by folly. Having the opportunity to make observations before she begins to be observed, she does not become the prey of the weak and the wicked. Her taste is strengthened and refined, her standard elevates itself, her judgment acquires a firm basis. But cast upon her own resources, her own blank inexperience, at her first entrance into the world, with nothing to stand between her and what is openly vapid and covertly vicious, with no clear eye to detect for her the false and distinguish the true, no strong, firm, judicious hand to guide tenderly and undeviatingly, to repress without irritating and encourage without emboldening, what wonder that the peach-bloom loses its delicacy, deepening into rouge or hardening into brass, and the happy young life is stranded on a cruel shore?

Hence it follows that our social gatherings consist, to so lamentable an extent, of pert youngsters or faded oldsters. Thence come those abominable "young people's parties," where a score or two or three of boys and girls meet and manage after their own hearts. Thence it happens that conversation seems to be taking its place among the Lost Arts, and the smallest of small talk reigns in its stead. Society, instead of giving its tone to the children, takes it from them, and since it cannot be juvenile, becomes insipid, and because it is too old to prattle, jabbers. Talkers are everywhere, but where are the men that say things? Where are the people that can be listened to and quoted? Where are the flinty people whose contact strikes fire? Where are the electric people who thrill a whole circle with sudden vitality? Where are the strong people who hedge themselves around with their individuality, and will be roused by no prince's kiss, but taken only by storm, yet, once captured, are sweeter than the dews of Hymettus? Where are the seers, the prophets, the Magi, who shall unfold for us the secrets of the sky and the seas, and the mystery of human hearts?

Yet fathers and mothers not only acquiesce in this state of things, they approve of it. They foster it. They are forward to annihilate themselves. They are careful to let their darlings go out alone, lest they be a restraint upon them,—as if that were not what parents were made for. If they were what they ought to be, the restraint would be not only wholesome, but impalpable. The relation between parents and children should be such that pleasure shall not be quite perfect, unless shared by both. Parents ought to take such a tender, proud, intellectual interest in the pursuits and amusements of their children that the children shall feel the glory of the victory dimmed, unless their parents are there to witness it. If the presence of a sensible mother is felt as a restraint, it shows conclusively that restraint is needed.

A woman also needs self-cultivation, both physical and mental, in order to self-respect. Undoubtedly Diogenes glorified himself in his tub. But people in general, and women in universal, except the geniuses,—need the pomp of circumstance. A slouchy garb is both effect and cause of a slouchy mind. A woman who lets go her hold upon dress, literature, music, amusement, will almost inevitably slide down into a bog of muggy moral indolence. She will lose her spirit; and when the spirit is gone out of a woman, there is not much left of her. When she cheapens herself, she diminishes her value. Especially when the evanescent charms of mere youth are gone, when the responsibilities of life have left their mark upon her, is it indispensable that she attend to all the fitnesses of externals, and strengthen and polish all her mental and social qualities. By this I do not mean that women should allow themselves to lose their beauty as they increase in years. Men grow handsomer as they grow older. There is no reason, there ought to be no reason, why women should not. They will have a different kind of beauty, but it will be just as truly beauty and more impressive and attractive than the beauty of sixteen. It is absurd to suppose that God has made women so that their glory passes away in half a dozen years. It is absurd to suppose that thought and feeling and passion and purpose, all holy instincts and impulses, can chisel away on a woman's face for thirty, forty, fifty years, and leave that face at the end worse than they found it. They found it a negative,—mere skin and bone, blood and muscle and fat. They can but leave their mark upon it, and the mark of good is good. Pity does not have the same finger-touch as revenge. Love does not hold the same brush as hatred. Sympathy and gratitude and benevolence have a different sign-manual from cruelty and carelessness and deceit. All these busy little sprites draw their fine lines, lay on their fine colors; the face lights up under their tiny hands; the prisoned soul shines clearer and clearer through, and there is the consecration and the poet's dream.

But such beauty is made, not born. Care and weariness and despondency come of themselves, and groove their own furrows. Hope and intelligence and interest and buoyancy must be wooed for their gentle and genial touch. A mother must battle against the tendencies that drag her downward. She must take pains to grow, or she will not grow. She must sedulously cultivate her mind and heart, or her old age will be ungraceful; and if she lose freshness without acquiring ripeness, she is indeed in an evil case. The first, the most important trust which God has given to any one is himself. To secure this trust, He has made us so that in no possible way can we benefit the world so much as by making the most of ourselves. Indulging our whims, or, inordinately, our just tastes, is not developing ourselves; but neither is leaving our own fields to grow thorns and thistles, that we may plant somebody else's garden-plot, keeping our charge. Even were it possible for a mother to work well to her children in thus working ill to herself, I do not think she would be justified in doing it. Her account is not complete when she says, "Here are they whom thou hast given me." She must first say, "Here am I." But when it is seen that suicide is also child-murder, it must appear that she is under doubly heavy bonds for herself.

Husbands, moreover, have claims, though wives often ignore them. It is the commonest thing in the world to see parents tender of their children's feelings, alive to their wants, indulgent to their tastes, kind, considerate, and forbearing, but to each other hasty, careless, and cold. Conjugal love often seems to die out before parental love. It ought not so to be. Husband and wife should each stand first in the other's estimation. They have no right to forget each other's comfort, convenience, sensitiveness, tastes, or happiness in those of their children. Nothing can discharge them from the obligations which they are under to each other. But if a woman lets herself become shabby, drudgy, and commonplace as a wife, in her efforts to be perfect as a mother, can she expect to retain the consideration that is due to the wife? Not a man in the world but would rather see his wife tidy, neat, and elegant in her attire, easy and assured in her bearing, intelligent and vivacious in her talk, than the contrary; and if she neglect these things, ought she to be surprised, if he turns to fresh woods and pastures new for the diversion and entertainment which he seeks in vain at home? This is quaky ground, but I know where I am, and I am not afraid. I don't expect men or women to say that they agree with me, but I am right for all that. Let us bring our common sense to bear on this point, and not be fooled by reiteration. Cause and effect obtain here as elsewhere. If you add two and two, the result is four, however much you may try to blink it. People do not always tell lies, when they are telling what is not the truth; but falsehood is still disastrous. Men and women think they believe a thousand things which they do not believe; but as long as they think so, it is just as bad as if it were so. Men talk—and women listen and echo—about the overpowering loveliness and charm of a young mother surrounded by her blooming family, ministering to their wants and absorbed in their welfare, self-denying and self-forgetful; and she is lovely and charming; but if this is all, it is little more than the charm and loveliness of a picture. It is not magnetic and irresistible. It has the semblance, but not the smell of life. It is pretty to look at, but it is not vigorous for command. Her husband will have a certain kind of admiration and love. Her wish will be law within a certain very limited sphere; but beyond that he will not take her into his counsels and confidence. A woman must make herself obvious to her husband, or he will drift out beyond her horizon. She will be to him very nearly what she wills and works to be. If she adapts herself to her children and does not adapt herself to her husband, he will fall into the arrangement, and the two will fall apart. I do not mean that they will quarrel, but they will lead separate lives. They will be no longer husband and wife. There will be a domestic alliance, but no marriage. A predominant interest in the same objects binds them together after a fashion; but marriage is something beyond that. If a woman wishes and purposes to be the friend of her husband,—if she would be valuable to him, not simply as the nurse of his children and the directress of his household, but as a woman fresh and fair and fascinating, to him intrinsically lovely and attractive, she should make an effort for it. It is not by any means a thing that comes of itself, or that can be left to itself. She must read, and observe, and think, and rest up to it. Men, as a general thing, will not tell you so. They talk about having the slippers ready, and enjoin women to be domestic. But men are blockheads,—dear, and affectionate, and generous blockheads,—benevolent, large-hearted, and chivalrous,—kind, and patient, and hard-working,—but stupid where women are concerned. Indispensable and delightful as they are in real life, pleasant and comfortable as women actually find them, not one in ten thousand but makes a dunce of himself the moment he opens his mouth to theorize about women. Besides, they have an axe to grind. The pretty things they inculcate—slippers, and coffee, and care, and courtesy—ought indeed to be done, but the others ought not to be left undone. And to the former women seldom need to be exhorted. They take to them naturally. A great many more women bore boorish husbands with fond little attentions than wound appreciative ones by neglect. Women domesticate themselves to death already. What they want is cultivation. They need to be stimulated to develop a large, comprehensive, catholic life, in which their domestic duties shall have an appropriate niche, and not dwindle down to a narrow and servile one, over which those duties shall spread and occupy the whole space.

This mistake is the foundation of a world of wretchedness and ruin. I can see Satan standing at the mother's elbow. He follows her around into the nursery and the kitchen. He tosses up the babies and the omelets, delivers dutiful harangues about the inappropriateness of the piano and the library, and grins fiendishly in his sleeve at the wreck he is making,—a wreck not necessarily of character, but of happiness; for I suppose Satan has so bad a disposition, that, if he cannot do all the harm he would wish, he will still do all he can. It is true that there are thousands of noble men married to fond and foolish women, and they are both happy. Well, the fond and foolish women are very fortunate. They have fallen into hands that will entreat them tenderly, and they will not perceive that anything is kept back. Nor are the noble men wholly unfortunate, in that they have not taken to their hearths shrews. But this is not marriage.

There are women less foolish. They see their husbands attracted in other directions more often and more easily than in theirs. They have too much sterling worth and profound faith to be vulgarly jealous. They fear nothing like shame or crime; but they feel the fact that their own preoccupation with homely household duties precludes real companionship; the interchange of emotions, thoughts, sentiments, a living and palpable and vivid contact of mind with mind, of heart with heart. They see others whose leisure ministers to grace, accomplishments, piquancy, and attractiveness, and the moth flies towards the light by his own nature. Because he is a wise and virtuous and honorable moth, he does not dart into the flame. He does not even scorch his wings. He never thinks of such a thing. He merely circles around the pleasant light, sunning himself in it without much thought one way or another, only feeling that it is pleasant; but meanwhile Mrs. Moth sits at home in darkness, mending the children's clothes, which is not exhilarating. Many a woman who feels that she possesses her husband's affection misses something. She does not secure his fervor, his admiration. His love is honest and solid, but a little dormant, and therefore dull. It does not brace, and tone, and stimulate. She wants not the love only, but the keenness and edge and flavor of the love; and she suffers untold pangs. I know it, for I have seen it. It is not a thing to be uttered. Most women do not admit it even to themselves; but it is revealed by a lift of the eyelash, by a quiver of the eye, by a tone of the voice, by a trick of the finger.

But what is the good of saying all this, if a woman cannot help herself? The children must be seen to, and the work must be done, and after that she has no time left. The "mother of a young and increasing family," with her "pale, thin face and feeble step," and her "multiplied and wearying cares," is "completely worn down with so many children." She has neither time nor spirit for self-culture, beyond what she may obtain in the nursery. What satisfaction is there in proving that she is far below where she ought to be, if inexorable circumstance prevent her from climbing higher? What use is there in telling her that she will alienate her husband and injure her children by her course, when there is no other course for her to pursue? What can she do about it?

There is one thing that she need not do. She need not sit down and write a book, affirming that it is the most glorious and desirable condition imaginable. She need not lift up her voice and declare that "she lives above the ills and disquietudes of her condition, in an atmosphere of love and peace and pleasure far beyond the storms and conflicts of this material life." Who ever heard of the mother of a young and increasing family living in an atmosphere of peace, not to say pleasure, above conflicts and storms? Who does not know that the private history of every family with the ordinary allowance of brains is a record of incessant internecine warfare? If she said less, we might believe her. When she says so much, we cannot help suspecting. To make the best of anything, it is not necessary to declare that it is the best thing. Children must be taken care of, but it is altogether probable that there are too many of them. Some people think that opinion several times more atrocious than murder in the first degree; but I see no atrocity in it, and there is none. I think there is an immense quantity of nonsense about, regarding this thing. For my part, I don't credit half of it. I believe in Malthus,—a great deal more than Malthus did himself. The prosperity of a country is often measured by its population; but quite likely it should be taken in inverse ratio. I certainly do not see why the mere multiplication of the species is so indicative of prosperity. Mobs are not so altogether lovely that one should desire their indefinite increase. A village is honorable, not according to the number, but the character of its residents. The drunkards and the paupers and the thieves and the idiots rather diminish than increase its respectability. It seems to me that the world would be greatly benefited by thinning out. Most of the places that I have seen would be much improved by being decimated, not to say quinqueted or bisected. If people are stubborn and rebellious, stiff-necked and uncircumcised, in heart and ears, the fewer of them the better. A small population, trained to honor and virtue, to liberality of culture and breadth of view, to self-reliance and self-respect, is a thousand times better than an overcrowded one with everything at loose ends. As with the village, so with the family. There ought to be no more children than can be healthily and thoroughly reared, as regards the moral, physical, and intellectual nature both of themselves and their parents. All beyond this is wrong and disastrous. I know of no greater crime, than to give life to souls, and then degrade them, or suffer them to be degraded. Children are the poor man's blessing and Cornelia's jewels, just so long as Cornelia and the poor man can make adequate provision for them. But the ragged, filthy, squalid, unearthly little wretches that wallow before the poor man's shanty-door are the poor man's shame and curse. The sickly, sallow, sorrowful little ones, shadowed too early by life's cares, are something other than a blessing. When Cornelia finds her children too many for her, when her step trembles and her cheek fades, when the sparkle flats out of her wine of life and her salt has lost its savor, her jewels are Tarpeian jewels. One child educated by healthy and happy parents is better than seven dragging their mother into the grave, notwithstanding the unmeasured reprobation of our little book. Of course, if they can stand seven, very well. Seven and seventy times seven, if you like, only let them be buds, not blights. If we obeyed the laws of God, children would be like spring blossoms. They would impart as much freshness and strength as they abstract. They are a natural institution, and Nature is eminently healthy. But when they "come crowding into the home-nest," as our book daintily says, they are a nuisance. God never meant the home-nest to be crowded. There is room enough and elbow-room enough in this world for everything that ought to be in it. The moment there is crowding, you may be sure something wrong is going on. Either a bad thing is happening, or too much of a good thing, which counts up just the same. The parents begin to repair the evil by a greater one. They attempt to patch their own rents by dilapidating their children. They recruit their own exhausted energies by laying hold of the young energies around them, and older children are bored, and fretted, and deformed in figure and temper by the care of younger children. This is horrible. Some care and task and responsibility are good for a child's own development; but every care, every toil, every atom of labor that is laid upon children beyond what is solely the best for their own character is intolerable and inexcusable oppression. Parents have no right to lighten their own burdens by imposing them upon the children. The poor things had nothing to do with being born. They came into the world without any volition of their own. Their existence began only to serve the pleasure or the pride of others. It was a culpable cruelty, in the first place, to introduce them into a sphere where no adequate provision could be made for their comfort and culture; but to shoulder them, after they get here, with the load which belongs to their parents is outrageous. Earth is not a paradise at best, and at worst it is very near the other place. The least we can do is to make the way as smooth as possible for the new-comers. There is not the least danger that it will be too smooth. If you stagger under the weight which you have imprudently assumed, stagger. But don't be such an unutterable coward and brute as to illumine your own life by darkening the young lives which sprang from yours. I often wonder that children do not open their mouths and curse the father that begat and the mother that bore them. I often wonder that parents do not tremble lest the cry of the children whom they oppress go up into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, and bring down wrath upon their guilty heads. It was well that God planted filial affection and reverence as an instinct in the human breast. If it depended upon reason, it would have but a precarious existence.

I wish women would have the sense and courage—I will not say, to say what they think, for that is not always desirable—but to think according to the facts. They have a strong desire to please men, which is quite right and natural; but in their eagerness to do this, they sometimes forget what is due to themselves. To think namby-pambyism for the sake of pleasing men is running benevolence into the ground. Not that women consciously do this, but they do it. They don't mean to pander to false masculine notions, but they do. They don't know that they are pandering to them, but they are. Men say silly things, partly because they don't know any better, and partly because they don't want any better. They are strong, and can generally make shift to bear their end of the pole without being crushed. So they are tolerably content. They are not very much to blame. People cannot be expected to start on a crusade against ills of which they have but a vague and cloudy conception. The edge does not cut them, and so they think it is not much of a sword after all. But women have, or ought to have, a more subtile and intimate acquaintance with realities. They ought to know what is fact and what is fol-de-rol. They ought to distinguish between the really noble and the simply physical, not to say faulty. If men do not, it is women's duty to help them. I think, if women would only not be quite so afraid of being thought unwomanly, they would be a great deal more womanly than they are. To be brave, and single-minded, and discriminating, and judicious, and clear-sighted, and self-reliant, and decisive, that is pure womanly. To be womanish is not to be womanly. To be flabby, and plastic, and weak, and acquiescent, and insipid, is not womanly. And I could wish sometimes that women would not be quite so patient. They often exhibit a degree of long-suffering entirely unwarrantable. There is no use in suffering, unless you cannot help it; and a good, stout, resolute protest would often be a great deal more wise, and Christian, and beneficial on all sides, than so much patient endurance. A little spirit and "spunk" would go a great way towards setting the world right. It is not necessary to be a termagant. The firmest will and the stoutest heart may be combined with the gentlest delicacy. Tameness is not the stuff that the finest women are made of. Nobody can be more kind, considerate, or sympathizing towards weakness or weariness than men, if they only know it exists; and it is a wrong to them to go on bolstering them up in their bungling opinions, when a few sensible ideas, wisely administered, would do so much to enlighten them, and reveal the path which needs only to be revealed to secure their unhesitating entrance upon it. It is absurd to suppose that unvarying acquiescence is necessary to secure and retain their esteem, and that a frank avowal of differing opinions, even if they were wrong, would work its forfeiture. A respect held on so frail a tenure were little worth. But it is not so. I believe that manhood and womanhood are too truly harmonious to need iron bands, too truly noble to require the props of falsehood. Truth, simple and sincere, without partiality and without hypocrisy, is the best food for both. If any are to be found on either side too weak to administer or digest it, the remedy is not to mix it with folly or falsehood, for they are poisons, but to strengthen the organisms with wholesome tonics,—not undiluted, perhaps, but certainly unadulterated.

O Edmund Sparkler, you builded better than you knew, when you reared eulogiums upon the woman with no nonsense about her!

MY SHIP.

  Mist on the shore, and dark on the sand,
    The chilly gulls swept over my head,
  When a stately ship drew near the land,—
    Onward in silent grace she sped.

  Lonely, I threw but a coward's glance
    Upon the brave ship tall and free,
  Joyfully dancing her mystic dance,
    As if skies were blue and smooth the sea.

  I breathed the forgotten odors of Spain,
    Remembered my castles so far removed,
  For they brought the distant faith again
    That one who loves shall be beloved.

  Then the goodly galleon suddenly
    Dropped anchor close to the barren strand,
  And various cargoes, all for me,
    Laid on the bosom of my land.

  O friend! her cargoes were thy love,
    The stately ship thy presence fair;
  Her pointed sails, like wings above,
    Shall fill with praises and with prayer.

* * * * *

BETROTHAL BY PROXY: A ROMANCE OF GENEALOGY.

CHAPTER I.

Ye who listen with impatience to the Reports of Historical Societies and have hitherto neglected to subscribe to an Antiquarian Journal, ye who imagine that there can be no intelligent and practical reply to the cui bono? shake of the head which declines to supply the funds for a genealogical investigation, attend to the history of my adventure in Foxden.

There!—I like to begin with the Moral; for no sensible man will leave the point and purpose of his testimony to the languid curiosity of a spent reader. Dr. Johnson never did so; and who am I to question his literary infallibility? So if you do not take kindly to the solemn rumble of the Johnsonese mail-coach of a sentence in which we set out, receive the purport of it thus: It is of advantage to be on good terms with one's ancestors: Also; men absorbed in this practical present may be all the better for a little counter irritation with the driest twigs of the family-tree.

And now, Why did I marry Miss Hurribattle? I am sure I had no intention of doing so. In the first place, when about eighteen years of age, I had firmly determined never to marry anybody. Then there were so many nice tea-ing families in the Atlantic city whose principal street was decorated by my modest counsellor's sign, that I really must excuse the rather unpleasant wonder of several friends at my out-of-the-way selection. That a somewhat experienced advocate, who had resisted for three years the fascinations of city belle-ship, should spend the legal vacation in a visit to an old gentleman he never saw before, and return affianced to a lady nobody had ever heard of,—I own there was something temptingly discussible in the circumstance; and knowing that fine relish for personal topics which distinguishes the American conversazione, how could I hope to escape? At first, it was a little awkward, when I went to a party, to see people who were talking together glance at me and murmur on with increased interest. Sometimes, when the wave of talk retreated a little, I would catch the prattle of some retiring rill to this effect: "But who are these Hurribattles? What an odd name! I wonder if that had anything to do with it."

The querist, whoever he or she might be, had unconsciously struck upon the explanation of the whole matter. Yes, it was the name: it had a great deal to do with it. And if you will allow me to step back a little into the past, and thence begin over again in good storyteller fashion, I will endeavor to make you understand how it all came about.

If I were obliged to designate in one word the profession and calling of Colonel Prowley of Foxden, I should say he was a Correspondent. Of course I do not mean a regular newspaper-correspondent, paid to concoct letters from Paris in the office of the "Foxden Regulator"; nor yet the amateur ditto, who is never tired of making family-tours to the White Mountains. But rather was he a gentleman, with an immense epistolary acquaintance all over the country, whose main business in life consisted in writing letters to all sorts of persons in a great variety of places. And this he did as his particular contribution towards the solution of this question: What in the world—or rather, what in the United States—is a man to do who accumulates sufficient property to relieve him from the necessities of active business? The answers offered to this inquiry of the Democratic Sphinx are, as we all know, various enough. Some men, of ready assurance and fluent speech, go into politics; some doze in libraries; some get up trotting-matches and yacht-races; while others dodge the difficulty altogether by going to disport themselves among the arts and letters of a foreign land. Colonel Prowley, with considerable originality, was moved to find employment in letter-writing, pursuing it with the same daily relish which many people find for gossip or small-talk. And this is the way in which I came to be favored with the good gentleman's communications. About three years ago a friend in England procured for me a book that I had long coveted,—Morton's "New English Canaan," printed at Amsterdam in the year 1637. This little volume, after the novelty of a fresh perusal was past, I happened to lend to a young gentleman of our boarding-house, who prepared short notices of books for one of the evening papers. He, it would appear, thought that some account of my acquisition might supply the matter for his diurnal paragraph. At all events, I received, some days after, a letter dated from Foxden, and bearing the signature of Elijah Prowley. It was couched in the old-fashioned style of compliment and excuses for the liberty taken,—which liberty consisted in requesting to have a fac-simile made of a certain page of a work that he had traced through a newspaper-article to my possession. The object, he said, was to supply the deficiency in a copy of the "Canaan" that had a place in his own library. Of course the request was complied with, and the correspondence begun.

The Colonel, to do him justice, wrote very entertaining letters, despite the somewhat antiquated phraseology in which his sentiments were clothed. Indeed, I soon found in his epistles all the variety of the grab-bag at a country-fair, in which the purchaser of the right of grab fumbles with pleasing uncertainty as to whether he is to draw forth a hymn-book or a shaving-brush, a packet of note-paper or a box of patent polish for stoves. At one time he would communicate the particulars of some antiquarian discovery at Foxden; at another he would copy for me the weekly bill of the town mortality, or journalize the parish quarrels about the repairs of the stove-funnel in Mr. Clifton's church.

I was well pleased to find that the little notes of acknowledgment which I despatched after the receipt of these leviathans seemed to be considered a sufficient representation of capital to justify the enormous rate of epistolary interest which the Colonel bestowed. I liked the style of my correspondent. It did me good to meet with the strong old expressions of our ancestors that were turning up in unexpected places. If the dear old phrases were sometimes better or worse than the fact they expressed, they must have improved what was good, and gibbeted more effectually what to the times seemed evil. Who would now think of designating a parcel of serious savages "the praying Indians of Natick"? And yet there is a sound and a power about the words that would go far to convert the skeptical aborigines in their own despite. Why, there was something rich and nervous in the talk of the very lawmakers. "The accursed sect of the Quakers,"—what a fine spirit such an accusative case gives to the dry formula of a legal enactment! the beat of the drum by which the edict was proclaimed in the streets of Boston seems only an appropriate accompaniment to so stirring a denunciation. Then to invite a brother to "exercise prophecy,"—as Winthrop used to call the business of preaching,—there is really something soul-invigorating in the very sound. No wonder the people could stand a good two-hours' discourse under so satisfactory a title!

I suppose, then, that much of my original relish for the communications of my Foxden correspondent came from his mastery over the antique glossary, and perhaps the rather ancient style of thought that fitted well the method of conveyance. Indeed, a good course of Bishop Copleston's "magic-lanthorn school" made me peculiarly susceptible to the refreshment of changing the gorgeous haze of modern philosophers for the sharpness and vitality with which old-fashioned people clothe such ideas as are vouchsafed to them.

I soon found that my friend had that passion for what may be called petty antiquarian research which is so puzzling to those who escape its contagion. Also that a pride of family, that lingers persistently in some parts of New England, seemed to concentrate itself and envelop him as in a cloud. He had attained the age of sixty a bachelor,—perhaps from finding no person in Foxden of sufficiently clear lineage to be united with the Squire's family,—or perhaps because he had a sister, five years older than himself, who fulfilled the duties of companion and housekeeper.

How strange a sensation it is to feel a real friendship and familiarity with one we have never seen! Yet if people are drawn together by those mysterious affinities which, like the daughters of the horse-leech, are ever crying, "Give, give," a few bits of paper bridge over space well enough, and enable us to recognize abroad the scattered fragments that complete ourselves.

The Colonel studied up my ancestors, who, it appears, were once people of sufficient consideration in the land, and finally transferred the interest to myself. At one time he took the trouble to go down to Branton, about forty miles from Foxden, for the purpose of verifying inquiries about progenitors of mine who had originally settled in that place. He advised me, as a son, in my reading and business; and although I often dismissed his suggestions as the whims of an old-fashioned recluse, I was always touched by the simplicity and sincere interest that prompted them. He would mysteriously hint that something might one day occur to give tangible proof of the regard in which he held me; but as I paid little heed to such warnings, I was totally unprepared for the plan developed in the letter of which an extract is here presented:—

"Concerning the propriety of your marrying, my dear young friend, my sister and myself have long known but one opinion; the only difficulty that has exercised us being, whom, among my divers correspondents, we could most heartily commend to your selection. Now it is known to you that I have striven for some time past to trace the descendants of the old family of Hurribattel, who seem to have disappeared from Branton about the year ten in the present century. The interest I have taken in the research comes from the fact that your great-great-uncle appears at one time to have been affianced to a lady of that family. For what reason an alliance which had everything to recommend it was broken off I have sorely puzzled myself to conjecture, but linger always in the labyrinths of doubt. Some months ago I received a catalogue from the Soggimarsh College in the Far West, to whose funds I had contributed a modest subscription. I was thrown into an ecstasy of astonishment, when, in glancing over the names of the honorable Faculty, my attention was arrested by words to this effect: Miss Hurribattle, Professor of Calisthenics and Female Deportment. Of course, I wrote to her immediately, and received right cordial replies to all inquiries. She seemed much interested in the union of the families that was formerly contemplated, and much desires to see you as the representative of your great-great-uncle. I need only add, that, so far as may be judged by the happy vein of her correspondence, she has at present no ensnarement of the heart, and has agreed to pay me a visit at Foxden the first of August next, when, by reason of the vacation, she will be at liberty for five weeks. Your own visit to me, so often postponed, is, as I believe, definitively fixed for the same time. So I expect you both, and need not enlarge on the strange delight it would give me, if a family-engagement of seventy years' standing should be closed by a marriage beneath my roof."

There was something so preposterous in this desperate match-making between people whom they had never seen, that Colonel Prowley and his sister had taken into their hands, that it really made a greater impression upon me than if the parties had been less unlikely to come together. A Professor of Calisthenics! Could anything be more unpromising? Yet, when my friend copied for me some extracts from the lady's letters that were sensible and feminine, I thought how odd it would be, if something should come of it, after all. I often found myself skipping Colonel Prowley's accounts of old Doctor Dastick, Mrs. Hunesley, and other great people of his town, and pondering upon the notices of his Western correspondent. I began to have a mysterious presentiment—which, in view of the calisthenics, I could not explain—that we might be not unadapted to each other. In any case, the lady's fine family-name was a recommendation that I knew how to appreciate. They have very young professors out West, I thought, and this is merely a temporary position; besides, I had a friend who married a female physician, and the match has turned out a very happy one. So I played with the idea, half in jest and half seriously, and looked forward with much interest to my visit to Foxden.

CHAPTER II

It was near noon, on an August day, when the train left me at the Foxden
station. Upon casting my eyes about to see what was to be done next,
I observed a very shabby and rickety carryall, with the legend
"Railway-Omnibus" freshly painted upon its side.

"It is better than a mile and a half up to Colonel Prowley's; but I calculate I can take you there, after I've left this lady," responded the proprietor of this turnout, in reply to a question of mine.

"But I want to go to Colonel Prowley's, too," said a feminine voice at my side.

"Well, now that's _com_plete," acquiesced the driver. "I'll just go get the baggage, and put you both through right away."

Of course I turned to view my companion. She was a middle-aged lady, something disordered in dress and hair, with a sharply marked countenance, and that diffusive sort of eye that seems to take one in as a speck which breaks the view of more interesting objects lying on the verge of the horizon. Yet her face was dimpled by those indescribable changing lines which indicate that a cessation of impulse has not marked the wearer's retreat from youth, and make us feel anew how blessed a thing it is for the character to keep our impulses strong within us, and to be strong ourselves in their restraint.

I was doubting whether to begin those little shivers and sidelings with which people who feel that they ought to be acquainted, but have nobody to introduce them, endeavor to supply the deficiency, when the lady abruptly pronounced my name, and inquired if I responded thereto.

"I thought it must be you," she said, on being satisfied regarding my identity, "for the Colonel wrote me that he expected you about this time. I feel we shall become friends. I am Miss Hurribattle."

Although I had a strong suspicion who it must be, yet a cold surprise seemed to run through me, when the dire certainty so suddenly declared itself. I dropped my carpet-bag, as if all my daintily built castles were in it, and it was best to crush them to pieces at once and have it over. I pondered, and helped tie a bandbox on behind the vehicle, and after some time found myself in the carryall staring at the felt hat of the driver an inch or two before my nose, and Miss Hurribattle established by my side. It occurred to me that it was my place to resume the conversation, and, in a sudden spasm of originality, I changed a remark respecting the beauty of the day into an observation on the steepness of the hill we began to ascend.

"It is very steep," assented the lady, "and I have a particular objection to riding up-hill: it always appears to me I am helping the horses draw. However, it may sometimes be pleasant; for I remember paying a visit of a fortnight to Boston, when I was a girl, and there I really thought that hills could not have been placed more conveniently."

"How so?" inquired I.

"Why, I stayed with some friends who lived in Charles Street, just on the bay; consequently we always drove up-hill when we went to a party, and downhill when we came home."

"And you were always so much more content to return than to go, that the accelerated speed of a down-hill passage was agreeable," suggested I, after having cast about vaguely for an explanation.

"Oh, dear! no! It was all on account of my back-hair: for in going up-hill one naturally leans forward,—so, of course, it couldn't get tumbled; but when we were coming home, it was no matter."

I glanced slightly at Miss Hurribattle, and thought it strange that a lady of her present disorderly and straggly appearance could have ever felt so much interest in fashionable proprieties. She seemed to be conscious of what was passing in my mind, and suddenly said,—

"Did you ever see a lady throw a stone?"

"I probably have," I replied; "though I do not at present recall any particular instance."

"Very well, then,—you will remember that it always seems as if she was going to throw herself after it. Now I recognize in this a portion of the mystic instruction that natural phenomena may give us, if we look at them earnestly; for is it not intended that woman should pursue with her whole being whatever she undertakes? The man throws his stone with a little jerk of the hand: he may be a legislator, a philanthropist, a father, and a merchant, each with distinct portions of himself, and be each with all the better effect to the others; but when a woman throws her stone, it is better for her to project herself along with it."

"But, surely, you cannot believe that she is entitled only to a single fling at the mark?"

"On the contrary, let her change her mark as often as she finds it too easy or too hard to hit. All I insist upon is a temporary concentration upon one pursuit. You wondered just now that I could ever have cared for display, or have thought much of my appearance; but at that time I knew no better, and followed the world with a devotion for which I have now, I trust, a better object."

I began to be quite interested in the sincerity and confidence with which my companion talked to me, and, after a few remarks expressing concurrence, I framed a question that would draw out the motives of her connection with the college, should she care to communicate them.

"It has been fortunate for me," answered Miss Hurribattle, "to have been born with an activity of temperament that has kept me from that maladie des désabusés which, when the freshness of youth has passed, frequently attacks ladies of some intellectual culture who do not marry. A strong principle of self-assertion, that has long been characteristic of my family, has left us unbound by that common propriety of sacrificing our best happiness for the sake of appearing happy to the world. This induced my father to quit Branton in pretty much the same spirit of opposition with which Chatterton quitted Bristol. Disgusted with its local celebrities, and chafing under the petty exactions and petty gossip to which a sudden loss of fortune had exposed him, he left the town without communicating to the neighbors his future destination. But I will not poach upon our friend the Colonel's speciality, and give you a family-history. It is sufficient to say that a year or two ago I was led to interest myself in the Soggimarsh College as a ground unincumbered by the old incredulities of man's best inspirations which grow so thickly in what are called the highest civilizations,—incredulities, indeed, which, in the fine figure of Coleridge, are nothing but credulities after all, only seen from behind, as they bow and nod assent to the habitual and the fashionable. But I see you are wondering at the particular position in the Academy which our catalogue assigns me, and you shall have the explanation. I have for a long time been painfully impressed with the total neglect of physical education by the women of America. It seems to me that no very important moral advance can be achieved while the exquisite organism through which our impressions come, and through which they should go forth again in acts, is so perverted. I was very anxious that the Soggimarsh College should distinctly recognize a correct physical training as being at least as important as any branch of mental discipline. Accordingly, when the titles of the professorships were under discussion, it seemed right not to take my designation from the classes I instruct in history and philosophy, but from the general gymnastic development of the female members of the college, which it is likewise my duty to oversee. I know, of course, that the prejudices of the public would hold me in greater esteem as a teacher of some ancient lore than in the capacity I assume before them; but you see I throw my stone in the womanish fashion, and do not leave enough of myself behind to be troubled about the matter."

I believe I have good Sir Thomas Browne's fancy of rejoicing to find people individual in something beside their proper names; and by this, as well as much more conversation not set down, I had the satisfaction to discover that Miss Hurribattle had something more than her bold patronymic to distinguish her from the Misses Smith and Robinson of my city-acquaintance. I could hardly believe that we had advanced so far to the footing of old friends, before we reached our destination. As our carryall turned into Colonel Prowley's avenue, however, a sudden recollection of the little romance the proprietor had arranged for his arriving guests came over me like a terrible dream. What a pity it is, I thought, that a friendly intercourse which I should highly prize must be disturbed by the awkward consciousness that this old letter-writer and his sister are watching and misinterpreting with all the zeal of match-makers who have baited their trap, and are ready to mistake anything for a nibble!

We drew up before a formal-looking, old-fashioned house, with piazzas to the two stories, each bordered with a good extent of unquestionably modern gutter. The staple growth of the place, in which the house was set, like the centre of an antique breastpin, seemed to lie in the shrub called box. This ornamental vegetable stretched down each side of the gravel walk, hedged in all sorts of ugly geometrical figures that contained flower-beds, and stood sentinel to the lower line of the piazza; farther on, you would see it allowed to grow to the height of three or four feet, to be curiously cut into cubes, pyramids, and miniature arches.

Colonel Prowley, who was soon at the door to receive us, was a much less imposing sort of man than I had imagined him. He appeared short and modest, and showed a kind face set about half-way up the chin in one of the old section-of-stove-pipe stocks that buckle up from behind; there was a little embarrassment in his manner, as if he found it hard to receive with proper cordiality two dear friends whose faces he had never before seen. We were taken to the parlor, stiffly neat in all its appurtenances, introduced to Miss Prowley, and soon after summoned to dinner.

There was much satisfaction in sitting down to such a repast as the Colonel knew how to give, only it made one shudder a little when he told us the names of great people long passed away who had ranged themselves about the same piece of mahogany during the days of his father and grandfather, for fourscore years into the past. However, if such reminiscences make us reflect upon the mutable character of human affairs, and send grave speculations of the "fleeting show" and "man's illusion" concerning which the poet has told us, I find that the best way is to remember that it is well to make our humble department in the show as entertaining as we can, and our little fragment of the illusion as illusive as possible.

At the head of the table sat the sister of our host, arrayed in the lank bombazine skirt, tight sleeves, and muslin cravat, which constituted the old-lady uniform of the past generation, and which in rare instances yet survives in the country. Upon her right hand was placed the clergyman, Mr. Clifton, who came to dine every Monday,—it being a convenient arrangement on account of the washing; and on her left was one Deacon Reyner, who kept the parish records, and was the local antiquary of the town.

One of the pleasantest diversions with which I am acquainted is a dinner among elderly people of character and originality, who are content to toss about the ball of conversation among themselves, and allow me to watch the game. And in this way was I entertained on my arrival at Foxden; for Miss Hurribattle was directly at her ease, and had plenty to say; while the brother and sister were content to offer the best of everything, and did not attempt to draw me out of my silence. I perceived they were thinking what a pity it was that Miss Hurribattle and myself had not the equality of age and temper that they had fancied for us; for I observed how they would follow the streaks of gray that straggled through the lady's locks, and then glance at the neatly turned moustache upon which in those days I prided myself, and realize that their agreeable plans might be destined to disappointment.

I remember the conversation first fell upon a certain general history of the Prowley family that its present masculine representative had in preparation.

"By the way," said Deacon Reyner, addressing the future historian on this head, "I have secured a correct copy of poor Prosody's epitaph, as you asked me the other day."

Miss Hurribattle, who looked as if she had some doubt whether poor Prosody was a man or an animal, returned a non-committal, "Indeed! I am very glad of it," but soon after added, "Was he a favorite dog?"

"A dog!" exclaimed the Colonel, whose family-history, dates and all, seemed to course his veins instead of blood, "he was my many times great uncle! I have surely told you how Noah Prowllie, who came to New England in 1642, and is supposed to have settled at Foxden some years later, married Desire, daughter of the Reverend Jabez Pluck. Being a rigid grammarian,—a character sufficiently rare at that period,—he named his three sons Orthography, Syntax, and Prosody,—a proceeding that is understood to have offended the Reverend Jabez, who was naturally partial to the Scriptural nomenclature then in vogue. His scruples, I regret to say, were more than justified in the conduct of his grandchildren. Poor Orthography Prowllie was an idle fellow, who never got beyond making his mark upon paper, and consequently made none in the world; Syntax could never agree with anybody; while as for Prosody, poor fellow"——

"It is enough to say that neither his verses nor his life would bear scanning!" said the Deacon, desiring to keep the conversation off unpleasant topics.

"But you certainly had a poet in your family?" said Miss Hurribattle, determined to repair her blunder by suggesting a potent cause of congratulation.

"Indeed we had, Madam!" said the Colonel, with creditable emotion; "though unfortunately none of his productions have come down to us. But we have the highest contemporary testimony to his excellence in a copy of verses prefixed to his posthumous discourse entitled 'The New Snare of a Maypole, or Satan's own Trap for a Slippery Church.' The lines were written by his colleague, the Reverend Exaltation Brymm, and are certainly much to the purpose: I generally keep a copy of them in my pocket-book."

"Oh, do read them, brother!" said Miss Prowley, with strong interest.

Thus adjured, the Colonel produced a piece of paper, put on his spectacles, and read to this effect:—

  "New Englande! weep: Thy tuncfull Prowllie's gone,
  Who skillfully his Armour buckled on
  Agaynst Phyllystine Scorn and Revelrie:
  His Sword well-furbished was a Sight to see!
  This littel Booke of his shall still be greene
  While Sathan's Fangles lorden stand betweene:
  Now Pet of Sinne boil up thy dolefull Skum!
  Ye juggelling Quakers laugh: his Inkhorn's dumb.
  He put XIII Pslames in verse for our Quire,
  And with XXVII Pastorals witcht Apollo's Lyre."

"Do you recollect John Norton's funeral elegy on Ann Bradstreet, the Eve of our female minstrelsy?" interrogated Miss Hurribattle; "there are two lines in it which are still in my memory:—

  'Could Maro's muse but hear her lively strain,
  He would condemn his works to fire again.'

What a launch upon the sea of fame! and how sad it is that an actual freight of verses should be preserved in the ship's hold!"

"Well, well, my kinsman was perhaps wise in trusting none of his psalms or pastorals to the press, especially as that greatest of poets, Pope, has since been in the world. But I truly regret that he left no portrait, nor even so much as an outline in black from which something might be made up by an imaginative artist. I have judges, majors, and attorneys, all properly labelled, in the other room, who would be much improved by a slight dash of the aesthetic element; however, I suppose it can't be helped now!"

"Not unless you substitute Saint Josselyn for an ancestor, as Mrs.
Hunesley did the other day," said Miss Prowley.

"Ha, ha! it might not be a bad plan to follow out the lady's suggestion: but do tell the story of her strange mistake."

"Why, you must know that the other day old Doctor Dastick brought his New-York niece to call upon us. She began to talk to my brother, and when at last topics of conversation failed, turned to look at the picture of Saint Josselyn, which could be seen through the open folding-doors."

"The gentleman whose sole garment consists of some sort of skin thrown over his shoulders: you must all have observed it as we came in to dinner," said our host, in parenthesis.

"Well, immediately below the Saint hangs a small painting of Uncle Joshua, in white stockings, cocked hat, and coat of maroon velvet, the poor gentleman's favorite dress.

"'Ah!' said Mrs. Hunesley, with her eyes fixed upon the Saint, 'quite a fine portrait!'

"'Why, yes,' said my brother, naturally supposing she meant the small picture below, 'a very fine portrait, and a capital likeness of my Uncle Joshua.'

"'Indeed!' said the lady, with a well-bred effort to conceal her surprise; 'he was taken in a—a—fancy dress, I suppose.'

"'On the contrary, it was his ordinary costume,' insisted the Colonel. 'I can remember him walking up the broad-aisle at church, dressed just as you see him there.'

"'I should not have thought it would have been allowed! Did not the deacons turn him out?' exclaimed Mrs. Hunesley, in great astonishment.

"'Turn him out! Why, Madam, he was a deacon himself, and the most popular man in the parish.'

"'Well, I had no idea that such things had ever been permitted in this country! I should have supposed that the fear of such an example on the young would have induced people to keep him in confinement.'

"'Good heavens, Madam!' remonstrated the Colonel, roused to a desperate vindication of the family-honor, 'let me tell you that his excellent influence on the young was the crowning virtue of his character. He used to go about town with his pockets filled with nuts and gingerbread to reward them when they were good.'

"'It is enough,' replied the lady; 'our views of propriety are so totally different that we will not pursue the subject. I will only say that—really—in that dress, I don't see where he could have had any pockets!'"

Deacon Reyner laughed heartily at these strictures upon the proprieties of his predecessor, and said,—

"Of course, the last remark must have brought about an explanation."

"Why, yes," said Colonel Prowley; "but when we see how slight an accident resolved the mystery, we should receive with doubt much of the personal scandal which is tossing about the world."

The clergyman assented very cordially to this proposition, and added, that it was a reflection that those of his flock then present would do well to bear in mind that very evening at Doctor Dastick's bone-party.

I confess to being a little startled at the spectral name of this entertainment, and began to puzzle myself whether the Doctor gave a levee to rapping spirits, or moralized over the skulls in his collection, like Hamlet in the church-yard. Miss Hurribattle seemed wandering in the mazes of a similar perplexity, and finally said,—

"What is a bone-party? Is it given out of compliment to the dead or the living?"

"Nay," said the Deacon, "I don't see how it could be much of a compliment to the dead."

"Except upon the principle, De mortuis nil, nisi bone 'em!" suggested Miss Hurribattle, with such perfect gravity that neither Miss Prowley nor the clergyman suspected the jocular atrocity that was hidden in her speech.

"The bone-parties of old Doctor Dastick," explained the Colonel, "are entertainments peculiar to Foxden; and as there is to be one this evening to which we are all invited, any anticipation of the diversion seems likely to diminish whatever of satisfaction may be in prospect. I will, however, remark, that some of the Doctor's guests are grievously oppressed by somnolence during his scholastic expositions; as a protection against which infirmity of the flesh, I do commend an after-dinner nap. It has been the fashion of the house since the days of my grandfather; and as he lived to a ripe old age, I do not think it could have been deleterious."

Soon after this, Colonel Prowley pushed back his chair from the table as a signal for the dispersal of the party. And I betook myself to my chamber, a sober apartment, with very uneven floor and very small windows, through one of which I peered out upon the box before the house, and thought over the people whose acquaintance I had just made. Once only were these musings interrupted by snatches of a conversation between my host and hostess as they passed across the piazza.

"When this comes about, sister, as I still believe it must, you shall adorn a page of my diary with one of your illustrative drawings. A pair of doves would be appropriate, or perhaps a vine clinging round an oak."

"And which of our guests is to be represented by the oak?" asked Miss Prowley, in a tone which betrayed a woman's perception of matrimonial incongruities.

"Nay, sister, our young friend has a steadiness of character which would be ill-mated with some giddy girl from the nursery. So make your vine a little woody, and the union will be all the firmer."

As there was no chance of taking a nap after this, I presently descended to walk in the garden. And there I encountered Miss Hurribattle, who did not seem to be one of the convenient visitors who can be put to sleep after dinner. The conversation which I had the honor of renewing with the lady, though it did not at all advance the whimsical project of Colonel Prowley, increased my respect for the high instincts of Nature which prompted her concern in the elevation of woman. She showed me how a reform, presenting on its surface much that was meagre and partial, was sustained by those accomplished in the study of the question, no less from the rigorous necessities of logic than from the demonstrations of history and experiment.

And here, perchance, the reader observes that we make but slight progress towards a solution of the inquiry proposed some pages back. Yet let it be remembered that in real experience the novelist's art of foreshadowing the end from the beginning and aiming every petty incident at the final result is very seldom perceptible. "Il ne faut pas voyager pour voir, mais pour ne pas voir," says the proverb; and the journey of life is included in its application. We do our rarest deeds, we take our most important steps, by what seems accident. Instead of forming plans with remote designs, we find it our best policy to seize circumstances as they run past us,—knowing, that, if we have strength and quickness enough, we may take from them all that is required.

CHAPTER III.

Doctor Dastick's bone-party was certainly an entertainment of unique description. A kind old gentleman was its originator, who thought to turn the enthusiasm for lectures, which the Lyceum had developed in Foxden, into a private and pleasant channel. Possessed with this praiseworthy design, the Doctor, who had given up practice by reason of years and competence, remembered a certain cabinet containing fossils, crystals, fragments of Indian implements, small pieces of the skeletons of their proprietors, vertebrae of extinct animals, besides a great amount of miscellaneous rubbish that refused to come to terms and be classified. Thus it seemed good to the proprietor of this medical rag-bag to invite the citizens of Foxden to a series of explanatory lectures upon its varied contents. This would have done well enough, if the Doctor could only have persuaded himself to select his most interesting specimens, and read up upon them, so as to retail a little fluent information after the manner of the lyceum-philosophers. But, unfortunately, the professional pride of the lecturer induced him to speak without preparation or discrimination upon any osteological article which happened to come to hand: which fact, perhaps, accounted for the prevalent somnolence of the auditory, concerning which I had been forewarned.

It is barely possible that these midsummer-night diversions of Doctor Dastick were suggested by the fame of evenings which, during the previous winter, several city physicians (men of eminent scientific attainments) had devoted to the instruction of their friends. And rumor could scarcely have overestimated the privilege of listening to the discursive fireside talk of such accurate observers. Having vividly realized all that was to be known of their subjects of special investigation, these distinguished gentlemen would steam steadily athwart the light winds of conversation and bring their company to a pleasant haven. The Foxden ex-practitioner, however, lacking the metropolitan attrition which keeps the intellectual engine in effective polish, drifted vaguely in a sea of fragmentary information; —occasionally, to be sure, bumping against some encyclopedic argosy, but, for the most part, making very leisurely progress, with much apparent waste in the machinery. A brief extract from my note-book may furnish an idea of these scientific discourses.

"Now, my friends," pursues the Doctor, "let us examine another curiosity,"—here he would take down something that looked like a mottled paving-stone in a very crumbling condition,—"let us examine it carefully through the glass,"—here a pause, during which he performed the operation in question. "What is it? Is it a fossil turtle? No," —with great deliberation,—"I should say it was not a fossil turtle. Is it a mass of twigs taken from the stomach of a mastodon? No, on the whole, it can't be a mass of twigs taken from the stomach of a mastodon. Is it a specimen of the top of Mount Sinai? No, it is not a specimen of the top of Mount Sinai. What is it, then? I—don't—know— what—it—is!"

Having arrived at this satisfactory conclusion, the Doctor would pass on to the next specimen, which, having provoked a similar series of interrogations and negations, would be dismissed with no very different result.

There is sometimes an advantage in not being a notable person; at all events, I thought so, when I saw the Prowleys and their guests of chief consideration, to wit, the clergyman, deacon, and Miss Hurribattle, accommodated on the first row of chairs, with their faces under grand illumination by two camphene-lamps upon the Doctor's table. There they sat, together with Mrs. Hunesley from New York, two or three distinguished visitors from the hotel, and the elders of Foxden, looking wistfully at the bones, as if in envy of their fleshless condition that sultry August evening.

It was with real satisfaction that I perceived I was considered worthy of no more worshipful company than that of the standing stragglers at the dark end of the parlor. And as the evening breeze came freshly through the window at the back of the room, I rejoiced heartily in my lack of title to the consideration of being snugly penned in a more honorable position. As I found it might be done without attracting attention, I obeyed a strong impulse that seized me to pass through the open window to the piazza. Thence I presently descended, and strolled about the precise gravel-walks, puzzling myself to conjecture how much of the rich light was owing to the red glow which lingered in the west, and how much to the full moon just breaking through the trees. My investigations were suddenly interrupted by the advent of a carryall, which drove-with great rapidity to the Doctor's gate. It was the very railway-omnibus that a few hours before had brought Miss Hurribattle and myself from the station.

"Hello, Cap'n," called out the driver, complimenting me with that military title, "can you give a hand to this trunk? I've got to go right slap back after two more fares."

I was near the gate, and of course cheerfully acceded to this request. A heavy trunk was lifted out, and placed just behind the lilac-bushes at the edge of the lawn. The driver jumped into his omnibus and hurried away with all speed, lest his two fares should pay themselves to a rival conveyance. Behind him, however, he had left the proprietress of the trunk,—a lady of about five-and-twenty, in whose countenance I detected that strange sort of familiarity that entire strangers sometimes carry about them.

"This is Doctor Dastick's, is it not? Do you know whether Mrs. Hunesley expected me?" she asked, with a grace of manner that was quite irresistible.

I informed her that I was a stranger in the place, and was only at the Doctor's for a single evening; but that I could not think that Mrs. Hunesley expected anybody, as I had just seen that lady firmly fixed in the front row of chairs before the Doctor's table,—whence, owing to the crowd of sitters behind, she would have some difficulty in extricating herself.

"Oh, I would not have her called for the world!" gayly exclaimed my companion. "She has told me all about the dear old Doctor's lectures; and I would not disturb his learned explanations on any account."

"I do not think that the company in general would regret an interlude of modern life and interest," said I.

"Perhaps not; but nothing seems to me so rude and disagreeable as to interrupt people, or disturb their attention, when assembled for a definite object."

We walked up the gravel-path, and softly entered the hall, where a shawl and bonnet were deposited. The Doctor's discourse was very audible, and the unexpected visitor seemed disposed to establish herself upon one of the hall-chairs, and wait till it was over. There was a graceful confidence in her movement, which is to me more captivating than a pretty face; and when I had opportunity to observe more closely, I was greatly attracted by the sensibility and refinement expressed through a countenance which otherwise would have been plain. As I seemed to be whimsically cast in the part of host, and as I perceived the lady was too well-bred to make my position at all awkward, I proposed the piazza as a pleasanter place of waiting than that she had chosen.

And here let me make one of those weighty observations, derived from a profound experience, which I trust will have a redeeming savor to the judicious, should this tale of mine fail to command that general popularity to which I have begun to suspect its title. I have found that all the fine passages that lighten and enlighten this life of ours seldom run into the traps we set for them, but seem to take a perverse satisfaction in descending upon us when we are least prepared for their reception. I have never been asked out to dine with a gentleman, devoted, we will say, to the same speciality in which I have a humble interest, without being sadly disappointed in the talk that my host had kindly promised me. And when I am going to another country, and a dear friend gives me a letter to some one whom he tells me I shall be glad to meet, and from whom I shall gain great instruction, I accept the letter, knowing very well that the man I shall really be glad to meet, and from whom I shall truly gain instruction, will present himself on the top of a diligence, or take a seat at my table at some cheap café or chop-house. Thus it is, that, when there is every reason why people should break through the commonplace rubbish on the surface, and disclose a pure vein of thought and feeling, they rarely contrive to do it, but reserve their best things for the chances that touch them, when self-consciousness is asleep, and the unconstrained humanity within expands to absorb its like. Is it not in every one's experience that there are persons with whom chance has thrown us for a few hours, whom we know better, and who know us better, than the friends with whom we have babbled of green fields, thermometers, and dirty pavements for a score of years? As I confidently expect an affirmative reply to this question, I fear no censure in saying that the evening passed on Doctor Dastick's piazza made me feel there was a possibility of social intercourse resembling the extravagant spirituality of the mystics, when the soul bounds to the height of joyful knowledge, and without process or medium knows complete satisfaction.

How we came to talk of many things, I cannot remember; but we somehow found ourselves speaking of matters of near and deep experience without consciousness of singularity. We admitted those puzzling life-questions that present themselves, on a still summer evening, when we long to escape from the conditions of finite being, and yet contemplate the necessity of working at our tasks shackled by a thousand iron circumstances.

"My plan of life, so far as I have any, seems to point to education," said my companion. "I am thrown in great measure upon my own activity for support, and have an aunt who is very zealous in the work, and who has often asked me to become her fellow-laborer. Until now I could never well leave home; but she has written to me again since"—she stopped, as if distressed, and with a woman's tact glanced at her mourning-dress to tell me the story;—"she has written to me earnestly of late upon the subject. I feel how noble an object it is to live for, and I want an object, Heaven knows; but there are reasons—perhaps I should say feelings, not reasons—why I hesitate. I am asked to bind myself for ten years to the work in a Western college. There are many advantages in a permanent position, both for the teacher and the institution, but"—

Her voice faltered; and I felt that Nature had at times made other suggestions to that fresh young spirit, other possibilities had dawned through the future; perhaps they were certainties,—and the thought passed me with a shudder.

"Teaching is a terrible drudgery," I said; "the labor and devotion of the true teacher are yet unrecognized by the world."

"I am not afraid of the vexations," she replied: "I am very fond of being with young people; yet I have been taught to think it was happier, if our affections could be somewhat more concentrated than—In short, I had better finish an awkward sentence, by saying that I do not feel quite ready to pledge myself to give up all possibilities connected with my New-England home."

It was spoken with such sweet ingenuousness that I was only charmed. The simple sincerity of the confession seemed to me much better than the flippant jest and pert talk with which I had heard such subjects treated while making my observations upon what my city-acquaintances had assured me was good society. Is it not Sterling who exclaims that a luxurious and polished life without a true sense of the beautiful and the great is more barren and sad to see than that of the ignorant and the brutalized? And if this be true, how shall we imagine a greater satisfaction than to find the fresh truth of Nature set in a polished and graceful form? For since it is through form that we take cognizance of all we love and all we believe, it is well that the sign and idea should merge, and come complete and whole to govern us aright.

I should have no objection to meditating after this manner for a page or two, as well as further hinting what important nothings sparkled upon Doctor Dastick's piazza that pleasant summer night. But as I must curtail this biographical fragment in some part or other, it seems best to do it about that portion where I may trust that the experience of every reader will supply the deficiency.

How harshly sounded the creaking of the furniture, and how strangely commercial and matter-of-fact the voices of the people that announced the conclusion of the lecture! Mrs. Hunesley managed to get out among the first, and was heartily glad to see my newly acquired friend, calling her, "My dear Kate,"—which I thought was a very pretty name,—and saying that she had not expected her quite so soon.

I looked into the parlor and saw the Prowley party tumbling over chairs, and scaling settees, in their haste to meet the cooling breezes of the piazza. But when they finally accomplished their purpose, and I was advancing with inquiries and congratulations, I started at seeing the surprise depicted in the countenance of Miss Hurribattle, as she gazed in the direction where I stood.

"Why, Aunt Patience!" exclaimed a voice at my side.

"Why, Kate Hurribattle!" was the response.

"How in the name of wonder did you get to Foxden?"

"How under the sun did you get to Foxden?"

"Why I am here naturally enough as the guest of my friend Colonel
Prowley."

"And I am here naturally enough as the guest of my friend Mrs.
Hunesley."

Now if I had dramatized the little event I have been trying to relate, I should have reached the precise point where the auditor would button up his coat, put on his hat, let his patent spring-seat go up with a click, and begin to leave the theatre with all expedition. What would it matter to him that I had prepared a circumstantial account of how all petty objections were got over, or that I had elaborated a peculiarly felicitous tag which Colonel Prowley would speak at a few backs as they disappeared into the lobby? The auditor referred to has got an inkling of how things are to end, and can guess out the particulars as he hurries off to his business. And here will be observed our decided advantage in having made sure of the Moral by a vigorous assertion of the same at the commencement of this narrative; for, thus relieved of the necessity of a final flutter into the empyrean of ethics, we may part company in a few easy sentences.

Although the circumstances I have set down, from being awkwardly packed in a small compass, may not appear to fit into each other with all the exactness of a dissecting-map, I am sure, that, as they really occurred spread over a necessary time, they seemed natural and simple enough. Mrs. Hunesley, Doctor Dastick's favorite niece, was the schoolmate of Miss Kate Hurribattle, and what more likely than that she should invite her friend to pass a few weeks with her at her summer-home in the country? And could there be a greater necessity than that, meeting daily as we did through those lovely August weeks, she should become—in short, that I should marry Miss Hurribattle?

And when this foolish little romance, which had taken nebulous outline in the fancy of Colonel Prowley, suddenly fell at his feet a serious indubitability, the dear, delighted old gentleman was the first to declare, that, as our engagement had existed for the last seventy years, it certainly did not seem worth while to wait much longer. At all events, we did not wait longer than the following Thanksgiving; since which period my experience leads me to declare, that, if the Miss Hurribattle of my great-great-uncle's day was at all comparable to the member of her family I met at Foxden, my respected relative made a great mistake in living a bachelor.

RESIGNATION.

You know how a little child of three or four years old kicks and howls, if it do not get its own way. You know how quietly a grown-up man takes it, when ordinary things fall out otherwise than he wished. A letter, a newspaper, a magazine, does not arrive by the post on the morning on which it had been particularly wished for, and counted on with certainty. The day proves rainy, when a fine day was specially desirable. The grown-up man is disappointed; but he soon gets reconciled to the existing state of facts. He did not much expect that things would turn out as he wished them. Yes: there is nothing like the habit of being disappointed, to make a man resigned when disappointment comes, and to enable him to take it quietly. And a habit of practical resignation grows upon most men, as they advance through life.

You have often seen a poor beggar, most probably an old man, with some lingering remains of respectability in his faded appearance, half ask an alms of a passer-by; and you have seen him, at a word of repulse, or even on finding no notice taken of his request, meekly turn away: too beaten and sick at heart for energy; drilled into a dreary resignation by the long custom of finding everything go against him in this world. You may have known a poor cripple, who sits all day by the side of the pavement of a certain street, with a little bundle of tracts in his hand, watching those who pass by, in the hope that they may give him something. I wonder, indeed, how the police suffer him to be there: for, though ostensibly selling the tracts, he is really begging. Hundreds of times in the long day, he must see people approaching, and hope that they may spare him a halfpenny, and find ninety-nine out of each hundred pass without noticing him. It must be a hard school of Resignation. Disappointments without number have subdued that poor creature into bearing one disappointment more with scarce an appreciable stir of heart. But, on the other hand, kings, great nobles, and the like, have been known, even to the close of life, to violently curse and swear, if things went against them; going the length of stamping and blaspheming even at rain and wind, and branches of trees and plashes of mud, which were of course guiltless of any design of giving offence to these eminent individuals. There was a great monarch, who, when any little cross-accident befell him, was wont to fling himself upon the floor, and there to kick and scream and tear his hair. And around him, meanwhile, stood his awe-stricken attendants: all doubtless ready to assure him that there was something noble and graceful in his kicking and screaming, and that no human being had ever before with such dignity and magnanimity torn his hair. My friend Mr. Smith tells me that in his early youth he had a (very slight) acquaintance with a great prince, of elevated rank and of vast estates. That great prince came very early to his greatness; and no one had ever ventured, since he could remember, to tell him he had ever said or done wrong. Accordingly, the prince had never learned to control himself, nor grown accustomed to bear quietly what he did not like. And when any one, in conversation, related to him something which he disapproved, he used to start from his chair, and rush up and down the apartment, furiously flapping his hands together, till he had thus blown off the steam produced by the irritation of his nervous system. That prince was a good man: and so aware was he of his infirmity, that, when in these fits of passion, he never suffered himself to say a single word: being aware that he might say what he would afterwards regret. And though he could not wholly restrain himself, the entire wrath he felt passed off in flapping. And after flapping for a few minutes, he sat down again, a reasonable man once more. All honor to him! For my friend Smith tells me that that prince was surrounded by toadies, who were ready to praise everything he might do, even to his flapping. And in particular, there was one humble retainer, who, whenever his master flapped, was wont to hold up his hands in an ecstasy of admiration, exclaiming, "It is the flapping of a god, and not of a man!"

Now all this lack of Resignation on the part of princes and kings comes of the fact, that they are so far like children that they have not become accustomed to be resisted, and to be obliged to forego what they would like. Resignation comes by the habit of being disappointed, and of finding things go against you. It is, in the case of ordinary human beings, just what they expect. Of course, you remember the adage, "Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed." I have a good deal to say about that adage. Reasonableness of expectation is a great and good thing: despondency is a thing to be discouraged and put down as far as may be. But meanwhile let me say, that the corollary drawn from that dismal beatitude seems to me unfounded in fact. I should say just the contrary. I should say, "Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he will very likely be disappointed." You know, my reader, whether things do not generally happen the opposite way from that which you expected. Did you ever try to keep off an evil you dreaded by interposing this buffer? Did you ever think you might perhaps prevent a trouble from coming by constantly anticipating it,—keeping, meanwhile, an under-thought that things rarely happen as you anticipate them, and thus that your anticipation of the thing might possibly keep it away? Of course you have; for you are a human being. And in all common cases, a watch might as well think to keep a skilful watchmaker in ignorance of the way in which its movements are produced, as a human being think to prevent another human being from knowing exactly how he will think and feel in given circumstances. We have watched the working of our own watches far too closely and long, my friends, to have the least difficulty in understanding the great principles upon which the watches of other men go. I cannot look inside your breast, my reader, and see the machinery that is working there: I mean the machinery of thought and feeling. But I know exactly how it works, nevertheless; for I have long watched a machinery precisely like it.

There are a great many people in this world who feel that things are all wrong, that they have missed stays in life, that they are beaten,—and yet who don't much mind. They are indurated by long use. They do not try to disguise from themselves the facts. There are some men who diligently try to disguise the facts, and who in some measure succeed in doing so. I have known a self-sufficient and disagreeable clergyman who had a church in a large city. Five-sixths of the seats in the church were quite empty; yet the clergyman often talked of what a good congregation he had, with a confidence which would have deceived any one who had not seen it. I have known a church where it was agony to any one with an ear to listen to the noise produced when the people were singing; yet the clergyman often talked of what splendid music he had. I have known an entirely briefless barrister, whose friends gave out that the sole reason why he had no briefs was that he did not want any. I have known students who did not get the prizes for which they competed, but who declared that the reason of their failure was, that, though they competed for the prizes, they did not wish to get them. I have known a fast young woman, after many engagements made and broken, marry as the last resort a brainless and penniless blackguard; yet all her family talk in big terms of what a delightful connection she was making. Now, where all that self-deception is genuine, let us be glad to see it; and let us not, like Mr. Snarling, take a spiteful pleasure in undeceiving those who are so happy to be deceived. In most cases, indeed, such trickery deceives nobody. But where it truly deceives those who practise it, even if it deceive nobody else, you see there is no true Resignation. A man who has made a mess of life has no need to be resigned, if he fancies he has succeeded splendidly. But I look with great interest, and often with deep respect, at the man or woman who feels that life has been a failure,—a failure, that is, as regards this world,—and yet who is quite resigned. Yes: whether it be the un-soured old maid, sweet-tempered, sympathetic in others' joys, God's kind angel in the house of sorrow,—or the unappreciated genius, quiet, subdued, pleased to meet even one who understands him amid a community which does not,—or the kind-hearted clever man to whom eminent success has come too late, when those were gone whom it would have made happy: I reverence and love, more than I can express, the beautiful natures I have known thus subdued and resigned.

Yes: human beings get indurated. When you come to know well the history of a great many people, you will find that it is wonderful what they have passed through. Most people have suffered a very great deal, since they came into this world. Yet in their appearance there is no particular trace of it all. You would not guess, from looking at them, how hard and how various their lot has been. I once knew a woman, rather more than middle-aged. I knew her well, and saw her almost every day, for several years, before I learned that the homely Scotchwoman had seen distant lands, and had passed through very strange ups and downs, before she settled into the quiet, orderly life in which I knew her. Yet when spoken to kindly, by one who expressed surprise that all these trials had left so little trace, the inward feeling, commonly suppressed, burst bitterly out, and she exclaimed, "It's a wonder that I'm living at all!" And it is a wonder that a great many people are living, and looking so cheerful and so well as they do, when you think what fiery passion, what crushing sorrow, what terrible losses, what bitter disappointments, what hard and protracted work they have gone through. Doubtless, great good comes of it. All wisdom, all experience, comes of suffering. I should not care much for the counsel of the man whose life had been one long sunshiny holiday. There is greater depth in the philosophy of Mr. Dickens than a great portion of his readers discern. You are ready to smile at the singular way in which Captain Cuttle commended his friend Jack Bunsby as a man of extraordinary wisdom, whose advice on any point was of inestimable value. "Here's a man," said Captain Cuttle, "who has been more beaten about the head than any other living man!" I hail the words as the recognition of a great principle. To Mr. Bunsby it befell in a literal sense; but we have all been (in a moral sense) a good deal beaten about both the head and the heart before we grew good for much. Out of the travail of his nature, out of the sorrowful history of his past life, the poet or the moralist draws the deep thought and feeling which find so straight a way to the hearts of other men. Do you think Mr. Tennyson would ever have been the great poet he is, if he had not passed through that season of great grief which has left its noble record in "In Memoriam"? And a youthful preacher, of vivid imagination and keen feeling, little fettered by anything in the nature of good taste, may by strong statements and a fiery manner draw a mob of unthinking hearers: but thoughtful men and women will not find anything in all that, that awakens the response of their inner nature in its truest depths; they must have religious instruction into which real experience has been transfused; and the worth of the instruction will be in direct proportion to the amount of real experience which is embodied in it. And after all, it is better to be wise and good than to be gay and happy, if we must choose between the two things; and it is worth while to be severely beaten about the head, if that is the condition on which alone we can gain true wisdom. True wisdom is cheap at almost any price. But it does not follow at all that you will be happy (in the vulgar sense) in direct proportion as you are wise. I suppose most middle-aged people, when they receive the ordinary kind wish at New-Year's time of a Happy New-Year, feel that happy is not quite the word; and feel that, too, though well aware that they have abundant reason for gratitude to a kind Providence. It is not here that we shall ever be happy,—that is, completely and perfectly happy. Something will always be coming to worry and distress. And a hundred sad possibilities hang over us: some of them only too certainly and quickly drawing near. Yet people are content, in a kind of way. They have learnt the great lesson of Resignation.

* * * * *

There are many worthy people who would be quite fevered and flurried by good fortune, if it were to come to any very great degree. It would injure their heart. As for bad fortune, they can stand it nicely, they have been accustomed to it so long. I have known a very hard-wrought man, who had passed, rather early in life, through very heavy and protracted trials. I have heard him say, that, if any malicious enemy wished to kill him, the course would be to make sure that tidings of some signal piece of prosperity should arrive by post on each of six or seven successive days. It would quite unhinge and unsettle him, he said. His heart would go: his nervous system would break down. People to whom pieces of good-luck come rare and small have a great curiosity to know how a man feels when he is suddenly told that he has drawn one of the greatest prizes in the lottery of life. The kind of feeling, of course, will depend entirely on the kind of man. Yet very great prizes, in the way of dignity and duty, do for the most part fall to men who in some measure deserve them, or who at least are not conspicuously undeserving of them and unfit for them. So that it is almost impossible that the great news should elicit merely some unworthy explosion of gratified self-conceit. The feeling would in almost every case be deeper and worthier. One would like to be sitting at breakfast with a truly good man, when the letter from the Prime-Minister comes in, offering him the Archbishopric of Canterbury. One would like to see how he would take it. Quietly, I have no doubt. Long preparation has fitted the man who reaches that position for taking it quietly. A recent Chancellor publicly stated how he felt, when offered the Great Seal. His first feeling, that good man said, was of gratification that he had fairly reached the highest reward of the profession to which he had given his life; but the feeling which speedily supplanted that was an overwhelming sense of his responsibility and a grave doubt as to his qualifications. I have always believed, and sometimes said, that good fortune—not so great or so sudden as to injure one's nerves or heart, but kindly and equable—has a most wholesome effect upon human character. I believe that the happier a man is, the better and kinder he will be. The greater part of unamiability, ill-temper, impatience, bitterness, and uncharitableness comes out of unhappiness. It is because a man is so miserable that he is such a sour, suspicious, fractious, petted creature. I was amused, this morning, to read in the newspaper an account of a very small incident which befell the new Primate of England on his journey back to London, after being enthroned at Canterbury. The reporter of that small incident takes occasion to record that the Archbishop had quite charmed his travelling-companions in the railway-carriage by the geniality and kindliness of his manner. I have no doubt he did. I am sure he is a truly good Christian man. But think of what a splendid training for producing geniality and kindliness he has been going through for a great number of years! Think of the moral influences which have been bearing on him for the last few weeks! We should all be kindly and genial, if we had the same chance of being so. But if Dr. Longley had a living of a hundred pounds a year, a fretful, ailing wife, a number of half-fed and half-educated little children, a dirty, miserable house, a bleak country round, and a set of wrong-headed and insolent parishioners to keep straight, I venture to say he would have looked, and been, a very different man in that railway-carriage running up to London. Instead of the genial smiles that delighted his fellow-travellers, (according to the newspaper-story,) his face would have been sour, and his speech would have been snappish; he would have leaned back in the corner of a second-class carriage, sadly calculating the cost of his journey, and how part of it might be saved by going without any dinner. Oh, if I found a four-leaved shamrock, I would undertake to make a mighty deal of certain people I know! I would put an end to their weary schemings to make the ends meet. I would cut off all those wretched cares which jar miserably on the shaken nerves. I know the burst of thankfulness and joy that would come, if some dismal load, never to be cast off, were taken away. And I would take it off. I would clear up the horrible muddle. I would make them happy: and in doing that, I know that I should make them good.

* * * * *

But I have sought the four-leaved shamrock for a long time, and never have found it; and so I am growing subdued to the conviction that I never shall. Let us go back to the matter of Resignation, and think a little longer about that.

Resignation, in any human being, means that things are not as you would wish, and yet that you are content.

Who has all he wishes? There are many houses in this world in which Resignation is the best thing that can be felt any more. The bitter blow has fallen; the break has been made; the empty chair is left (perhaps a very little chair); and never more, while Time goes on, can things be as they were fondly wished and hoped. Resignation would need to be cultivated by human beings; for all round us there is a multitude of things very different from what we would wish. Not in your house, not in your family, not in your street, not in your parish, not in your country, and least of all in yourself, can you have things as you would wish. And you have your choice of two alternatives. You must either fret yourself into a nervous fever, or you must cultivate the habit of Resignation. And very often Resignation does not mean that you are at all reconciled to a thing, but just that you feel you can do nothing to mend it. Some friend, to whom you are really attached, and whom you often see, vexes and worries you by some silly and disagreeable habit,—some habit which it is impossible you should ever like, or ever even overlook; yet you try to make up your mind to it, because it cannot be helped, and you would rather submit to it than lose your friend. You hate the east-wind: it withers and pinches you, in body and soul: yet you cannot live in a certain beautiful city without feeling the east-wind many days in the year. And that city's advantages and attractions are so many and great that no sane man with sound lungs would abandon the city merely to escape the east-wind. Yet, though resigned to the east-wind, you are anything but reconciled to it.

Resignation is not always a good thing. Sometimes it is a very bad thing. You should never be resigned to things continuing wrong, when you may rise and set them right. I dare say, in the Romish Church, there were good men before Luther who were keenly alive to the errors and evils that had crept into it, but who, in despair of making things better, tried sadly to fix their thoughts upon other subjects: who took to illuminating missals, or constructing systems of logic, or cultivating vegetables in the garden of the monastery, or improving the music in the chapel: quietly resigned to evils they judged irremediable. Great reformers have not been resigned men. Luther was not resigned; Howard was not resigned; Fowell Buxton was not resigned; George Stephenson was not resigned. And there is hardly a nobler sight than that of a man who determines that he will NOT make up his mind to the continuance of some great evil: who determines that he will give his life to battling with that evil to the last: who determines that either that evil shall extinguish him, or he shall extinguish it. I reverence the strong, sanguine mind, that resolves to work a revolution to better things, and that is not afraid to hope it can work a revolution. And perhaps, my reader, we should both reverence it all the more that we find in ourselves very little like it. It is a curious thing, and a sad thing, to remark in how many people there is too much resignation. It kills out energy. It is a weak, fretful, unhappy thing. People are reconciled, in a sad sort of way, to the fashion in which things go on. You have seen a poor, slatternly mother, in a way-side cottage, who has observed her little children playing in the road before it, in the way of passing carriages, angrily ordering the little things to come away from their dangerous and dirty play; yet, when the children disobey her, and remain where they were, just saying no more, making no farther effort. You have known a master tell his man-servant to do something about stable or garden, yet, when the servant does not do it, taking no notice: seeing that he has been disobeyed, yet wearily resigned, feeling that there is no use in always fighting. And I do not speak of the not unfrequent cases in which the master, after giving his orders, comes to discover that it is best they should not be carried out, and is very glad to see them disregarded: I mean when he is dissatisfied that what he has directed is not done, and wishes that it were done, and feels worried by the whole affair, yet is so devoid of energy as to rest in a fretful resignation. Sometimes there is a sort of sense as if one had discharged his conscience by making a weak effort in the direction of doing a thing, an effort which had not the slightest chance of being successful. When I was a little boy, many years since, I used to think this; and I was led to thinking it by remarking a singular characteristic in the conduct of a school-companion. In those days, if you were chasing some other boy who had injured or offended you, with the design of retaliation, if you found you could not catch him, by reason of his superior speed, you would have recourse to the following expedient. If your companion was within a little space of you, though a space you felt you could not make less, you would suddenly stick out one of your feet, which would hook round his, and he, stumbling over it, would fall. I trust I am not suggesting a mischievous and dangerous trick to any boy of the present generation. Indeed, I have the firmest belief that existing boys know all we used to know, and possibly more. All this is by way of rendering intelligible what I have to say of my old companion. He was not a good runner. And when another boy gave him a sudden flick with a knotted handkerchief, or the like, he had little chance of catching that other boy. Yet I have often seen him, when chasing another, before finally abandoning the pursuit, stick out his foot in the regular way, though the boy he was chasing was yards beyond his reach. Often did the present writer meditate on that phenomenon, in the days of his boyhood. It appeared curious that it should afford some comfort to the evaded pursuer, to make an offer at upsetting the escaping youth,—an offer which could not possibly be successful. But very often, in after-life, have I beheld in the conduct of grown-up men and women the moral likeness of that futile sticking-out of the foot. I have beheld human beings who lived in houses always untidy and disorderly, or whose affairs were in a horrible confusion and entanglement, who now and then seemed roused to a a feeling that this would not do, who querulously bemoaned their miserable lot, and made some faint and futile attempt to set things right, attempts which never had a chance to succeed, and which ended in nothing. Yet it seemed somehow to pacify the querulous heart. I have known a clergyman, in a parish with a bad population, seem suddenly to waken up to a conviction that he must do something to mend matters, and set agoing some weak little machinery, which could produce no appreciable result, and which came to a stop in a few weeks. Yet that faint offer appeared to discharge the claims of conscience, and after it the clergyman remained long time in a comatose state of unhealthy Resignation. But it is a miserable and a wrong kind of Resignation which dwells in that man who sinks down, beaten and hopeless, in the presence of a recognized evil. Such a man may be in a sense resigned, but, he cannot possibly be content.

If you should ever, when you have reached middle age, turn over the diary or the letters you wrote in the hopeful though foolish days when you were eighteen or twenty, you will be aware how quietly and gradually the lesson of Resignation has been taught you. You would have got into a terrible state of excitement, if any one had told you then that you would have to forego your most cherished hopes and wishes of that time; and it would have tried you even more severely to be assured that in not many years you would not care a single straw for the things and the persons who were then uppermost in your mind and heart. What an entirely new set of friends and interests is that which now surrounds you! and how completely the old ones are gone: gone, like the sunsets you remember in the summers of your childhood; gone, like the primroses that grew in the woods where you wandered as a boy! Said my friend Smith to me, a few days ago: "You remember Miss Jones, and all about that? I met her yesterday, after ten years. She is a fat, middle-aged, ordinary-looking woman. What a terrific fool I was!" Smith spoke to me in the confidence of friendship; yet I think he was a little mortified at the heartiness with which I agreed with him on the subject of his former folly. He had got over it completely; and in seeing that he was (at a certain period) a fool, he had come to discern that of which his friends had always been aware. Of course, early interests do not always die out. You remember Dr. Chalmers, and the ridiculous exhibition about the wretched little likeness of an early sweetheart, not seen for forty years, and long since in her grave. You remember the singular way in which he signified his remembrance of her, in his famous and honored age. I don't mean the crying, nor the walking up and down the garden-walk calling her by fine names. I mean the taking out his card: not his carte; you could understand that: but his visiting-card bearing his name, and sticking it behind the portrait with two wafers. Probably it pleased him to do so; and assuredly it did harm to no one else. And we have all heard of the like things. Early affections are sometimes, doubtless, cherished in the memory of the old. But still, more material interests come in, and the old affection is crowded out of its old place in the heart. And so those comparatively fanciful disappointments sit lightly. The romance is gone. The mid-day sun beats down, and there lies the dusty way. When the cantankerous and unamiable mother of Christopher North stopped his marriage with a person at least as respectable as herself, on the ground that the person was not good enough, we are told that the future professor nearly went mad, and that he never quite got over it. But really, judging from his writings and his biography, he bore up under it, after a little, wonderfully well.

But looking back to the days which the old yellow letters bring back, you will think to yourself, Where are the hopes and anticipations of that time? You expected to be a great man, no doubt. Well, you know you are not. You are a small man, and never will be anything else; yet you are quite resigned. If there be an argument which stirs me to indignation at its futility, and to wonder that any mortal ever regarded it as of the slightest force, it is that which is set out in the famous soliloquy in "Cato," as to the Immortality of the Soul. Will any sane man say, that, if in this world you wish for a thing very much, and anticipate it very clearly and confidently, you are therefore sure to get it? If that were so, many a little schoolboy would end by driving his carriage and four, who ends by driving no carriage at all. I have heard of a man whose private papers were found after his death all written over with his signature as he expected it would be when he became Lord Chancellor. Let us say his peerage was to be as Lord Smith. There it was, SMITH, C., SMITH, C., written in every conceivable fashion, so that the signature, when needed, might be easy and imposing. That man had very vividly anticipated the woolsack, the gold robe, and all the rest. It need hardly be said, he attained none of these. The famous argument, you know of course, is, that man has a great longing to be immortal, and that therefore he is sure to be immortal. Rubbish! It is not true that any longing after immortality exists in the heart of a hundredth portion of the race. And if it were true, it would prove immortality no more than the manifold signatures of SMITH, C., proved that Smith was indeed to be Chancellor. No: we cling to the doctrine of a Future Life; we could not live without it; but we believe it, not because of undefined longings within ourselves, not because of reviving plants and flowers, not because of the chrysalis and the butterfly,—but because "our Saviour, Jesus Christ, hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel."

There is something very curious, and very touching, in thinking how clear and distinct, and how often recurring, were our early anticipations of things that were never to be. In this world, the fact is for the most part the opposite of what it should be to give force to Plato's (or Cato's) argument: the thing you vividly anticipate is the thing that is least likely to come. The thing you don't much care for, the thing you don't expect, is the likeliest. And even if the event prove what you anticipated, the circumstances, and the feeling of it, will be quite different from what you anticipated. A certain little girl three years old was told that in a little while she was to go with her parents to a certain city, a hundred miles off,—a city which may be called Altenburg as well as anything else. It was a great delight to her to anticipate that journey, and to anticipate it very circumstantially. It was a delight to her to sit down at evening on her father's knee, and to tell him all about how it would be in going to Altenburg. It was always the same thing. Always, first, how sandwiches would be made,—how they would all get into the carriage, (which would come round to the door,) and drive away to a certain railway-station,—how they would get their tickets, and the train would come up, and they would all get into a carriage together, and lean back in corners, and eat the sandwiches, and look out of the windows, and so on. But when the journey was actually made, every single circumstance in the little girl's anticipations proved wrong. Of course, they were not intentionally made wrong. Her parents would have carried out to the letter, if they could, what the little thing had so clearly pictured and so often repeated. But it proved to be needful to go by an entirely different way and in an entirely different fashion. All those little details, dwelt on so much, and with so much interest, were things never to be. It is even so with the anticipations of larger and older children. How distinctly, how fully, my friend, we have pictured out to our minds a mode of life, a home and the country round it, and the multitude of little things which make up the habitude of being, which we long since resigned ourselves to knowing could never prove realities! No doubt, it is all right and well. Even Saint Paul, with all his gift of prophecy, was not allowed to foresee what was to happen to himself. You know how he wrote that he would do a certain thing, "so soon as I shall see how it will go with me."

But our times are in the Best Hand. And the one thing about our lot, my reader, that we may think of with perfect contentment, is that they are so. I know nothing more admirable in spirit, and few things more charmingly expressed, than that little poem by Mrs. Waring which sets out that comfortable thought. You know it, of course. You should have it in your memory; and let it be one of the first things your children learn by heart. It may well come next after, "O God of Bethel": it breathes the self-same tone. And let me close these thoughts with one of its verses:—

  "There are briers besetting every path,
    Which call for patient care:
  There is a cross in every lot,
   And an earnest need for prayer:
  But a lowly heart that leans on Thee
    Is happy anywhere!"

THE FLAG.

  There's a flag hangs over my threshold, whose folds are more dear to me
  Than the blood that thrills in my bosom its earnest of liberty;
  And dear are the stars it harbors in its sunny field of blue
  As the hope of a further heaven that lights all our dim lives through.

  But now should my guests be merry, the house is in holiday guise,
  Looking out through its burnished windows like a score of welcoming eyes.
  Come hither, my brothers who wander in saintliness and in sin!
  Come hither, ye pilgrims of Nature! my heart doth invite you in.

  My wine is not of the choicest, yet bears it an honest brand;
  And the bread that I bid you lighten I break with no sparing hand;
  But pause, ere you pass to taste it, one act must accomplished be:
  Salute the flag in its virtue, before ye sit down with me.

  The flag of our stately battles, not struggles of wrath and greed:
  Its stripes were a holy lesson, its spangles a deathless creed;
  'T was red with the blood of freemen, and white with the fear of the foe,
  And the stars that fight in their courses 'gainst tyrants its symbols
     know.

  Come hither, thou son of my mother! we were reared in the self-same
     arms;
  Thou hast many a pleasant gesture, thy mind hath its gifts and charms;
  But my heart is as stern to question as mine eyes are of sorrows full:
  Salute the flag in its virtue, or pass on where others rule.

  Thou lord of a thousand acres, with heaps of uncounted gold,
  The steeds of thy stall are haughty, thy lackeys cunning and bold:
  I envy no jot of thy splendor, I rail at thy follies none:
  Salute the flag in its virtue, or leave my poor house alone.

  Fair lady with silken trappings, high waving thy stainless plume,
  We welcome thee to our numbers, a flower of costliest bloom:
  Let a hundred maids live widowed to furnish thy bridal bed;
  But pause where the flag doth question, and bend thy triumphant head.

  Take down now your flaunting banner, for a scout comes breathless and
     pale,
  With the terror of death upon him; of failure is all his tale:
  "They have fled while the flag waved o'er them! they've turned to the
     foe their back!
  They are scattered, pursued, and slaughtered! the fields are all rout
     and wrack!"

  Pass hence, then, the friends I gathered, a goodly company!
  All ye that have manhood in you, go, perish for Liberty!
  But I and the babes God gave me will wait with uplifted hearts,
  With the firm smile ready to kindle, and the will to perform our parts.

  When the last true heart lies bloodless, when the fierce and the false
     have won,
  I'll press in turn to my bosom each daughter and either son;
  Bid them loose the flag from its bearings, and we'll lay us down to rest
  With the glory of home about us, and its freedom locked in our breast.

WET-WEATHER WORK.

BY A FARMER.

I.

It is raining; and being in-doors, I look out from my library-window, across a quiet country-road, so near that I could toss my pen into the middle of it.

A thatched stile is opposite, flanked by a straggling hedge of Osage-orange; and from the stile the ground falls away in green and gradual slope to a great plateau of measured and fenced fields, checkered, a month since, with bluish lines of Swedes, with the ragged purple of mangels, and the feathery emerald-green of carrots. There are umber-colored patches of fresh-turned furrows; here and there the mossy, luxurious verdure of new-springing rye; gray stubble; the ragged brown of discolored, frost-bitten rag-weed; next, a line of tree-tops, thickening as they drop to the near bed of a river, and beyond the river-basin showing again, with tufts of hemlock among naked oaks and maples; then roofs, cupolas; ambitious lookouts of suburban houses, spires, belfries, turrets: all these commingling in a long line of white, brown, and gray, which in sunny weather is backed by purple hills, and flanked one way by a shining streak of water, and the other by a stretch of low, wooded mountains that turn from purple to blue, and so blend with the northern sky.

Is the picture clear? A road; a farm-flat of party-colored checkers; a near wood, that conceals the sunken meadow of a river; a farther wood, that skirts a town,—that seems to overgrow the town, so that only a confused line of roofs, belfries, spires, towers, rise above the wood; and these tallest spires and turrets lying in relief against a purple hill-side, that is as far beyond the town as the town is beyond my window; and the purple hill-side trending southward to a lake-like gleam of water, where a light-house shines upon a point; and northward, as I said, these same purple hills bearing away to paler purple, and then to blue, and then to haze.

Thus much is seen, when I look directly eastward; but by an oblique glance southward (always from my library-window) the checkered farm-land is repeated in long perspective: here and there is a farm-house with its clustered out-buildings; here and there a blotch of wood, or of orcharding; here and there a bright sheen of winter-grain; and the level ends only where a slight fringe of tree-tops, and the iron cordon of a railway that leaps over a marshy creek upon trestle-work, separate it from Long Island Sound.

To the north, under such oblique glance as can be caught, the farm-lands in smaller inclosures stretch half a mile to the skirts of a quiet village. A few tall chimneys smoke there lazily, and below them you see as many quick and repeated puffs of white steam. Two white spires and a tower are in bold relief against the precipitous basaltic cliff, at whose foot the village seems to nestle. Yet the mountain is not wholly precipitous; for the columnar masses been fretted away by a thousand frosts, making a sloping débris below, and leaving above the iron-yellow scars of fresh cleavage, the older blotches of gray, and the still older stain of lichens. Nor is the summit bald, but tufted with dwarf cedars and oaks, which, as they file away on either flank, mingle with a heavier growth of hickories and chest-nuts. A few stunted kalmias and hemlock-spruces have found foothold in the clefts upon the face of the rock, showing a tawny green, that blends prettily with the scars, lichens, and weather-stains of the cliff; all which show under a sunset light richly and changefully as the breast of a dove.

But just now there is no glow of sunset; raining still. Indeed, I do not know why I should have described at such length a mere landscape, (than which I know few fairer,) unless because of a rainy day it is always in my eye, and that now, having invited a few outsiders to such entertainment as may belong to my wet farm-days, I should present to them at once my oldest acquaintance,—the view from my library-window.

But as yet it is only coarsely outlined. We may some day return to it with a fond particularity; for let me warn the reader that I have that love of such scenes, nay, for the very verdure of the lawn, that I could put an ink-mark for every blade of the fresh-springing grass, and yet feel that the tale of its beauty, and of its emerald wealth, were not half told.

This day we spend in-doors, and busy ourselves with the whims, doctrines, and economics of a few

OLD-TIME FARMERS.

The shelves where they rest in vellum and in dust are only an arm's-length from the window; so that I can relieve the stiff classicism of Flaxman's rendering of the "Works and Days," or the tedious iteration of Columella and Crescenzio, by a glance outside into the rain-cloud, under which lies always the checkered illustration of the farming of to-day, and beyond which the spires stand in sentinel.

Hesiod is currently reckoned one of the oldest farm-writers; but there is not enough in his homely poem ("Works and Days") out of which to conjure a farm-system. He gives good advice, indeed, about the weather, about ploughing when the ground is not too wet, about the proper timber to put to a plough-beam, about building a house, and taking a bride. But, on the other hand, he gives very bad advice, where, as in Book II., (line 244,) he recommends to stint the oxen in winter, and (line 285) to put three parts of water to the Biblian wine.

Mr. Gladstone notes the fact that Homer talks only in a grandiose way of rural life and employments, as if there were no small landholders in his day; but Hesiod, who must have lived within a century of Homer, with his modest homeliness, does not confirm this view. He tells us a farmer should keep two ploughs, and be cautious how he lends either of them. His household stipulations, too, are most moderate, whether on the score of the bride, the maid, or the "forty-year-old" ploughman; and for guardianship of the premises the proprietor is recommended to keep "a sharp-toothed cur."

This reminds us how Ulysses, on his return from voyaging, found seated round his good bailiff Eumaeus four savage watch-dogs, who straightway (and here Homer must have nodded) attack their old master, and are driven off only by a good pelting of stones.

This Eumaeus, by the way, may be regarded as the Homeric representative farmer, as well as bailiff and swineherd,—the great original of Gurth, who might have prepared a supper for Cedric the Saxon very much as Eumaeus extemporized one upon his Greek farm for Ulysses. Pope shall tell of this bit of cookery in rhyme that has a ring of the Rappahannock:—

  "His vest succinct then girding round his waist,
  Forth rushed the swain with hospitable haste,
  Straight to the lodgements of his herd he run,
  Where the fat porkers slept beneath the sun;
  Of two his cutlass launched the spouting blood;
  These quartered, singed, and fixed on forks of wood,
  All hasty on the hissing coals he threw;
  And, smoking, back the tasteful viands drew,
  Broachers, and all."

This is roast pig: nothing more elegant or digestible. For the credit of Greek farmers, I am sorry that Eumaeus has nothing better to offer his landlord,—the most abominable dish, Charles Lamb and his pleasant fable to the contrary notwithstanding, that was ever set before a Christian.

To return to Hesiod, we suspect that he was only a small farmer—if he had ever farmed at all—in the foggy latitude of Boeotia, and knew nothing of the sunny wealth in the south of the peninsula, or of such princely estates as Eumaeus managed in the Ionian seas. Flaxman has certainly not given him the look of a large proprietor in his outlines: his toilet is severely scant, and the old gentleman appears to have lost two of his fingers in a chaff-cutter. As for Perses, who is represented as listening to the sage,[A] his dress is in the extreme of classic scantiness,—being, in fact, a mere night-shirt, and a tight fit at that.

[Footnote A: Flaxman's Illustrations of "Works and Days," Plate I.]

But we dismiss Hesiod, the first of the heathen farm-writers, with a loving thought of his pretty Pandora, whom the goddesses so bedecked, whom Jove looks on (in Flaxman's picture) with such sharp approval, and whose attributes the poet has compacted into one resonant line, daintily rendered by Cooke,—

     "Thus the sex began
  A lovely mischief to the soul of man."

I next beg to pull from his place on the shelf, and to present to the reader, my friend General Xenophon, a most graceful writer, a capital huntsman, an able strategist, an experienced farmer, and, if we may believe Laertius, "handsome beyond expression."

It is refreshing to find such qualities united in one man at any time, and doubly refreshing to find them in a person so far removed from the charities of today that the malcontents cannot pull his character in pieces. To be sure, he was guilty of a few acts of pillage in the course of his Persian campaign; but he tells the story of it in his "Anabasis" with a brave front: his purse was low, and needed replenishment; there is no cover put up, of disorderly sutlers or camp-followers.

The farming reputation of the General rests upon his "Economics" and his horse-treatise ([Greek: Hippikae]).

Economy has come to have a contorted meaning in our day, as if it were only—saving. Its true gist is better expressed by the word management; and in that old-fashioned sense it forms a significant title for Xenophon's book: management of the household, management of flocks, of servants, of land, of property in general.

At the very outset we find this bit of practical wisdom, which is put into the mouth of Socrates, who is replying to Critobulus:—"Those things should be called goods that are beneficial to the master. Neither can those lands be called goods which by a man's unskilful management put him to more expense than he receives profit by them; nor may those lands be called goods which do not bring a good farmer such a profit as may give him a good living."

Thereafter (sec. vii.) he introduces the good Ischomachus, who, it appears, has a thrifty wife at home, and from that source flow in a great many capital hints upon domestic management. The apartments, the exposure, the cleanliness, the order, are all considered in such an admirably practical, common-sense way as would make the old Greek a good lecturer to the sewing-circles of our time. And when the wife of the wise Ischomachus, in an unfortunate moment, puts on rouge and cosmetics, the grave husband meets her with this complimentary rebuke:—"Can there be anything in Nature more complete than yourself?"

"The science of husbandry," he says, and it might be said of the science in most times, "is extremely profitable to those who understand it; but it brings the greatest trouble and misery upon those farmers who undertake it without knowledge." (sec. xv.)

Where Xenophon comes to speak of the details of farm-labor, of ploughings and fallowings, there is all that precision and particularity of mention, added to a shrewd sagacity, which one might look for in the columns of the "Country Gentleman." He even describes how a field should be thrown into narrow lands, in order to promote a more effectual surface-drainage. In the midst of it, however, we come upon a stereorary maxim, which is, to say the least, of doubtful worth:—"Nor is there any sort of earth which will not make very rich manure, by being laid a due time in standing water, till it is fully impregnated with the virtue of the water." His British translator, Professor Bradley, does, indeed, give a little note of corroborative testimony. But I would not advise any active farmer, on the authority either of General Xenophon or of Professor Bradley, to transport his surface-soil very largely to the nearest frog-pond, in the hope of finding it transmuted into manure. The absorptive and retentive capacity of soils is, to be sure, the bone just now of very particular contention; but whatever that capacity may be, it certainly needs something more palpable than the virtue of standing water for its profitable development.

Here, again, is very neat evidence of how much simple good sense has to do with husbandry: Socrates, who is supposed to have no particular knowledge of the craft, says to his interlocutor,—"You have satisfied me that I am not ignorant in husbandry; and yet I never had any master to instruct me in it."

"It is not," says Xenophon, "difference in knowledge or opportunities of knowledge that makes some farmers rich and others poor; but that which makes some poor and some rich is that the former are negligent and lazy, the latter industrious and thrifty."

Next, we have this masculine ergo:—"Therefore we may know that those who will not learn such sciences as they might get their living by, or do not fall into husbandry, are either downright fools, or else propose to get their living by robbery or by begging." (sec. xx.)

This is a good clean cut at politicians, office-holders, and other such beggar craft, through more than a score of centuries,—clean as classicism can make it: the Attic euphony in it, and all the aroma of age.

Once more, and it is the last of the "Oeconomica," we give this charming bit of New-Englandism:—"I remember my father had an excellent rule," (Ischomachus loquitur,) "which he advised me to follow: that, if ever I bought any land, I should by no means purchase that which had been already well-improved, but should choose such as had never been tilled, either through neglect of the owner, or for want of capacity to do it; for he observed, that, if I were to purchase improved grounds, I must pay a high price for them, and then I could not propose to advance their value, and must also lose the pleasure of improving them myself, or of seeing them thrive better by my endeavors."

When Xenophon wrote his rural treatises, (including the [Greek: Kunaegetikos],) he was living in that delightful region of country which lies westward of the mountains of Arcadia, looking toward the Ionian Sea. Here, too, he wrote the story of his retreat, and his wanderings among the mountains of Armenia; here he talked with his friends, and made other such symposia as he has given us a taste of at the house of Callias the Athenian; here he ranged over the whole country-side with his horses and dogs: a stalwart and lithe old gentleman, without a doubt; able to mount a horse or to manage one, with the supplest of the grooms; and with a keen eye, as his book shows, for the good points in horse-flesh. A man might make a worse mistake than to buy a horse after Xenophon's instructions, to-day. A spavin or a wind-gall did not escape the old gentleman's eye, and he never bought a horse without proving his wind and handling him well about the mouth and ears. His grooms were taught their duties with nice speciality: the mane and tail to be thoroughly washed; the food and bed to be properly and regularly prepared; and treatment to be always gentle and kind.

Exception may perhaps be taken to his doctrine in regard to stall-floors. Moist ones, he says, injure the hoof: "Better to have stones inserted in the ground close to one another, equal in size to their hoofs; for such stalls consolidate the hoofs of those standing on them, beside strengthening the hollow of the foot."

After certain directions for rough riding and leaping, he advises hunting through thickets, if wild animals are to be found. Otherwise, the following pleasant diversion is named, which I beg to suggest to sub-lieutenants in training for dragoon-service:—"It is a useful exercise for two horsemen to agree between themselves, that one shall retire through all sorts of rough places, and as he flees, is to turn about from time to time and present his spear; and the other shall pursue, having javelins blunted with balls, and a spear of the same description, and whenever he comes within javelin-throw, he is to hurl the blunted weapon at the party retreating, and whenever he comes within spear-reach, he is to strike him with it."

Putting aside his horsemanship, in which he must have been nearly perfect, there was very much that was grand about the old Greek,—very much that makes us strangely love the man, who, when his soldiers lay benumbed under the snows on the heights of Armenia, threw off his general's coat, or blanket, or what not, and set himself resolutely to wood-chopping and to cheering them. The farmer knew how.

Such men win battles. He has his joke, too, with Cheirisophus, the Lacedaemonian, about the thieving propensity of his townspeople, and invites him, in virtue of it, to steal a difficult march upon the enemy. And Cheirisophus grimly retorts upon Xenophon, that Athenians are said to be great experts in stealing the public money, especially the high officers. This sounds home-like! When I come upon such things, I forget the parasangs and the Taochians and the dead Cyrus, and seem to be reading out of American newspapers.

It is quite out of the question to claim Theocritus as a farm-writer; and yet in all old literature there is not to be found such a lively bevy of heifers, and wanton kids, and "butting rams," and stalwart herdsmen, who milk the cows "upon the sly," as in the "Idyls" of the musical Sicilian.

There is no doubt but Theocritus knew the country to a charm: he knew all its roughnesses, and the thorns that scratched the bare legs of the goatherds; he knew the lank heifers, that fed, "like grasshoppers," only on dew; he knew what clatter the brooks made, tumbling headlong adown the rocks,—

[Greek: apo tus petras kataleibetai ypsothen ydor]

he knew, moreover, all the charms and coyness of the country-nymphs, giving even a rural twist to his praises of the courtly Helen:—

  "In shape, in height, in stately presence
        fair,
  Straight as a furrow gliding from the
        share."[B]

[Footnote B: Elton's translation, I think. I do not vouch for its correctness.]

A man must have had an eye for good ploughing and a lithe figure, as well as a keen scent for the odor of fresh-turned earth, to make such a comparison as that!

Theocritus was no French sentimentalist; he would have protested against the tame elegancies of the Roman Bucolics; and the sospiri ardenti and miserelli aman of Guarini would have driven him mad. He is as brisk as the wind upon a breezy down. His cow-tenders are swart and bare-legged, and love with a vengeance. There is no miserable tooting upon flutes, but an uproarious song that shakes the woods; and if it comes to a matter of kissing, there are no "reluctant lips," but a smack that makes the vales resound.

It is no Boucher we have here, nor Watteau: cosmetics and rosettes are far away; tunics are short, and cheeks are nut-brown. It is Teniers, rather:—boors, indeed; but they are live boors, and not manikin shepherds.

I shall call out another Sicilian here, named Moschus, were it only for his picture of a fine, sturdy bullock: it occurs in his "Rape of Europa":—

  "With yellow hue his sleekened body beams;
  His forehead with a snowy circle gleams;
  Horns, equal-bending, from his brow emerge,
  And to a moonlight crescent orbing verge."

Nothing can be finer than the way in which this "milky steer," with
Europa on his back, goes sailing over the brine, his "feet all oars."
Meantime, she, the pretty truant,

  "Grasps with one hand his curved projecting horn,
  And with the other closely drawn compressed
  The fluttering foldings of her purple vest,
  Whene'er its fringed hem was dashed with dew
  Of the salt sea-foam that in circles flew:
  Wide o'er Europa's shoulders to the gale
  The ruffled robe heaved swelling, like a sail."

Moschus is as rich as the Veronese at Venice; and his picture is truer to the premium standard. The painting shows a pampered animal, with over-red blotches on his white hide, and is by half too fat to breast such "salt sea-foam" as flashes on the Idyl of Moschus.

Another poet, Aratus of Cilicia, whose very name has a smack of tillage, has left us a book about the weather [Greek: Dosaemeia] which is quite as good to mark down a hay-day by as the later meteorologies of Professor Espy or Judge Butler.

Besides which, our friend Aratus holds the abiding honor of having been quoted by St. Paul, in his speech to the Athenians on Mars Hill:—

"For in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said: 'For we are also His offspring.'"

And Aratus, (after Elton,)—

  "On thee our being hangs; in thee we move;
  All are thy offspring, and the seed of Jove."

Scattered through the lesser Greek poets, and up and down the Anthology, are charming bits of rurality, redolent of the fields and of field-life, with which it would be easy to fill up the measure of this rainy day, and beat off the Grecian couplets to the tinkle of the eave-drops. Up and down, the cicada chirps; the locust, "encourager of sleep," sings his drowsy song; boozy Anacreon flings grapes; the purple violets and the daffodils crown the perfumed head of Heliodora; and the reverent Simonides likens our life to the grass.

Nor will I part company with these, or close up the Greek ranks of farmers, (in which I must not forget the great schoolmaster, Theophrastus,) until I cull a sample of the Anthology, and plant it for a guidon at the head of the column,—a little bannerol of music, touching upon our topic, as daintily as the bees touch the flowering tips of the wild thyme.

It is by Zonas the Sardian:—

[Greek: Ai o agete nxouthai oimblaeides akra melissai, _K.T.L.,]

and the rendering by Mr. Hay:—

  "Ye nimble honey-making bees, the flowers are in their prime;
  Come now and taste the little buds of sweetly breathing thyme,
  Of tender poppies all so fair, or bits of raisin sweet,
  Or down that decks the apple tribe, or fragrant violet;
  Come, nibble on,—your vessels store with honey while you can,
  In order that the hive-protecting, bee-preserving Pan
  May have a tasting for himself, and that the hand so rude,
  That cuts away the comb, may leave yourselves some little food."

Leaving now this murmur of the bees upon the banks of the Pactolus, will slip over-seas to Tusculum, where Cato was born, who was the oldest of the Roman writers upon agriculture; and thence into the Sabine territory, where, upon an estate of his father's, in the midst of the beautiful country lying northward of the Monte Gennaro, (the Lucretilis of Horace,) he learned the art of good farming.

In what this art consisted in his day, he tells us in short, crackling speech;—"Primum, bene arare; secundum, arare; tertium, stercorare." For the rest, he says, choose good seed, sow thickly, and pull all the weeds. Nothing more would be needed to grow as good a crop upon the checkered plateau under my window as ever fattened among the Sabine Hills.

Has the art come to a stand-still, then; and shall we take to reading
Cato on fair days, as well as rainy?

There has been advance, without doubt; but all the advance in the world would not take away the edge from truths, stated as Cato knew how to state them. There is very much of what is called Agricultural Science, nowadays, which is—rubbish. Science is sound, and agriculture always an honest art; but the mixture, not uncommonly, is bad,—no fair marriage, but a monstrous concubinage, with a monstrous progeny of muddy treatises and disquisitions which confuse more than they instruct. In contrast with such, it is no wonder that the observations of such a man as Cato, whose energies had been kept alive by service in the field, and whose tongue had been educated in the Roman Senate, should carry weight with them. The grand truths on which successful agriculture rests, and which simple experience long ago demonstrated, cannot be kept out of view, nor can they be dwarfed by any imposition of learning. Science may explain them, or illustrate or extend; but it cannot shake their preponderating influence upon the crop of the year. As respects many other arts, the initial truths may be lost sight of, and overlaid by the mass of succeeding developments,—not falsified, but so belittled as practically to be counted for nothing. In this respect, agriculture is exceptional. The old story is always the safe story: you must plough and plough again; and manure; and sow good seed, and enough; and pull the weeds; and as sure as the rain falls, the crop will come.

Many nice additions to this method of treatment, which my fine-farming friends will suggest, are anticipated by the old Roman, if we look far enough into his book. Thus, he knew the uses of a harrow; he knew the wisdom of ploughing in a green crop; he had steeps for his seed; he knew how to drain off the surface-water,—nay, there is very much in his account of the proper preparation of ground for olive-trees, or vine-setting, which looks like a mastery of the principles that govern the modern system of drainage.[C]

[Footnote C: XLIII. "Sulcos, si locus aquosus erit, alveatos esse oportet," etc.]

Of what particular service recent investigations in science have been to the practical farmer, and what positive and available aid, beyond what could be derived from a careful study of the Roman masters, they put into the hands of an intelligent worker, who is tilling ground simply for pecuniary advantage, I shall hope to inquire and discourse upon, some other day: when that day comes, we will fling out the banner of the nineteenth century, and give a gun to Liebig, and Johnson, and the rest.

Meantime, as a farmer who endeavors to keep posted in all the devices for pushing lands which have an awkward habit of yielding poor crops into the better habit of yielding large ones, I will not attempt to conceal the chagrin with which I find this curmudgeon of a Roman Senator, living two centuries before Christ, and northward of Monte Gennaro, who never heard of "Hovey's Root-Cutter," or of the law of primaries, laying down rules[D] of culture so clear, so apt, so full, that I, who have the advantages of two thousand years, find nothing in them to laugh at, unless it be a few oblations to the gods;[E] and this, considering that I am just now burning a little incense (Havana) to the nymph Volutia, is uncalled for.

[Footnote D: This mention, of course, excludes the Senator's formulae for unguents, aperients, cattle-nostrums, and pickled pork.]

[Footnote E: CXXXIV. Cato, De Re Rusticâ.]

And if Senator Cato were to wake up to-morrow, in the white house that stares through the rain yonder, and were to open his little musty vellum of slipshod maxims, and, in faith of it, start a rival farm in the bean line, or in vine-growing,—keeping clear of the newspapers,—I make no doubt but he would prove as thrifty a neighbor as my good friend the Deacon.

We nineteenth-century men, at work among our cabbages, clipping off the purslane and the twitch-grass, are disposed to assume a very complacent attitude, as we lean upon our hoe-handles,—as if we were doing tall things in the way of illustrating physiology and the cognate sciences. But the truth is, old Laertes, near three thousand years ago, in his slouch cap and greasy beard, was hoeing up in the same way his purslane and twitch-grass, in his bean-patch on the hills of Ithaca. The difference between us, so far as the crop and the tools go, is, after all, ignominiously small. He dreaded the weevil in his beans, and we the club-foot in our cabbages; we have the "Herald," and he had none; we have "Plantation-Bitters," and he had his jug of the Biblian wine.

M. Varro, another Roman farmer, lies between the same covers "De Re Rusticâ" with Cato, and seems to have had more literary tact, though less of blunt sagacity. Yet he challenges at once our confidence by telling us so frankly the occasion of his writing upon such a subject. Life, he says, is a bubble,—and the life of an old man a bubble about to break. He is eighty, and must pack his luggage to go out of this world. ("Annus octogesimus admonet me, ut sarcinas colligam antequam proficiscar e vitâ.") Therefore he, writes down for his wife, Fundania, the rules by which she may manage the farm.

And a very respectably old lady she must have been, to deal with the villici and the coloni, if her age bore suitable relation to that of her husband. The ripe maturity of many of the rural writers I have introduced cannot fail to strike one. Thus, Xenophon gained a strength in his Elian fields that carried him into the nineties; Cato lived to be over eighty; and now we have Varro, writing his book out by Tusculum at eighty, and surviving to counsel with Fundania ten years more. Pliny, too, (the elder,) who, if not a farmer, had his country-seats, and left very much to establish our acquaintance with the Roman rural life, was a hale, much-enduring man, of such soldierly habits and large abstemiousness as to warrant a good fourscore,—if he had not fallen under that murderous cloud of ashes from Mount Vesuvius, in the year 79.

The poets, doubtless, burnt out earlier, as they usually do. Virgil, whom I shall come to speak of presently, certainly did: he died at fifty-one. Tibullus, whose opening Idyl is as pretty a bit of gasconade about living in a cottage in the country, upon love and a few vegetables, as a maiden could wish for, did not reach the fifties; and Martial, whose "Faustine Villa," if nothing else, entitles him to rural oblation, fell short of the sixties.

Varro indulges in some sharp sneers at those who had written on the same subject before him. This was natural enough in a man of his pursuits: he had written four hundred books!

Of Columella we know scarcely more than that he lived somewhere about the time of Tiberius, that he was a man of wealth, that he travelled extensively through Gaul, Italy, and Greece, observing intelligently different methods of culture, and that he has given the fullest existing compend of ancient agriculture. In his chapter upon Gardening he warms into hexameters; but the rest is stately and euphonious prose. In his opening chapter, he does not forego such praises of the farmer's life as sound like a lawyer's address before a county-society on a fair-day. Cincinnatus and his plough come in for it; and Fabricius and Curius Dentatus; with which names, luckily, our orators cannot whet their periods, since Columella's mention of them is about all we know of their farming.

He falls into the way, moreover, of lamenting, as people obstinately continue to do, the "good old times," when men were better than "now," and when the reasonable delights of the garden and the fields engrossed them to the neglect of the circus and the theatres. But when he opens upon his subject proper, it is in grandiose, Spanish style, (he was a native of Cadiz,) with a maxim broad enough to cover all possible conditions:—"Qui studium agricolationi dederit, sciat haec sibi advocanda: prudentiam rei, facultatem impendendi voluntatem agendi." Or, as Tremellius says,—"That man will master the business, qui et colere sciet, et poterit, et volet."

This is comprehensive, if not encouraging. That "facultatem impendendi" is a tremendous bolster to farming as to anything else; it is only another shape of the "poterit," and the "poterit" only a scholarly rendering of pounds and pence. As if Tremellius had said,—That man will make his way at farming who understands the business, who has the money to apply to it, and who is willing to bleed freely.

With a kindred sagacity this shrewd Roman advises a man to slip upon his farm often, in order that his steward may keep sharply at his work; he even suggests that the landlord make a feint of coming, when he has no intention thereto, that he may gain a day's alertness from the bailiff. The book is of course a measure of the advances made in farming during the two hundred years elapsed since Cato's time; but those advances were not great. There was advance in power to systematize facts, advance in literary aptitude, but no very noticeable gain in methods of culture. Columella gives the results of wider observation, and of more persistent study; but, for aught I can see, a man could get a crop of lentils as well with Cato as with Columbia; a man would house his flocks and servants as well out of the one as the other; in short, a man would grow into the "facultatem impendendi" as swiftly under the teachings of the Senator as of the later writer of the reign of Tiberius.

It is but dull work to follow those teachings; here and there I warm into a little sympathy, as I catch sight, in his Latin dress, of our old friend Curculio; here and there I sniff a fruit that seems familiar,—as the fraga, or a morum; and here and there comes blushing into the crabbed text the sweet name of some home-flower,—a lily, a narcissus, or a rose. The chief value of the work of Columella, however, lies in its clear showing-forth of the relative importance given to different crops, under Roman culture, and to the raising of cattle, poultry, fish, etc.; as compared with crops. Knowing this, we know very much that will help us toward an estimate of the domestic life of the Romans. We learn, with surprise, how little they regarded their oxen, save as working-animals,—whether the milk-white steers of Clitumnus, or the dun Campanian cattle, whose descendants show their long-horned stateliness to this day in the Roman forum. The sheep, too, whether of Tarentum or of Canusium, were regarded as of value chiefly for their wool and milk; and it is surely amazing, that men who could appreciate the iambics of Horace and the eloquence of Cicero should have shown so little fancy for a fat saddle of mutton or for a mottled sirloin of beef.

I change from Columella to Virgil, and from Virgil back to some pleasant Idyl of Tibullus, and from Tibullus to the pretty prate of Horace about the Sabine Hills; I stroll through Pliny's villa, eying the clipped box-trees; I hear the rattle in the tennis-court; I watch the tall Roman girls—

"Grandes virgines proborum colonorum"—

marching along with their wicker-baskets filled with curds and fresh-plucked thrushes, until there comes over me a confusion of times and places.

—The sound of the battle of to-day dies; the fresh blood-stains fade; and I seem to wake upon the heights of Tusculum, in the days of Tiberius. The farm-flat below is a miniature Campagna, along which I see stretching straight to the city the shining pavement of the Via Tusculana. The spires yonder melt into mist, and in place of them I see the marble house-walls of which Augustus boasted. As yet the grander monuments of the Empire are not built; but there is a blotch of cliff which may be the Tarpeian Rock, and beside it a huge hulk of building on the Capitoline Hill, where sat the Roman Senate. A little hitherward are the gay turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of the princely houses on the Palatine Hill, and in the foreground the stately tomb of Cecilia Metella. I see the barriers of a hippodrome, (where now howling jockeys make the twilight hideous); a gestatio, with its lines of cherry-trees, is before me, and the velvety lavender-green of olive-orchards covers the hills behind. Vines grow upon the slope eastward,—

"Neve tibi ad solem vergant vineta cadentem,"—

twining around, and flinging off a great wealth of tendrils from their supporting-poles (pedamenta). The figs begin to show the purple bloom of fruitage, and the villicus, who has just now come in from the atriolum, reports a good crop, and asks if it would not be well to apply a few loads of marl (tofacea) to the summer fallow, which Cato is just now breaking up with the Campanian steers, for barley.

Scipio, a stanch Numidian, has gone to market with three asses loaded with cabbages and asparagus. Villicus tells me that the poultry in the fattening-coops (as close-shut as the Strasburg geese)[F] are doing well, and he has added a soupçon of sweetening to their barley-gruel. The young doves have their legs faithfully broken, ("obteras crura") and are placidly fattening on their stumps. The thrush-house is properly darkened, only enough light entering to show the food to some three or four thousand birds, which are in course of cramming for the market. The cochlearium has a good stock of snails and mussels; and the little dormice are growing into fine condition for an approaching Imperial banquet.

[Footnote F: "Locus ad hanc rem desideratur maxime calidus, et minimi luminis, in quo singulae caveis angustioribus vel sportis inclusae pendeant aves, sed ita coarctatae, ne versari posslnt."—Columella, Lib. VIII. cap. vii.]

Villicus reports the clip of the Tarentine sheep unusually fine, and free from burrs. The new must is all a-foam in the vinaria; and around the inner cellar (gaudendem est!) there is a tier of urns, as large as school-boys, brimming with ripe Falernian.

If it were not stormy, I might order out the farm-chariot, or curriculum, which is, after all, but a low, dumpy kind of horse-cart, and take a drive over the lava pavement of the Via Tusculana, to learn what news is astir, and what the citizens talk of in the forum. Is all quiet upon the Rhine? How is it possibly with Germanicus? And what of that story of the arrest of Seneca? It could hardly have happened, they say, in the good old days of the Republic.

And with this mention, as with the sound of a gun, the Roman pastoral dream is broken. The Campagna, the olive-orchards, the columbarium, fall back to their old places in the blurred type of Columella. The Campanian steers are unyoked, and stabled in the text of Varro. The turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of the palaces of Sylla and the Caesars, give place to the spires of a New-England town,—southward of which I see through the mist a solitary flag flying over a soldiers' hospital. It reminds of nearer and deadlier perils than ever environed the Roman Republic,—perils out of which if the wisdom and courage of the people do not find a way, some new Caesar will point it with the sword.

Looking northward, I see there is a bight of blue in the sky; and a lee set of dark-gray and purple clouds is folding down over the eastern horizon,—against which the spires and the flag show clearer than ever. It means that the rain has stopped; and the rain having stopped, my in-door work is done.

* * * * *

GOLDEN WEDDING.

The reader whose eye is arrested by my title will doubtless anticipate a romance on that ever-old, ever-new theme of a certain god with a torch leading two souls bound together by iron concealed in flower-wreaths, until, alas! life seems ordinary enough to be symbolized by tin,—of the tin-wedding entering into the refiner's fire, and, by sure transmutation, rising from the baser metal to the paler, but purer silver,—of the subtile alchemy of years, which, in human life's great crucible,

  "Transmute, so potent are the spells they know
  Into pure gold the silver of to-day."

Perhaps, reader, you are not altogether to be disappointed; and yet, for the present, it is only a glass of sparkling wine I wish you to take with me. You will please read on that delicate strip of paper around the bottle's neck the name in gilt,—"Golden Wedding." At once you grow transcendental, and suppose that some German vine-dresser in Catawba-land—by the way, Gerritt Smith's gardener is a nephew of Schiller!—was dreaming of the marriage of the Sun with the Vine, his darling plant, in whose juice linger and sparkle the light and joy of many faded days. But no, it was named from a real Golden Wedding.

Let me take you—as the clairvoyants say—to a large, sooty, toiling city in the West. From street to street you shall go, and see but little to excite your admiration, unless you are a constant believer that work is worship. But here, in the centre of the city, is a noble old mansion with its beautiful park around it, which a traveller who saw it once compared to a pearl on the breast of a blacksmith. Here it was that the Golden Wedding took place.

Who that was there can ever forget it? In my own memory that throng of the worthy, the beautiful, the gay of a great city will stand as the one fulfilment which Fate has given me of many Oriental promissory dreams, most of which she has failed to honor. In that great company you might have traced all the circles of that city's growth, as you may trace a tree's history in its rings. That lady there was the first white baby born here, where now over two hundred thousand human beings reside. Here are the pioneers who filled the first log-huts on the city's site, until they overflowed through the roofs. And here is an inner circle of children, and an outer one of grandchildren, about the two who are the heart of this beautiful celebration. Can that lovely, erect, blooming lady be a bride of fifty years? Looking at her, one would say it is a great and unnecessary mistake of ours to grow old. But more closely must we look at that quaint old man by her side. Lately he has passed away; but every day of his long life left a trace worthy to be noted well. His eighty years and twenty-five days of life comprise an epitome of the history and growth of a great community. Not so would you at first interpret that plain old man; though, to a knowing eye, that eye, clear with looking at the duty that lies nearest, that mouth, telling of patient, unimpulsive energy, that broadness about the brow, would be guaranties of a marked life.

And now for my story, which you must let me tell in a rambling way; for any systematic biography of that man would be like putting one of his own Catawba-vines into your herbarium.

I introduce you to a fair-haired, handsome youth, on the deck of a small steamboat, which is bearing him to his fortune in the great West. He is penniless. His father was wealthy; but in the war he was a Tory, and, in the confiscation of his property, his sin was visited upon his son. But he was not the boy to repine, with youth and the great West before him. And now as from the steamer's deck he sees a fine landscape with a few log-houses on it, he believes that it is one day to be a great city, and concludes to stop there. So he is put ashore with his trunk.

He has already determined to study law. He goes to the one judge who resides there, and is taken as a student into his office. More log-houses are built; a court-house is erected; and presently that institution at sight of which the shipwrecked Englishman fell on his knees and thanked God he was in a Christian land—the gallows—made its appearance. So the young man had a fair practice.

The records of the West, if they are ever written, will testify how often whimsical Fortune thrusts her favors on men against their will. This very judge with whom our youth studied law became environed with pecuniary difficulties, and wished once to satisfy a claim of a few hundred dollars by deeding away a sheep-pasture of a few acres, which was of no sort of use to him. But when he went to get his wife's signature to the conveyance, she burst into tears; she knew, she said, that the pasture was worthless; but she had in her childhood heard there the tinkling of the bells of her father's sheep; it was very foolish, she knew, but now that they had all passed away, the bells over in the pasture tinkled on in her memory, and she hated to give it up. The kind husband would not insist, but went sadly to his work. It was not long before the sheep-pasture was worth a million dollars! Sentiment, you see, is not always an unproductive article.

But this case was scarcely so curious as that which presently thrust a goodly capital on the hands of our young law-student. His first case in the court was that of a horse-thief, whom he induced a jury to acquit. When he came to his client for a fee, the scapegrace whispered that he had nothing on earth wherewith to pay the fee except two old whiskey-stills and—a horse. When he heard this last word, the lawyer's conscience gave him a twinge. After a moment's reflection, he said,—"You will need the horse; and you had best make him take you as far as possible from this region of country. I must be satisfied with the whiskey-stills." It was not for a long time that he thought even to inquire about the stills. When he did so, he found them in possession of a man who implored him not to take them away, and promised to pay something for them. Finding that he could not do this, he begged our hero to accept as payment for them a few acres of barren land, which, with great reluctance, he agreed to do. Erelong the tide of emigration set westward, and this land is to-day worth two million dollars!

But his subsequent life showed that the man's fortune was not luck; for by economy, not by hoarding,—by foresight, and a generous trust to all laborers who wished to lease lands, his wealth grew to nearly fifteen million dollars.

When he found that he had enough to live comfortably upon, he retired from the bar, and devoted himself to horticulture. He found that the region in which he lived was adapted to the growth of the vine, and began his experiments, which, during his life, extended to the culture of more than forty varieties. He laid before the community, from time to time, a report of his successes, he called on all to come and taste the wines he made, until the tidings went over the earth, and from Germany, France, Italy, came vine-dressers and wine-makers, who covered every hill-side for miles around him with vintages.

Those who came from afar to inquire into this new branch of industry, for which he had opened the way, were surprised to meet the millionnaire, the Catawba-Prince, in his plain garb and with his humble habits.

How many stories I could tell you of this unintentional, odd homeliness of manner and life, from which he never departed, and which those around him found it impossible to depart from, even in respect to the style of the coffin in which he was laid, and the procession which followed him to the beautiful cemetery! His dress was always that of a man of the humblest fortunes; and Dame Gossip says that he was so fond of his old coat, that, when a change became absolutely necessary, his daughters were obliged to prepare the new one, and substitute it for the old whilst he was asleep, so that in the morning he should put it on unconsciously, or, if he discovered the change; must wear the new or none. The same dame has it that a youth, who afterward became his son-in-law, having caught sight somewhere of one of the old man's daughters, desired to know her, and that, in the park, which was open to all, he met the old gentleman, whom he supposed to be the gardener, and offered him a bribe, if he would bring the lady out among the roses. The old man accepted the bribe, and returned with the lady, whom, with a sly twinkle of the eye, he introduced as "my daughter" to the blushing youth. And again it is told, that once, on a very warm day, the old man, having to wait for a friend, sat down on a stone just outside of his own gate, took off his hat, and, closing his eyes, dozed a little. When he got up, he found a silver quarter in his hat. Whether it was put there by some one who really thought he was an object of charity, or by a wag, the old man appreciated the joke, and, with a smile, put it into the pocket out of which had to come forty thousand dollars for annual taxes. These stories may or may not be true; but in some sense such stories have a certain truth, whether invented or not. They can live and circulate only in a community where they are characteristic of the person of whom they are told. Generous men are not pursued by stories of parsimony; mean men never hear even untrue stories of their generosity.

And this last remark leads me to speak of the relation in which the wealthiest man of the West stood to the throngs of the poor and the suffering who surrounded him.

If, in the city, you had gone to the President of the Boorioboola-Gha Sewing-Circle, or to the Tract-Society Rooms, or to the clergy, and inquired whether the city's richest man was charitable, you would have received an ominous shrug in reply. Vainly have they gone to him for any such charities. Vainly did they go to him for some "poor, but worthy and Christian woman."

"I will give nothing," he replied; "there are enough who will give to her; what I have to give shall go to the unworthy poor, whom none will help,—the Devil's poor, Sir,—those whom Christians leave to the Devil."

Many a minister has been sorely puzzled by the receipt of a fifty-dollar bill "for the relief of the depraved." His office was constantly thronged with outcasts, who were generally relieved by small sums. In his relations with these people, his simplicity and eccentricity were noted by all who knew him. Among many stories which I know to be true, I select the following.

Some six or eight years ago the winter was very cold; the river was frozen, and all the "wharf-rats" were thrown out of work. A near relative of the old gentleman came to the city, and passed the night at his house. After tea he sauntered to the office to take a quiet cigar. To his surprise, he found it filled with a crowd—more than fifty—of brawny, beastly-looking men. The presence of the childlike old man, his face beaming with shrewdness and kindly humor, seemed alone to keep them from being a mob. His manner to them said,—"You poor wretches, I know how reckless you are; yet I am not sure but I should be as bad, had I been exposed to the same bad influences." These houseless vagrants had been coming every night, while the river was frozen, to get a dime for a night's lodging.

The young man had been forced by the unpleasantness of the crowd to go and enjoy his cigar outside. As he sat there, the ugly crowd filed out quietly, each with his dime, (the clerk distributing,) till the last man. He seemed to feel very ill-used, and was scarcely clear of the door-way before he gave vent to his indignation:—"I'll be d——d, if I don't let Old —— know that I won't be put off with a five-cent piece and a three-cent piece! Let me ketch him out, and I'll mash his," etc., etc.

Glowing with righteous indignation, and glad of the opportunity, the young relative rushed in and exclaimed,—

"Mr. ——! I have had many occasions to remonstrate with you on your indiscriminate charities, your encouragement of beggary and vice. The wretch who went out last is breathing threats of personal violence against you, because he has been put off with a five-cent piece and a three-cent piece!"

How was the indignant remonstrant mortified, when the old man simply turned his head to the clerk and said,—

"Mark, why did you not give that man his dime?"

"I had given out all the dimes, Sir, and I gave him all I had left."

"See that he gets his extra two cents the next time he comes. I have no doubt I should have been mad, if I had been in his place."

A forlorn-looking man once came and asked for help.

"I am afraid to give you money. I think I know how you will spend it."

Of course the man protested that strong drink was an abomination unto him,—that what his nature most craved was "pure, fresh milk."

The old man, with a look in which it would be hard to say whether shrewdness or credulity predominated, at once hastened to the milk-cellar and returned with a glass of milk; the fellow swallowed the dose with an eager reluctance quite comical to behold, but which excited no movement in the muscles of the old gentleman's face.

On a raw, wet winter's day, a loafer applied for a pair of shoes. He had on an old, shambling pair, out at both toes. The old Wine-Prince was sitting with a pair of slippers on, and had his own shoes warming at the fire.

"Well," said he to the applicant, "you do look rather badly off, for such a cold, wet day; here, see if these shoes will fit you," handing his own.

The fellow tried them on and pronounced them a complete fit, and went on his way rejoicing. The clerk was amused, half an hour after, to see the old gentleman searching for his shoes and wondering what had become of them. He was reminded that he had given them to the beggar. On further inquiry, he found that he had no other pair in the house.

The following significant story was told me by the son of the old man. I present it in nearly his own words.

"Adjoining me in the country lives an old German who nearly seventy years ago was sold in New York for his passage. A confectioner of Baltimore bought him for seven years' service, and he went with his master to fulfil his obligation. When his time was out, he turned his face towards the setting sun, and started to seek his fortune. On arriving in Pittsburg, having no money, he engaged to 'work his way' down the river on a flat-boat. He stopped at the little village, as our city then was, and opened a shop. He was skilful, and succeeded. He came to my father, and bought, on ten years' credit, a place in the country, where, in course of time, he built a house, and, with my father's assistance, planted a vineyard. He then gave up all other business but that of the vine-dresser.

"One day, in the autumn, a few years ago, I overtook the old man on horseback, on his way to town. After wishing me a cheery good-morning, he said,—

"'I am on my way to town, to sell your father my wine.'

"'He will be glad to get it; he is buying wine, and yours is made so carefully that he will be glad to have it.'

"'I mean to sell it to him for fifty cents a gallon.'

"'Oh,' said I, 'don't offer it at that. I know he is paying double that sum.'

"'Nevertheless, I mean to sell it to him for half a dollar.'

"I looked inquiringly.

"'Well, Sir, I was but a boy when I left Germany; but I was old enough to remember that a man, after a hard day's work, could go to a wine-house, and for two cents could get a tumblerful. It did him good, and he went home to his family fresher and brighter for his wine. He was never drunk, and never wasted his earnings to appease a diseased appetite. I want to see that state of things brought about here. Our poor people drink whiskey. I want them to have cheap wine in its place. Fifty cents a gallon will pay me well this year for my capital and labor, and next year I think I can sell it for forty cents.'

"'But, my friend, see how this will work. You will sell your wine to Mr. —— for fifty cents; and he will send it to his wine-cellar, and they will bottle it and sell it for all they can get.'

"'That's their lookout,' said the Teuton; 'I shall have done my duty.'

"It was rather hard to get an advantage of my father, but I thought now I had him. On reaching the city, I sought him out, and told the story with all its circumstances.

"'Now, Sir, in presence of the example of this old German,—sold in New York for his passage, faithfully fulfilling the years of his servitude, working his way to a small competency by savings and industry,—will you dare to let the world hear of you, a rich man, making a profit on wine?'

"The old man's eye dropped an instant, then he said,—

"'My son, Heaven knows I do not wish to make money out of wine. I have given much time and much money for the last fifty years to make this doubtful experiment successful. I have paid high prices for wine, and used all other means in my power to make it remunerative,—to induce others to plant vineyards. If I should now take your suggestion and bring wine down to a low price, I should ruin the enterprise. But let the extended cultivation of the grape be once firmly established, and then competition will bring it low enough.'

"'Well,' said I, 'that may be good worldly wisdom; but I like the spirit of the old Dutchman better, after all.'

"'There I agree with you; for once, you are right.'"

A most careful accountant has shown that his contributions to grape-culture amounted to one-fourth of his whole fortune: a clear loss to him, but not to the public.

Though the lips of Christendom repeat, Sunday after Sunday, the warning that the left hand should not know what the right hand doeth, yet it is very apt to judge of a man's liberality by the paragraphs concerning him in the newspapers. The old gentleman once gave his city several acres of land for an observatory which was to be erected; and there is no doubt that he had reason to conclude, as have others, that it was the worst, as it was the most public, charity of his life. That his private charities were numerous and without self-crediting, the present writer happens to know. Once, after going through the great wine-cellar where millions were coined, I went through the barracks in the upper portion of the same building, where a wretched tenantry of the Devil's poor lived in squalor. Each of these families was required to pay room-rent to the millionnaire. As I passed along, I found one man and woman in wrathful distress. They must pay their rent, or be turned out of their rooms. The rent was two or three dollars. I said,—

"The old gentleman will not turn you out."

"You do not know him; he will be sure to, if we do not pay him every cent."

I determined to search him out and represent the case. I could not find him; but before I concluded my search, I found that the poor people had been compelled to sell a table and some chairs to pay the rent. The next day I saw them again, and found them heartily abusing the old man as "a stingy brute," who would "sell the chairs from under them." Yet I observed that they had a new table and three new chairs. When I asked them how they came by them, they said they had been sent by an unknown hand, which they supposed to be mine. A thought struck me, and after some trouble I ferreted out the fact, that, although the rich old man had, for reasons connected with the good order of the barracks, always exacted every cent of the rent from each tenant, whatever the consequences, he had many times, as in this case, secretly returned more than it had cost them to pay it. They were left to believe him a hard man, and often attributed his benefits to societies and persons whose charity would have been stifled by the whiskey-stench of their rooms.

Thus, then, went on his life, until the day when the Golden Wedding was to be celebrated. That year, the sons, with the vine-dressers, the bottlers, corkers, and all, gathered together and said,—

"Come, now! let us this year make a wine that shall be like the nectar for a true man's soul!"

So, with one accord, they gathered the richest grapes, and selected from them; then they made the wine-press clean and sweet, and cast the grapes therein. One great hiss,—a spurt of gold flushed with rubies,—and all that is acrid is left, all that is rich and sweet is borne away, to be labelled "GOLDEN WEDDING."

And now, as I taste it, it seems to me flavored beyond all earthly wine, as if it were the expression of an humble and faithful man, who had a legitimate object, which he obtained by steadfastness. The wine-makers maintain, that wine, though long confined in bottles, sympathizes still with the vines from which it was pressed; and when the season of the flowering of vines comes, it is always agitated anew. Surely the Catawba must ever sparkle afresh, when in it, as now, we pledge the memory of the brave and wise pioneer whose life climbed to its maturity along with the purple clusters which so had garnered the frost and sunshine of a life as well as of the seasons.

THE SILURIAN BEACH.

With what interest do we look upon any relic of early human history! The monument that tells of a civilization whose hieroglyphic records we cannot even decipher, the slightest trace of a nation that vanished and left no sign of its life except the rough tools and utensils buried in the old site of its towns or villages, arouses our imagination and excites our curiosity. Men gaze with awe at the inscription on an ancient Egyptian or Assyrian stone; they hold with reverential touch the yellow parchment-roll whose dim, defaced characters record the meagre learning of a buried nationality; and the announcement, that for centuries the tropical forests of Central America have hidden within their tangled growth the ruined homes and temples of a past race, stirs the civilized world with a strange, deep wonder.

To me it seems that to look on the first land that was ever lifted above the waste of waters, to follow the shore where the earliest animals and plants were created when the thought of God first expressed itself in organic forms, to hold in one's hand a bit of stone from an old sea-beach, hardened into rock thousands of centuries ago, and studded with the beings that once crept upon its surface or were stranded there by some retreating wave, is even of deeper interest to men than the relics of their own race, for these things tell more directly of the thoughts and creative acts of God.

Standing in the neighborhood of Whitehall, near Lake George, one may look along such a sea-shore, and see it stretching westward and sloping gently southward as far as the eye can reach. It must have had a very gradual slope, and the waters must have been very shallow; for at that time no great mountains had been uplifted, and deep oceans are always the concomitants of lofty heights. We do not, however, judge of this by inference merely; we have an evidence of the shallowness of the sea in those days in the character of the shells found in the Silurian deposits, which shows that they belonged in shoal waters.

Indeed, the fossil remains of all times tell us almost as much of the physical condition of the world at different epochs as they do of its animal and vegetable population. When Robinson Crusoe first caught sight of the footprint on the sand, he saw in it more than the mere footprint, for it spoke to him of the presence of men on his desert island. We walk on the old geological shores, like Crusoe along his beach, and the footprints we find there tell us, too, more than we actually see in them. The crust of our earth is a great cemetery where the rocks are tombstones on which the buried dead have written their own epitaphs. They tell us not only who they were and when and where they lived, but much also of the circumstances under which they lived. We ascertain the prevalence of certain physical conditions at special epochs by the presence of animals and plants whose existence and maintenance required such a state of things, more than by any positive knowledge respecting it. Where we find the remains of quadrupeds corresponding to our ruminating animals, we infer not only land, but grassy meadows also, and an extensive vegetation; where we find none but marine animals, we know the ocean must have covered the earth; the remains of large reptiles, representing, though in gigantic size, the half aquatic, half terrestrial reptiles of our own period, indicate to us the existence of spreading marshes still soaked by the retreating waters; while the traces of such animals as live now in sand and shoal waters, or in mud, speak to us of shelving sandy beaches and of mud-flats. The eye of the Trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the old beach where he lived; for there is nothing in Nature without a purpose, and when so complicated an organ was made to receive the light, there must have been light to enter it. The immense vegetable deposits in the Carboniferous period announce the introduction of an extensive terrestrial vegetation; and the impressions left by the wood and leaves of the trees show that these first forests must have grown in a damp soil and a moist atmosphere. In short, all the remains of animals and plants hidden in the rocks have something to tell of the climatic conditions and the general circumstances under which they lived, and the study of fossils is to the naturalist a thermometer by which he reads the variations of temperature in past times, a plummet by which he sounds the depths of the ancient oceans,—a register, in fact, of all the important physical changes the earth has undergone.

But although the animals of the early geological deposits indicate shallow seas by their similarity to our shoal-water animals, it must not be supposed that they are by any means the same. On the contrary, the old shells, crustacea, corals, etc., represent types which have existed in all times with the same essential structural elements, but under different specific forms in the several geological periods. And here it may not be amiss to say something of what are called by naturalists representative types.

The statement that different sets of animals and plants have characterized the successive epochs is often understood as indicating a difference of another kind than that which distinguishes animals now living in different parts of the world. This is a mistake. There are so-called representative types all over the globe, united to each other by structural relations and separated by specific differences of the same kind as those that unite and separate animals of different geological periods. Take, for instance, mud-flats or sandy shores in the same latitudes of Europe and America; we find living on each animals of the same structural character and of the same general appearance, but with certain specific differences, as of color, size, external appendages, etc. They represent each other on the two continents. The American wolves, foxes, bears, rabbits, are not the same as the European, but those of one continent are as true to their respective types as those of the other; under a somewhat different aspect they represent the same groups of animals. In certain latitudes, or under conditions of nearer proximity, these differences may be less marked. It is well known that there is a great monotony of type, not only among animals and plants, but in the human races also, throughout the Arctic regions; and the animals characteristic of the high North reappear under such identical forms in the neighborhood of the snow-fields in lofty mountains, that to trace the difference between the ptarmigans, rabbits, and other gnawing animals of the Alps, for instance, and those of the Arctics, is among the most difficult problems of modern science.

And so is it also with the animated world of past ages; in similar deposits of sand, mud, or lime, in adjoining regions of the same geological age, identical remains of animals and plants may be found, while at greater distances, but under similar circumstances, representative species may occur. In very remote regions, however, whether the circumstances be similar or dissimilar, the general aspect of the organic world differs greatly, remoteness in space being thus in some measure an indication of the degree of affinity between different faunae. In deposits of different geological periods immediately following each other we sometimes find remains of animals and plants so closely allied to those of earlier or later periods that at first sight the specific differences are hardly discernible. The difficulty of solving these questions, and of appreciating correctly the differences and similarities between such closely allied organisms, explains the antagonistic views of many naturalists respecting the range of existence of animals, during longer or shorter geological periods; and the superficial way in which discussions concerning the transition of species are carried on is mainly owing to an ignorance of the conditions above alluded to. My own personal observation and experience in these matters have led me to the conviction that every geological period has had its own representatives, and that no single species has been repeated in successive ages.

The laws regulating the geographical distribution of animals and their combination into distinct or zoological provinces called faunae with definite limits are very imperfectly understood as yet; but so closely are all things linked together from the beginning till to-day that I am convinced we shall never find the clue to their meaning till we carry on our investigations in the past and the present simultaneously. The same principle according to which animal and vegetable life is distributed over the surface of the earth now prevailed in the earliest geological periods. The geological deposits of all times have had their characteristic faunae under various zones, their zoological provinces presenting special combinations of animal and vegetable life over certain regions, and their representative types reproducing in different countries, but under similar latitudes, the same groups with specific differences.

Of course, the nearer we approach the beginning of organic life, the less marked do we find the differences to be, and for a very obvious reason. The inequalities of the earth's surface, her mountain-barriers protecting whole continents from the Arctic winds, her open plains exposing others to the full force of the polar blasts, her snug valleys and her lofty heights, her table-lands and rolling prairies, her river-systems and her dry deserts, her cold ocean-currents pouring down from the high North on some of her shores, while warm ones from tropical seas carry their softer influence to others,—in short, all the contrasts in the external configuration of the globe, with the physical conditions attendant upon them, are naturally accompanied by a corresponding variety in animal and vegetable life.

But in the Silurian age, when there were no elevations higher than the Canadian hills, when water covered the face of the earth with the exception of a few isolated portions lifted above the almost universal ocean, how monotonous must have been the conditions of life! And what should we expect to find on those first shores? If we are walking on a sea-beach to-day, we do not look for animals that haunt the forests or roam over the open plains, or for those that live in sheltered valleys or in inland regions or on mountain-heights. We look for Shells, for Mussels and Barnacles, for Crabs, for Shrimps, for Marine Worms, for Star-Fishes and Sea-Urchins, and we may find here and there a fish stranded on the sand or tangled in the sea-weed. Let us remember, then, that, in the Silurian period, the world, so far as it was raised above the ocean, was a beach, and let us seek there for such creatures as God has made to live on sea-shores, and not belittle the Creative work, or say that He first scattered the seeds of life in meagre or stinted measure, because we do not find air-breathing animals when there was no fitting atmosphere to feed their lungs, insects with no terrestrial plants to live upon, reptiles without marshes, birds without trees, cattle without grass, all things, in short, without the essential conditions for their existence.

What we do find—and these, as I shall endeavor to show my readers, in such profusion that it would seem as if God, in the joy of creation, had compensated Himself for a less variety of forms in the greater richness of the early types—is an immense number of beings belonging to the four primary divisions of the Animal Kingdom, but only to those classes whose representatives are marine, whose home then, as now, was either in the sea or along its shores. In other words, the first organic creation expressed in its totality the structural conception since carried out in such wonderful variety of details, and purposely limited then, because the world, which was to be the home of the higher animals, was not yet made ready to receive them.

I am fully aware that the intimate relations between the organic and physical world are interpreted by many as indicating the absence, rather than the presence, of an intelligent Creator. They argue, that the dependence of animals on material laws gives us the clue to their origin as well as to their maintenance. Were this influence as absolute and unvarying as the purely mechanical action of physical circumstances must necessarily be, this inference might have some pretence to logical probability,—though it seems to me unnecessary, under any circumstances, to resort to climatic influences or the action of any physical laws to explain the thoughtful distribution of the organic and inorganic world, so evidently intended to secure for all beings what best suits their nature and their needs. But the truth is, that, while these harmonious relations underlie the whole creation in such a manner as to indicate a great central plan, of which all things are a part, there is at the same time a freedom, an arbitrary element in the mode of carrying it out, which seems to point to the exercise of an individual will; for, side by side with facts, apparently the direct result of physical laws, are other facts, the nature of which shows a complete independence of external influences.

Take, for instance, the similarity above alluded to between the fauna of the Arctics and that of the Alps, certainly showing a direct relation between climatic conditions and animal and vegetable life. Yet even there, where the shades of specific difference between many animals and plants of the same class are so slight as to battle the keenest investigators, we have representative types both in the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms as distinct and peculiar as those of widely removed and strongly contrasted climatic conditions. Shall we attribute the similarities and the differences alike to physical causes? Compare, for example, the Reindeer of the Arctics with the Ibex and the Chamois, representing the same group in the Alps. Even on mountain-heights of similar altitudes, where not only climate, but other physical conditions would suggest a recurrence of identical animals, we do not find the same, but representative types. The Ibex of the Alps differs, for instance, from that of the Pyrenees, that of the Pyrenees from those of the Caucasus and Himalayas, these again from each other and from that of the Altai.

But perhaps the most conclusive proof that we must seek for the origin of organic life outside of physical causes consists in the permanence of the fundamental types, while the species representing these types have differed in every geological period. Now what we call typical features of structure are in themselves no more stable or permanent than specific features. If physical causes, such as light, heat, moisture, food, habits of life, etc., acting upon individuals, have gradually in successive generations changed the character of the species to which they belong, why not that of the class and the branch also? If we judge this question from the material side at all, we must, in order to judge it fairly, look at it wholly from that point of view. If these specific changes are brought about in this way, it is because external causes have positive permanent effects upon the substances of which animals are built: they have power to change their hair, to change their skin, to change certain external appendages or ornamentations, and any other of those ultimate features which naturalists call specific characters. Now I would ask what there is in the substances out of which class characters are built that would make them less susceptible to such external influences than these specific characters. In many instances the former are more delicate, more sensitive, far more fragile and transient in their material nature than the latter. And yet never, in all the chances and changes of time, have we seen any alteration in the mode of respiration, of reproduction, of circulation, or in any of the systems of organs which characterize the more comprehensive groups of the Animal Kingdom, although they are quite as much under the immediate influence of physical causes as those structural features which have been constantly changing.

The woody fibre of the Pine-trees has had the same structure from the Carboniferous age to this day, while their mode of branching and the forms of their cones and leaves have been different in each period according to their respective species. The combination of rings, the structure of the wings, and the articulations of the legs are the same in the Cockroaches of the Carboniferous age as in those which infest our ships and our dwellings to-day, while the proportion of their parts is on quite another scale. The tissue of the Corals in the Silurian age is identical in chemical combination and organic structure with that of the Corals of our modern reefs, and yet the extensive researches upon this class for which we are indebted to Milne Edwards and Haime have not revealed a single species extending through successive geological ages, but show us, on the contrary, that every age has had its own kinds, differing among themselves in the same way as those of the Gulf of Mexico differ now from those of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. The scales of the oldest known fishes in the Silurian beds have the same microscopic structure as those of their representative types today, and yet I have never seen a single fossil fish presenting the same specific characters in the successive geological epochs. The teeth of the oldest Sharks show the same microscopic structure as those of the present time, and we do not lack opportunities for comparison, since the former are as common in the mountain-limestone of Ireland as are those of the living Sharks on any beach where our fishermen boil them for the sake of their oil, and yet the Sharks appear under different generic and specific forms in each geological age.

But without multiplying examples, which might be adduced ad infinitum, to show permanence of type combined with repeated changes of species, suffice it to say, that, while the general features in the framework of the organic world and the materials of which that framework is built, though quite as subject to the influence of physical external circumstances as any so-called specific-features, have remained perfectly intact from the beginning of Creation till now, so that not the smallest difference is to be discerned in these respects between the oldest representatives of the oldest types in the oldest Silurian rocks and their successors through all the geological ages up to the present day, the species have been different in each epoch. It is surely a fair question to ask the advocates of the transmutation theory, whether they attribute to physical laws the discernment that would lead them to change the specific features, but to respect all those characters by which the higher structural combinations of the Animal Kingdom are preserved without alteration,—in other words, to maintain the organic plan, while constantly diversifying the mode of expressing it. If so, it would perhaps be as well to call them by another name, since they show all the comprehensive wisdom of an intelligent Creator. Until they can tell us why certain features of animals and plants are permanent under conditions which, according to their view, have power to change certain other features no more perishable or transient in themselves, the supporters of the development theory will have failed to substantiate their peculiar scientific doctrine.

But this discussion has led us far away from our starting point, and interrupted our walk along the Silurian beach; let us return to gather a few specimens there, and compare them with the more familiar ones of our own shores. I have said that the beach was a shelving one, and covered of course with shoal waters; but as I have no desire to mislead my readers, or to present truths as generally accepted which are still subject to dispute, I would state here that the parallel ridges across the State of New York, considered by some geologists as the successive shores of a receding ocean, are believed by others to be the inequalities on the bottom of a shallow sea. Not only, however, does the general character of these successive terraces suggest the idea that they must have been shores, but the ripple-marks upon them are as distinct as upon any modern beach. The regular rise and fall of the water is registered there in waving, undulating lines as clearly as on the sand-beaches of Newport or Nahant; and we can see on any one of those ancient shores the track left by the waves as they rippled back at ebb of the tide thousands of centuries ago. One can often see where some obstacle interrupted the course of the water, causing it to break around it; and such an indentation even retains the soft, muddy, plastic look that we observe on the present beaches, where the resistance made by any pebble or shell to the retreating wave has given it greater force at that point, so that the sand around the spot is soaked and loosened. There is still another sign, equally familiar to those who have watched the action of water on a beach. Where a shore is very shelving and flat, so that the waves do not recede in ripples from it, but in one unbroken sheet, the sand and small pebbles are dragged and form lines which diverge whenever the water meets an obstacle, thus forming sharp angles on the sand. Such marks are as distinct on the oldest Silurian rocks as if they had been made yesterday. Nor are these the only indications of the same fact. There are certain animals living always upon sandy or muddy shores, which require for their well-being that the beach should be left dry a part of the day. These animals, moving about in the sand or mud from which the water has retreated, leave their tracks there; and if, at such a time, the wind is blowing dust over the beach, and the sun is hot enough to bake it upon the impressions so formed, they are left in a kind of mould. Such trails and furrows, made by small Shells or Crustacea, are also found in plenty on the oldest deposits.

Admitting it, then, to be a beach, let us begin with the lowest type of the Animal Kingdom, and see what Radiates are to be found there. There are plenty of Corals, but they are not the same kinds of Corals as those that build up our reefs and islands now. The modern Coral animals are chiefly Polyps, but the prevailing Corals of the Silurian age were Acalephian Hydroids, animals which indeed resemble Polyps in certain external features, and have been mistaken for them, but which are nevertheless Acalephs by their internal structure; for, instead of having the vertical partitions dividing the body into chambers, so characteristic of the Polyps, they are divided by tubes corresponding to the radiating tubes of the Acalephs proper, these tubes being themselves divided at regular distances by horizontal floors, so that they never run uninterruptedly from top to bottom of the body. I subjoin a woodcut of a Silurian Coral, which does not, however, show the peculiar internal structure, but gives some idea of the general appearance of the old Hydroid Corals. We have but one Acalephian Coral now living, the Millepore; and it was by comparing that with these ancient ones that I first detected their relation to the Acalephs. For the true Acalephs or Jelly-Fishes we shall look in vain; but the presence of the Acalephian Corals establishes the existence of the type, and we cannot expect to find those kinds preserved which are wholly destitute of hard parts. I do not attempt any description of the Polyps proper, because the early Corals of that class are comparatively few, and do not present features sufficiently characteristic to attract the notice of the casual observer.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Of the Echinoderms, the class of Radiates represented now by our Star-Fishes and Sea-Urchins, we may gather any quantity, though the old fashioned forms are very different from the living ones. I have dwelt at such length in a former article[A] on the wonderful beauty and variety of the Crinoids, or "Stone Lilies," as they have been called, from their resemblance to flowers, that I will only briefly allude to them here. The subjoined wood-cut represents one with a closed cup; but the number of their different patterns is hardly to be counted, and I would invite any one who questions the abundant expression of life in those days to look at some slabs of ancient limestone in the Zoölogical Museum at Cambridge, where the stems of the Crinoids are tangled together as thickly as sea-weed on the shore. Indeed, some of our rock-deposits consist chiefly of the fragments of their remains.

[Footnote A: See Methods of Study in Natural History, Atlantic
Monthly, No. LVII., July, 1862.]

[Illustration]

The Mollusks were also represented then, as now, by their three classes,—Acephala, Gasteropoda, and Cephalopoda. The Acephala or Bivalves we shall find in great numbers, but of a very different pattern from the Oysters, Clams, and Mussels of recent times. The annexed wood-cut represents one of these Brachiopods, which form a very characteristic type of the Silurian deposits. The square cut of the upper edge, where the two valves meet along the back and are united by a hinge, is altogether old-fashioned, and unknown among our modern Bivalves. The wood-cut does not show the inequality of the two valves, also a very characteristic feature of this group,—one valve being flat and fitting closely into the other, which is more spreading and much fuller. These, also, were represented by a great variety of species, and we find them crowded together as closely in the ancient rocks as Oysters or Clams or Mussels on any of our modern shores. Besides these, there were the Bryozoa, a small kind of Mollusk allied to the Clams, and very busy then in the ancient Coral work. They grew in communities, and the separate individuals are so minute that a Bryozoan stock looks like some delicate moss. They still have their place among the Reef-Building Corals, but play an insignificant part in comparison with that of their predecessors.

Of the Silurian Univalves or Gasteropods there is not much to tell, for their spiral shells were so brittle that scarcely any perfect specimens are known, though their broken remains are found in such quantities as to show that this class also was very fully represented in the earliest creation. But the highest class of Mollusks, the Cephalopods or Chambered Shells, or Cuttle-Fishes, as they are called when the animal is unprotected by a shell, are, on the contrary, very well preserved, and they are very numerous. Of these I will speak somewhat more in detail, because their geological history is a very curious one.

[Illustration]

The Chambered Nautilus is familiar to all, since, from the exquisite beauty of its shell, it is especially sought for by conchologists; but it is nevertheless not so common in our days as the Squids and Cuttle-Fishes, which are the most numerous modern representatives of the class. In the earliest geological days, on the contrary, those with a shell predominated, differing from the later ones, however, in having the shell perfectly straight instead of curved, though its internal structure was the same as it is now and has ever been. Then, as now, the animal shut himself out from his last year's home, building his annual wall behind him, till his whole shell was divided into successive chambers, all of which were connected by a siphon. Some of the shells of this kind belonging to the Silurian deposits are enormous: giants of the sea they must have been in those days. They have been found fifteen feet long, and as large round as a man's body. One can imagine that the Cuttle-Fish inhabiting such a shell must have been a formidable animal. These straight-chambered shells of the Silurian and Devonian seas are called Orthoceratites (see wood-cut below). We shall meet them again hereafter, under another name and with a different form; for, as they advance in the geological ages, they not only assume the curved outline with ever closer whorls till it culminates in the compact coil of the Ammonites of the middle periods, but the partitions, which are perfectly plain walls in these earlier forms, become scalloped and involuted along the edges in the later ones, making the most delicate and exquisite tracery on the surface of the shell.

Of Articulates we find only two classes, Worms and Crustacea. Insects there were none,—for, as we have seen, this early world was wholly marine. There is little to be said of the Worms, for their soft bodies, unprotected by any hard covering, could hardly be preserved; but, like the marine Worms of our own times, they were in the habit of constructing envelopes for themselves, built of sand, or sometimes from a secretion of their own bodies, and these cases we find in the earliest deposits, giving us assurance that the Worms were represented there. I should add, however, that many impressions described as produced by Worms are more likely to have been the tracks of Crustacea.

But by far the most characteristic class of Articulates in ancient times were the Crustaceans. The Trilobites stand in the same relation to the modern Crustacea as the Crinoids do to the modern Echinoderms. They were then the sole representatives of the class, and the variety and richness of the type are most extraordinary. They were of nearly equal breadth for the whole length of the body, and rounded at the two ends, so as to form an oval outline. To give any adequate idea of the number and variety of species would fill a volume, but I may enumerate some of the more striking differences: as, for instance, the greater or less prominence of the anterior shield,—the preponderance of the posterior end in some, while in others the two ends are nearly equal,—the presence or absence of prongs on the shield and of spines along the sides of the body,—appendages on the head in some species, of which others are entirely destitute,—and the smooth outline of some, while in others the surface is broken by a variety of external ornamentation. Such are a few of the more prominent differences among them. But the general structural features are the same in all. The middle region of the body is always divided in uniform rings, lobed in the middle so as to make a ridge along the back with a slight depression on either side of it. It is from this three-lobed division that they receive their name. The subjoined wood-cut represents a characteristic Silurian Trilobite.

[Illustration]

There is no group more prominent in the earliest creations than this one of the Trilobites, and so exclusively do they belong to them, that, as we shall see, in proportion as the later representatives of the class come in, these old-world Crustaceans drop out of the ranks, fall behind, as it were, in the long procession of animals, and are left in the ancient deposits. Even in the Carboniferous period but few are to be found: they had their day in the Silurian and Devonian ages. In consequence of their solid exterior, the preservation of these animals is very complete; and their attitudes are often so natural, and the condition of all their parts so perfect, that one would say they had died yesterday rather than countless centuries ago.

Their geological history has been very thoroughly studied; not only are we familiar with all their adult characters, but even their embryology is well known to naturalists. It is, indeed, wonderful that the mode of growth of animals which died out in the Carboniferous period should be better known to us than that of many living types. But it is nevertheless true that their embryonic forms have been found perfectly preserved in the rocks, and Barrande, in his "Système Silurien de la Bohème," gives us all the stages of their development, from the time when the animal is merely sketched out as a simple furrow in the embryo to its mature condition. So complete is the sequence, that the plate on which their embryonic changes are illustrated contains more than thirty figures, all representing different phases of their growth. There is not a living Crab represented so fully in any of our scientific works as is that one species of Trilobite whose whole story Barrande has traced from the egg to its adult size. Such facts should make those who rest their fanciful theories of the origin and development of life on the imperfection of the geological record, filling up the supposed lapses to suit themselves, more cautious as to their results.

We have found, then, Radiates, Mollusks, and Articulates in plenty; and now what is to be said of Vertebrates in these old times,—of the highest and most important division of the Animal Kingdom, that to which we ourselves belong? They were represented by Fishes alone; and the Fish chapter in the history of the early organic world is a curious, and, as it seems to me, a very significant one. We shall find no perfect specimens; and he would be a daring, not to say a presumptuous thinker, who would venture to reconstruct a fish of the Silurian age from any remains that are left to us. But still we find enough to indicate clearly the style of those old fishes, and to show, by comparison with the living types, to what group of modern times they belong. We should naturally expect to find the Vertebrates introduced in their simplest form; but this is by no means the case: the common fishes, as Cod, Herring, Mackerel, and the like, were unknown in those days.

But there are two groups of so-called fishes, differing from these by some marked features, among which we may find the modern representatives of these earliest Vertebrates. Of these two groups one consists chiefly now of the Gar-Pikes of our Western waters, though the Sturgeons share also in some of their features. In these fishes there is a singular union of reptilian with fish-like characters. The systems of circulation and of respiration in them are more complicated than in the common fishes; the structure of the skull resembles that of the skull in reptiles, and they have other reptilian characters, such as their ability to move the head upon the neck independently of the body, and the connection of the vertebrae by ball-and-socket joint, instead of by inverted cones, as in the ordinary fishes. Their scales are also peculiar, being covered by enamel so hard, that, if struck with steel, they will emit sparks like flint. It is on account of this peculiarity that the whole group has been called Ganoid. Now, though we have not found as yet any complete specimens of Silurian fishes, their disconnected remains are scattered profusely in the early deposits. The scales, parts of the backbone, parts of the skull, the teeth, are found in a tolerable state of preservation; and these indications, fragmentary as they are, give us the clue to the character of the most ancient fishes. A large proportion of them were no doubt Ganoids; for they had the same peculiar articulation of the vertebrae, the flexibility of the neck, and the hard scales so characteristic of our Gar-Pikes.

There is another type of these ancient Vertebrates, which has also its representatives among our modern fishes. These are the Sharks and Skates, or, as the Greeks used to call them, the Selachians,—making a very appropriate distinction between them and common fishes, on account of the difference in the structure of the skeleton. In Selachians the quality of the bones is granular, instead of fibrous, as in fishes; the arches above and below the backbone are formed by flat plates, instead of the spines so characteristic of all the fish proper; and the skull consists of a solid box, instead of being built of overlapping pieces like the true fish-skull. They differ also in their teeth, which, instead of being implanted in the bone by a root, as in fishes, are loosely set in the gum without any connection with the bone, and are movable, being arranged in several rows one behind another, the back rows moving forward to take the place of the front ones when the latter are worn off. They are unlike the common fishes also in having the backbone continued to the very end of the tail, which is cut in uneven lobes, the upper lobe being the longer of the two, while the terminal fin, so constant a feature in fishes, is wanting. The Selachians resemble higher Vertebrate types not only in the small number of their eggs, and in the closer connection of the young with the mother, but also in their embryological development, which has many features in common with that of birds and turtles. Of this group, also, we find numerous remains in the ancient geological deposits; and though we have not the means of distinguishing the species, we have ample evidence for determining the type.

This combination of higher with lower features in the earlier organic forms is very striking, and becomes still more significant when we find that many of the later types recall the more ancient ones. I have called these more comprehensive groups of former times, combining characters of different classes, synthetic or prophetic types; and we might as fitly give the name of retrospective types to many of the later groups, for they recall the past, as the former anticipate the future. And it is not only among the Fishes and the Reptiles that we find these combinations. The most numerous of the ancient Radiates are the Acalephlan Corals, combining, in the Hydroid form, the Polyp-like mode of life, habits, and general appearance with the structure of Acalephs. The Crinoids, with the closed cups in some, and the open, star-like crowns in others, unite features of the present Star-Fishes and Sea-Urchins, and, by their stem attaching them to the ground, include also a Polyp-like character; while the Trilobites, with their uniform rings and their prominent anterior shield, unite characters of Worms and Crustacea.

These early types seem to sketch in broad, general characters the Creative purpose, and to include in the first average expression of the plan all its structural possibilities. The Crinoid forms include the thought of the modern Star-Fishes and Sea-Urchins; the simple chambered shells of the Silurian anticipate the more complicated structure of the later ones; the Trilobites give the most comprehensive expression of the Articulate type; while the early Fishes not only prophesy the Reptiles which are to come, but also hint at Birds and even at Mammalia by their embryonic development and their mode of reproduction.

Looked at from this point of view, the animal world is an intellectual Creation, complete in all its parts, and coherent throughout; and when we find, that, although these ancient types have become obsolete and been replaced by modern ones, yet there are always a few old-fashioned individuals, left behind, as it were, to give the key to the history of their race, as the Gar-Pike, for instance, to explain the ancient Fishes, the Millepore to explain the old Acalephian Corals, the Nautilus to be the modern exponent of the Ammonites and Orthoceratites of past times, we cannot avoid the impression that this Creative work has been intended also to be educational for Man, and to teach him his own relation to the organic world. The embryology of the modern types confirms this idea, for here we find an epitome of their geological history. The embryo of the present Star-Fishes recalls the Crinoids; the embryo of the Crab recalls the Trilobites; the embryo of the Vertebrates, including even that of the higher Mammalia, recalls the ancient Fishes. Does not this fact, that the individual animal in its growth recalls the history of its type, prove that the Creative Thought in its immediate present action embraces all that has gone before, as its first organic expression included all that was to come? The study of Nature in its highest meaning shows us the present doubly rich with all the past, and the past linked and interwoven with the present, not lying divorced and dead behind it.

I have spoken of the Silurian beach as if there were but one, not only because I wished to limit my sketch, and to attempt at least to give it the vividness of a special locality, but also because a single such shore will give us as good an idea of the characteristic fauna of the time as if we drew our material from a wider range. There are, however, a great number of parallel ridges belonging to the Silurian and Devonian periods, running from east to west, not only through the State of New York, but far beyond, through the States of Michigan and Wisconsin into Minnesota; one may follow nine or ten such successive shores in unbroken lines, from the neighborhood of Lake Champlain to the Far West. They have all the irregularities of modern sea-shores, running up to form little bays here, and jutting out in promontories there; and upon each one are found animals of the same kind, but differing in species from those of the preceding.

Although the early geological periods are more legible in North America, because they are exposed over such extensive tracts of land, yet they have been studied in many other parts of the globe. In Norway, in Germany, in France, in Russia, in Siberia, in Kamtchatka, in parts of South America, in short, wherever the civilization of the white race has extended, Silurian deposits have been observed, and everywhere they bear the same testimony to a profuse and varied creation. The earth was teeming then with life as now, and in whatever corner of its surface the geologist finds the old strata, they hold a dead fauna as numerous as that which lives and moves above it. Nor do we find that there was any gradual increase or decrease of any organic forms at the beginning and close of the successive periods. On the contrary, the opening scenes of every chapter in the world's history have been crowded with life, and its last leaves as full and varied as its first.

I think the impression that the faunae of the early geological periods were more scanty than those of later times arises partly from the fact that the present creation is made a standard of comparison for all preceding creations. Of course, the collections of living types in any museum must be more numerous than those of fossil forms, for the simple reason that almost the whole of the present surface of the earth, with the animals and plants inhabiting it, is known to us, whereas the deposits of the Silurian and Devonian periods are exposed to view only over comparatively limited tracts and in disconnected regions. But let us compare a given extent of Silurian or Devonian sea-shore with an equal extent of sea-shore belonging to our own time, and we shall soon be convinced that the one is as populous as the other. On the New-England coast there are about one hundred and fifty different kinds of fishes, in the Gulf of Mexico two hundred and fifty, in the Red Sea about the same. We may allow in present times an average of two hundred or two hundred and fifty different kinds of fishes to an extent of ocean covering about four hundred miles. Now I have made a special study of the Devonian rocks of Northern Europe, in the Baltic and along the shore of the German Ocean. I have found in those deposits alone one hundred and ten kinds of fossil fishes. To judge of the total number of species belonging to those early ages by the number known to exist now is about as reasonable as to infer that because Aristotle, familiar only with the waters of Greece, recorded less than three hundred kinds of fishes in his limited fishing-ground, therefore these were all the fishes then living. The fishing-ground of the geologist in the Silurian and Devonian periods is even more circumscribed than his, and belongs, besides, not to a living, but to a dead world, far more difficult to decipher.

But the sciences of Geology and Palaeontology are making such rapid progress, now that they go hand in hand, that our familiarity with past creations is daily increasing. We know already that extinct animals exist all over the world: heaped together under the snows of Siberia,—lying thick beneath the Indian soil,—found wherever English settlers till the ground or work the mines of Australia,—figured in the old Encyclopaedias of China, where the Chinese philosophers have drawn them with the accuracy of their nation,—built into the most beautiful temples of classic lands, for even the stones of the Parthenon are full of the fragments of these old fossils, and if any chance had directed the attention of Aristotle towards them, the science of Palaeontology would not have waited for its founder till Cuvier was born,—in short, in every corner of the earth where the investigations of civilized men have penetrated, from the Arctic to Patagonia and the Cape of Good Hope, these relics tell us of successive populations lying far behind our own, and belonging to distinct periods of the world's history.

* * * * *

In my next article I shall give some account of the marshes and forests of the Carboniferous age, with their characteristic vegetation and inhabitants.

CORALIE.

    Pale water-flowers,
  That quiver in the quick turn of the brook,
    And thou, dim nook,—
  Dimmer in twilight,—call again to me
  Visions of life and glory that were ours,
  When first she led me here, young Coralie!

    No longer blest,
  Yet standing here in silence, may not we
    Fancy or feign
  That little flowers do fall about thy rest
  In silver mist and tender-dropping rain,
  And that thy world is peace, loved Coralie?

    Our friendships flee,
  And, darkening all things with her mighty shade,
    Comes Misery.
  No longer look the faces that we see,
  With the old eyes; and Woe itself shall fade,
  Nor even this be left us, Coralie!

    Feelings and fears
  That once were ours have perished in the mould,
    And grief is cold:
  Hearts may be dead to grief; and if our tears
  Are failing or forgetful, there will be
  Mourners about thy bed, lost Coralie!

    The brook-flowers shine,
  And a faint song the falling water has,—
    But not for thee!
  The dull night weepeth, and the sorrowing pine
  Drops his dead hair upon thy young grave-grass,
    My Coralie! my Coralie!

* * * * *

    I took from its glass a flower,
  To lay on her grave with dull accusing tears;
  But the heart of the flower fell out as I handled the rose,
  And my heart is shattered, and soon will wither away.

    I watch the changing shadows,
  And the patch of windy sunshine upon the hill,
  And the long blue woods; and a grief no tongue can tell
  Breaks at my eyes in drops of bitter rain.

    I hear her baby-wagon,
  And the little wheels go over my heart;
  Oh, when will the light of the darkened house return?
  Oh, when will she come who made the hills so fair?

    I sit by the parlor-window,
  When twilight deepens, and winds get cold without;
  But the blessed feet no more come up the walk,
  And my little girl and I cry softly together.

* * * * *

SOJOURNER TRUTH, THE LIBYAN SIBYL.

Many years ago, the few readers of radical Abolitionist papers must often have seen the singular name of Sojourner Truth, announced as a frequent speaker at Anti-Slavery meetings, and as travelling on a sort of self-appointed agency through the country. I had myself often remarked the name, but never met the individual. On one occasion, when our house was filled with company, several eminent clergymen being our guests, notice was brought up to me that Sojourner Truth was below, and requested an interview. Knowing nothing of her but her singular name, I went down, prepared to make the interview short, as the pressure of many other engagements demanded.

When I went into the room, a tall, spare form arose to meet me. She was evidently a full-blooded African, and though now aged and worn with many hardships, still gave the impression of a physical development which in early youth must have been as fine a specimen of the torrid zone as Cumberworth's celebrated statuette of the Negro Woman at the Fountain. Indeed, she so strongly reminded me of that figure, that, when I recall the events of her life, as she narrated them to me, I imagine her as a living, breathing impersonation of that work of art.

I do not recollect ever to have been conversant with any one who had more of that silent and subtle power which we call personal presence than this woman. In the modern Spiritualistic phraseology, she would be described as having a strong sphere. Her tall form, as she rose up before me, is still vivid to my mind. She was dressed in some stout, grayish stuff, neat and clean, though dusty from travel. On her head she wore a bright Madras handkerchief, arranged as a turban, after the manner of her race. She seemed perfectly self-possessed and at her ease,—in fact, there was almost an unconscious superiority, not unmixed with a solemn twinkle of humor, in the odd, composed manner in which she looked down on me. Her whole air had at times a gloomy sort of drollery which impressed one strangely.

"So, this is you," she said.

"Yes," I answered.

"Well, honey, de Lord bless ye! I jes' thought I'd like to come an' have a look at ye. You's heerd o' me, I reckon?" she added.

"Yes, I think I have. You go about lecturing, do you not?"

"Yes, honey, that's what I do. The Lord has made me a sign unto this nation, an' I go round a-testifyin', an' showin' on 'em their sins agin my people."

So saying, she took a seat, and, stooping over and crossing her arms on her knees, she looked down on the floor, and appeared to fall into a sort of reverie.

Her great gloomy eyes and her dark face seemed to work with some undercurrent of feeling; she sighed deeply, and occasionally broke out,—

"O Lord! O Lord! Oh, the tears, an' the groans, an' the moans! O Lord!"

I should have said that she was accompanied by a little grandson of ten years,—the fattest, jolliest woolly-headed little specimen of Africa that one can imagine. He was grinning and showing his glistening white teeth in a state of perpetual merriment, and at this moment broke out into an audible giggle, which disturbed the reverie into which his relative was falling.

She looked at him with an indulgent sadness, and then at me.

"Laws, Ma'am, he don't know nothin' about it,—he don't. Why, I've seen them poor critters, beat an' 'bused an' hunted, brought in all torn,—ears hangin' all in rags, where the dogs been a-bitin' of 'em!"

This set off our little African Puck into another giggle, in which he seemed perfectly convulsed.

She surveyed him soberly, without the slightest irritation.

"Well, you may bless the Lord you can laugh; but I tell you, 't wa'n't no laughin' matter."

By this time I thought her manner so original that it might be worth while to call down my friends; and she seemed perfectly well pleased with the idea. An audience was what she wanted,—it mattered not whether high or low, learned or ignorant. She had things to say, and was ready to say them at all times, and to any one.

I called down Dr. Beecher, Professor Allen, and two or three other clergymen, who, together with my husband and family, made a roomful. No princess could have received a drawing-room with more composed dignity than Sojourner her audience. She stood among them, calm and erect, as one of her own native palm-trees waving alone in the desert. I presented one after another to her, and at last said,—

"Sojourner, this is Dr. Beecher. He is a very celebrated preacher."

"Is he?" she said, offering her hand in a condescending manner, and looking down on his white head. "Ye dear lamb, I'm glad to see ye! De Lord bless ye! I loves preachers. I'm a kind o' preacher myself."

"You are?" said Dr. Beecher. "Do you preach from the Bible?"

"No, honey, can't preach from de Bible,—can't read a letter."

"Why, Sojourner, what do you preach from, then?"

Her answer was given with a solemn power of voice, peculiar to herself, that hushed every one in the room.

"When I preaches, I has jest one text to preach from, an' I always preaches from this one. My text is, 'WHEN I FOUND JESUS.'"

"Well, you couldn't have a better one," said one of the ministers.

She paid no attention to him, but stood and seemed swelling with her own thoughts, and then began this narration:—

"Well, now, I'll jest have to go back, an' tell ye all about it. Ye see, we was all brought over from Africa, father an' mother an' I, an' a lot more of us; an' we was sold up an' down, an' hither an' yon; an' I can 'member, when I was a little thing, not bigger than this 'ere," pointing to her grandson, "how my ole mammy would sit out o' doors in the evenin', an' look up at the stars an' groan. She'd groan an' groan, an' says I to her,—

"'Mammy, what makes you groan so?'

"An' she'd say,—

"'Matter enough, chile! I'm groanin' to think o' my poor children: they don't know where I be, an' I don't know where they be; they looks up at the stars, an' I looks up at the stars, but I can't tell where they be.

"'Now,' she said, 'chile, when you're grown up, you may be sold away from your mother an' all your ole friends, an' have great troubles come on ye; an' when you has these troubles come on ye, ye jes' go to God, an' He'll help ye.'

"An' says I to her,—

"'Who is God, anyhow, mammy?'

"An' says she,—

"'Why, chile, you jes' look up dar! It's Him that made all dem!'

"Well, I didn't mind much 'bout God in them days. I grew up pretty lively an' strong, an' could row a boat, or ride a horse, or work round, an' do 'most anything.

"At last I got sold away to a real hard massa an' missis. Oh, I tell you, they was hard! 'Peared like I couldn't please 'em, nohow. An' then I thought o' what my old mammy told me about God; an' I thought I'd got into trouble, sure enough, an' I wanted to find God, an' I heerd some one tell a story about a man that met God on a threshin'-floor, an' I thought, 'Well an' good, I'll have a threshin'-floor, too.' So I went down in the lot, an' I threshed down a place real hard, an' I used to go down there every day, an' pray an' cry with all my might, a-prayin' to the Lord to make my massa an' missis better, but it didn't seem to do no good; an' so says I, one day,—

"'O God, I been a-askin' ye, an' askin' ye, an' askin' ye, for all this long time, to make my massa an' missis better, an' you don't do it, an' what can be the reason? Why, maybe you can't. Well, I shouldn't wonder ef you couldn't. Well, now, I tell you, I'll make a bargain with you. Ef you'll help me to git away from my massa an' missis, I'll agree to be good; but ef you don't help me, I really don't think I can be. Now,' says I, 'I want to git away; but the trouble's jest here: ef I try to git away in the night, I can't see; an' ef I try to git away in the daytime, they'll see me, an' be after me.'

"Then the Lord said to me, 'Git up two or three hours afore daylight, an' start off.'

"An' says I, 'Thank 'ee, Lord! that's a good thought.'

"So up I got, about three o'clock in the mornin', an' I started an' travelled pretty fast, till, when the sun rose, I was clear away from our place an' our folks, an' out o' sight. An' then I begun to think I didn't know nothin' where to go. So I kneeled down, and says I,—

"'Well, Lord, you've started me out, an' now please to show me where to go.'

"Then the Lord made a house appear to me, an' He said to me that I was to walk on till I saw that house, an' then go in an' ask the people to take me. An' I travelled all day, an' didn't come to the house till late at night; but when I saw it, sure enough, I went in, an' I told the folks that the Lord sent me; an' they was Quakers, an' real kind they was to me. They jes' took me in, an' did for me as kind as ef I'd been one of 'em; an' after they'd giv me supper, they took me into a room where there was a great, tall, white bed; an' they told me to sleep there. Well, honey, I was kind o' skeered when they left me alone with that great white bed; 'cause I never had been in a bed in my life. It never came into my mind they could mean me to sleep in it. An' so I jes' camped down under it, on the floor, an' then I slep' pretty well. In the mornin', when they came in, they asked me of I hadn't been asleep; an' I said, 'Yes, I never slep' better.' An' they said, 'Why, you haven't been in the bed!' An' says I, 'Laws, you didn't think o' sech a thing as my sleepin' in dat 'ar' bed, did you? I never heerd o' sech a thing in my life.'

"Well, ye see, honey, I stayed an' lived with 'em. An' now jes' look here: instead o' keepin' my promise an' bein' good, as I told the Lord I would, jest as soon as everything got a-goin' easy, I forgot all about God.

"Pretty well don't need no help; an' I gin up prayin.' I lived there two or three years, an' then the slaves in New York were all set free, an' ole massa came to our house to make a visit, an' he asked me ef I didn't want to go back an' see the folks on the ole place. An' I told him I did. So he said, ef I'd jes' git into the wagon with him, he'd carry me over. Well, jest as I was goin' out to git into the wagon, I met God! an' says I, 'O God, I didn't know as you was so great!' An' I turned right round an' come into the house, an' set down in my room; for 't was God all around me. I could feel it burnin', burnin', burnin' all around me, an' goin' through me; an' I saw I was so wicked, it seemed as ef it would burn me up. An' I said, 'O somebody, somebody, stand between God an' me! for it burns me!' Then, honey, when I said so, I felt as it were somethin' like an amberill [umbrella] that came between me an' the light, an' I felt it was somebody,—somebody that stood between me an' God; an' it felt cool, like a shade; an' says I, 'Who's this that stands between me an' God? Is it old Cato?' He was a pious old preacher; but then I seemed to see Cato in the light, an' he was all polluted an' vile, like me; an' I said, 'Is it old Sally?' an' then I saw her, an' she seemed jes' so. An' then says I, 'Who is this?' An' then, honey, for a while it was like the sun shinin' in a pail o' water, when it moves up an' down; for I begun to feel 't was somebody that loved me; an' I tried to know him. An' I said, 'I know you! I know you! I know you!'—an' then I said, 'I don't know you! I don't know you! I don't know you!' An' when I said, 'I know you, I know you,' the light came; an' when I said, 'I don't know you, I don't know you,' it went, jes' like the sun in a pail o' water. An' finally somethin' spoke out in me an' said, 'This is Jesus !' An' I spoke out with all my might, an' says I, 'This is Jesus! Glory be to God!' An' then the whole world grew bright, an' the trees they waved an' waved in glory, an' every little bit o' stone on the ground shone like glass; an' I shouted an' said, 'Praise, praise, praise to the Lord!' An' I begun to feel sech a love in my soul as I never felt before,—love to all creatures. An' then, all of a sudden, it stopped, an' I said, 'Dar's de white folks, that have abused you an' beat you an' abused your people,—think o' them!' But then there came another rush of love through my soul, an' I cried out loud,—'Lord, Lord, I can love even de white folks!'

"Honey, I jes' walked round an' round in a dream. Jesus loved me! I knowed it,—I felt it. Jesus was my Jesus. Jesus would love me always. I didn't dare tell nobody; 't was a great secret. Everything had been got away from me that I ever had; an' I thought that ef I let white folks know about this, maybe they'd get Him away,—so I said, 'I'll keep this close. I won't let any one know.'"

"But, Sojourner, had you never been told about Jesus Christ?"

"No, honey. I hadn't heerd no preachin',—been to no meetin'. Nobody hadn't told me. I'd kind o' heerd of Jesus, but thought he was like Gineral Lafayette, or some o' them. But one night there was a Methodist meetin' somewhere in our parts, an' I went; an' they got up an' begun for to tell der 'speriences; an' de fust one begun to speak. I started, 'cause he told about Jesus. 'Why,' says I to myself, 'dat man's found him, too!' An' another got up an' spoke, an' I said, 'He's found him, too!' An' finally I said, 'Why, they all know him!' I was so happy! An' then they sung this hymn": (Here Sojourner sang, in a strange, cracked voice, but evidently with all her soul and might, mispronouncing the English, but seeming to derive as much elevation and comfort from bad English as from good):—

  "There is a holy city,
     A world of light above.
  Above the stairs and regions,[A]
     Built by the God of love.

  "An everlasting temple,
     And saints arrayed in white
  There serve their great Redeemer
     And dwell with him in light.

  "The meanest child of glory
     Outshines the radiant sun;
  But who can speak the splendor
     Of Jesus on his throne?

  "Is this the man of sorrows
    Who stood at Pilate's bar,
  Condemned by haughty Herod
    And by his men of war?

  "He seems a mighty conqueror,
    Who spoiled the powers below,
  And ransomed many captives
    From everlasting woe.

  "The hosts of saints around him
    Proclaim his work of grace,
  The patriarchs and prophets,
    And all the godly race,

  "Who speak of fiery trials
    And tortures on their way;
  They came from tribulation
    To everlasting day.

  "And what shall be my journey,
    How long I'll stay below,
  Or what shall be my trials,
    Are not for me to know.

  "In every day of trouble
    I'll raise my thoughts on high,
  I'll think of that bright temple
    And crowns above the sky."

[Footnote A: Starry regions.]

I put in this whole hymn, because Sojourner, carried away with her own feeling, sang it from beginning to end with a triumphant energy that held the whole circle around her intently listening. She sang with the strong barbaric accent of the native African, and with those indescribable upward turns and those deep gutturals which give such a wild, peculiar power to the negro singing,—but above all, with such an overwhelming energy of personal appropriation that the hymn seemed to be fused in the furnace of her feelings and come out recrystallized as a production of her own.

It is said that Rachel was wont to chant the "Marseillaise" in a manner that made her seem, for the time, the very spirit and impersonation of the gaunt, wild, hungry, avenging mob which rose against aristocratic oppression; and in like manner, Sojourner, singing this hymn, seemed to impersonate the fervor of Ethiopia, wild, savage, hunted of all nations, but burning after God in her tropic heart, and stretching her scarred hands towards the glory to be revealed.

"Well, den ye see, after a while I thought I'd go back an' see de folks on de ole place. Well, you know, de law had passed dat de culled folks was all free; an' my old missis, she had a daughter married about dis time who went to live in Alabama,—an' what did she do but give her my son, a boy about de age of dis yer, for her to take down to Alabama? When I got back to de ole place, they told me about it, an' I went right up to see ole missis, an' says I,—

"'Missis, have you been an' sent my son away down to Alabama?'

"'Yes, I have,' says she; 'he's gone to live with your young missis.'

"'Oh, Missis,' says I, 'how could you do it?'

"'Poh!' says she, 'what a fuss you make about a little nigger! Got more of 'em now than you know what to do with.'

"I tell you, I stretched up. I felt as tall as the world!

"'Missis,' says I, 'I'll have my son back agin!'

"She laughed.

"'You will, you nigger? How you goin' to do it? You ha'n't got no money.'

"'No, Missis,—but God has,—an' you'll see He'll help me!'—an' I turned round an' went out.

"Oh, but I was angry to have her speak to me so haughty an' so scornful, as ef my chile wasn't worth anything. I said to God, 'O Lord, render unto her double!' It was a dreadful prayer, an' I didn't know how true it would come.

"Well, I didn't rightly know which way to turn; but I went to the Lord, an' I said to Him, 'O Lord, ef I was as rich as you be, an' you was as poor as I be, I'd help you,—you know I would; and, oh, do help me!' An' I felt sure then that He would.

"Well, I talked with people, an' they said I must git the case before a grand jury. So I went into the town when they was holdin' a court, to see ef I could find any grand jury. An' I stood round the court-house, an' when they was a-comin' out, I walked right up to the grandest-lookin' one I could see, an' says I to him,—

"'Sir, be you a grand jury?'

"An' then he wanted to know why I asked, an' I told him all about it; an' he asked me all sorts of questions, an' finally he says to me,—

"'I think, ef you pay me ten dollars, that I'd agree to git your son for you.' An' says he, pointin' to a house over the way, 'You go 'long an' tell your story to the folks in that house, an' I guess they'll give you the money.'

"Well, I went, an' I told them, an' they gave me twenty dollars; an' then I thought to myself, 'Ef ten dollars will git him, twenty dollars will git him sartin.' So I carried it to the man all out, an' said,—

"'Take it all,—only be sure an' git him'

"Well, finally they got the boy brought back; an' then they tried to frighten him, an' to make him say that I wasn't his mammy, an' that he didn't know me; but they couldn't make it out. They gave him to me, an' I took him an' carried him home; an' when I came to take off his clothes, there was his poor little back all covered with scars an' hard lumps, where they'd flogged him.

"Well, you see, honey, I told you how I prayed the Lord to render unto her double. Well, it came true; for I was up at ole missis' house not long after, an' I heerd 'em readin' a letter to her how her daughter's husband had murdered her,—how he'd thrown her down an' stamped the life out of her, when he was in liquor; an' my ole missis, she giv a screech, an' fell flat on the floor. Then says I, 'O Lord, I didn't mean all that! You took me up too quick.'

"Well, I went in an' tended that poor critter all night. She was out of her mind,—a-cryin', an' callin' for her daughter; an' I held her poor ole head on my arm, an' watched for her as ef she 'd been my babby. An' I watched by her, an' took care on her all through her sickness after that, an' she died in my arms, poor thing!"

"Well, Sojourner, did you always go by this name?"

"No, 'deed! My name was Isabella; but when I left the house of bondage, I left everything behind. I wa'n't goin' to keep nothin' of Egypt on me, an' so I went to the Lord an' asked Him to give me a new name. And the Lord gave me Sojourner, because I was to travel up an' down the land, showin' the people their sins, an' bein' a sign unto them. Afterwards I told the Lord I wanted another name, 'cause everybody else had two names; and the Lord gave me Truth, because I was to declare the truth to the people.

"Ye see some ladies have given me a white satin banner," she said, pulling out of her pocket and unfolding a white banner, printed with many texts, such as, "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof," and others of like nature. "Well," she said, "I journeys round to camp-meetins, an' wherever folks is, an' I sets up my banner, an' then I sings, an' then folks always comes up round me, an' then I preaches to 'em. I tells 'em about Jesus, an' I tells 'em about the sins of this people. A great many always comes to hear me; an' they 're right good to me, too, an' say they want to hear me agin."

We all thought it likely; and as the company left her, they shook hands with her, and thanked her for her very original sermon; and one of the ministers was overheard to say to another, "There's more of the gospel in that story than in most sermons."

Sojourner stayed several days with us, a welcome guest. Her conversation was so strong, simple, shrewd, and with such a droll flavoring of humor, that the Professor was wont to say of an evening, "Come, I am dull, can't you get Sojourner up here to talk a little?" She would come up into the parlor, and sit among pictures and ornaments, in her simple stuff gown, with her heavy travelling-shoes, the central object of attention both to parents and children, always ready to talk or to sing, and putting into the common flow of conversation the keen edge of some shrewd remark.

"Sojourner, what do you think of Women's Rights?"

"Well, honey, I 's ben to der meetins, an' harked a good deal. Dey wanted me fur to speak. So I got up. Says I,—'Sisters, I a'n't clear what you'd be after. Ef women want any rights more 'n dey 's got, why don't dey jes' take 'em, an' not be talkin' about it?' Some on 'em came round me, an' asked why I didn't wear Bloomers. An' I told 'em I had Bloomers enough when I was in bondage. You see," she said, "dey used to weave what dey called nigger-cloth, an' each one of us got jes' sech a strip, an' had to wear it width-wise. Them that was short got along pretty well, but as for me"—She gave an indescribably droll glance at her long limbs and then at us, and added,—"Tell you, I had enough of Bloomers in them days."

Sojourner then proceeded to give her views of the relative capacity of the sexes, in her own way.

"S'pose a man's mind holds a quart, an' a-woman's don't hold but a pint; ef her pint is full, it's as good as his quart."

Sojourner was fond of singing an extraordinary lyric, commencing,—

  "I'm on my way to Canada,
    That cold, but happy land;
  The dire effects of Slavery
    I can no longer stand.
      O righteous Father,
        Do look down on me
      And help me on to Canada,
        Where colored folks are free!"

The lyric ran on to state, that, when the fugitive crosses the Canada line,

  "The Queen comes down unto the shore,
    With arms extended wide,
  To welcome the poor fugitive
    Safe onto Freedom's side."

In the truth thus set forth she seemed to have the most simple faith.

But her chief delight was to talk of "glory," and to sing hymns whose burden was,—

  "O glory, glory, glory,
  Won't you come along with me?"

and when left to herself, she would often hum these with great delight, nodding her head.

On one occasion, I remember her sitting at a window singing and fervently keeping time with her bead, the little black Puck of a grandson meanwhile, amusing himself with ornamenting her red-and-yellow turban with green dandelion-curls, which shook and trembled with her emotions, causing him perfect convulsions of delight.

"Sojourner," said the Professor to her, one day, when he heard her singing, "you seem to be very sure about heaven."

"Well, I be," she answered, triumphantly.

"What makes you so sure there is any heaven?"

"Well, 'cause I got such a hankerin' arter it in here," she said,—giving a thump on her breast with her usual energy.

There was at the time an invalid in the house, and Sojourner, on learning it, felt a mission to go and comfort her. It was curious to see the tall, gaunt, dusky figure stalk up to the bed with such an air of conscious authority, and take on herself the office of consoler with such a mixture of authority and tenderness. She talked as from above,—and at the same time, if a pillow needed changing or any office to be rendered, she did it with a strength and handiness that inspired trust. One felt as if the dark, strange woman were quite able to take up the invalid in her bosom, and bear her as a lamb, both physically and spiritually. There was both power and sweetness in that great warm soul and that vigorous frame.

At length, Sojourner, true to her name, departed. She had her mission elsewhere. Where now she is I know not; but she left deep memories behind her.

To these recollections of my own I will add one more anecdote, related by Wendell Phillips.

Speaking of the power of Rachel to move and bear down a whole audience by a few simple words, he said he never knew but one other human being that had that power, and that other was Sojourner Truth. He related a scene of which he was witness. It was at a crowded public meeting in Faneuil Hall, where Frederick Douglas was one of the chief speakers. Douglas had been describing the wrongs of the black race, and as he proceeded, he grew more and more excited, and finally ended by saying that they had no hope of justice from the whites, no possible hope except in their own right arms. It must come to blood; they must fight for themselves, and redeem themselves, or it would never be done.

Sojourner was sitting, tall and dark, on the very front seat, facing the platform; and in the hush of deep feeling, after Douglas sat down, she spoke out in her deep, peculiar voice, heard all over the house,—

"Frederick, is God dead?"

The effect was perfectly electrical, and thrilled through the whole house, changing as by a flash the whole feeling of the audience. Not another word she said or needed to say; it was enough.

It is with a sad feeling that one contemplates noble minds and bodies, nobly and grandly formed human beings, that have come to us cramped, scarred, maimed, out of the prison-house of bondage. One longs to know what such beings might have become, if suffered to unfold and expand under the kindly developing influences of education.

It is the theory of some writers, that to the African is reserved, in the later and palmier days of the earth, the full and harmonious development of the religious element in man. The African seems to seize on the tropical fervor and luxuriance of Scripture imagery as something native; he appears to feel himself to be of the same blood with those old burning, simple souls, the patriarchs, prophets, and seers, whose impassioned words seem only grafted as foreign plants on the cooler stock of the Occidental mind.

I cannot but think that Sojourner with the same culture might have spoken words as eloquent and undying as those of the African Saint Augustine or Tertullian. How grand and queenly a woman she might have been, with her wonderful physical vigor, her great heaving sea of emotion, her power of spiritual conception, her quick penetration, and her boundless energy! We might conceive an African type of woman so largely made and moulded, so much fuller in all the elements of life, physical and spiritual, that the dark hue of the skin should seem only to add an appropriate charm,—as Milton says of his Penseroso, whom he imagines

      "Black, but such as in esteem
  Prince Memnon's sister might beseem,
  Or that starred Ethiop queen that strove
  To set her beauty's praise above
  The sea-nymph's."

But though Sojourner Truth has passed away from among us as a wave of the sea, her memory still lives in one of the loftiest and most original works of modern art, the Libyan Sibyl, by Mr. Story, which attracted so much attention in the late World's Exhibition. Some years ago, when visiting Rome, I related Sojourner's history to Mr. Story at a breakfast at his house. Already had his mind begun to turn to Egypt in search of a type of art which should represent a larger and more vigorous development of nature than the cold elegance of Greek lines. His glorious Cleopatra was then in process of evolution, and his mind was working out the problem of her broadly developed nature, of all that slumbering weight and fulness of passion with which this statue seems charged, as a heavy thunder-cloud is charged with electricity.

The history of Sojourner Truth worked in his mind and led him into the deeper recesses of the African nature,—those unexplored depths of being and feeling, mighty and dark as the gigantic depths of tropical forests, mysterious as the hidden rivers and mines of that burning continent whose life-history is yet to be. A few days after, he told me that he had conceived the idea of a statue which he should call the Libyan Sibyl. Two years subsequently, I revisited Rome, and found the gorgeous Cleopatra finished, a thing to marvel at, as the creation of a new style of beauty, a new manner of art. Mr. Story requested me to come and repeat to him the history of Sojourner Truth, saying that the conception had never left him. I did so; and a day or two after, he showed me the clay model of the Libyan Sibyl. I have never seen the marble statue; but am told by those who have, that it was by far the most impressive work of art at the Exhibition.

A notice of the two statues from the London "Athenaeum" must supply a description which I cannot give.

"The Cleopatra and the Sibyl are seated, partly draped, with the characteristic Egyptian gown, that gathers about the torso and falls freely around the limbs; the first is covered to the bosom, the second bare to the hips. Queenly Cleopatra rests back against her chair in meditative ease, leaning her cheek against one hand, whose elbow the rail of the seat sustains; the other is outstretched upon her knee, nipping its forefinger upon the thumb thoughtfully, as though some firm, wilful purpose filled her brain, as it seems to set those luxurious features to a smile as if the whole woman 'would.' Upon her head is the coif, bearing in front the mystic uraeus, or twining basilisk of sovereignty, while from its sides depend the wide Egyptian lappels, or wings, that fall upon her shoulders. The Sibilla Libica has crossed her knees,—an action universally held amongst the ancients as indicative of reticence or secrecy, and of power to bind. A secret-keeping looking dame she is, in the full-bloom proportions of ripe womanhood, wherein choosing to place his figure the sculptor has deftly gone between the disputed point whether these women were blooming and wise in youth, or deeply furrowed with age and burdened with the knowledge of centuries, as Virgil, Livy, and Gellius say. Good artistic example might be quoted on both sides. Her forward elbow is propped upon one knee; and to keep her secrets closer, for this Libyan woman is the closest of all the Sibyls, she rests her shut mouth upon one closed palm, as if holding the African mystery deep in the brooding brain that looks out through mournful, warning eyes, seen under the wide shade of the strange horned (ammonite) crest, that bears the mystery of the Tetragrammaton upon its upturned front. Over her full bosom, mother of myriads as she was, hangs the same symbol. Her face has a Nubian cast, her hair wavy and plaited, as is meet."

We hope to see the day when copies both of the Cleopatra and the Libyan
Sibyl shall adorn the Capitol at Washington.

AMERICAN HORTICULTURE.

Horticulture in the United States has, except in a commercial sense, been subordinate to the pursuit of wealth. Before man can indulge in objects of elegance and refinement, he must have secured the comforts of life: the utile must lead the dulce, a well-stocked kitchen-garden precede the parterre. We have now, however, in the older sections of the Union, at least, passed through the ordeal of a young nation: elegance is following the plain and practical; the spacious mansion, with its luxurious appurtenances, is succeeding the cottage, as this in turn was the successor of the cabin. The perception of the picturesque is a natural result of earlier steps in the path of refinement: man may build from a vulgar ambition for distinction, but he seldom plants unless prompted by love of Nature and elevated impulses. Lord Bacon, in his essay "Of Gardens," says, "When ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater perfection." A case which seems to confirm this position occurs to us. The site of a noble building, erected for our Government, was adorned by wide-spreading trees, the growth of generations, which, after the building was completed, the architect cut down before his axe could be arrested. On being reproached for his Vandalism, he retorted,— "Trees may be seen everywhere, but such a Grecian portico as that—where?"

Among a young people like ourselves, the nursery and the market-garden hold prominent places in horticultural pursuits; the latter yields a prompt return for the investment of capital and labor, and just in proportion as demand increases, so will be the exertion to meet it. Thus we find the markets of the cities amply supplied with every luxury of fruit and vegetable: the seasons are anticipated by artificial means, glass is brought into requisition, and the tables of the wealthy are furnished with a profusion unknown to royalty in an earlier age.

The capacity of Americans to mould circumstances to themselves rather than adapt themselves to circumstances, to remove obstacles, to accomplish by the aid of machinery much that other peoples reach through toil alone, has passed into a proverb: hence it need hardly cause surprise, if unexampled success attend efforts at market-gardening, bringing to the very doors of the comparatively poor vegetables and fruits which in Europe are enjoyed only by the higher classes. As an illustration,—where but in America are peaches planted by a single individual by tens of thousands, and carried to market on steamboats chartered for the special purpose, in quantities of one or two thousand bushels at a trip?

The earlier American nurseries were few in number, and, compared with some now existing, of quite limited extent,—though equal, perhaps, in proportion to population. The first of which there is any record, and probably the earliest established, was that of John Bartram, near Philadelphia, about the year 1730. Here were congregated many of the prominent native plants and trees, preparatory to exportation to Europe,—also the fruits and plants of the other hemisphere, obtained in exchange for American productions. The specimen trees planted by the elder Bartram and his descendants still adorn the grounds, classic to the botanist and the lover of Nature: long may they stand, living memorials of generations passed away, our earliest evidence of a taste for horticulture!

The next nursery in the order of date is that of Prince, in Flushing, New York, established, we believe, prior to the Revolution, and continued by the family to the present day. Flushing has become a centre in the nursery-trade, and many acres thereabout are covered with young trees intended for transplantation. A stroll round the village would lead one to suppose the chief interest of the inhabitants was bound up in the nursery-business, as is that of Lynn in shoes, and of Lowell in cotton goods. Prominent among the Flushing nurseries are those of Parsons, which, though of comparatively recent origin, abound in rich treasures.

The nurseries of the brothers David and Cuthbert Landreth appear to have been the third in the order of succession. They were established at Philadelphia shortly after the Revolution, and within the limits of the city. The increase of population and their expanding trade caused a removal to another and more ample field of culture, which, for nearly half a century, was the resort of most people of taste who visited Philadelphia.

Nurseries are now found everywhere. The Far West has some which count the young trees by millions, and fruit-trees of single kinds by the hundred thousand. The Hoveys, of Boston, have long been prominent, not only as nurserymen, but as writers on horticulture. Elwanger and Barry, of Rochester, New York, have a large breadth of land, we forbear to state our impression of the number of acres, covered by nursery-stock. Professional florists also have multiplied to an unlimited extent, exhibiting the growth of refining taste. Plants suited to window-culture, and bouquets of choice flowers, are sold on street-corners, and carried from door to door. Cameilias, of which we recollect single flowers having been sold at a dollar, can now be purchased at fifty cents the plant.

It might be curious, in reference to this subject of horticulture, to institute an inquiry as to cause and effect. Have the increased means of gratifying taste expanded it, or has taste rapidly developed created the means of supply? Doubtless there has been reaction from both directions, each operating on the other. One striking exhibition of pure taste among us is the formation of picturesque arboretums, especially of terebinthinate trees, and others allied to the Coniferae. This taste, so diligently cultivated in England, has found zealous worshippers among us, and some admirable collections have been formed. The cemetery of Laurel Hill, at Philadelphia, under the critical eye and taste of the proprietor, Mr. John Jay Smith, that of Mount Auburn, in Cambridge, of Greenwood, New York, and the cemetery in Cincinnati, have afforded fine specimens of rare trees, though, from the nature of their purposes, picturesque effect could not be reached, except so far as aided by irregularity of surface. And here we would remark, in connection with this subject, that one regulation of the Cincinnati cemetery is worthy of imitation. No arbitrary railings or ill-kept hedges bound the individual lots; all is open, and the visitor, as he drives through the grounds, is charmed by the effect,—a park studded with monuments: the social distinctions, which, perhaps, necessarily separated in life, have disappeared in death.

In connection with landscape-gardening, one American name stands conspicuous,—the name of one who, if not, in point of time, the first teacher of the art in this country, has at least done more than any other to direct attention to it,—to exhibit defects, suggest improvements, create beauties, and invest his subject with such a charm and interest as to captivate many minds which might otherwise have been long insensible to the dormant beauty within their reach, or that which they themselves had the power to produce: we refer, of course, to the late Andrew J. Downing. With naturally fine artistic perceptions, his original occupation of a nurseryman gave direction to his subsequent pursuits. Under different circumstances, his taste might, perhaps, have been turned to painting, sculpture, or architecture: indeed, to the last he paid no inconsiderable attention; and as the result, many a rural homestead, which might otherwise have been a bleak house, is conspicuous as the abode of taste and elegance.

Among the prominent private arboretums in our country may be mentioned that of Mr. Sargent at Wodeneshe. Mr. Sargent, as may be seen by his supplement to Downing's "Landscape-Gardening," is an enthusiast in the culture of conifers; he is reputed to have made liberal importations, and the results of his attempts at acclimation, given to the public, have aided others in like endeavors. Judge Field, of Princeton, New Jersey, has a pinetum of much value; some of his specimens are of rare excellence. He, also, has been a diligent importer.

* * * * *

Though our sketch of the present state of horticulture among us is quite imperfect, affording but an indistinct glimpse of the ample field which invites our view, it would scarcely be pardonable, were we to overlook a branch of rural industry in which horticultural success is interested, and without which the practical pleasures and family-comfort of rural homes would be greatly abridged. We refer to garden-seed culture. It may be that the purchaser of a paper of seed for the kitchen-garden seldom stops to consider the minute care which has been required to secure its purity; most probably, in many cases, he makes the purchase as though it were the mere product of mechanical skill, which, after the machinery is perfected, and the steam-engine has been set in motion, turns out the finished article, of use or ornament, with scarcely an effort of mind to direct its movements. Not so in the production of seeds: many are the hours of watchful care to be bestowed upon it, and stern and unyielding are its demands on the skilled eye and the untiring hand. It is because in some cases the eye is not skilled, and the hand often tires, that so many seeds of more than doubtful worth are imposed upon the market, filling the village and cross-road shops with the germs of disappointment. The history of the seed-culture in the United States is not without interest to those who, like many readers of the "Atlantic," reside in the quiet country; to every family thus situated the certainty of obtaining seeds of trustworthy quality—certain to vegetate, and sure to prove true to name—is of more importance than can be appreciated by those who rely upon the city-market, and have at all times and seasons ample supplies of vegetables within easy reach. On looking round for some individual establishment which we may use as the representative of this branch of industry, we naturally turn to Bloomsdale, as the most prominent and widest-known of seed-farms; and if the reader will join us in a trip thither, we shall be pleased with his company, and perchance he may not wholly regret the time occupied in the excursion. The period we shall choose for the visit is the close of the month of June.

On a bright day we take our seats in the cars at Jersey City, provided with the talisman to insure an attentive reception. Onward we whirl through fertile fields and smiling villages; Newark, Brunswick, Princeton, are successively passed; shortly we reach the Delaware at Trenton; a run of a few miles through Penn's Manor, the garden-spot of the Proprietary Governor, brings us to Bristol, the station from which we most readily reach our destination. As we approach the grounds from the front, a prominent object meets the eye, a noble white pine of gigantic proportions, somewhat the worse for many a winter's storm, but which still stands in all its majestic grandeur, as it has stood whilst generations have come and passed away. On entering the premises, we find ourselves in the midst of a lawn of ten acres in the English style. To enumerate the various trees, in groups or single specimens, which most invite our notice, would interfere with the main object of our visit. We have come for a special purpose, and we can only allude to a very few of the species to which our attention may be supposed to be directed. A white spruce, in rich luxuriance, measuring, as the branches trail upon the sward, upwards of sixty feet in circumference; the Himalayan white pine, with its deep fringe-like foliage, twenty-five feet in height; the Cephalonian fir, with leaves as pungent as an Auricaria, twenty feet high, and many specimens of the same kind of nearly equal magnitude; yews, of more than half a century's growth; a purple beech, of thirty feet in height, its branches as many in circumference, contrasting with the green around; numerous specimens of balm of Gilead, silver firs, and Norway spruces, unsurpassed in beauty of form, the last presenting every variety of habit in which it delights to sport: these are some of the gems of the lawn. But we must hurry onward to the practical business in view.

The harvest, which, in seed-culture, lasts for many consecutive weeks, has just commenced. The first important crop that ripens is the turnip,—which is now being cut. The work is performed by the use of grass-hooks or toothless sickles; stem after stem is cut, until the hand is full, when they are deposited in canvas sheets; as these are filled, boys stand ready to spread others; men follow to tie up those which have been filled; others succeed, driving teams, and loading wagons, with ample shelvings, with sheet-full piled on sheet-full, until the sturdy oxen are required to test their strength in drawing them to the drying-houses; arrived there, each sheet-full is separately removed by rope and tackle, and the contents deposited on the skeleton scaffolding within the building, there to remain until the seed is sufficiently cured and dry enough to thresh. These drying-houses are buildings of uniform character, two stories in height and fifty feet square, constructed so as to expose their contents to sun and air, and each provided with a carefully laid threshing-floor, extending through the building, with pent-house for movable engine. When the houses are full and the hulm in a fit state for threshing, the engine is started and the work begun. One man, relieved by others from time to time, (for the labor requires activity, and consequently is exhausting,) feeds the thresher, which, with its armed teeth, moves with such velocity as to appear like a solid cylinder. Here there is no stopping for horses to take breath and rest their weary limbs,—puff, puff, onward the work,—steam as great a triumph in threshing as in printing or spinning. Men and boys are stationed at the rear of the thresher to remove the straw, and roughly separate the seed from the shattered hulm,—others again being engaged in thrusting the dried crop from the scaffolds, and placing it in suitable position for the feeders. When one drying-house has thus been emptied, the engine is removed to another; the same process is pursued until the circuit of the buildings has been made, and thus the ceaseless round (ceaseless at least for a season) is continued. As soon as the crop in the first house has been threshed, the work of winnowing is commenced, and skilled hands thus engaged follow on in the track of the engine. As each crop is cleaned and put in merchantable order, it is placed in bags of two bushels each and carried to the storehouses and granaries, there to await a requisition from the city-warehouse.

We have just witnessed the process of saving the crop of turnip-seed. And how much may that reach? is a natural inquiry. Of all the varieties, including the ruta-baga, about one thousand bushels, is the response. We should have thought a thousand pounds would supply the entire Union; but we are reminded it is in part exported to far distant lands. And what is the crop so much like turnip, but still green, and apparently of more vigorous growth? That is one of the varieties of cabbage, of which several standard kinds are under cultivation. Another adjoining is radish; still another, beet; and thus we pass from kind to kind, until we have exhausted a long catalogue of sorts.

Let us stop our walk over the grounds for a few moments, taking seats under the shadow of a tree, and make some inquiries as to the place itself, its extent, the course of culture, the description of manures used, etc. Our cicerone assents to the proposal, and proceeds to answer our general inquiries. Bloomsdale contains in round numbers four hundred acres; it has a frontage on the Delaware of upwards of a mile, is bounded on the west by the Delaware Canal, and is divided into two nearly equal parts by the Philadelphia and Trenton Railroad. The soil is a light loam, easily worked, suited to rapid percolation, admitting of labor immediately after heavy rain, and not liable to suffer by drought. The manures used are principally crude, obtained from the city, and landed on the premises from shallops continually plying, laden with the "sinews of farming." Street-scrapings are more used than stable-manure; bone-dust and guano enter largely into the account; and the aggregate annual expenditure foots up a sum almost equivalent to the fee-simple of an ordinary farm. The culture is that denominated drill; but of course much of it is simply straight lines drawn by the plough, in which the roots for seeding are planted by hand. The ground, with the exception of the lawn and a portion occupied from time to time by grass for home use, is divided by wagon-roads into squares and parallelograms; cross fences are not used; and each crop forms a distinct feature, accessible at any stage of growth. The several varieties of each kind, as, for instance, those of turnip, cabbage, beet, lettuce, are planted widely apart, to guard against possible admixture; but the chances of that result must be much less than is popularly supposed, efforts having been used experimentally to test its practicability, and that between kindred closely allied, without success. Although the extent of the grounds would appear to be formidable, even for a farm conducted in the usual mode, it is insufficient for the demands on the proprietors, without diligent exertion and prompt recropping,—two crops in each year being exacted, only a small part of the land escaping double duty, the extent annually ploughed thus amounting to nearly twice the area of the farm. The heavy hauling is performed by oxen, the culture principally by mules, which are preferred to horses, as being less liable to injury, and better adapted to the narrow drill culture practised.

The seeds of Bloomsdale have attained a world-wide reputation, and, to quote an expression used in reference to them, "are almost as well known on the Ganges as on the Mississippi or Ohio." They are regularly exported to the British possessions in India, to the shores of the Pacific, throughout the West Indies, and occasionally to Australia. The drier atmosphere of this country ripens them better than the humid climate of England, adapting them to exportation; and it is no slight triumph to see them preferred by Englishmen on English soil. At home, thousands of hamlets, south and west of Philadelphia, until interrupted by the war, were supplied with Landreth's seeds. The business, founded nearly three-quarters of a century ago, is now conducted by the second and third generations of the family with which it originated. Thus has success been achieved through long and patient industry steadily directed to the same pursuit, and a reputation built up for American seeds, despite the want of national protection.

THE EAST AND THE WEST.

[This poem was written by THEODORE WINTHROP seven years ago, and after his death was found among his unpublished papers.]

  We of the East spread our sails to the sea,
    You of the West stride over the land;
  Both are to scatter the hopes of the Free,
    As the sower sheds golden grain from his hand.

  'Tis ours to circle the stormy bends
    Of a continent, yours its ridge to cross;
  We must double the capes where a long world ends,
    Lone cliffs where two limitless oceans toss.

  They meet and are baffled 'mid tempest and wrath,
    Breezes are skirmishing, angry winds roar,
  While poised on some desperate plunge of our path
    We count up the blackening wrecks on the shore.

  And you through dreary and thirsty ways,
    Where rivers are sand and winds are dust,
  Through sultry nights and feverish days,
    Move westward still as the sunsets must:

  Where the scorched air quivers along the slopes,
    Where the slow-footed cattle lie down and die,
  Where horizons draw backward till baffled hopes
    Are weary of measureless waste and sky.

  Yes, ours to battle relentless gales,
    And yours the brave and the patient way;
  But we hold the storms in our trusty sails,
    And for you the life-giving fountains play.

  There are stars above us, and stars for you,—
    Rest on the path, and calm on the main:
  Storms are but zephyrs, when hearts are true;
    We are no weaklings, quick to complain,

  When lightnings flash bivouac-fires into gloom,
    And with crashing of forests the rains sheet down,—
  Or when ships plunge onward where night-clouds loom,
    Defiant of darkness and meeting its frown.

  These are the days of motion and march;
    Now we are ardent, and young, and brave:
  Let them that come after us build the arch
    Of our triumph, and plant with the laurel our grave.

  Time enough to rear temples when heroes are dead,
    Time enough to sing paeans after the fight:
  Prophets urge onward the future's tread;
    We,—we are to kindle its beacon-light.

  Our sires lit torches of quenchless flame
    To illumine our darkness, if night should be;
  But day is a friend to our standards, and shame
    Be ours, if we win not a victory!

  Man is nobler than men have been,
    Souls are vaster than souls have dreamed;
  There are broader oceans than eyes have seen,
    Noons more glowing than yet have beamed.

  Creeping shadows cower low on our land;
    These shall not dim our grander day:
  Stainless knights must be those who stand
    Full in the van of a world's array!

  When shall we cease our meagre distrust?
    When to each other our true hearts yield?
  To make this world an Eden, we must
    Fling away each weapon and shield,

  And meet each man as a friend and mate,
    Trample and spurn and forget our pride,
  Glad to accept an equal fate,
    Laboring, conquering side by side.

PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF THE LATE HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE.

Cairo, Egypt, February 6th, 1862. I am afraid I repeat myself in talking about the beauty of the climate here, but to-day is so lovely that I cannot refrain from recurring to the subject. While you are shivering under the blasts of winter, we have a genuine June morning: the air soft and pure, the atmosphere clear, innumerable birds chirping in the trees opposite the windows, (for the Arabs never interfere with birds,) and the aspect of things from our balcony overlooking the Esbekieh, or public square, as pleasant as one could wish. The beautiful weather, too, is constant.

But I must tell you of my dining yesterday with Mrs. R., to meet Mr. Buckle, the author of the History of Civilization, who has just returned from his two or three months' voyage upon the Nile, in which he pushed as far as Nubia. He is now staying for a little while in Cairo, or rather in his dahabieh, or boat, (which he says is more comfortable than any hotel,) moored in the river at Boolak, the port of the town. Mrs. R., the daughter of Lady Duff Gordon, and granddaughter of Mrs. Austin, is a most attractive and accomplished young lady; her husband is the manager in Egypt of the great banking-house of Briggs and Company, in which he is a partner. Their usual residence is at Alexandria; but at this season "all the world" of Egypt comes to Cairo, to enjoy the beautiful weather here, while it is raining incessantly in Alexandria, only a hundred and thirty miles distant. Mrs. R. in asking Mr. Thayer, our Consul-General, to meet Mr. Buckle, with very great kindness included me in the invitation. The only other lady present was Miss P., a niece of the late Countess of Blessington, herself the author of several pleasant stories, and of a poem which gained a prize in competition with one by Mrs. Browning and another by Owen Meredith: she is spending the winter with Mrs. R. There were also present C., who conducts the house of Briggs and Company in Cairo; O., another banker; and Hekekyan Bey, an Armenian, a well-read and intelligent man, formerly Minister of Public Instruction under Mehemet Ali, and still, I believe, in receipt of a pension from the Viceroy's government, in consideration of his public services, which have been valuable.

The dinner was at an hotel called the Restaurant d'Auric. We assembled in Mrs. R.'s drawing-room, an apartment in the banking-house at a little distance, and walked to the hotel. The company fell into two groups, each lighted by a swarthy boab or lackey carrying a mushal or lantern; and I happened to walk with Mr. Buckle, so that I had a brief talk with him in the street, before the general conversation began at the table. He remarked upon the extraordinary devotion exhibited by Delane of the London Times to the interests and politics of Lord Palmerston. Becoming interested in our conversation, we strayed away from the rest, and were walking about a quarter of a mile down the bazaar, when (are you surprised to hear?) Mr. Buckle was missed, the two boabs came running after us, and we were cited to the dinner-table.

Buckle, of course, was the card. He talked with a velocity and fulness of facts that was wonderful. The rest of us could do little but listen and ask questions. And yet he did not seem to be lecturing us; the stream of his conversation flowed along easily and naturally. Nor was it didactic; Buckle's range of reading has covered everything in elegant literature, as well as the ponderous works whose titles make so formidable a list at the beginning of his History, and, as he remembers everything he has read, he can produce his stores upon the moment for the illustration of whatever subject happens to come up.

In the first place, let me say how delightful it was to discover his cordial interest in our own country. He expresses a strong hope that England will take no part against us, and do nothing to break the blockade. He is going to write about America; indeed, his next volume, besides containing a complete view of the German philosophy, will treat of the United States. But he will visit us before he writes. Although appreciating the great work of De Tocqueville, he complains of the general inadequacy of European criticism upon America. Gasparin's books, by the way, he has not seen. For his own part, he considers the subject too vast, he says, and the testimony too conflicting, to permit him to write upon it before he has seen the country; and meanwhile he scrupulously refrains from forming any conclusive opinions.

Subject to this reservation of judgment, however, he remarked that he was inclined to think that George III forced us prematurely into democracy, although the natural tendency of things both in America and England was towards it; and he thought that perhaps we had established a political democracy without having yet achieved an intellectual democracy: the two ought to go hand in hand together. The common people in England, he said, are by far the most useful class of society. He had been especially pleased by the numerous letters he had received from working-men who had read his book. These letters often surprised him by the acuteness and capacity displayed by their writers. The nobility would perish utterly, if it were not constantly recruited from commoners. Lord Brougham was the first member of the secular peerage who continued after his elevation to sign his name in full, "H. Brougham," which he did to show his continued sympathy with the class from which he sprang. Buckle remarked that the history of the peasantry of no European country has ever been written, or ever can be written, and without it the record of the doings of kings and nobles is mere chaff. Surnames were not introduced until the eleventh century, and it is only since that period that genealogy has become possible.

Another very pleasant thing is Mr. Buckle's cordial appreciation of young men. He repeated the story, which I believe is in his book, that, when Harvey announced to the world his great discovery of the circulation of the blood, among the physicians who received it was none above the age of forty. Mr. Thayer described to Buckle some of our friends who have read his book with especial satisfaction. He evidently took pleasure in this proof of appreciation, and said that this was the class of readers he sought. "In fact, the young men," he said, "are the only readers of much value; it is they who shape the future." He said that Thackeray and Delane had told him he would find Boston very like England. He knows but few Bostonians. He had corresponded with Theodore Parker, whom he considered a remarkable man; he had preserved but one of his letters, which he returned to Mrs. Parker, in answer to her request for materials to aid her in preparing the memoir of her late husband. Buckle says that he does not generally preserve other than business-letters.

Mr. Buckle gave an amusing account of the origin of the wigs which the lawyers wear in England, and which, by the way, struck me as infinitely ludicrous when I saw them on the heads of the judges and counsel in Westminster Hall. Originally the clergy were forbidden to practise law, and, as they were the best lawyers, the wig was worn to conceal the tonsure. He had anecdotes to tell of Johnson, Lamb, Macaulay, Voltaire, Talleyrand, etc., and quoted passages from Burke and from Junius at length in the exact words. Junius he considers proved to be Sir Philip Francis. He told a good story against Wordsworth, contained in a letter from Lamb to Talfourd, which the latter showed to Buckle, but had considered among the things too personal to be published. Wordsworth was decrying Shakspeare. "Pooh!" he said, "it is all very easy: I could write like Shakspeare myself, if I had a mind to!" "Precisely so," rejoined Lamb,—"if you had a mind to."

Mr. Buckle does not think much of the ancient Egyptian civilization, differing in this respect toto caelo from Hekekyan Bey, who finds in the monuments proofs of the existence of an expansive popular government. Buckle declares that the machines, as figured in the hieroglyphics, are of the most primitive kind,—and that the learning, by all accounts, was confined to the priests, and covered a very narrow range, exhibiting no traces of acquaintance with the higher useful arts. He says it is a fallacy to suppose that savages are bodily superior to civilized men. Captain Cook found that his sailors could outwork the islanders. I remarked, in confirmation, that our Harvard boat-clubs won the prizes in rowing-matches against all comers. Buckle seemed interested, and asked for a more particular account, which, of course, I took great pleasure in giving. C., like a true Englishman, doubted the general fact, and said the Thames watermen out-rowed their university-clubs.

For Turkish civilization Mr. Buckle has not the slightest respect,—said he could write the whole of it on the back of his hand; and here Hekekyan Bey cordially agreed with him. Buckle is very fond of chess, and can play two games at once blindfold. He inquired very particularly about a native here who it is said can play four or six in this manner, and said he should like to try a game with him. He had seen Paulsen, but not Morphy.

Mr. Thayer asked him if in England he had been subjected to personal hostility for his opinions, or to anything like social ostracism. He said, generally not. A letter from a clergyman to an acquaintance in England, expressing intense antipathy to him, although he had never seen the writer, was the only evidence of this kind of opposition. "In fact," said he, naively, "the people of England have such an admiration of any kind of intellectual splendor that they will forgive for its sake the most objectionable doctrines." He told us that the portion of his book which relates to Spain, although by no means complimentary to that country, has been translated and published separately there. T. remarked that to this circumstance, no doubt, we may ascribe some part of the modern regeneration of Spain, the leading statesmen being persuaded to a more liberal policy; but this view Buckle disclaimed with an eagerness seeming to be something more than the offspring of modesty.

After dinner we returned to Mrs. R.'s apartments, where we had tea. Buckle and Hekekyan now got into an animated discussion upon the ancient Egyptian civilization, which scarcely gave the rest of us a chance to put in a single word. It was, however, exceedingly interesting to sit and listen. Indeed, although there was nothing awful about Buckle, one felt a little abashed to intrude his own remarks in such a presence. You will be amused to hear that Mrs. R., who had seen me but once before, told T. that she did not think I seemed to have much to say for myself. Pray tell this in circles where they accuse me of monopolizing the conversation. We stayed until nearly midnight, and then, taking our leave, Buckle accompanied T. and myself as far as the door of our hotel. Buckle received most kindly all suggestions made to him of books to be read upon American affairs, and people to be seen in the United States.

February 7th. To-day we made a party to drive to see the Howling Dervishes, who howl on Fridays. Friday is sometimes called "the Mahometan Sunday," which is a correct phrase, if the especial celebration of religious services is meant; but it is not at all a day of rest: we found the people continuing their various avocations as usual. At the mosque we met Mr. Buckle, a little careless in his dress,—in this respect affording a not disagreeable contrast to the studied jauntiness which Englishmen are apt to affect in their travelling-gear. Nobody is allowed to press the floor of the mosque with shoes upon the feet. T. and I, warned by our former experience, had brought pieces of cotton cloth to tie over our shoes; and some cloth slippers of a bright orange color, such as the Arabs are fond of using, had been provided, which Miss P. slipped directly over her walking-boots. Buckle, with careless indifference, pulled off his shoes and walked in in his stockinged feet. His figure is tall and slender, although he is a large man; he stoops a little in standing; his head, well-shaped, is partly bald; and although his features are not striking in themselves, they are rendered so by his animated expression. The photograph which I have seen is a wretched caricature.

The performances of the Dervishes were precisely the same as those which I witnessed in the same place a fortnight ago, and may be found most exactly described by Mr. Trollope (who saw them two or three years since) in his admirable novel of "The Bertrams," Chapter 38. If I desired to tell you what we saw, I could not do better than to adopt Mr. Trollope's language without alteration. This will prove to you the sameness of this singular religious rite. Driving back, Miss P. helped us to recall some of the incidents of the dinner of the preceding day. She used to see almost all the distinguished literary characters at the house of her aunt; but she told us that she never met anybody whose conversation could bear comparison with that of Buckle, excepting Lord Brougham and Alexander Dumas. The latter disgusts by his insufferable egotism. Miss P. also gave us a very entertaining account of an Arab wedding which she attended a day or two ago in company with Mrs. R. As soon as they were inside the house they were separated from their escort, and were admitted to the apartment where the bride was obliged to sit in state for three days, covered with jewelry, clusters of diamonds literally plastered upon her cheeks and forehead.

February 10th. Yesterday Mr. Thayer entertained Mr. Buckle at dinner. The party included Mrs. R. and some of the guests whom we had met at her table. We had hoped also for the presence of Mr. R., who was expected to come up from Alexandria; but the train failed to bring him. Mr. Thayer also invited Sir James Outram, but he is too unwell to come, although expressing himself pleased with the invitation. The landlord of the hotel where the consul-general is staying (Hotel des Ambassadeurs) was very proud of the occasion, and the entertainment, although simple, was elegant. An oval table was found of exactly the right size to seat eight. Buckle was in excellent spirits, and, as before, was the life of the party. We had been terribly afraid lest he and Hekekyan should get into another long disputation, for the excellent Bey has fortified himself with new materials; but the ladies were taken into our confidence to aid in turning the conversation, if it should be necessary, all of which made a great deal of entertainment; but there proved to be no occasion for anything of the sort.

Buckle told some capital stories: among them, one against Alison, almost too good to be true, namely, that in the first edition of his History he mentioned among the causes of the French Devolution "the timber-duty," because he had read in a French pamphlet that there were popular discontents about the droits de timbre.[A] Alison's History, he said, is the very worst that ever was written. He cited a good definition, (Addison's, I believe,) that "fine writing is that which is true without being obvious." In the course of the conversation, in which, as before, Buckle touched points in the whole circle of literature and science, giving us quotations even in Hebrew from the Talmud and the Bible, he made a very pretty compliment to our host, introduced as adroitly as from the lips of a professed courtier, but evidently spoken on the moment. It was something in this way. Hekekyan and Buckle were in an argument, and Buckle said, "Ah, you mistake a necessary condition for the cause." "What is cause but necessary condition?" asked Hekekyan. "Very different: two men can't fight a duel without meeting, but every two men who meet don't fight a duel." "But they couldn't fight a duel without meeting," persisted Hekekyan. "Yes," rejoined Buckle; "but the meeting isn't the cause of the duel. Why, there could not be a dinner-party, unless the company met; but our meeting here to-day isn't the cause of the dinner: the cause of the dinner is the kindness of our host." "Or rather, of the landlord," said N. "Oh, no! of the American government," said C. "Ah," said Buckle, "those things are not the cause: the cause of our good dinner, I maintain, is only the charming hospitality of the consul-general." Is not this metaphysics made easy, and prettily employed?

[Footnote A: It is fair to say that an examination of the chapter on the causes of the French Revolution, in several editions of Alison's History, including the first, gives this story no support.]

After dinner we had tea and coffee; the ladies, in Egypt, could scarcely do less than allow tobacco, and Mr. Buckle particularly enjoyed some choice cigars which T. was able to offer him. The party did not break up until nearly midnight, when all the guests retired together.

February 11th. To my pleasure, the train from Alexandria yesterday afternoon brought Mr. B., of New York, and his very agreeable family, with whom I crossed the Atlantic in the Persia last October. They went at first to another hotel, but to-day they have determined to come to that at which we are staying. I called upon them on their arrival, and asked the gentlemen to join us at dinner, and afterwards in going, in company with Mr. Buckle, whom Mr. Thayer had previously invited, to attend a fantasia, or exhibition of singing and dancing, by Arab professionals, at the house of Mr. Savallan, a wealthy French banker, who has lived a long time in the Levant and has in some degree adopted Oriental customs. He has lately sold to the Viceroy a tooth-brush, comb, and hair-brush, for the handsome price of fourteen thousand dollars. They were doubtless richly set with jewels; but the profit on these transactions is immense. Mr. B. accepted the invitation for dinner, and Mr. W. joined us afterwards.

At dinner I was seated next to Mr. Buckle, and thus had an opportunity for private conversation. He asked about American books, and told me his opinion of those he had read. He said that Quincy's History of Harvard University was the latest book on America he received before leaving England. He preferred Kent's exposition of the United States Constitution to Story's, although this also he had consulted and used. He had not seen Mr. Charles Francis Adams's complete edition of the works of his grandfather, nor Parton's Life of Jackson, both of which I begged him to read, particularly the chapters in the former in which are traced the steps in the progress of making the American Constitutions. He told me about his library in London, which is surpassed (among private libraries) only by that belonging to Mr. Van de Weyer, the Belgian Minister, whose wife is the daughter of our Bostonian Mr. Bates, of Barings. Buckle has twenty-two thousand volumes, all selected by himself; and he takes great pleasure in them. He spends eight or nine hundred pounds a year upon his library. He owns copies of all the books referred to in his History; some of them are very old and rare. He also possesses a considerable collection, made likewise by himself, of curiosities in natural history; he has added largely to it in Egypt, where, in fact, he has been buying with open hands. He said he could not be perfectly happy in leaving the country, if obliged to go away without a crocodile's egg, a trophy which as yet he has been unable to obtain.

He told me his plan of travel in America. He will not set out until our domestic troubles are composed, for he desires to see the practical working of our institutions in their normal state, not confused and disturbed by the excitements of war. He would go first to Boston and New York, the intellectual and commercial heads (as he said) of the republic,—and to Washington, the political capital. He would then like to pass from the Northern into the Southern States, but asked if he could travel safely in the latter, in view of his extreme opinions in detestation of slavery. I assured him that nobody would dare to molest one so well known, even if our war did not abate forever the nuisance of lynching, to say nothing of its probable effect in promoting the extinction of slavery. From the Southern States he said he would wish to pass into Mexico, thence to Peru and to Chili; then to cross the Pacific Ocean to Japan, to China, to India, and so back by the overland route to England. This magnificent scheme he has seriously resolved upon, and proposes to devote to it two or three years. He undertakes it partly for information and partly for relaxation of his mental faculties, which he has injured by overwork, and which imperatively demand repose. He asked many questions with regard to matters of detail,—whether he would find conveyance by steamers in the Pacific, and of what sort would be the accommodations in them and in sailing-vessels. He asked at what season he had best arrive in the United States, and whether he had better land at New York or at Boston. Boston he said he regarded as "the intellectual head of the country, and New York, you know, for trade." I answered his questions as well as I could, and told him he must not omit seeing our Western country, and some of the new cities, like Chicago. He asked me if I knew "a Mrs. Child," who had written him a letter and sent him her book about the history of religion. I knew of course that he meant "The Progress of Religious Ideas," by Mrs. L. Maria Child. He had been pleased with the letter, and with the book.

The conversation becoming general, Mr. B., of New York, told a story of an old Congressional debate in which John Randolph derisively compared Edward Everett to Richelieu: Buckle at once said he should regard it as a compliment of the very highest kind to be compared to Richelieu. You will smile, perhaps, if I tell you that I could not resist asking Buckle if he had read Dumas's historical novels, and he said he had not, although he had felt an inclination to do so. He asked one or two questions about them, and gave a rapid generalization of the history of France at that time.

This conversation at the dinner-table of course was by far the pleasantest part of the evening, for the fantasia did not amount to much, although the house was a fine one, the host most cordial, and the novelty of the entertainment was enjoyable.

February 12th. Mr. Buckle called upon T. and myself in the afternoon, and sat talking between two and three hours. I wish I could give you a full report of all that he said. He told us of the only lecture he ever delivered; it was before the Royal Institution, March 19, 1858, and was printed in "Fraser's Magazine" for April, just afterwards. It may be found reprinted in America in "Littell's Living Age," No. 734. The subject was "The Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge." Murchison, Owen, and Faraday told him afterwards, separately, that they were perfectly satisfied with it, which is certainly a strong combination of authority. He told us all about his education, which is interesting, for he has been most truly self-taught. When he was a boy, he was so delicate that it was thought he could not live; the celebrated Dr. Abernethy, who was a particular friend of his father, saw how important it was to keep him from mental excitement, and begged that he might not be troubled by lessons. Accordingly, he was never sent to school at any time, except for a brief period to a clergyman who had directions not to make him study; and he was never regularly taught anything. Until eight years of age he hardly knew his letters. At the age of fifteen he found out Shakespeare and read it with great zest. At seventeen he conceived the plan of his book, and resolved to do two things to make himself fit to write it: first, he resolved to devote four hours a day to the study of physical science, in order that he might be able fully to understand and to unfold its relations with history; secondly, he resolved to devote an equal portion of each day to the study of English composition and practice in writing, in order that he might be able to set forth his opinions with force and perspicuity. To these resolutions he adhered for twelve years. Every day, after breakfast, he shut himself up for four hours with his experiments and his investigations; and afterwards devoted four hours to analyzing the style of the best English authors, inquiring (as he said) "where it was that I wrote worse than they." He studied not only in England, but in Germany and other European countries. He learned all the languages which he knows (and he knows nearly all I ever heard of) without the aid of a master in any, excepting German, in which he began with a master, but soon dismissed him, because he hindered more than he helped. He read Hebrew with a Jewish rabbi, but that was after he had learned the language. He considers the knowledge of languages valuable only as the stepping-stone to other learning, and spoke with contempt of a person in Egypt who was mentioned to him as speaking eight languages familiarly.

"Has he done anything?"

"No."

"Then he is only fit to be a courier."

Buckle is not a university-man, although both his father and grandfather were educated at Cambridge.

He has long since abandoned the practice of writing at night, and now does not put pen to paper after three o'clock in the afternoon. When at home, in London, he walks every day, for about an hour and a half, at noon; frequently dines out and reads perhaps an hour after coming home. He goes exclusively to dinner-parties, because they take less time than others. When he is engaged in composition, he walks about the room, sometimes excitedly, his mind engrossed with his subject, until he has composed an entire paragraph, when he sits down and writes it, never retouching, nor composing sentence by sentence, which he thinks has a tendency to give an abrupt and jerky effect to what is written. Traces of this, he thinks, may be found in Macaulay's style.

Mr. Thayer showed him the little stock of books he happened to have with him at Cairo. Mr. Buckle looked them over with interest, expressing his opinions upon them. One of them, Mr. Bayle St. John's little book on the Turkish question, he borrowed, although he said that he denied himself all reading on this journey, undertaken for mental rest, and had brought no books with him. We got upon the inevitable subject of international copyright, which he discussed in a spirit of remarkable candor. His own experience was this: that the Messrs. Appleton reprinted his first volume without compensation, asking him to furnish materials for a prefatory memoir, of which request he took no notice; afterwards, when the second volume was published, they sent him something, I believe fifty pounds. In due course of time, receiving a request from Theodore Parker to that effect, he wrote a letter to aid him in the preparation of a memoir for the Messrs. Appleton's Cyclopaedia.[B]

[Footnote B: In this memoir it is stated that Mr. Buckle was born at Lee, November 24,1822. If this date be correct, his age, at the time of his death at Damascus, May 29, 1862, fell short of forty years by five days less than six months. In conversation, however, at this time, February, 1862, he spoke of his age as thirty-eight, notwithstanding the surprise that was expressed, for he appeared several years older. Mr. Glennie, in his letter describing the circumstances of Mr. Buckle's death, mentions his age as thirty-nine.]

I pointed out to Mr. Buckle the very important distinction between copyright for the British author and monopoly for the British publisher. I told him that the American people and their representatives in Congress would not have the least objection to paying a trifling addition to the cost of books, which would make, upon the immense editions sold of the popular books, a handsome compensation to the foreign authors,—but that they have very decided objections to the English system of enormously high prices for books. I instanced to him several books which can be bought in the United States for a quarter or half a dollar, while in England they cannot be purchased for less than a guinea and a half, that is, for seven or eight dollars,—although the author gains very little by these high prices, which, indeed, would be absolutely prohibitory of the circulation of the books in the United States. And since the great literary market of the United States has been created at the public expense, by the maintenance of the system of universal education, it is perhaps not unreasonable that our legislators should insist upon preserving, by the competition among publishers, the advantages of low prices of books, in pursuance of a policy which looks to a wide circulation. In Great Britain the publishers follow a different policy and insist on selling books at high prices to a comparatively small circle of readers.

Mr. Buckle was kind enough to listen attentively to this sort of reasoning and had the candor to admit that it is entitled to some degree of weight. Indeed, he said at once that he had earnestly wished to bring out a cheap edition of his own book in England, omitting the notes and references, for the use of the working-classes, of whose appreciation, as I have previously mentioned, he had received many gratifying proofs; he had made his arrangements for this purpose, but was prevented from carrying them out by the opposition of his publishers, who objected that such an edition would injure their interest in the more costly edition. But Mr. Buckle freely declared that he would, in his circumstances, rather forego the profit on the sale of his book than restrict its circulation.

I may, perhaps, be permitted to mention that another English author related to me his home experience, precisely to the same effect, in which the vested interests of his publishers thwarted him in his wish to publish an edition of his writings at a low price for general circulation. It is quite certain that the British public must themselves be disenthralled from the tyranny of high prices with which they are now burdened, before they can ask to bring another land under the dominion of their exclusive system in literature.

This conversation led to a description of the reading public in America,—of the intelligence and independence of our working-people,—of their habits of life and of thought,—about which Buckle manifested great interest, asking many intelligent questions.

Mr. Buckle is in easy circumstances, and attends personally to the management of his money. He finds no difficulty in letting it upon first-class mortgages, at five per cent., and does not expect a higher rate of interest.

February 13th. To-night there was a religious celebration, including an illumination, in the mosque at the Citadel. We had expected to go and see it; and Mr. T. had invited Mr. B. and his party, as well as Mr. Buckle, and the two lads by whom he is accompanied in his journeyings, to go with us. These young gentlemen are sons of a dear friend of Mr. Buckle's, no longer living.

But at the last moment before dinner the advice was strongly given on all sides that we should not go, lest some bigoted Mussulmans should take offence, and there might be a disturbance. Not long ago, a party of Englishmen behaved very badly in the mosque on a similar occasion, from which has resulted a disturbed state of feeling. It of course cannot be pleasant to people of any religious belief to have their ceremonies made a spectacle for curiosity; and although the moudier (mayor of the city) promised ample protection, the plan was given up, and the company being gathered, we had a pleasant evening together. The presence of the ladies of Mr. B.'s party gave the opportunity to see Mr. Buckle again under the inspiration of ladies' society, which he especially enjoys, and in the lighter conversation suited to which he shines with not less distinction than when conversing upon abstruse topics.

In the course of the evening, in the midst of conversation in which he was taking an animated part, Mr. Buckle exhibited symptoms of faintness. Fresh air was at once admitted to the room, which was full of cigar-smoke; water and more powerful restoratives were brought, but these he declined. After a few minutes' repose upon the divan, he declared that he was perfectly recovered, and half an hour afterwards took his leave with the boys. We were quite anxious until we heard that he had safely reached his boat, in which he is still living.

February 14th. Returning from the Turkish bath, I found a valentine in the shape of a telegraphic despatch only thirteen days from Boston,—thirty-six hours from Liverpool. It was dated at Boston the 1st, forwarded from Liverpool at 10 A.M. of the 13th, and reached Alexandria at 11.55 A.M. of the 14th, whence it was transmitted to Cairo without delay. This is almost equal to the Arabian Nights. The distance travelled by the despatch is about six thousand miles.

February 15th. This day we had an excursion to the Petrified Forest. It was got up partly to give us all a taste of camel-riding, and it was originally expected that everybody would go on camels; then it was agreed that half should go on camels, and "ride-and-tie." In this view, one camel and one donkey were ordered for T. and myself. But Mr. B. was subsequently persuaded that with four horses he could have a carriage dragged through the desert to the forest, which would be more comfortable for the ladies; and he made that arrangement in his own and their behalf. Freddy B. is a first-rate horseman, and an Arab steed was ordered for him. Mr. Buckle was determined to go in a thing called a mazetta, a sort of huge bedstead with curtains, borne on the back of a camel, big enough to carry a small family, in which he expected to find room for himself and the two boys travelling with him. Besides these, the party included the Reverend Mr. Lansing, the excellent head of the American mission here, the Honorable W.S., a young Englishman, and his tutor, the Reverend Mr. S., whose agreeable company had been bespoken when the camel-project was in full strength.

On looking down from the balcony at the transportation-train marshalled for the occasion, amid the admiring gaze of all the idlers of Cairo, I was at first a little chagrined to find, as the final result of the various arrangements, that, besides the camels, the mazetta, the carriage-and-four, and the proud-stepping horse, there appeared but one donkey, that selected for me. But I was, in truth, very well off. To begin with, it was not thought prudent that Mr. Buckle should use the mazetta until the procession had got beyond the narrow streets of Cairo, lest the camel bearing it should take fright and knock the whole thing to pieces against the wall of a house. Accordingly, he and his charges took donkeys, and I rode off with them, at the head of the column. By-and-by Mr. Buckle changed to the conveyance originally proposed, but a very short experiment (literally, I suspect) sickened him of the mazetta, whose motion is precisely that of a ship in a storm, and he sent back to the town for donkeys. At the next halt the ladies took him into the carriage, where he found himself, as he said, "in clover," and that was the end of his greatness in camel-riding. This remark, by the way, suggested a name ("Clover") for our boat in our voyage up the Nile just afterwards; but patriotism prevailed, and we named her "Union." It pretty soon appeared that the camel which T. was riding was young and frisky; the animal was accordingly pronounced unsafe, and T. changed to a donkey which had fortunately been brought along for a reserve. The Honorable W.S.'s camel, from the saddle becoming unfastened, pitched rider and saddle to the ground, a fall of five or six feet: fortunately no harm was done, and he bravely mounted again. The saddle upon the camel which the Reverend Mr. S. rode split in two, and the seat must have been a torture; but he bore it like a martyr, never flinching. But camel-stock had so far depreciated, and donkeys gone up, that I was able to try as much as I liked of camel-riding now and then, at the same time obliging a friend by the use of my donkey meanwhile. Riding a camel at a walk is the same sort of thing as riding a very hard-trotting horse without stirrups, and with no chance to grasp the animal fairly to hold your seat. When the camel trots, you may imagine yourself on a treadmill.

The journey to the forest, about ten miles, was safely accomplished. We found the petrifactions duly wonderful. An excellent luncheon was laid out, after which we had an hour and a half of very entertaining conversation, in which Mr. Buckle and Rev. Mr. S. held the leading parts,—all around us as desolate and silent as one could imagine. It was interesting to observe the manner in which Buckle estimated eminent names, grouping them in some instances by threes, a favorite conceit with him. John Stuart Mill, of all living men, he considers as possessing the greatest mind in the world. Aristotle, Newton, and Shakspeare are the greatest the world has produced in past times. Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare are the only three great poets. Johnson, Gibbon, and Parr are the three writers who have done the greatest harm to the English language. Of Hallam he has a strong admiration. He spoke of Sydney Smith as the greatest English wit, and of Selwyn as next to him, and described Macaulay's memory as unequalled in conversation.

For the return-trip, the donkeys generally were preferred. Miss B., with spirit, tried camel-riding for a while, and so did Master F. We stopped to look at the tombs of the Caliphs, and reached the hotel at nightfall, somewhat fatigued, but satisfied with the day's expedition.

February 16th. The morning was gratefully devoted to rest. In the afternoon, attended service at the Mission, where Rev. Mr. S. preached an interesting discourse from John xv. 1-4. On the way home met Mr. Buckle, who came in, and was persuaded to stay to dinner. In speaking of religion, he said that there is no doctrine or truth in Christianity that had not been announced before, but that Christianity is by far the noblest religion in existence. The chief point of its superiority is the prominence it gives to the humane and philanthropic element; and in giving this prominence lies its originality. He believes in a Great First Cause, but does not arrive at his belief by any process of reasoning satisfactory to himself. Paley's argument, from the evidence of design, he regards as futile: if the beauty of this world indicates a creating cause, the beauty of that great cause would suggest another, and so on. He believes in a future state, and declared most impressively that life would be insupportable to him, if he thought he were forever to be separated from one person,—alluding, it is probable, to his mother, to whose memory he dedicates the second volume of his book.[C] He has no doubt that in the future state we shall recognize one another; whether we shall have the same bodies he has no opinion, although he regards matter as indestructible. He declares himself unable to form any judgment as to the mode of future existence. Religion, he says, is on the increase in the world, but theology is declining.

[Footnote C: The words he uses are,—"To the memory of my mother I consecrate this volume."]

Mr. Buckle characterized as the sublimest passage in Shakspeare the lines in the "Merchant of Venice,"—

      "Look how the floor of heaven
  Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold!
  There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
  But in his motion like an angel sings,
  Still quiring to the young-eyed cherabims:
  Such harmony is in immortal souls!
  But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
  Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

Mr. Thayer suggested the similarity between the closing part of this passage, about our deafness to the music of the stars, owing to the "muddy vesture," and the sonnet of Blanco White which speaks of the starry splendors to which our eyes are blinded by the light of day:—

  "Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew
  Thee, from report divine, and heard thy name,
  Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
  This glorious canopy of light and blue?
  Yet 'neath the curtain of translucent dew,
  Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
  Hesperus with the host of heaven came,
  And lo! creation widened in man's view.
  Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
  Within thy beams, O Sun? or who could find,
  Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,
  That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?
  Why do we, then, shun Death with anxious strife?
  If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?"

Mr. Buckle seemed to be struck by the comparison. He proceeded to speak of Blanco White's memoirs as painfully interesting, and said that he had always liked Archbishop Whately for adhering to White after the desertion of the latter by old friends on account of his change of belief.

* * * * *

The next few days were occupied in preparations for the voyage up the Nile in company with my New York friends. Mr. Buckle had very kindly taken great interest in our plans, and had earnestly advised me to go. "You will do very wrong indeed," he said, "if you do not go." On the 19th of February we embarked; and as we saluted his boat, lying just below us in the Nile, while our own shoved off, I little thought that I should never see him again,—that his brilliant career was so shortly to come to an untimely end. The serious conversation just recorded was the last in which I took part with him.

Mr. Buckle remained in Cairo until the beginning of March, when he set out with the two boys, and Mr. J.S. Stuart Glennie, across the Desert, for Sinai and Petra. Greatly improved in health by the six weeks in the Desert, (according to Mr. Glennie's letter,) he undertook the more fatiguing travelling on horseback through Palestine. He fell ill on the 27th of April, but recovered his health, as it seemed, to such an extent that Mr. Glennie parted from him on the 21st of May. On the 29th of May, at Damascus, Mr. Buckle died. Among the incoherent utterances of his illness, it was possible to distinguish the exclamation, "Oh, my book, my book, I shall never finish my book!"

And beyond the grief felt in the loss of the kind friend and agreeable companion, our plaint, in common with the whole world, ever must be, that he did not live to finish his book.

CAVALRY SONG.

  The squadron is forming, the war-bugles play.
  To saddle, brave comrades, stout hearts for a fray!
  Our captain is mounted,—strike spurs, and away!

  No breeze shakes the blossoms or tosses the grain;
  But the wind of our speed floats the galloper's mane,
  As he feels the bold rider's firm hand on the rein.

  Lo, dim in the starlight their white tents appear!
  Ride softly! ride slowly! the onset is near!
  More slowly! more softly! the sentry may hear!

  Now fall on the Rebel—a tempest of flame!
  Strike down the false banner whose triumph were shame!
  Strike, strike for the true flag, for freedom and fame!

  Hurrah! sheathe your swords! the carnage is done.
  All red with our valor, we welcome the sun.
  Up, up with the stars! we have won! we have won!

NO FAILURE FOR THE NORTH.

We have reached a point in the history of our national troubles where it seems desirable to examine our present position, and to consider whether we ought to surrender ourselves to despair, or congratulate ourselves on decided success,—whether we should abandon all attempts to restore the Union, assert the dignity of the Constitution, and punish treason, or nerve ourselves to new effort, and determine to persevere in a righteous cause so long as a single able-bodied man remains or a dollar of available property is unexpended.

It may be, it must be, conceded that we commenced the contest with very crude and inadequate notions of what war really is. We proposed to decide the issue by appealing to the census and the tax-list,—tribunals naturally enough occurring to a mercantile and manufacturing community,—but how if the enemy prefer cannon and cold steel? Our first campaign was in the field of statistics, and we found the results highly satisfactory. Our great numerical superiority, aided by our immense material resources, gave us an early and an easy victory. We outnumbered the enemy everywhere, defeated them in every pitched battle, starved them by a vigilant blockade, secured meanwhile the sympathy and support of the whole civilized world by the holiness of our cause, and commanded its respect by the display of our material power and our military capacity,—and in a few short months crushed the Rebellion, restored the Union, vindicated the Constitution, hung the arch-traitors, and saw peace in all our borders. This was our campaign—on paper. But war is something more than a sum in arithmetic. A campaign cannot be decided by the rule of three. No finite power can control every contingency, and have all the chances in its favor.

A Moorish legend, given to us in the graceful narrative of Washington Irving, relates, that an Arabian astrologer constructed for the pacific Aben Hafuz, King of Granada, a magical mode of repulsing all invaders without risking the lives of his subjects or diminishing the contents of the royal treasury. He caused a tower to be built, in the upper part of which was a circular hall with windows looking towards every point of the compass, and before each window a table supporting a mimic army of horse and foot. On the top of the tower was a bronze figure of a Moorish horseman, fixed on a pivot, with elevated lance. Whenever a foe was at hand, the figure would turn in that direction, and level his lance as if for action. No sooner was it reported to the vigilant monarch that the magic horseman indicated the approach of an enemy, than His Majesty hastened to the circular hall, selected the table at the point of the compass indicated by the horseman's spear, touched with the point of a magic lance some of the pigmy effigies before him, and belabored others with the butt-end. A scene of confusion at once ensued in the mimic army. Part fell dead, and the rest, turning their weapons upon each other, fought with the utmost fury. The same scene was repeated in the ranks of the advancing enemy. Each renewed attempt at invasion was foiled by this easy and economical expedient, until the King enjoyed rest even from rumors of wars.

Now this is a pleasing fiction, and highly creditable to the light and airy fancy of the Moors. It almost makes one sigh that an astrologer so fertile in resources is not still extant. It is difficult to conceive, indeed, of a more felicitous arrangement for a monarch devoted to his ease, and proof against all temptations to military glory, or for a people wedded to peaceful pursuits, and ambitious only of material prosperity. But no such fascinating substitute for fields of carnage is available in our degenerate days,—"C'est charmant, mais ce n'est pas la guerre."

Nor yet is any useful example furnished by the warlike qualities of the army raised by Peter Stuyvesant for the reduction of Fort Casimir: not even when we remember that it included "the Van Higginbottoms, a race of schoolmasters, armed with ferules and birchen rods,—the Van Bummels, renowned for feats of the trenches,—the Van Bunschotens, who were the first that did kick with the left foot,"—with many other warriors equally fierce and formidable. We must, however reluctantly, leave such romantic legends and facetious chronicles, and learn more practical lessons from the sober and instructive page of history. We shall there find that war means alternate success and defeat, alternate hope and disappointment, great suffering in the field, many vacant chairs at many firesides, immense expenditures with little apparent result, "the best-laid schemes" foiled by a thousand unexpected contingencies, lamentable indecision in the cabinet, glaring blunders in the field, stagnation of industry, and heavy taxation.

  "War is a game, which, were the nations wise,
  Kings would not play at."

But nations are not always wise, and war often becomes a necessity. When, then, the necessity arises, it should be met manfully. The question once deliberately decided that peace is no longer consistent with national honor or national safety, the dread alternative must be accepted with all its hazards and all its horrors. To organize only in anticipation of certain and speedy success, to despise and underrate the enemy, to inquire with how small an army and how limited an expenditure the war can be carried on, is as unstatesmanlike as it is in flat defiance of all historical teaching. But if we carry our folly still farther in the same direction,—if we fail to take into grave account the most obvious and inevitable incidents of actual warfare,—if in our overweening confidence we neglect discipline, underrate the prime importance of promptness and decision in action, certainty and celerity in movement, and energy and activity in pursuit,—if, in a word, we expect that the defences of the enemy are to fall into our hands by means as unwarlike as those that decided the fate of Jericho, or dream that because our cause is just every precedent in history and every principle in human nature will be overruled in our favor,—then we deserve to be outgeneralled, and are fortunate, if we escape final and disastrous defeat.

Now has not this been precisely our cardinal and capital error, and are we not to-day suffering its natural consequences? To the blind and unreasoning confidence with which we began this war has succeeded a reaction running into the very opposite extreme. We are given over to a despondency quite as unwarrantable as the extravagance of our early hopes. We demanded and expected impossibilities. Forgetting that the age of miracles has passed, many are now bitterly complaining that nothing has been accomplished, and predicting that all future efforts will terminate in similar failure. Two years have not elapsed since the first gun was fired at Fort Sumter; and yet we are amazed and mortified that our forces have not overrun the whole South, that victory has not crowned our arms in every battle, and that our flag does not float triumphant over every acre of every State once called Confederate. Whether this most desirable result could have been accomplished, if this or that policy had been adopted at the outset, is one of those problems that will never be solved; nor is the inquiry at present pertinent or profitable. Let us rather ask whether, in view of the means actually employed, our discontent with the existing condition of affairs is not unmanly and unreasonable. We are to measure results, not by the efforts that we ought to have put forth, nor by those which we should put forth, if, with our dear-bought experience, we were called upon once more to undertake such a gigantic enterprise. We must recall the aspect of affairs when we first embarked on this perilous sea. We must remember how ignorant we were of all the danger before us, how imperfect was the chart by which our course was to be determined, how many shoals and sunken rocks and crosscurrents we were to encounter, as yet unknown to any pilot on board our noble ship of state, how little we knew of navigation in such angry waters, under so stormy a sky.

Turn back the pages of history for two short years, and dwell a moment on the picture presented to our eyes. A nation, enjoying to the utmost the substantial benefits belonging to fifty years of profound peace and unexampled prosperity, enervated by those habits of luxury which wealth easily accumulated always fosters, with a standing army hardly large enough to protect our Western frontier from the incursions of hostile Indians, and a navy ludicrously small in proportion to the extent of our sea-coast and the value of our commerce, is suddenly plunged into a war covering such an extent of territory and calling for such an array of power by sea and land as to dwarf into insignificance all modern wars, hardly excepting the military operations of Napoleon I.

And it must be remembered that education and habit had trained us to an implicit reliance on the sufficiency of our laws and the competency of our Constitution to meet and decide every issue that could possibly be presented. We could conceive of no public wrongs which could not be redressed by an appeal to the ballot-box, and of no private injuries for which our statutes did not provide a suitable remedy.

We were not only a law-abiding, but a peace-loving people. The report of the revolver was not heard in our streets, nor was the glitter of the bowie-knife seen in our bar-rooms. We deprecated mob-violence, and disliked the summary proceedings of Judge Lynch. We took no pains to conceal our horror of unnecessary bloodshed, and shared the views of civilized Christendom about duelling. Now and then, to be sure, a Southerner in one of his sportive moods would stab an inattentive waiter in some Northern hotel, or a chivalrous son of South Carolina, elegantly idling away a few years in a New-England university, would shoot some base-born tutor, or, as an episode in Congressional proceedings, the member from Arkansas would threaten to pull the nose, spit in the face, and gouge out the eyes of the (profane participled) sneaking Yankee,—meaning thereby a quiet, inoffensive member from Massachusetts. But these incidents of Southern civilization were not frequent enough to become fashionable. We still clung to our plebeian prejudices against lawless violence, and persisted in believing that a swaggering bully could not be an ornament to cultivated and refined society. In fact, some excellent individuals at the North went so far as to seek to disseminate these old-fashioned notions among their Southern brethren, and made annual subscriptions to what was known (alas, that we must use the historic tense!) as the "Southern Aid Society," having for its praiseworthy object the support of ministers who should preach the gospel to our ardent and impulsive neighbors. What a sad and significant commentary is it upon the ingratitude of depraved human nature, that the condescending clergyman who whilom consented to collect the offerings of these discriminating philanthropists is now a chaplain in the Confederate army, and is invoking the most signal judgments of Heaven upon his former friends and fellow-laborers!

This, then, was our condition, and these were our habits, when we were rudely awakened from our dreams of peace by the roar of cannon and the clash of arms. What wonder that the startling summons found us all unready for such a crisis? What wonder that our early preparations to confront the issue thus forced upon us without note of warning were hasty, incomplete, and quite inadequate to the emergency? Is it discreditable to us that we were slow to appreciate the bitterness and intensity of that hatred, which, long smouldering under the surface of Southern society, burst forth at once into a wide-spread conflagration, severing like flax all the ties of kindred, and all the bonds of individual friendship and national intercourse which had united us for half a century? Here was a section of our Union which had always enjoyed equal rights with us under the Constitution, and had known the Government only by its blessings,—nay, more, had actually, by the confession of its own statesmen, controlled the internal administration and dictated the foreign policy of the country since the adoption of the Constitution; which had no substantial grievance to complain of, and no fanciful injury which could not be readily redressed by legal and constitutional methods. Are we to be blamed because we could not easily bring ourselves to believe that an integral part of our nation, with such a history, could, under a pretence so bald as to insult the common sense of Christendom, rush headlong into a war which must close all its avenues of commerce, paralyze all its industry, threaten the existence of its cherished and peculiar institution,—in a word, whether successful or unsuccessful, inevitably result in its political suicide? At this very moment, accustomed as we have been for many sad and weary months to the daily development of Southern folly and madness, it is difficult, when we withdraw our minds from the present, to realize that the whole war is not a hideous nightmare.

In view of all this, I ask, is it strange that we did not at once comprehend all our danger, and did not enter the field with all our forces,—determined to fight with desperate energy until every trace of rebellion was crushed out? If, disturbed at midnight by footsteps in your chamber, you start up from sound slumber to see a truculent-looking vagabond prowling about your room with a lighted candle, do you not at once spring to your feet, collar the intruder, and shout lustily for help, if he prove too strong for you? Prompt and vigorous action in such a case is simply the impulse of instinct. But how if you recognize in the untimely visitor a member of your own household? Will you seize and overpower him without asking a single question, or waiting for a word of explanation? Will you not pause for some overt act of hostility, some convincing proof of a fell purpose? Suppose it transpire that he really means mischief, and you lose an important advantage by your delay to strike. You may regret the result; but does it in the least tend to show that you were cowardly or careless? Now was not this our exact dilemma? Although the origin of the war and the circumstances attendant upon its commencement are a thrice-told tale, are we not in danger of overlooking their bearing upon all our subsequent action? And shall we not act wisely, if we recur to them again and again, during this momentous contest?

But, asks a timid Conservative,—from whose patient button the fingers of an ardent apostle of peace have recently and most reluctantly parted,—has not this war been shamefully mismanaged by the Administration? have not contractors grown rich while soldiers have suffered? have not incompetent generals been unjustly advanced, and skilful commanders been summarily shelved? have we gained any advantages at all commensurate with our loss of blood and our expenditure of money? would not a cessation of hostilities on any terms be better than such a war as we are now waging? If we might venture to suggest a word of caution to our desponding friend, before attempting a reply to his broadside of questions, we would say: Beware how you indulge in too much conversation with a certain class of our citizens, whose hearty loyalty has been more than doubted, and whose conversion to the beauties of peace and the horrors of war is so sudden as to be very suspicious. Examine their antecedents, and you will find, that, when "border ruffians" in Kansas threatened with fire and sword the inoffensive emigrants from New England, these gentlemen saw nothing unusual in such proceedings, and answered all remonstrances with ridicule. Put them to the question to-day, and it will appear, that, from the very beginning of the struggle, all their sympathies have been with the South. They will tell you that Northern Abolitionists are alone responsible for the war; that the secession of the Southern States may have been unwise, but was not unreasonable; that they have always condemned coercion and advocated compromise; and that there is no safe and satisfactory way out of our existing difficulties but—peace. What do they mean by peace? Such peace as the highwayman, armed to the teeth, offers to the belated traveller! Such peace as Benedict Arnold sought to negotiate with the English general! They know that the South will accept no terms but the acknowledgment of her independence, or the abject and unconditional submission of the Free States. They reject the first alternative, because they dare not go before the North on such an issue. Disguise it as they may, they are willing to adopt the second. The party to which, without an exception, these men belong, is powerless without the cooperation of the South, and would consider no sacrifice of principle too great, and no humiliation of the North too degrading, if it promised the restoration of their political supremacy. Avoid all such men. Distrust their advice. That way dishonor lies, and national disgrace. If you are not "armed so strong in honesty" as to be proof against such treasonable talk, you will soon be aware of a softening of your backbone, and a lamentable loss of earnest, active patriotism. Take counsel rather of your own common sense. Looking at the question in its narrowest and most selfish bearings, you know that we can neither recede nor stand still. Submission Is slavery. Disunion paves the way for endless secession, and eternal warfare between rising and rival republics.

But there are other symptoms of disloyalty besides this persistent demand for peace. There are indications of a desire to array sections of the North against each other, and—Heaven save the mark!—by the very politicians who have been most bitter in their denunciation of "geographical parties." Here comes a little Western lawyer, with unlimited resources of slang and slender capital of ideas, barely redeemed from being an absolute blackguard by the humanizing influences of a New England college, but showing fewer and fewer symptoms of civilization as he forgets the lessons of his collegiate life; and he delights an audience of New York "roughs," adopted citizens of Celtic extraction, and lager-loving Germans, (do not cocks always crow longest and loudest on a dung-hill?) by the novel information, that "Puritanism is a reptile" and the cause of all our troubles, and that we shall never fulfil our national destiny until Puritanism has been crushed. Let us not elevate this nauseating nonsense into importance by attempting a reply. Such men must be left to follow out their inevitable instincts. They are not worth the trouble necessary to civilize them. Mr. Rarey succeeded in taming a zebra from the London Zoölogical Gardens; but a single lesson could not permanently reclaim the beast, and it soon relapsed into its native and normal ferocity. One experiment sufficed to show the power of the artist; no possible increase of value in the educated animal would have justified a prolonged and perfect training.

You ask if we have gained any advantages commensurate with our efforts, or with the high-sounding phrase of our declared purpose. Let us look at this a moment. Suppose we begin with a glance at the other side of the picture. Has all the boasting, have all the promises, been on the Federal side? Did we hear nothing of the Confederate flag floating over Faneuil Hall?—nothing of Washington falling into the hands of the enemy?—nothing of a festive winter in Philadelphia and a general distribution of spoils in New York?—nothing of foreign intervention?—nothing of the cowardice of Northern Mudsills and the omnipotence of King Cotton? Decidedly, the Rebels began with a sufficiently startling programme. Let us see how far they have carried it out. As they were clearly the assailants, we have an undoubted right to ask what they have accomplished aggressively. We say, then, that, excepting in the case of one brief raid, the soil of a single Free State has never been polluted by the hostile tread of an invading force; that every battle-field has been within the limits of States claimed as Confederate; that, while the war has desolated whole States represented in the Confederate Congress, not an acre north of Mason and Dixon's line has suffered from the ravages of the Rebel armies. Was ever another scorpion more completely surrounded and shut in by a cordon of fire?

This is surely something, but it is by no means all. Have we accomplished nothing aggressively? We will call into court a witness from the enemy's camp. Hear the recent testimony of a leading journal, published in the Confederate capital:[A]—

[Footnote A: Richmond Examiner, January 20th, 1863.]

"It is not altogether an empty boast on the part of the Yankees, that they hold all that they have ever held, and that another year or two of such progress as they have already made will find them masters of the Southern Confederacy. They who think independence is to be achieved by brilliant but inconsequential victories would do well to look at the magnitude of Yankee possessions in our country. Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri are claimed as constituent parts of the Confederation: they are as much in the power of Lincoln as Maine and Minnesota. The pledge once deemed foolish by the South, that he would 'hold, occupy, and possess' all the forts belonging to the United States Government, has been redeemed almost to the letter by Lincoln. Forts Pickens, [Sumter?] and Morgan we still retain; but, with these exceptions, all the strongholds on the seaboard, from Fortress Monroe to the Rio Grande, are in the hands of the enemy. Very consoling and very easy to say that it was impossible to prevent all this, and that the occupation of the outer edge of the Republic amounts to nothing. Drowry's Bluff and Vicksburg give the lie to the first assertion; and the onward movement of Rosecrans towards Alabama, the presence of Grant in North Mississippi and of Curtis in Middle Arkansas, to say nothing of Banks at New Orleans and Baton Rouge, set at rest the silly dream that a thin strip of sea-coast only is in possession of our foes. The truth is, the Yankees are in great force in the very heart of the Confederacy; they swarm on all our borders; they threaten every important city yet belonging to us; and nearly two hundred thousand of them are within two days' march of the Confederate capital. This is no fiction. It is a fact so positive that no one can deny it."

But this reluctant recital by no means exhausts the record of our successes. We have put into the field a volunteer force, fully armed and equipped, which, whether we consider its magnitude, the rapidity with which it has been raised, its fighting qualities, its patient endurance of unaccustomed hardships, or its intelligent appreciation of the principles involved in the contest, is without a counterpart in history. And yet more, from the invention and achievements of our iron-clads dates a new era in naval warfare, while in the value and variety of our ordnance we have taken the lead of all civilized nations. Can you find in all this nothing to quicken the pulse of your patriotism? Is here no ground for encouragement, no incitement to renewed effort?

But you complain of corruption among contractors, and of knavery among politicians. Will you point me to a single war, ever waged on the face of the earth, where all the rulers were above reproach and all their subordinates unselfish? But what will you do about it? Grant that many contractors have made dishonest fortunes out of the calamities of their country, and that there are officeholders with whom "Stand by the Constitution!" means, Stand by the public crib from which we are richly and regularly fed, and "Uphold the Administration!" should be translated, Give us our full four years' enjoyment of the loaves and fishes. What then? Shall a few worthless straws here, and a few heaps of offal there, arrest or check the onward march of a mighty army, the steady progression of a great principle? Away with such trumpery considerations! Punish with the utmost severity of the law every public plunderer whose crimes can be dragged into the light of day; send to the Coventry of universal contempt every lagging and lukewarm official; but, in the name of all that is holy in purpose and noble in action, move on! To hesitate is worse than folly; to delay is more than madness. The salvation of our country trembles in the balance. The fate of free institutions for—who shall say how long?—may hang upon the issue of the struggle.

Your catalogue of grievances, however, is still incomplete. You are dissatisfied with our generalship as displayed in the field, and with the wisdom of our policy as developed by the cabinet. Unquestionably you have a constitutional right to grumble to your heart's content; but are you not aware that such complaints are as old as the history of the human race? Do you believe this to be the first war that was ever mismanaged, and that our undoubted blunders are either novel or peculiar to Republics? There never was a greater mistake. If there were brave men before Agamemnon, and wise counsellors before Ulysses, there certainly have been incompetent commanders before Major-General A., and shallow statesmen before Secretary B. We do not monopolize executive imbecility, nor are our military blunders without parallel or precedent. To attribute our occasional reverses and our indecisive victories, our inaction in the field and our confusion in the cabinet, to our peculiar form of government, is as inconsequential as it would be to trace all our disasters to the color of President Lincoln's hair or the number of General Halleck's children.

The enemies of free institutions, hardly yet recovered from their astonishment at beholding an army of volunteers, superior in number and quality to any the world ever saw, spring into existence with such marvellous rapidity as to eclipse, in sober fact, the fabulous birth of Minerva full-armed from the head of Jove, or their still greater surprise at seeing the immense expenses of so gigantic a war readily met without assistance from abroad, by large loans cheerfully made and heavy taxation patiently borne, are reduced to the necessity of exulting over what they term our "total want of military genius," and our "incapacity to conduct a campaign successfully."

It is useless to deny that we may have challenged criticism and provoked a smile by our large promise and our smaller performance. But are we the sole and exclusive proprietors of this experience? Where in the past or the present shall we find a great and powerful nation much addicted to modesty or self-depreciation? Least of all, should we have expected such venomous criticism and such unsparing ridicule from England. To be sure, we have long since ceased to look for sympathy or even justice at her hands. We have come to understand and appreciate the tone and temper of her ruling classes towards this country. In addition to their inherited antipathy to Republics, they believe in sober earnest what one of their greatest wits said jocosely, that "the great object for which the Anglo-Saxon race appears to have been created is the making of calico." And whatever interferes, or threatens to interfere, with this ennobling occupation is sure to incur their passive displeasure, if not their active hostility. We expect nothing, therefore, from their good-will; but we have a right to demand, as a matter of good taste, that, in criticizing our campaigns, they shall not wholly ignore their own military blunders, especially those so recent as to be fresh in the recollection of every third-form school-boy in the kingdom. For, if campaigns carried on with the smallest possible result in proportion to the magnitude of the sacrifice of money and life,—if a succession of incompetent generals in command,—if critical military opportunities neglected and enormous strategic blunders committed,—if indecision, nepotism, and red tape at home, envy, want of unity, and incapacity among officers, and unnecessary and inexcusable hardship among the privates,—if all this declares the decadence of a Government, then was the sun of England hastening to its setting during the Crimean War.

We hear much said abroad about our indecisive battles, our barren victories, our failure to take advantage of the crippled condition of a defeated enemy, and our unaccountable disinclination to follow up a successful attack by a prompt pursuit. Now, not for the sake of excusing or palliating the numerous and grave errors into which we have fallen during our own unhappy struggle, nor yet to exonerate from censure any civil officers or military leaders who may be wholly or in part responsible for these errors, but simply to demonstrate that they are liable to occur under any form of government, and, indeed, have recently befallen the very Government whose rulers now hold us to the strictest account, and are most eager to convict us of extraordinary misconduct and incapacity, we propose, very briefly, and without further introduction, to examine the record of the English army during the Crimean War.

The first important battle fought on the Peninsula was that of the Alma. We will give, as concisely as possible, so much of the history of this engagement, compiled from authentic English sources, as will present a correct picture of the plans formed and the results accomplished.

"The 15th of August, 1854, was the date first fixed for the sailing of the allied forces from Varna to the Crimea. It was postponed until the 20th, then till the 22d, then the 26th,—then successively to the 1st, 2d, and 7th of September; that is, the French fleet left Varna on the 5th, and the English sailed from the neighboring port of Baltschik on the 7th." It is admitted that "these delays hazarded not only the success, but even the practicability of the whole design, as between the 15th and 25th of September the great equinoctial gales sweep over the Black Sea, and lash it into tempests of the most destructive nature."

The voyage, however, was accomplished in safety, and on the 14th of September the Allies arrived at the Crimea, off a place called the "Old Fort," only about thirty miles north of Sebastopol. The whole army was composed of 27,000 English, 24,000 French, and 8,000 Turks. The landing occupied the 14th, 15th, and 16th of September. At nine o'clock, A.M., of September 19th, the army began the advance, and on the evening of the same day rested for the night within sight of the Russian forces, strongly intrenched on the banks of the Alma, about twelve miles distant from the "Old Fort." Early in the afternoon of the following day the Allies attacked the stronghold of the enemy, and in less than three hours the Russian intrenchments were successfully stormed, and the Russian army was in full retreat. The English and French troops fought with determined and distinguished bravery, and their victory was complete. But what was decided by this bloody struggle? Bad generalship on the part of the Russians, certainly; but what else? Mr. Russell says,—"This great battle was not decisive, so far as the fate of Sebastopol was concerned, merely because we lacked either the means or the military genius to make it so." The victory was not followed up, the retreating foe were not pursued, ample time was given to the enemy to reorganize and retrieve their losses, and the evening of the eventful 20th of September found the allied forces no nearer the capture of Sebastopol than they were before the battle.

Did "the Alma" crown the allied generals with fresh and well-earned laurels? We appeal once more to Mr. Russell:—"I may inquire, Was there any generalship shown by any of the allied generals at the Alma? We have Lord Raglan painted by one of his staff, trotting in front of his army, amid a shower of balls, 'just as if he were riding down Rotten Row,' with a kind nod for every one, and leaving his generals to fight it out as best they could; riding across the stream through the French Riflemen, not knowing where he was going to, or where the enemy were, till fate led him to a little knoll, from which he saw some of the Russian guns on his flank; whereupon he sent an order to Turner's battery for guns, and seemed surprised that they could not be dragged across a stream and up a hill which presented some difficulties to an unencumbered horseman; then cantering off to join the Guards just ere they made their charge, and finding it all over while he was in a hollow of the ground." Lord Raglan, let it be remembered, was the Commander-in-Chief of the English forces. And again:—"The Light Division was strangely handled. Sir George Brown, whose sight was so indifferent that he had to get one of his officers to lead his horse across the river, seemed not to know where his division was…. If the conduct of a campaign be a succession of errors, the Crimean expedition was certainly carried on secundum artem." Once more, on the same point, and quoting from the same authority:—"All the Russian officers with whom I have conversed, all the testimony I have heard or read, coincide on these two points: first, that, if, on the 25th, we had moved to Bakschiserai in pursuit of the Russians, we should have found their army in a state of the most complete demoralization, and might have forced the great majority of them to surrender as prisoners of war, in a sort of cul-de-sac, from which but few could have escaped; secondly, that, had we advanced directly against Sebastopol, the town would have surrendered, after some slight show of resistance to save the honor of the officers." Certainly, such generalship as this did not promise very well for the results of the campaign.

Let us follow the movements of the Allies a little farther. On the morning of September 25th, the combined forces took up their line of march southward. On the 26th, they reached and occupied the town of Balaklava, about six miles distant from Sebastopol. On the 28th of the same month, Lord Raglan wrote to the Duke of Newcastle, then Secretary of War, "We are busily engaged in disembarking our siege-train and provisions, and we are most desirous of undertaking the attack of Sebastopol without the loss of a day." And yet it is not until October 10th that the Allies commence digging their trenches before the town. Meanwhile the allied army was anxious and impatient. "'When will the siege commence?' was the constant inquiry of the wearied and expectant troops. 'To-morrow,' was the usual response, 'most probably to-morrow.' But day after day came and went, and the Allies still rusted in inaction, while the Russians worked day and night at strengthening their defences." "The time dragged heavily on; still the Russians worked with incredible industry, and still the cannon of the Allies had not yet opened their thunders upon Sebastopol." On the 17th of October, twenty-one days after the occupation of Balaklava, the allied forces commenced fire by land and sea on the stronghold of the enemy. The bombardment continued from half-past six, A.M., until nightfall, but is conceded to have been a complete and mortifying failure. From this time until the 5th of November, it will not be contended that any substantial advantage was gained by the invading forces, or that material progress was made towards the reduction of the Russian Gibraltar.

Then came the Battle of Inkerman, a gallant and desperate sortie of the Russians, bravely and successfully resisted by the besiegers. The loss of life on both sides was terrible. To what extent was this battle decisive? Mr. Russell shall give his own testimony on this point:—"We had nothing to rejoice over, and almost everything to deplore, in the Battle of Inkerman. We defeated the enemy, indeed, but had not advanced one step nearer the citadel of Sebastopol." In other words, the Allies had repulsed the Russians, but had barely escaped annihilation, while, from having been the besiegers, they became the besieged, and remained so until largely reinforced from home. "A heavy responsibility," says Mr. Russell, "rests on those whose neglect enabled the enemy to attack us where we were least prepared for it, and whose indifference led them to despise precautions which, taken in time, might have saved us many valuable lives, and have trebled the loss of the enemy." The English not only committed the serious error of underrating the enemy, and neglecting the most ordinary precautions against surprise, but, during the whole of the desperate and bloody fight, they gave no proof whatever of generalship. The stubborn, unyielding bravery of the troops was the salvation of the army. "We owed the victory, such as it was, to strength, not to superior intelligence and foresight. It was a soldiers' battle, in which we were saved by the muscle, nerve, and courage of our men." Humanity shudders and the heart sickens over the sufferings of that gallant army of martyrs to cabinet incapacity and military imbecility during the long and dreary winter of 1854-55.

On the 9th of April, 1855, commenced the second grand bombardment of Sebastopol, which, though continuing for twelve days, resulted, like the first, in mortifying failure, no serious or irreparable injuries being caused to the main defences of the enemy. "The real strength of the place remained unimpaired. That which was injured during the day the Russians repaired as if by magic during the night. The particulars of this twelve days' bombardment are wearisome. The same wasted energy, the same night-skirmishes without effect, the same battering and repairing, the same unwearied exertions On the part of the Allies and wonderful endurance and resistance on the part of the Russians, together with, on each side, the same loss of life and frightful mutilations."

Two months were passed in comparative inaction, the sad monotony being varied only by ineffective sorties and indecisive skirmishes. On the 18th of June, the first grand assault of the Malakhoff and Redan was attempted. The allied troops displayed the utmost gallantry, and did all that brave men could do under disgracefully incompetent commanders, but were repulsed with horrible slaughter. No one can read the details of the fruitless massacre, without fully confirming the indignant testimony of an intelligent eye-witness, writing from the camp:—

"I know not what may have been the feelings of your home public, on reading the telegraphic news of our defeat, (for I presume the scribes at head-quarters made no attempt to conceal the naked truth, that our repulse was neither more nor less than a defeat,) but here mingled shame and indignation were general throughout the camp. Officers and men alike felt that disgrace had been incurred, and that solely in consequence of the unredeemed mismanagement of their generals. Remembering the confusion which characterized the commencement of our movement, and coupling this with the murderous preparations made by the enemy, you will be at no loss to understand that success was most improbable. During the whole affair, Lord Raglan and Sir George Brown were ensconced within our eight-gun battery; but, though this afforded a good view of the scene of the struggle, and of the disorders which marked it, they appeared to be unable to give any efficient directions for the correction of our multiplied blunders. When the whole sad scene was ended, our men straggled back to the camp in a state of dispirited confusion, well in keeping with the mob-like disorder in which they had been throughout the assault."

The final bombardment of Sebastopol took place on the 5th of September, followed on the 8th by the renewed assault of the French on the Malakhoff and of the English on the Redan. Skilful generalship, adequate forces, and desperate bravery gave victory to the French, and "the key to Sebastopol" remained in their hands. Meanwhile the English assault upon the Redan was repulsed with frightful sacrifice of life. It will not be contended that the French owed any part of their success to superior good-fortune. Indeed, all the extrinsic advantages were on the side of the English. The French were to lead off in the assault, and the tricolor waving over the captured fortification was to be the signal for the advance of the English. If the French succeeded, every sentiment of personal ambition and national pride would stimulate their allies to achieve an equal victory. If the French failed, the English had only to remain in their trenches.

Now let us examine the comparative generalship displayed in the two assaults. We are quite willing that English authority should draw the contrast. "The preparations of the French were actually scientific in their vigorous attention to every matter calculated to lead to victory: nothing appeared to have been forgotten, nothing neglected. Even the watches of the leading officers had been regulated, that there might not be the smallest error with regard to time. It is a painful reflection that this carefulness of preparation, and prescience with respect to probabilities, was not shown by the English general and his associates in arranging the mode of attack. When the orders were promulgated, on the 7th, many officers shook their heads doubtingly, and observed, in deprecating tones, 'This looks like another 18th of June.' It was generally observed that the attacking columns were not strong enough, that they were too far behind, and that the trenches did not afford room for a sufficient number of men."

The signal for the French assault was given: thirty thousand men, weary of long inactivity, and burning to add new lustre to the bright record of their country's military glory,—drums and trumpets meanwhile sounding the charge, and the air resounding with shouts of "Vive l'Empereur,"—darted from their trenches, swarmed up the embankments, dashed over the parapet, swept the enemy like chaff before them; and the Malakhoff was won. Hours of the fiercest fighting found the French still masters of the situation; at nightfall the Russian general sullenly drew off his defeated forces, and the victory was complete.

It is painful to turn from this brilliant picture to the sombre coloring and the dreary details of the attack on the Redan. To three thousand doomed men was assigned the perilous undertaking. Incredible as it may appear, in view of previous failure, there seems to have been no adequate preparation, no intelligible plan, no competent leader. It was simply brute force assailing brute force. The few men who actually entered the Redan neglected to spike the guns; no reinforcements came to their aid; everything was blind excitement, and headlong, undisciplined haste. "The men of the different regiments became mingled together in inextricable confusion. The Nineteenth men did not care for the officers of the Eighty-Eighth, nor did the soldiers of the Twenty-Third heed the command of an officer who did not belong to their regiment. The officers could not find their men,—the men lost sight of their officers." But why dwell on what soon became mere butchery? The loss of the storming party, in killed, wounded, and missing, was 2447.

Considered as a military movement, it would seem to be conceded that no grosser blunder could have been made than the selection of so small a force for so desperate an undertaking. There was no chance of success but by attacking simultaneously both flanks and the salient of the Redan. The storming party was barely large enough for the assault of the salient, thus exposing the handful of men to a murderous and fatally destructive fire from the flanks. This was bad enough, certainly, but worse remains behind. English critics have most severely censured our generals for sometimes placing new recruits in posts of danger, requiring cool heads, steady nerves, and the habit of discipline. Perhaps they have forgotten the following incident. Among the picked men selected out of the entire British forces as this very storming party were raw recruits from the Ninety-Seventh Regiment, who were designated for this perilous service as a punishment for their cowardice in a recent skirmish!—and to make this punishment still more severe, they were ordered to lead off in the assault! An historian of the war says,—"The inexperience of some of these recruits seems almost incredible. One young fellow, who came to the field-hospital with a broken arm and a bullet in his shoulder, carried his firelock with him, but confessed that he had never fired it off, as he was unable to do so. The piece, upon being examined, was found to be in perfect order. Such poor undisciplined lads, fresh from the plough, ought never on any occasion to have been pitted against the well-drilled soldiers of Russia; but it was something worse than blundering to lead them on to the assault of a formidable work like the Redan. Such generalship recalls to our mind the remark of the Russian officer with regard to the military force of England, that 'it was an army of lions led by donkeys.'" Mr. Russell states that many of these recruits "had only been enlisted a few days, and had never fired a rifle in their lives."

Now will it be believed that General Codrington, to whom was committed the planning and directing of this ill-starred and disastrous enterprise, succeeded Sir James Simpson as Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty's forces in the Crimea? How must the shade of Admiral Byng have haunted Her Majesty's Government, unless it was a most forgiving ghost! If General Codrington's promotion could have been delayed a little more than eighteen months, it might have occurred appropriately on the centennial anniversary of the death of that ill-fated naval commander, convicted by court-martial and shot for "not doing his utmost"!

On the evening of the 8th of September, the Russians blew up their magazines, fired the buildings, and evacuated the town. So fell Sebastopol, after a siege of three hundred and forty-five days. It has been considered by the English a bit of very choice pleasantry to allude to our oft-recurring statement, that "the decisive blow had been struck," and that "the backbone of the Rebellion was broken." It may not be impertinent to remind them, that the report, first circulated in France and England in the latter part of September, 1854, and fortified by minute details, that Sebastopol—the backbone of Russian resistance to the allied arms—had fallen, was repeated and reiterated from time to time during the war, until the phrase, "Sebastopol est pris," passed into a by-word, and did good service in relieving the cruelly overworked Greek Kalends.

And now we come naturally to the consideration of another and an important inquiry. Did the beginning of the war find, or did its progress develop or create, a single English general of commanding military capacity, competent to handle in the field even so small an army as the British contingent in the Crimea? Of Lord Raglan Mr. Russell says, and without doubt says truly,—"That he was a great chief, or even a moderately able general, I have every reason to doubt, and I look in vain for any proof of it, whilst he commanded the English army in the Crimea." Another authority says,—"The conviction that he was not a great general is universal and uncontradicted. He could perform the ordinary duties of a general satisfactorily, but he was lamentably deficient in those qualities which constitute military genius. He possessed considerable professional experience, great application, and remarkable powers of endurance; but he lacked the energy, vehemence, and decision of character which are essential to the constitution of a successful military chieftain." To his hesitation in council, and his want of energy and promptness in action, have always been attributed, in large measure, the ruinous delays and the fearful suffering in the army which he commanded. Lord Raglan died in June, 1855, in his sixty-seventh year. General Simpson succeeded him. "It was believed at the time," writes Mr. Russell, "and now is almost notorious, that he opposed his own appointment, and bore testimony to his own incapacity." "He was slow and cautious in council, and it is no wonder that where Lord Raglan failed, General Simpson did not meet with success." The English press and people demanded his recall. His incompetency was everywhere acknowledged, and indeed he himself would have been the last man to deny it. In about three months from the date of General Simpson's appointment, "the Queen was graciously pleased to permit him to resign the command of the army." As we have already seen, his place was filled by General Codrington. This officer was as signally rewarded, because he had failed, as he could have been, if he had succeeded. Mr. Russell quotes approvingly the comment of a French officer upon this appointment:—"If General Codrington had taken the Redan, what more could you have done for him than to make him General, and to give him command of the army? But he did not take it, and he is made General and Commander-in-Chief." With equal discrimination, Sir James Simpson was created Field-Marshal! The remainder of the campaign gave General Codrington no further opportunity of displaying his qualities for command. No other important action occurred before the termination of hostilities.

Great credit is certainly due to Mr. Russell for fearlessly exposing the errors and incompetency of the three officers successively at the head of the English army, in spite of "much obloquy, vituperation, and injustice," and for bearing his invariable and eloquent testimony to the bravery, endurance, and patience of the British private soldier.

In this brief recital of English blunders during the Crimean War, we have made no mention of the desperate and disastrous "charge of the Light Brigade," the gross and culpable inefficiency of the Baltic fleet under Admiral Sir Charles Napier, and other instances of military incapacity no less monstrous. Enough, however, has been told to more than justify the very mild summing-up of Mr. Russell, that the "war had exposed the weakness of our military organization in the grave emergencies of a winter campaign, and the canker of a long peace was unmistakably manifested in our desolated camps and decimated battalions."

Why should we add to this dismal recital the appalling sufferings of the soldiers,—helpless victims to bad management at home and shameful neglect in the field,—the long, freezing nights of trench-work under a driving rain, "without warm or water-proof clothing,—the trenches two and three feet deep with mud, snow, and half-frozen slush, so that many, when they took off their shoes, were unable to get their swollen feet into them again, and might be seen barefooted about the camp, the snow half a foot deep on the ground,"—creeping for shelter into "miserable tents pitched as it were at the bottom of a marsh, where twelve or fourteen unhappy creatures lay soaking without change of clothing" until they were called out again to their worse than slave-labor,—disease, brought on by exhaustion, exposure, overwork, and deficient food, sweeping the men off by thousands, and yet no sufficient supply of medical stores and no adequate number of medical attendants, not a soul seeming to care for their comfort or even for their lives,—so neglected and ill-treated that "the wretched beggar who wandered about the streets of London led the life of a prince compared with the British soldiers who were fighting for their country, and who were complacently assured by the home authorities that they were the best-appointed army in Europe." The world knows the whole sad story by heart. And is it not written in the volumes of evidence sworn to before the Commission appointed by Parliament to inquire into the condition of the army?

Nor is it necessary to dwell upon the extent to which the home administration was responsible for the general mismanagement of the war, in its main features and its minute details,—nor the thoroughly English stolidity with which all complaints were received by every member of the Government, from the cabinet minister who dictated pompous and unmeaning despatches, down to the meanest official who measured red tape,—nor the intense and universal popular indignation which, after a year "full of horrors," compelled the resignation of the Aberdeen Ministry. Lord Derby did not, perhaps, overstate the verdict of the nation, when he said in the House of Lords,—"From the very first to the very last, there has been apparent in the course pursued by Her Majesty's Government a want of previous preparation,—a total want of prescience; and they have appeared to live from day to day providing for each successive exigency after it arose, and not before it arose. TOO LATE have been the fatal words applicable to the whole conduct of Her Majesty's Government in the course of the war." The change in the Ministry, however, by no means cured all the evils which had existed; for, although the sufferings of the soldiers—thanks in large part to the providential appearance and heroic conduct of Florence Nightingale—were greatly diminished, still, as we have seen, the military blunders continued to the close of the war.

Now, if we do not greatly mistake, the lesson which this country should learn from the mortifying experience of the English army in the Crimea is not one of exultation over its lamentable and unnecessary errors, but rather of indifference to the insulting criticism of a nation which can so ill afford to be critical, and of determination to profit in every possible way by those blunders which might have been avoided. The history of all wars, moreover, should teach us that now and then there comes a time when to hold the olive-branch in one hand and the sword in the other, especially if the olive-branch is kept in the foreground and the sword in the background, involves not only a sad waste of energy, but is mistaken kindness to our enemies.

Those who have read—and who has not?—the charming story of "Rab and his Friends" will remember the incident which, for the sake of brevity, we reluctantly condense. A small, thorough-bred terrier, after being rudely interrupted in his encounter with a large shepherd's-dog, darts off, fatally bent on mischief, to seek a new canine antagonist. He discovers him in the person of a huge mastiff, quietly sauntering along in a peaceful frame of mind, all unsuspicious of danger. The angry terrier makes straight at him, and fastens on his throat. The rest of the story shall be told in the graphic language of the author. "To our astonishment, the great creature does nothing but stand still, hold himself up, and roar,—yes, roar: a long, serious, remonstrative roar. How is this? He is muzzled! The bailies had proclaimed a general muzzling, and his master, studying strength and economy mainly, had encompassed his huge jaws in a home-made apparatus, constructed out of the leather of some ancient breeching. His mouth was open as far as it could; his lips curled up in rage,—a sort of terrible grin; his teeth gleaming, ready, from out the darkness; the strap across his mouth tense as a bowstring; his whole frame stiff with indignation and surprise; his roar asking us all round, 'Did you ever see the like of this?' He looked a statue of anger and astonishment, done in Aberdeen granite. We soon had a crowd; the chicken held on. 'A knife!' cried Bob; and a cobbler gave him his knife: you know the kind of knife, worn away obliquely to a point, and always keen. I put its edge to the tense leather; it ran before it; and then!—one sudden jerk of that enormous head, a sort of dirty mist about his mouth, no noise,—and the bright and fierce little fellow is dropped, limp and dead."

If we draw a useful moral from this homely incident, it will not be the first time that the unerring sagacity of animals has been serviceable to man. A stealthy, cunning, unscrupulous, desperate, devilish foe has seized the nation by the throat and threatens its life. The Government is strong, courageous, determined, abundantly able to make a successful resistance, and even to kill the insolent enemy; but—it is muzzled: muzzled here by conservative counsels, and there by radical complaints,—by the over-cautious policy of one general, and the headlong haste of another,—by a too tender regard for slavery in some States, and by a too zealous anxiety for instant emancipation in others,—by fear of provoking opposition in one quarter, and by a blind defiance of all obstacles in another. Now what shall be done? Shall we hesitate, despond, despair? Never! For Heaven's sake, take off the muzzle. Use every weapon which the God of Battles has placed in our hands. Put forth all the power of the nation. Encourage and promote all fighting generals; cashier all officers who are determined to make war on peace principles; arm, equip, and discipline negroes, not to burn, plunder, and massacre, but to meet their and our enemies in fair and open fight.[B] Demonstrate to the world that we are terribly in earnest. Waste no time in discussing the chance of foreign intervention. Postpone Pacific railroads, international telegraphs, polygamy in Utah, African colonization, everything, to the engrossing and emergent crisis which now confronts the Government. Make the contest sharp, short, and decisive. Put down the Rebellion, vindicate the majesty of the Law, the sacredness of the Union, and the integrity of the Constitution. There will be time enough, after this is done, to discuss all minor questions and all collateral issues. One paramount duty lies directly before us. Let us perform this duty fearlessly, and leave the future with God.

[Footnote B: The opposition to the employment of negro regiments, if made by traitors North or South, can be easily comprehended,—if made by loyal men, is wholly inexplicable. Your neighbor's house takes fire at night. The flames, long smouldering, make rapid progress, and threaten the comfort, certainly, if not the lives of his household, and the total destruction of his property. The alarm is given. An engine comes promptly to the rescue. It is just in season to save his dwelling. The firemen spring with ready alacrity to their places. But stop! He suddenly discovers the appalling fact that they are negroes! True, there is not a moment to be lost. No other engine is, or can be, within helping distance. The least delay means poverty and a houseless family. And yet he rudely dismisses the dusky firemen, folds his arms with Spartan stoicism, and, looking complacently on the burning building, says, "Better this than to rely on the assistance of niggers!" Is it Spartan stoicism? Is it not rather stark lunacy? And would you not take immediate measures to provide such a man with permanent quarters in a mad-house?]

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Roba di Roma. By WILLIAM W. STORY. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 355, 369. London: Chapman & Hall. 1863.

The father of the celebrated Mr. Jonathan Wild was in the habit of saying, that "travelling was travelling in one part of the world as well as another; it consisted in being such a time from home, and in traversing so many leagues; and he appealed to experience whether most of our travellers in France and Italy did not prove at their return that they might have been sent as profitably to Norway and Greenland." Fielding himself, the author of this sarcasm, was a very different kind of traveller, as his Lisbon journal shows; but we think he told no more than the truth in regard to the far greater part of those idle people who powder themselves with dust from the highways and blur their memories with a whirl through the galleries of Europe. They go out empty, to come home unprofitably full. They go abroad to escape themselves, and fail, as Goethe says they always must, in the attempt to jump away from their own shadows. And yet even the dullest man, if he went honestly about it, might bring home something worth having from the dullest place. If Ovid, instead of sentimentalizing in the "Tristia," had left behind him a treatise on the language of the Getae which he learned, we should have thanked him for something more truly valuable than all his poems. Could men only learn how comfortably the world can get along without the various information which they bring home about themselves! Honest observation and report will long continue, we fear, to be one of the rarest of human things, so much more easily are spectacles to be had than eyes, so much cheaper is fine writing than exactness. Let any one who has sincerely endeavored to get anything like facts with regard to the battles of our civil war only consider how much more he has learned concerning the splendid emotions of the reporter than the events of the fight, (unless he has had the good luck of a peep into the correspondence of some pricelessly uncultivated private,) and he will feel that narrative, simple as it seems, can be well done by two kinds of men only,—those of the highest genius and culture, and those wholly without either.

It gradually becomes clear to us that the easiest things can be done with ease only by the very fewest people, and those specially endowed to that end. The English language, for instance, can show but one sincere diarist, Pepys; and yet it would seem a simple matter enough to jot down the events of every day for one's self without thinking of Mrs. Posterity Grundy, who has a perverse way, as if she were a testatrix and not an heir, of forgetting precisely those who pay most assiduous court to her. One would think, too, that to travel and tell what you have seen should be tolerably easy; but in ninety-nine books out of a hundred does not the tourist bore us with the sensations he thinks he ought to have experienced, instead of letting us know what he saw and felt? If authors would only consider that the way to write an enlivening book is not by seeing and saying just what would be expected of them, but precisely the reverse, the public would be gainers. What tortures have we not seen the worthiest people go through in endeavoring to get up the appropriate emotion before some famous work in a foreign gallery, when the only sincere feeling they had was a praiseworthy desire to escape! If one does not like the Venus of Milo, let him not fret about it, for he may be sure she never will.

Montaigne felt obliged to separate himself from travelling-companions whose only notion of their function was that of putting so many leagues a day behind them. His theory was that of Ulysses, who was not content with seeing the cities of many men, but would learn their minds also. And this way of taking time enough, while we think it the best everywhere, is especially excellent in a country so much the reverse of fast as Italy, where impressions need to steep themselves in the sun and ripen slowly as peaches, and where carpe diem should be translated take your own time. But is there any particular reason why everybody should go to Italy, or, having done so, should tell everybody else what he supposes he ought to have seen there? Surely, there must be some adequate cause for so constant an effect.

Boswell, in a letter to Sir Andrew Mitchell, says, that, if he could only see Rome, "it would give him talk for a lifetime." The utmost stretch of his longing is to pass "four months on classic ground," after which he will come back to Auchinleck uti conciva satur,—a condition in which we fear the poor fellow returned thither only too often, though unhappily in no metaphorical sense. We rather think, that, apart from the pleasure of saying he had been there, Boswell was really drawn to Italy by the fact that it was classic ground, and this not so much by its association with great events as with great men, for whom, with all his weaknesses, he had an invincible predilection. But Italy has a magnetic virtue quite peculiar to her, which compels alike steel and straw, finding something in men of the most diverse temperaments by which to draw them to herself. Like the Siren, she sings to every voyager a different song, that lays hold on the special weakness of his nature. The German goes thither because Winckelmann and Goethe went, and because he can find there a sausage stronger than his own; the Frenchman, that he may flavor his infidelity with a bitter dash of Ultramontanism, or find fresher zest in his chattering boulevard after the sombre loneliness of Rome; the Englishman, because the same Providence that hears the young ravens when they cry is careful to furnish prey to the courier also, and because his money will make him a Milor in partibus. But to the American, especially if he be of an imaginative temper, Italy has a deeper charm. She gives him cheaply what gold cannot buy for him at home, a Past at once legendary and authentic, and in which he has an equal claim with every other foreigner. In England he is a poor relation whose right in the entail of home traditions has been docked by revolution; of France his notions are purely English, and he can scarce help feeling something like contempt for a people who habitually conceal their meaning in French; but Rome is the mother-country of every boy who has devoured Plutarch or taken his daily doses of Florus. Italy gives us antiquity with good roads, cheap living, and, above all, a sense of freedom from responsibility. For him who has escaped thither there is no longer any tyranny of public opinion; its fetters drop from his limbs when he touches that consecrated shore, and he rejoices in the recovery of his own individuality. He is no longer met at every turn with "Under which king, bezonian? Speak, or die!" He is not forced to take one side or the other about table-tipping, or the merits of General Blank, or the constitutionality of anarchy. He has found an Eden where he need not hide his natural self in the livery of any opinion, and may be as happy as Adam, if he be wise enough to keep clear of the apple of High Art. This may be very weak, but it is also very agreeable to certain temperaments; and to be weak is to be miserable only where it is a duty to be strong.

Coming from a country where everything seems shifting like a quicksand, where men shed their homes as snakes their skins, where you may meet a three-story house, or even a church, on the highway, bitten by the universal gad-fly of bettering its position, where we have known a tree to be cut down merely because "it had got to be so old," the sense of permanence, unchangeableness, and repose which Italy gives us is delightful. The oft-repeated non è più come era prima may be true enough of Rome politically, but it is not true of it in most other respects. To be sure, gas and railroads have got in at last; but one may still read by a lucerna and travel by vettura, if he like, using Alberti as a guide-book, and putting up at the Bearas a certain keen-eyed Gascon did three centuries ago.

Mr. Story has taken Italy with due deliberation, having lived there now some fifteen years. He has thus been enabled to let things come to him, instead of running after them; and his sensations have had time to ripen slowly toward the true moment of projection, without being shaken and hurried, or huddled one atop of the other. We doubt if the picturesque can be profitably done by the job, for in aesthetics the proverb that half a loaf is better than no bread does not hold. An Italian festa, we suspect, if you make it a matter of business, will turn its business-side to you, and you will go away without having been admitted to the delightful confidence of its innocent gayety and unpremeditated charm. Tourists must often have remarked, in making an excursion to a ruin or bit of picturesque scenery, that what chance threw in to boot was by far the best part of their bargain, for the most beautiful experiences come not by observation. The crumbling temple lured them forth, but it was only to see a sunset or to hear a nightingale.

What between winters in Rome and summers in one or the other mountain-town, with intervals of absence now at Florence and now at Siena, Mr. Story has had such opportunities as fall to the lot of very few foreigners. For, in studying the ways of a people, it is as with wild animals,—you must be long enough among them to get them wonted, so that you may catch them at unawares. His book is on the whole a delightful one, and would have been so without qualification, had he confined it to a relation of his own experiences. Where he narrates or describes, he is always lively and interesting; where he disserts or grows learned, he gives up his vantage-ground, and must consent to be dull like everybody else. Anybody can be learned, anybody except Dr. Holmes dull; but not everybody can be a poet and artist. The chapter on the Evil Eye is a marvel of misplaced erudition. The author has hunted all antiquity like a policeman, and arrested high and low on the least suspicion of a squint. Horace and Jodocus Damhouder, (to whose harmless Dam our impatience tempts us to add an n,) Tibullus and Johannes Wouwerus, St. Augustine and Turnebus, with a motley mob of Jews, Christians, Greeks, Romans, Arabians, and Lord-knows-whats, are all thrust into the dock cheek by jowl. For ourselves, we would have taken Mr. Story's word for it, without the attestation of these long-winded old monsters, who wrote about charms and enchantments in a style as potent in disenchantment as holy-water, and who bored their own generation too thoroughly to have any claim upon the button of ours. Every age is sure of its own fleas without poking over the rag-bag of the past; and of all things, a superstition has the least need of proving the antiquity of its pedigree, since its very etymology is better than the certificate of all the Heralds' Colleges put together. We are surprised that so clever and lively a man as Mr. Story, should not have seen that in such matters one live fact is better than fifty dead ones, and that even in history it is not so much the facts as what the historian has contrived to see in them that gives life to his work.

But learning makes a small part of Mr. Story's book; only, as the concluding chapter happens to bristle with quotations and references, thickly as the nave of St. Peter's on a festival with bayonets, this is the last taste left in the mouth. The really valuable parts of the book (and they make much the larger part of it) are those in which the author relates his own experiences. After so many volumes stuffed like a chiffonnier's basket with the shreds of ancient Rome, it is really refreshing to come upon a book which makes us feel that Italy is still inhabited by very human beings, and contains something more than the tombs of the Scipios, and inscriptions interesting only to people who think a dead Roman donkey better than a living Italian lion. The chapters on Street-Music in Rome, on Games, on Gaffes and Theatres, on Villeggiatura and the Vintage, on the Ghetto, the Markets, and Summer in the City, are all of them delightful and new. They really teach us something, while the learning, we are sorry to say, does nothing of the kind. Several of these chapters our readers will remember enjoying in the "Atlantic." They are good for those who have been in Italy, for those who are going thither, and, above all, for those who must stay at home. They contain the most cheerful and picturesque descriptions of Italian life and scenery we have ever met with. And we cannot be too thankful to Mr. Story that he leaves a theme so poetical in itself to be poetical, without any officious help from himself, and that, though an artist, he does not enter on any of those disquisitions which would have made Sir Joshua shift his trumpet. On the whole, we are inclined to forgive him the polyglot lumber of his chapter on the Evil Eye in consideration of the scenery and galleries which he has spared us. We think we see symptoms that the Nature-mania which began with Rousseau is on the decline, and that men and their ways are getting into fashion again as worth study. The good time is perhaps coming when some gallant fellow will out with it that he hates mountains, and will be greeted with a shout of delight from his emancipated brethren.

Mr. Story is a person of very remarkable endowments. An accomplished musician and poet, (we ought to have said before how remarkably good the translations in these volumes are,) a skilful draughtsman, the author of reputable law-books, he would seem to have been in danger of verifying the old saw, had he not proved himself so eminently a master in sculpture. We think the country is deeply indebted to Mr. Story for having won so complete a triumph at the London World's Fair with his Cleopatra and Libyan Sibyl, at a time when English statesmen and newspapers were assuring the world that America was relapsing into barbarism. Those statues, if we may trust the unvarying witness of judicious persons, are conceived and executed in a style altogether above the stone-cutting level of the day, and give proof of real imaginative power. Mr. Story's genius and culture, with the fresh spur of so marked a success, will, we are sure, produce other works to his own honor and that of his country. For we feel that we have a country still,—feel it the more deeply for our suffering, and our hope deferred,—and out of the darkness of to-day we have still faith to see a fairer America rising, a higher ideal of freedom, to warm the soul of the artist and nerve the arm of the soldier.

Hand-Book of Universal Literature. From the Latest and Best Authorities. By MRS. ANNE C.L. BOTTA. A New Edition. 12mo. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1862.

A thing once done assumes a magical simplicity. No matter what may have been the previous difficulty, or how much work may be involved in the result, yet, when the work is done, the problem solved, all the difficulty and labor promptly disappear from view, as if in dread of being led captive in triumphal procession after the Caesar who has mastered them. Thus, it does not seem at all strange that we should have a book professing to guide us through all the intricacies of general literature; indeed, now that the work is put into our hands, it seems so easy of accomplishment that the only marvel would appear to be that we have had none hitherto. Yet the conditions necessary to such a work are of the rarest to be found; not so rare, indeed, when each is considered separately, but rarely to be met with in combination.

In order even to attempt a work of this nature, its utility must first be fully appreciated; but, unfortunately, those whose need is the greatest, as being immediately present, would on that very account be incompetent to supply the need, while those who by dint of patient study have brought themselves up to the point of competency for the task no longer realize the want,—just as men who have become rich by industry forget the necessities of poverty, which were the earliest spurs upon their energy.

The great majority of readers, therefore, have good reason to thank Mrs. Botta, that, after having met a great educational need in her own experience, she has benevolently set about supplying the same need in the experience of others. The same motive which has led her to do this has also made her work, from the peculiar manner in which it is conducted, an important contribution toward a more perfect educational system than generally prevails; though we would not do her the injustice to imply that what she has done claims merit on this account alone or chiefly. It does claim merit in this way, and of a very high order, because it avoids a prominent fault that vitiates most works intended to promote the general diffusion of knowledge. The fault referred to is the same which De Quincey, in a note to his "Political Economy," has called the greatest vice of teaching,—namely, that the teacher does not readily enter into, as an inheritance, the difficulties of the pupil. Merely to have corrected this fault, to have met the popular mind half-way and upon its own ground, was to furnish an important condition hitherto lacking in the field chosen.

The extent of the work—embracing, as it does, the whole field of literature—imposes other and more difficult conditions. Originality, in any primary sense, was of course an impossibility; a single lifetime would not suffice even for the most cursory examination of original materials on so grand a scale. It was necessary, therefore, to select and make use of the best authorities, critical and historical, those whose researches have been most valuable and comprehensive, in each particular department of the field. These authorities were to be found, not in a single language, but in several; and even after they were found, and the various results of their investigations put at their just estimate, the important work of selection had then only just commenced. Here were the master-critics and antiquaries,—the Müllers, Champollions, and all. Some use must be made of each; but the compass, no less than the design, of the work demanded the exclusion of all secondary and unimportant matter, yet in such a manner that the ideal unity should not be at all disturbed. Here was required, not merely tact and discrimination, but a high degree of philosophical analysis; and since this was valueless except as it was followed by comprehensive synthesis, the power of artistic combination was no less requisite to the complete result.

From the foregoing remarks it must not be supposed that there has been throughout a remodelling of all the material used. On the contrary, it is one of the most important of the features which give value and interest to the work, that in frequent instances the material has been presented precisely as it came to hand; a felicitous or humorous turn of a sentence, a pointed antithesis, a happy grouping of historic incidents, or a vigorous clinching of manifold thoughts in a single expression, has been happily preserved where by others it might have been ejected, or marred in the changing, for the sake of giving to the work a factitious claim to an originality which, in such a field, is plainly the least desirable characteristic. Our most hearty thanks are due to Mrs. Botta that she has been willing to sacrifice what at the best would have been a spurious claim to the purely legitimate one, of having conquered almost insuperable difficulties, and, by the most conscientious fidelity, elaborated a really valuable treatise, where before there existed none at all.

So great as has been the need of this work, so great will be the appreciation of it at the hands of the reading public. A whole has been given where hitherto only parts had existed, and those for the most part inaccessible to the general reader.

We have no space to enlarge upon the many particular excellences of the book. It is vivacious in style, having none of the tedium belonging to most works of this description. There is very much concerning ancient religion, and concerning the classification of languages, as well as respecting the peculiarities of each, that has never before been presented in a popular form. We have rarely, indeed, seen so much that was valuable, and so well digested, compressed within such limited bounds.

The New American Cyclopaedia; a Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge. Edited by GEORGE RIPLEY and CHARLES A. DANA. 16 vols. royal 8vo. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

The sixteenth and concluding volume of the "New American Cyclopaedia" brings Messrs. Ripley and Dana to the end of one of the most laborious and important literary works ever undertaken in this country; and the voice of the public, we are sure, will be all but unanimous in congratulating them upon the generally satisfactory manner in which they have performed their task. The cost of the work, according to a New-York journal, has been over four hundred thousand dollars. Six years have been spent in its execution, and nearly five hundred writers have been employed to contribute to it. Naturally, the articles are of very unequal merit; but it is fair to remark that a high standard of scholarship and literary polish has evidently been aimed at, from the first volume to the last, and there is scarcely any point upon which the "New American Cyclopaedia" may not safely challenge comparison with any work of similar pretensions in the English language.

Practically, none of the cyclopaedia previously accessible in our language has now much value. Such works as "Rees's," the "Edinburgh," the "London," and the "Penny" Cyclopaedias, the "Encyclopaedia Metropolitana," and the excellent, though rather brief, "Encyclopedia Americana" of Dr. Francis Lieber, the only one, except the "New American," ever written in this country, however good in their day, have long been entirely out of date. The "English Cyclopaedia" of Charles Knight, and the eighth edition of the famous "Encyclopaedia Britannica," were completed while the work of Messrs. Ripley and Dana was yet in progress; but they are so different from the latter in their scope and execution, and so much more costly, that they can hardly be said to rival it. The first-named is a revised issue of the old "Penny Cyclopaedia" of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and retains some of the best features of that excellent work. Its arrangement seems to us peculiarly inconvenient; but its most glaring defect is the lack of American subjects, and the slipshod, unsatisfactory, and inaccurate manner in which the few that are found in it have been treated. The "Encyclopaedia Britannica" is open to the same objection. The first edition of this great work appeared over ninety years ago. It contained neither historical, biographical, nor geographical articles, and was rather a collection of treatises on the principal arts and sciences than a cyclopaedia in the common acceptation of the term. It has since been five times almost remodelled, arranged alphabetically, and greatly enlarged; but it still preserves its old distinguishing feature of treating great scientific and historical subjects exhaustively under a single head: for instance, there are two elaborate historical articles on "Britain" and "England," but none on Charles I. or Charles II.; long articles on "Animal Kingdom" and "Mammalia,"—so long, in fact, that it is almost impossible to find anything in them without an index,—but none on the separate animals. For the scholar, this plan, perhaps, has its advantages; but, for the unlearned reader, who turns to his cyclopaedia to find an intelligible account of the habits of some particular creature, without caring greatly what its precise place may be in the zoölogical kingdom, or looks for a name without knowing whether it belongs to a fish or a river, no book that professes to be a manual of reference could well be arranged on a more inconvenient principle. One of the chief duties of a cyclopaedia is to save trouble,—to put one on the high-road to knowledge, without unnecessary delay in finding the guide-boards. But send a half-educated man to look for a scrap of learning in an article of a hundred pages, and one might as well at once turn him loose into a library. And what is worse, the unwieldy dimensions of these great articles are out of all proportion to the information they contain. We venture to assert that the ponderous "Encyclopaedia Britannica," with its twenty-two quarto volumes, will tell less, for instance, about the Horse, or about Louis XIV., than the much smaller work of Messrs. Ripley and Dana. In the "New American Cyclopaedia" there are few articles over twenty pages long. The leading subjects in the sciences, such as "Anatomy," "Botany," "Physiology," etc., have from three to ten pages each,—enough to give an outline of the principles and history of the science. The great geographical and political divisions of the globe are treated at somewhat greater length. Every important plant, beast, bird, and fish, every large town, river, lake, province, and mountain, every notable monarch, and every great battle, (not forgetting "Bull Run" and the "Chickahominy Campaign,") is the subject of a separate article.

Next to this very convenient subdivision of topics, the most striking merit of the new cyclopaedia is, perhaps, comprehensiveness. Among its faults, very few faults of omission can fairly be charged; and, indeed, it seems to us rather to err in giving too many articles, especially on American second-rate preachers, politicians, and literary men, all of whom are no doubt ticketed for immortality by a select circle of friends and admirers, but in whom the public at large take the faintest possible interest. On the other hand, the space given to such heroes is small; and so long as they do not exclude more valuable matter, but only add a little to the bulk of the volumes, they do no great harm, and may chance to be useful. In the department of natural history this work is much fuller than any other general dictionary. It is also especially complete in technology and law, (the latter department having been under the care of Professor Theophilus Parsons,) and sufficiently so in medicine, theology, and other branches of science.

Among the articles upon which its success and reputation will chiefly rest are those relating to technology. With scarcely an exception, they are plain, practical, and full of common sense. Those on "Cotton" and "Wool" and their manufactures, the various metals and the ways of working them, (the article on "Zinc" is the best we have ever seen on that subject,) "Gas," "Ship," "Railroad," "Telegraph," "Sewing-Machine," "Steam," and "Sugar," are compact summaries of valuable knowledge, and will go far to commend the work to a class of persons who, except in our own country, are not much given to reading or book-buying. They vindicate the claims of the Cyclopaedia to be a popular dictionary, not intended solely for the scholar's library, but directed to the wants of the artisan and man of business. It is not too much to say of many of them,—of "Ship," for instance, and "Telegraph,"—that, apart from their value as records of industrial progress and invention, they are interesting enough to furnish a very pleasant hour's occupation to the desultory reader.

The other scientific articles are mostly written in a clear, unpretending style, with a sparing use of technical expressions; and so far as we have discovered, they do ample justice to all recent discoveries. The articles by Professor Bache on the "Tides," Professor Dalton on "Embryology," Professor J.D. Dana on "Crystallography," Dr. W.H. Draper on the "Nervous System," Professor James Hall on "Palaeontology," Professor Henry, of the Smithsonian Institution, on "Magnetism" and "Meteorology," James T. Hodge on "Earth" and "Electricity," Frank H. Storer on "Chemistry" and kindred subjects, Dr. Reuben on "Heat," "Light," "Vision," "Winds," etc., and the philological contributions of Dr. Kraitsir and Professor Whitney, do the highest credit to the work in which they appear. The forbidding appearance of Dr. Kraitsir's articles will get more notice than their deep learning. We cannot but regret that such valuable papers as those on "Hieroglyphics," "Cuneiform Inscriptions," "Indian Languages," and we may add, though belonging to another class of subjects, "Brahma" and "Buddha," by the same author, should not have been dressed with a little more taste, and the naked deformity of barbarous paradigms covered with some of the ornaments of a readable style. It is the more a pity, because the articles are well worth any care that could be spent upon them.

The biographical articles are sufficiently numerous, and, though rigidly condensed, are full enough for all ordinary purposes. There are few such elaborate biographies as those contributed by Macaulay, De Quincey, and others, to the "Encyclopaedia Britannica"; but Mr. Bancroft's "Jonathan Edwards," Mr. Everett's "Hallam," "Washington," and "Daniel Webster," President Felton's "Agassiz," Professor Lowell's "Dante," Professor Schaff's "Luther" and "Melancthon," Mr. Seward's "DeWitt Clinton," A. W. Thayer's "Beethoven," "Handel," "Haydn," and "Mozart," Richard Grant White's "Shakespeare," and the articles on "Patrick Henry," "Washington Irving," "Milton," "Southey," "Schiller," "Swift," and many others we might name, are admirable specimens of literary composition. Among miscellaneous articles that deserve particular praise are a well-written and elaborate history of the Jewish people and literature under the title "Hebrews"; a picturesque account of "London"; a summary of all that is known about "Japan"; excellent histories of "Newspapers" and "Periodical Literature"; a brilliant article on "Athens" by the late President Felton; a review of "Arctic Discovery"; valuable and exceedingly interesting papers on "Army," "Artillery," "Infantry," and "Cavalry," with one on "Gunnery" by Commodore Charles Henry Davis; "Painting"; "Sculpture"; "Serfs"; "Slavery"; "Hungary"; and the best published account of the "Mormons." The article on the "United States" fills one hundred and twenty pages, including thirty-three pages of fresh statistical tables, and gives an admirable summary of our history down to last September; it closes with a comprehensive survey of American literature. The supplement gives a biography of nearly every general in the Union and Rebel armies.

The promises of the editors on the score of impartiality have been well kept. It would be too much to expect them to satisfy everybody, or never to be caught tripping; but in the great questions of religion and politics, they seem to have preserved a happy mean between the outspoken freedom of the partisan and the halting timidity of the man who never commits himself because he never has an opinion. Their contributors represent nearly every Christian creed, every shade of politics, and every part of the English-speaking world, from Salt Lake City to London, and from Mobile to Montreal.

We have only to add that the Cyclopaedia does fuller justice to our own country than she has ever received from such a book before; that the historical and statistical articles present the latest accessible information; and that, so far as our opportunities of examination permit us to judge, the book, though of course not free from errors, is accurate to a more than ordinary degree. The labor of the editors has been careful and conscientious; and they have produced a work which must long endure as a valuable contribution to American literature and a credit to American scholarship.

Manual of Geology: treating of the Principles of the Science with Special Reference to American Geological History, etc. By JAMES D. DANA. 8vo. Philadelphia: Theodore Bliss & Co. London: Trabner & Co.

No work on any science has yet been published in our language more exhaustive of facts, more clear in statement, or more philosophical in general character and arrangement, than Dana's "Mineralogy," as presented in its last and revised edition.

Of course, the announcement of a "Manual of Geology" by the same author could not fail to excite hopes that a long-felt want on the part of the American public was to be met, a void in our scientific literature to be filled. Nor are we disappointed in our expectations, now that the work has appeared and time has been given for its careful perusal. On the contrary, we feel a degree of satisfaction that might perhaps express itself too strongly in praise, if we were not withheld by the supposition that a proper notice of the contents of the volume would do more for its appreciation by the reader than any language of eulogy.

What, then, is the distinctive character of the work, and wherein do the contents so differ from previous publications as to claim our especial notice?

In the first place, we would state, that, while it is a manual of general geological knowledge concerning the history of the earth and of life on its surface, and full of information concerning the strata and geological phenomena of all parts of our globe, it is yet peculiar, inasmuch as it treats of the principles of the science with special reference to American Geological History. In this will be found its great value to American students; for who of them has not had his patience tried, and his enthusiasm often chilled, in vain attempts to solve the questions which have sometimes arisen in his mind concerning American geology, and has not sought their solution in the only way open to him,—a consultation of innumerable State Reports, and other publications, not half of which were accessible when required?

Another distinctive feature of the work is the prominence given to Historical Geology, or that portion which treats of the successive formation of the strata of the different periods, and of the development and characteristics of the life upon the surface. The whole treatment of this exhibits in a marked degree the extended research and philosophical ability of the author.

GENERAL CONTEXTS AND DIVISIONS OF THE WORK.

Physiographic Geology.—This embraces a general survey of the earth's features: its continents, oceans, lakes, river-systems, oceanic and atmospheric currents, climates, distribution of forest-regions, deserts, etc.

Lithological Geology.—This treats of the rocks, and of their arrangement: the first embracing an account of all the important chemical elements that enter into their constitution, the minerals and organic materials that occur in their composition, and the kinds and distinguishing characteristics of those that make up the earth's surface; the second presenting the arrangement of rocks, stratified and unstratified,—the structure due to deposition and other agencies,—the dislocations of strata, and the consequent faults and distortions of fossils contained in them,—together with considerations upon the age and chronological division of all the strata of the earth's surface.

Historical Geology.—This third part of the volume, and that which peculiarly characterizes the work, opens with some general remarks upon the divisions in Geological History, and the announcement of certain important principles to be kept in view while considering the subject. The progress of life is then described as the basis of subdivision into Geological Ages; and the subdivisions of geological time are presented as follows:—

I. Azoic Time or Age.

II. Palaeozoic Time. 1. The Age of Mollusks, or Silurian. 2. The Age of Fishes, or Devonian. 3. The Age of Coal Plants, or Carboniferous.

  III. Mesozoic Time.
    4. The Age of Reptiles.

  IV. Cenozoic Time.
    5. The Age of Mammals.

  V. Era of Mind.
    6. The Age of Man.

And in connection with this is given a table of the further subdivision of this history into Geological Periods, and a map showing the distribution of the rocks of each of these periods over the surface of the United States.

The great divisions above given are, as stated, essentially the same as proposed by Professor Agassiz, who, however, made the era of Fishes to embrace the first and second ages of Palaeozoic Time, the Silurian and the Devonian, instead of restricting it, as now done, to the latter, and calling the former the Age of Mollusks.

Following these general considerations, each great division of geologic time is successively taken up, commencing with the Azoic. Each period of the several divisions is treated of in order; and the rocks of each epoch and their distribution described, first, as they exhibit themselves in America,—then, more briefly, as they appear in Europe. A full account of the life that manifested itself in each epoch, both vegetable and animal, is likewise given in the same order. The igneous and other disturbing agencies are then considered, and general remarks added upon the geography, the character of the surface, and various phenomena of the period.

The whole of this portion of the work is abundantly illustrated with well-executed figures of all the characteristic species that distinguish the several periods, mostly drawn from American examples.

Dynamical Geology.—This particular branch of the subject is made less prominent than usual in geological works, but it will not be found lacking in any point.

The subject is presented in the following order:—

1. Life as an agent in protecting, destroying, and making rocks.

2. Cohesive Attraction.

3. The Atmosphere as a mechanical agent.

4. Water as a mechanical agent.

5. Heat as an agent in volcanic phenomena, igneous eruptions, metamorphism, veins, etc.

6. Movements of the earth's crust, plication of strata, origin of mountains, earthquakes, etc.

7. Chemistry of Rocks.

Under the first head, we have much interesting matter concerning peat and coral formations, coral reefs and their origin, illustrated with figures.

Under the head of Water as an Agent, some plates are given, new to the general reader, of the remarkable cañons of the Colorado, which so well illustrate the powerful agency of this element in wearing away for itself deep channels in the strata. Under the same head is an interesting essay upon Glaciers, with figures, one of which is a reduced copy of a sketch in Agassiz's great work, representing the Glacier of Zermatt, in the Monte-Rosa region.

Under the head of Heat as an Agent, we have, as might be expected, interesting and valuable matter upon volcanic phenomena, and those of metamorphism.

We have thus briefly passed in review the contents of the work, and without criticism, too, for we would scarcely have a sentence in the book altered or omitted. Yet we do not always concur in all the views expressed or implied by the author. For instance, we consider the evidence of the Jurassic age of the Ichnolitic strata of the sandstone of the Connecticut River too strong to allow of their being any longer classed among the Triassic. We certainly differ from him in much that is said upon the subject of Man, as of one species. Yet we do not care to dwell upon these points, especially the latter. Our author will not expect to find all readers agreeing with him upon such mooted questions.

We do not think that we overestimate the value of this work, when we express our belief that its publication will mark an era in our geological progress. By this we do not mean to imply that its character is such as to be of great service to those among us who are already learned in the geology and palaeontology of our continent; but we do mean to affirm, that, by the efficient aid which this work will be to them, thousands and tens of thousands who have sought hitherto for information on its great subjects, when seeking was literally "groping in darkness," will be helped forward to a degree of knowledge respecting the history and life of our globe which they could not otherwise have attained.

Elements of Military Art and History: comprising the History and Tactics of the Separate Arms, the Combination of the Arms, and the Minor Operations of War. By EDWARD DE LA BARRE DUPARCQ, Captain of Engineers in the Army of France, and Professor of the Military Art in the School of Saint-Cyr. Translated and edited by BRIGADIER-GENERAL GEORGE W. CULLUM, Chief of Staff of the General-in-Chief of the Armies of the United States. 8vo. New York: D. Van Nostrand.

War has its science and its art. There is a domain of general principles, which have their application in all the active operations of war; and military science is but the sum of these principles in their theory and practice. The art of war deals more directly with the details and practical direction of military affairs, and abounds in rules of action, organization, and administration. Military science and art are equally the results of experience in war. Principles of strategy have grown out of the exercise of the highest military mind in weighing the general features of campaigns, and from the perceptive and logical recognition of those elements essential to success. The art of war has grown up as a body of practices, traditions, and rules, naturally resulting from the immense sum of experience in military life and action among all nations. It is, indeed, so inwoven with military history that the two should be studied in connection. Military art is more mature than military science; and in war, as in the practice of other professions and trades, definite and empirical rules for daily guidance, based mainly on practice, serve almost to exclude science and to keep it unprogressive. When, however, a Napoleonic mind becomes truly imbued with vital military principles, its most successful strokes may result from a bold disregard of rules under the lead of higher intelligence. But as military science is very imperfect, and as Hannibals, Fredericks, and Napoleons are not every-day products, it behooves lesser lights to study the art of war most conscientiously, in the hope of at least escaping the fatal category of blunders which crude officers are forever repeating.

The publication of a really good book on Military Art and History is, just now, a fortunate event, and its appearance two years since might have saved us much costly and mortifying experience. Enlightened men of all nations concede to the French school of soldiers and military authors a certain preeminence, due partly to the genius of the people and partly to the immense vital growth of war-craft under Napoleon. Barre Duparcq is one of the most favorably known among recent military writers in France. As an engineer officer and Professor of Military Art in the famous school of Saint-Cyr, he has been led to study fortification, military history, army-organization, and the art of war with a methodical thoroughness, which, besides other highly valued works, has given us its ripe fruit in the volume before us. If not the very best, this is certainly among the best of the numerous volumes devoted to this topic; and General Cullum's judgment in selecting this work for translation is fully justified by the admirable system, clear and learned, but brief exposition, and entirely trustworthy quality, which even hasty readers must recognize. Could this book be put into the hands and heads of our numerous intelligent, but untrained officers, it would work a transformation supremely needed. It is lamentable to think how many precious lives and how much national honor have been thrown away from the lack of just that portion of military instruction which is here offered in a single volume. Though no one book can make an accomplished officer, we may say that no officer can read Duparcq's Elements without positive advantage and real progress as a soldier. The topics treated, with constant illustration from history, are, the organization and functions of the four arms, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineers; organization of active armies; marches and battles; outposts; detachments; armed reconnoissances; passage of rivers; convoys; partisans; redoubts; barricades; heights; roads; farms or houses; forages; defiles; villages; and field hygiene.

General Cullum is well known as one of the most proficient students of military science and art in our service, and is amply qualified to prepare an original textbook on this subject. That he should have found time to translate Duparcq's work, amid his arduous and important services as General Halleck's chief of staff and chief engineer during the remarkable Western campaign, shows an industry only to be explained by his intense realization of the need of a book like this, as an antidote to that deficient military instruction which has been so replete with bad results. The translation is a faithful and lucid rendering of the original, and the technical words and expressions are generally satisfactory equivalents of the French terms.

We venture to express the hope that this painful war will lead to a fresh and successful study of military science and art in relation to American campaign-elements, so that future contingencies can be more creditably met than was that which Secession suddenly precipitated on us.

Rejoinder to Mrs. Stowe's Reply to the Address of the Women of England.

Emily Faithfull, "printer and publisher in ordinary to Her Majesty," has issued from the "Victoria Press," in London, a small pamphlet with the above title, written at the request of a committee of British women by Miss Frances Power Cobbe, author of "Intuitive Morals." As Mrs. Stowe's "Reply" was first printed in this magazine, we here give the whole "Rejoinder."

"The following Address has been written with the belief that it embodies the general sentiments of English women on the subject of Slavery. It has been decided to seek no signatures on the present occasion, rather than repeat the vast undertaking of obtaining any number which should adequately correspond with the half-million names appended to the former Address.

"MADAM,—You have asked of the women of England a solemn question. You have recalled the Address which half a million of us once sent you, appealing to our sisters in America to raise their voices against Slavery; and you demand, Where is now the spirit which dictated that appeal? You quote the evidence of our press and our public speakers, that the righteous indignation against Slavery which once kindled in all English hearts has waned, if it have not died out; and you allege that we have been wanting in generous faith and sympathy for the North in her great struggle, and have even descended to afford countenance, if not assistance, to the South. You challenge us to account for this dereliction from our former ardent sentiments, and you ask wherefore it is that now, when the conflict has assumed its most terrible form, and the peaceful persuasions of philanthropists have been superseded by the shock of contending armies spreading desolation through your land,—now we stand afar off, viewing coldly that awful contest, and sending, instead of cheering words of sympathy and faith, only doubts and lamentations over a 'fratricidal war,' and regrets partitioned with strange impartiality between the sufferers in the cause of free America, and those who have, in their own audacious words,' founded their commonwealth on the institution of Slavery.' You retort our old appeal in the face of these things, and you say to us, 'Sisters, you have spoken well; we have heard you; we have heeded; we have striven in the cause, even unto death; we have sealed our devotion by desolate hearth and darkened homestead,—by the blood of sons, husbands, and brothers. In many of our dwellings the very light of our lives has gone out, and yet we accept the lifelong darkness as our own part in this great and awful expiation, by which the bonds of wickedness shall be loosed, and abiding peace established on the foundation of righteousness. Sisters, what have you done, and what do you mean to do? In view of the decline of the noble anti-slavery fire in England, in view of all the facts and admissions recited from your own papers, we beg leave, in solemn sadness, to return to you your own words:—

"'A common origin, a common faith, and, we sincerely believe, a common cause, urge us at the present moment to address you on the subject of the fearful encouragement and support which is being afforded by England to a slave-holding Confederacy. We appeal to you as sisters, as wives, as mothers, to raise your voices to your fellow-citizens, and your prayers to God, for the removal of this affliction and disgrace from the Christian world.'

"Madam, in answering this solemn appeal, we do not desire to detail the causes which may, in a measure, explain or palliate this failure in our national sympathy, whose existence (in so far as it is true) we profoundly deplore. Enough, and more than enough, debate has been already held on the complicated motives which have blended in your war, as in all other human concerns, and on the occasional acts of questionable spirit which must inevitably attend the public policy and sentiments of a nation engaged in deadliest conflict and bleeding at every pore. Somewhat you may perhaps forgive to those who have withheld their full sympathies, jealous that a most righteous cause should be maintained with any save the most untainted motives and the most unbending rectitude, and who have failed even yet to read in your policy the full desire to accomplish that end of universal emancipation whereto Providence is visibly directing the course of events. Somewhat, also, may be forgiven to those who have been misled by the misrepresentations of a portion of our press, and offended by the inimical spirit of your own. But, Madam, although many lips have been closed which ought to have spoken to you words of blessing, though the voice of England which has reached you has lacked that full tone of heartfelt sympathy you had justly anticipated, yet believe not that our nation is truly alienated from yours, or apostate to the great principles of freedom which were once our glory. The heart of England is sound at the core: Slavery is now and ever an abomination in our eyes; nor has the dastard proposition to recognize the Confederate States failed to call forth indignant rejection, and that even with peculiar earnestness from those suffering operatives whose relief such a measure might have secured. It is to assure you of this, to vindicate ourselves from the shame of turning back in the hour of trial,—most foreign to our common Saxon race,—that we, the Women of England, offer you this response.

"We do not less abhor Slavery now than when your eloquent words called out an echo of feeling throughout Europe, such as no other appeal for the wronged or the miserable ever produced. We abhor Slavery, judging it simply as human beings, and because of all the agonies and tortures it has occasioned. We abhor it, judging it especially as women, because of all the unspeakable wrongs, the hideous degradation, it has inflicted on our sex. But we abhor it not only because of these its results, nor with a hatred which would be withdrawn, were they disputable now or remediable hereafter. We abhor Slavery for itself, and for its own enormous iniquity,—even the robbing from a human being of that freedom which it was the supreme gift of Omnipotence to bestow. We hold, that, were it in the power of the slaveholder to make his slaves absolutely happy, Slavery would not less be an injustice and a crime. Happiness is not to be measured against freedom, else would God have left us brutes, not men, and spared us all the sorrows of struggling humanity. And whereas it has been argued that the negro is of a race inferior to his master, and that therefore it is justifiable to enslave him, we reply, that the right to freedom is not founded on the equality of the holder to any other human being, else were every white man also lawfully to be enslaved by every other stronger or wiser than himself. But the right to freedom is founded simply and solely on the moral nature wherewith God has endowed every man and woman of the human race, enabling them, by its use, to attain to that virtue which is the end of their creation. And whereas others, again, have defended Slavery on the grounds of the supposed Divine sanction to be found for it in the Scriptures, we reply, that we deplore the condition of those whose religion can lend itself to the task of seeking to appeal to God for the permission of an institution which the consciences He has made unequivocally loathe and condemn. Nor shall we hesitate to stigmatize such an appeal as hypocrisy, until the theologians who make it advance a step farther, and tell us that they are prepared to represent Jesus of Nazareth as one who, in fitting time and place, might have been a purchaser and a master of slaves. Thus, Madam, do we still condemn and abhor Slavery, as we have ever done, as in itself, and in its own nature, utterly evil and utterly indefensible; and we consider its vast and terrible results of cruelty and immorality to be only the natural fruit of so stupendous a wrong.

"We have not withheld from your nation either the tribute of admiration for the vast sacrifices you have made, or of sympathy for the bereavements and sufferings you have endured. But the expression of such admiration and sympathy from the truest hearts among us has been almost silenced by the solemn joy wherewith we have beheld your country purging herself, even through seas of blood, for her guilty participation in the crimes of the past, and preparing for herself the stainless future of 'a land wherein dwelleth righteousness.' We have rejoiced in the midst of sorrow to know that the doom of Slavery was written by a Divine Hand, even from the hour when its upholders dared to believe it possible in the face of Heaven to build up a State upon an injustice. We have looked with awe-struck consciences to this great revelation of the moral laws which govern the nations of the earth, and show to men who sought for God in the records of distant ages that the Living Lord still rules on high, and is working out even before our eyes the delivery of the captive and the punishment of the oppressor. The greatest national sin of Christian times has wrought the greatest national overthrow. The hidden evil of the land, which long smouldered underground, has blazed forth at last like a volcano, bursting in sunder the most solid of human institutions, and pouring the lava-streams of ruin and desolation even to the remotest shores where the spoil of guilt had been partaken. But while we behold with awe, in the present calamity, the manifestation of Supreme Justice, we look with confident hope to the final issue to which it must lead. In whatever mode that end may be brought out, and through whatever struggles America may yet be doomed to pass, we are assured that only one termination can await a conflict between a nation which has abjured its complicity with crime and a confederation which exists but to perpetuate that crime forever. It is not now, in the presence of the events of the last three years, that we shall be tempted to fear that Wrong and Robbery, and the systematic degradation of woman, may possibly prove to be principles of stability, capable of producing the security and consolidation of a commonwealth! Your courage in this Titanic strife,—the lavish devotion with which the best blood of your land has been poured out on the field, and the tears of childless mothers shed in homes never before visited by the sorrows of war,—the patriotic generosity with which your treasures have been cast into the gulf opened suddenly in your busy and prosperous land, even as of old in the forum of ancient Rome,—these noble acts of yours inspire with confidence in you, no less than pride in the indomitable energies of our common race. But above your valor and your patriotism, we look with still higher hope to those moral laws whose vindication is involved in the issue of the conflict; and we feel assured, that, while for the Slave-Power the future can hold no possibility of enduring prosperity, for Free America it promises the regeneration of a higher and holier national existence, when the one great blot which marred the glory of the past shall have been expiated and effaced forever.

"This, Madam, is the belief and these are the hopes of thousands of Englishmen. They are, we are persuaded, even more universally the belief and hopes of the Women of England, whose hearts the complicated difficulties of politics and the miserable jealousies of national rivalry do not distract from the great principles underlying the contest. The failure of English sympathy whereof you complain is but partial at the most, and for that partial failure we deeply and sorrowfully grieve. But the nation at large is still true; and wherever it has been possible to learn the feelings of the great masses, no lack of ardent feeling has ever been found in England for the Northern cause. Though senseless words and inhuman jests have been bandied across the Atlantic, yet we are assured that in the heart of both our nations survives unchanged that kindred regard and respect whose property it is, above other human feelings, to be indestructible. At this hour of your own greatest need and direful struggle,—at this hour, when a pirate from our ports is ravaging your shores, as you believe (albeit erroneously) with our guilty connivance—at this very hour you have come forward with noblest generosity, and sent us the rich vessel which has brought food to our starving people. The Griswold has been your answer to the Alabama. It is a magnanimous, a sublime one; and English hearts are not too cold to read it aright, or to cherish through all future time the memory thereof. Scorn and hate are transient and evanescent things; charity and love have in them the elements of immortality.

"Madam, we answer your Appeal by this rejoinder, and send this message through your honored hands to our sisters in America: Our hearts are with you in unchanged sympathy for your holy cause, in undying abhorrence of Slavery, in profound sorrow for your present afflictions, and in firmest faith in the final overthrow of that unrighteous Power whose corner-stone is an injustice and a crime.

"IN BEHALF OF

"THE WOMEN OF ENGLAND."

* * * * *

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