The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 27, January, 1860 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics, by Various

Antique Art, beside affording a standard by which the modern may be measured, has the remarkable property-giving it a higher value—of testing the genuineness of the Art-impulse.

Even to genius, that is, to the artist, a true Art-life is difficult of attainment. In the midst of illumination, there is the mystery: the subjective mystery, out of which issue the germs—like seeds floated from unknown shores—of his imaginings; the objective mystery, which yields to him, through obvious, yet unexplained harmonies, the means of manifestation.

Behind the consciousness is the power; behind the power, that which gives it worth and occupation.

To the artist definite foresight is denied. His life is full of surprises at new necessities. When the present demand shall have been fulfilled, what shall follow? Shall it be Madonna, or Laocoön? His errand is like that of the commander who bears sealed instructions; and he may drift for years, ere he knows wherefore. Thorwaldsen waited, wandering by the Tiber a thousand days,—then in one, uttered his immortal "Night."

Not even the severest self-examination will enable one in whom the Art-impulse exists to understand thoroughly its aim and uses; yet to approximate a clear perception of his own nature and that of the art to which he is called is one of his first duties. What he is able to do, required to do, and permitted to do, are questions of vital importance.

Possession of himself, of himself in the highest, will alone enable the student in Art to solve the difficulties of his position. His habitual consciousness must be made up of the noblest of all that has been revealed to it; otherwise those fine intuitions, akin to the ancient inspirations, through whose aid genius is informed of its privileges, are impossible.

Therefore the foremost purpose of an artist should be to claim and take possession of self. Somewhere within is his inheritance, and he must not be hindered of it. Other men have other gifts,—gifts bestowed under different conditions, and subject in a great degree to choice. Talent is not fastidious. It is an instrumentality, and its aim is optional with him who possesses it. Genius is exquisitely fastidious, and the man whom it possesses must live its life, or no life.

In view of these considerations, the efforts of an artist to assume his true position must be regarded with earnest interest, and importance must be attached to that which aids him in attaining to his true plane.

Such aid may be, and is, derived from the influences of Italy. Of those agencies which have a direct influence upon the action of the artist, which serve to assist him in manifesting his idea and fulfilling his purpose, mention will be made in connection with the works which have been produced in Italian studios. They have less importance than that great element related to the innermost of the artist's life,—to that power of which we have spoken, making Art-action necessary.

It is not, however, exclusively antique Art which exercises this power of elevation. Ancient Art may be a better term; as all great Art bears a like relation to the student. In Florence the mediaeval influences predominate. Rome exercises its power through the medium of the antique.

There is much Christian Art in Rome. Yet its effect is insignificant, compared with that of the vast collection of Greek sculptures to be found within its walls. Instinctively, as the vague yearnings and prophecies of youth lift him in whom they quicken away from youth's ordinary purposes and associations, his thought turns to that far city where are gathered the achievements of those who were indeed the gods of Hellas. To be there, and to demand from those eloquent lips the secret of the golden age, is his dream and aim, and there shall be solved the problem of his life.

But antique Art, waiting so patiently twenty centuries to afford aid to the artist, waits also to sit in judgment upon his worth and acts. Woe to him who cannot pass the ordeal of its power, and explain the enigma of its speech!

Nothing can be more pitiful and sad than the condition of one who, having been subjected to the influence of ancient Art, has not had the ability to recognize or the earnestness of purpose essential to the apprehension of the truths which it has for his soul instead of his hands. But if, through truthfulness of aim, and a sense of the divine nature of the errand to which he seems appointed, he reach the law of Art, then henceforth its pursuit becomes the sign of life; if the impulse bear him no farther than rules, then all he produces goes forth as a proclamation of death. There is no middle path. Art is high or low: high, if it be the profoundest life of an earnest man, uttering itself in the real, even though it be awkwardly, and in violation of all accepted methods of expression; low, if it be not such utterance, even though consummate in obedience to the finest rules of all Art-science. There can be no other way. The life is in the man, and not in the stone; and no affectation of vitality can atone for the absence of that soul which should have been breathed into existence from his own divine life.

As was said, possession of self is the only condition under which the quantity and quality of the Art-impulse may be determined. It is only when a man stands face to face with himself, in the stillness of his own inner world, that his possibilities become apparent; and it is only when conscious of these, and inspired by a just sense of their dignity, that he can achieve that which shall be genuine success. Once he must be lifted away and isolated from worldly surroundings, relieved from all objective influences, from the pressure of all human relations; once the very memory of all these must be blotted out; once he must be alone. This is possible to a Mendelssohn in the awful solitude of Beethoven's "Sonate Pathétique," to a painter in the presence of Leonardo's "Last Supper," and to a sculptor in the hushed halls of the Vatican.

But that which lifts the true artist above externals, the externals of his own individual being, crushes the false, to whom the marble and the paint are in themselves the ultimate.

This train of thought has been suggested by the fact of the dominion which classic Art has acquired over sculptors, and by the influence of the sixteenth and seventeenth century schools upon painters. It is due, however, to our sculptors in Italy that credit should be given them for having resisted the influence of forms, of the mere letter of the classic, to a greater extent than the students of any other nation. Whether or not they have been receptive of the spirit of the antique remains to be seen.

American painters have been less fortunate. Too often the lessons of the old masters, and especially those of the earliest, the Puritan Fathers of Art, have been unheeded; or the rules and practices which served them temporarily, subject to the phase of the ideal for the time uppermost, have passed into permanent laws, to be obeyed under all conditions of Art-utterance.

The United States have had within the last twenty years as many as thirty sculptors and painters resident in Italy. At the beginning of the present year ten sculpture studios in Rome and Florence were occupied by Americans. We will speak of these artists in the order in which they entered the profession of an art which they have served to develop in this first period of its history in America. The eldest bears the honored name of Hiram Powers.

Three parties have been remarkably unjust to this man,—namely, his friends, his enemies, and himself.

Neither the artist nor his friends need feel solicitude for his fame. The exact value of his excellence shall be estimated, and the height of his genius fully recognized, when the right man comes. Other award than that from an age on a level with his own life can be of small worth to one who has attained to the true level of Art. Fame must come to him of that vision which can pierce the external of his work and penetrate to the presence of his very soul. His action must be traced to its finest ideal motive,—as chemist-philosophers pursue the steps of analysis until opaque matter is resolved to pure, ethereal elements. His fame must be from such vision, and it will approach the universal just in proportion as his pulse beats in unison with the heart of mankind. Whatever may be an artist's plans, or those of his friends, in regard to his valuation by the world, while he is living, ultimately he himself, divested of all save his own individuality, must stand revealed.

Those who in other departments of action are necessarily governed somewhat, or it may be entirely, by rules of conduct general in nature and universal in application, may fail to receive or may escape justice. They are to a great degree involuntary agents, and subject to the laws of science, to the operations of which they are obliged to conform. The private fact of the man is hidden by the public general truth. If, however, the energies of the individual overtop the science, enabling him to assert himself above the summit of its history, then is he accessible to all generations, and can in no wise avoid or forfeit his just fame.

In Art, this intimate relation of the result of action to the actor is complete,—inasmuch as, to be Art, to rise above being something else, the shadow and mockery of Art, it must be of and from the man, a spontaneity, a reflection, light for light, shade for shade, color for color, of his entire being; and with this effect his will has little to do. Therefore, unless he be an impostor, he need give himself no trouble regarding his future. His works shall serve as a clue, produced century after century, along which posterity shall feel its way back to his studio and heart. No need of thought for his morrow.

But for his to-day he may well be solicitous. If fame be his reflection, he has also the shadow of himself, his reputation.

It is a great error to assume that these two effects are so related that the augmentation of the one must increase the other, and as great a mistake to confound the two. The truth is, that reputation and fame are rarely coincident. They are not unfrequently in direct opposition,—so much so, that some names, which the world cannot give up, have to be filtered through a thick mass of years, to purify them of their reputations, and leave them simply famous.

No name has suffered more than that of Powers. His friends, blind to the laws which govern these matters, have wrought bravely to construct for him a reputation commensurate with his vaguely imagined worth; but upon his real worth they have evinced no desire to lay their foundation. No accurate survey has been made of his abilities, no definite plan of his artist-nature. Often a place has been demanded for his name in the history of Art, and the first place too, because of his fine frank eye, or the simplicity of his manners,—because his workmen cut the chain of the Greek slave out of one piece of stone, or the marble of the statue itself had no spot as big as a pin-head,—because he himself chooses to rasp and scrape plaster, rather than model in plastic clay,—because he tinkered up the "infernal regions" of the Cincinnati Museum years ago, or spends his time now in making perforating-machines and perforated files; in fine, for any reason rather than for the right legitimate one of artistic merit, they have demanded room for their favorite.

Even those who look deeper than this, appreciating Mr. Powers as a gentleman, an ingenious mechanic, and a skillful manipulator in sculpture, have been content or constrained to urge his claims to attention upon false considerations. We have heard it gravely remarked, as a matter of astonishment, that there were individuals—refined men, apparently—who looked upon the Venus de' Medici as a finer work than the Greek Slave. In the files of a New York paper may be found an article, written by a highly cultivated man, in which Powers's busts are asserted to be rather the effect of miracles than the results of human effort. The spirit which has prompted these and many kindred expressions cannot be too much deplored by those who love Art and know the artist. It has succeeded in creating for him a reputation broad and remarkable, but most unfortunate, because not his own, because not the reputation which should have formed about his name here, as fame will yonder; unfortunate, because, though broad, it is the breadth of an inverted pyramid, which must naturally topple over of itself, and incumber his path with ruins.

The false position in which Mr. Powers has been placed by his friends has of course won him many enemies.

Bold, sincere, working enemies are highly useful in developing an artist's character, especially if he be a law-abiding follower of the art. But enemies must be dealers of fair blows, wagers of honorable warfare; no assassin is worthy of the name of enemy. Sometimes, however, those who are worthy of the name, and entitled to respect, may make injudicious and unfair use of censure and invective. It is unwise, when the necessity arises to set aside a worthless or an imperfect image, to turn Iconoclast and demolish those surrounding it which are worthy of a place in the temple. True criticism, for its own sake, if prompted by no higher motive, deals justly.

The friends of Mr. Powers have, in their estimate of his ability, given him credit for that which he does not possess, and claimed recognition for merit unsupported by the value of his works. His enemies have labored assiduously, not only to deprive the estimate of its unwarranted quantity, but to overthrow the whole, and leave him merely a mechanic, a dexterous mechanic, with small views, but large ambition, trying to pass himself off as an artist. His busts are asserted to be but more elaborate examples of his skill in the "perforated-file-and-patent-punch" line.

But as the struggles to elevate this artist's reputation above its proper level have proved signal failures, so the effort to depreciate it must ultimately be defeated. Only one kind of injustice ever proves irreparable wrong: that which a man exercises towards himself. Mr. Powers had a specialty.

So constituted that the most difficult executive operations are to him but play and pleasure, he has also, to govern and inform this rare organization, a broad, manly, and most genial human nature. This combination decided the question of his proper mission, and in virtue of it he has been enabled to model a series of most remarkable busts, the true excellence of which must be recognized in spite of friends and foes, and the epithets "miraculous" and "mechanical."

It is possible that the highest type of portrait-sculpture is beyond the limit of this specialty; indeed, it is almost impossible that with the elements constituting it there should be associated the still rarer power to achieve the most exalted ideal Art; and such Art we believe the highest portraiture to be.

A consummate representation of a man in his divinest development, the last refined ideal of him then, would be indeed somewhat miraculous!

The world asks less. It claims to know of a man what the face of him became under the influences of human, temporal relations. It wants preserved of the statesman the statesman's face, of the merchant the merchant's face; and this demand, when governed by a cultivated taste, is a legitimate one,—as legitimate as is the demand for any history. The public requires the image of the man whom the public knew, and they regard as valuable that which can be received as a definite and trustworthy statement of a great man, or of one whom it esteemed great. It requires this, has a right to such information; and the generation which fails to demand of its artists a true record of its prominent men fails utterly in its duty. The bust of a man goes down to posterity, not only the history which it is in itself, but as an interpreter of the history of its age. Were it not for Art, an age would recede into the unknown, to be recorded as dark, or into the shadowy world of myth. Portraiture, more than aught else, serves to elucidate the tradition or story of a people. How impossible to explain to the twentieth century the bad mystery of our present, without the aid of Powers's head of Calhoun, the less adequate bust of Stephen A. Douglas, and the one which should be modelled of Mr. Buchanan! A faithful delineation of the features of some men is needful. We should be thankful for that black frown of Nero, for the bald pate of Scipio, for those queer eyes of Marius, and for the long neck of Cicero, as seen in the newly discovered bust. These are the signs of the men, and explain them.

Mr. Powers has succeeded in reporting more accurately than any other recent artist the physical facts of the individual face. From one of his marbles we derive definite ideas of the human character of its subject, what its ambition is, and what its weakness; what have been its loves and its antipathies, its struggles and its victories, its joys and its sorrows, may be revealed to him who has learned what the human face becomes under the influence of these incessant forces. No mere talent can accomplish such results. Behind all that kind of strength lies the fact of peculiar sympathies, relating the artist to this phase of Art-representation; and within certain limits, which should have been undebatable, his rule was absolute.

The great mistake with Mr. Powers has been his oversight regarding these limits. There has been debate, hesitation, and a continual wandering away from the duties of his errand. Years have been devoted to those ghosts of sculpture, allegorical figures; other years wasted in the elaboration of machinery. Not that his ideal statues are worthless, or fall short of great beauty and exquisite delicacy; not that his skill as a mechanician is other than great. But the age cannot afford these things, nor can the sculptor afford them. A year is too great a sum to give for a statue of California. Better than that, the several portraits of valued men which might have been acquired,—one bust, even, like those which surprised and compelled the reverence of Thorwaldsen. Better the perfected ability which would have given his country the Webster he should and might have made than a hundred "Americas."

There are two considerations which may have misled Mr. Powers. One, a pecuniary one, which he should have disposed of as did Agassiz, when such was advanced to induce him to give lyceum lectures:—"Sir, I cannot afford to make money!" The other may have been the weight of the prevailing error that portrait-sculpture is a less honorable branch of Art.

Less than what? The historical? What finer history than Titian's Paul III., Raphael's Leo X., Albert Dürer's head of himself? What finer than the Pericles, the Marcus Aurelius of the Capitol, the Demosthenes of the Vatican, Chantrey's Scott, Houdon's Voltaire, Powers's Jackson?—Heroic? what more heroic than the Lateran Sophocles, the Venetian Colleoni, or Rauch's statue of Frederick the Great?—Poetical? What picture more sweetly poetical than Raphael's head of himself in the Uffizi, or Giotto's Dante in the Bargello? What ideal statue surpasses in poetical power Michel Angelo's De' Medici in the San Lorenzo Chapel? What ideal head is more beautiful than the Townley Clytie of the British Museum, or the Young Augustus of the Vatican? What grander than Da Vinci's portrait of himself?

No,—when the sculptor has wrought the adequate representation of the individual in its best estate, he may rest assured that he has achieved "high Art."

Let us not be unjust to Mr. Powers's ideal works. In the qualities of chasteness of conception, delicacy of treatment, temperate grace, and that rarer, finer quality of dignified repose, they have not been surpassed since the time of Greek Art. When the subject chosen has not been foreign to the artist's nature, as in the "Eve," nor foreign to the Art's province, as in the "California," his success has been very like a triumph.

But the success has not been that which he was entitled to grasp; the seeming triumph has precluded a real victory. We must believe that the highest lessons of ancient Art have, in a great measure, been unrecognized by Mr. Powers. The external has been studied. No man can talk more justly of that exquisite line of the Venus de' Medici's temple and cheek, or point out more discriminatingly the beauties of the Milo statue, or detect more quickly the truths of the antique busts. He has discovered, also, somewhat of the great secret of repose,—has perceived that it is essential, in some wise, to all greatness in Art, more particularly in his own department of sculpture. But beyond that simple recognition of the fact, what? That repose is dependent on power to act, and must be great in proportion to mightiness of power? No, he could not have seen this; else had his Webster come to us less questionable in intent, less remote in its merits from the massive self-possession of the man.

For what Mr. Powers became before he left America he cannot be praised too greatly. He carried with him to Europe just that knowledge of Nature and that executive power which prepared him to take advantage of the aid that all great Art was waiting to afford. Had he won "the large truth," he would have found the scope and purpose of his genius, as in America he had found that of his talent. He would have seen his specialty to be worthy of all reverence, for he would have attained to an appreciation of the high possibilities of portrait-Art. There would have been developed, under the influence of great principles, the power to make statues of great men,—colossal, instead of big,—reposeful, instead of paralyzed,—grand, instead of arrogant,—statues worthy of the hand that wrought the busts of Calhoun, Jackson, and Webster, worthy to rank with the few mighty embodiments of power, the Sophocles, the Aristides, and the Demosthenes. This he might have done; and this he may yet accomplish.

THE AMBER GODS.

STORY FIRST.

We've some splendid old point-lace in our family, yellow and fragrant, loose-meshed. It isn't every one has point at all; and of those who have, it isn't every one can afford to wear it. I can. Why? Oh, because it's in character. Besides, I admire point any way,—it's so becoming; and then, you see, this amber! Now what is in finer unison, this old point-lace, all tags and tangle and fibrous and bewildering, and this amber, to which Heaven knows how many centuries, maybe, with all their changes, brought perpetual particles of increase? I like yellow things, you see.

To begin at the beginning. My name, you're aware, is Giorgione Willoughby. Queer name for a girl! Yes; but before papa sowed his wild oats, he was one afternoon in Fiesole, looking over Florence nestled below, when some whim took him to go into a church there, a quiet place, full of twilight and one great picture, nobody within but a girl and her little slave,—the one watching her mistress, the other saying dreadfully devout prayers on an amber rosary, and of course she didn't see him, or didn't appear to. After he got there, he wondered what on earth he came for, it was so dark and poky, and he began to feel uncomfortably,—when all of a sudden a great ray of sunset dashed through the window, and drowned the place in the splendor of the illumined painting. Papa adores rich colors; and he might have been satiated here, except that such things make you want more. It was a Venus;—no, though, it couldn't have been a Venus in a church, could it? Well, then, a Magdalen, I guess, or a Madonna, or something. I fancy the man painted for himself, and christened for others. So, when I was born, some years afterward, papa, gratefully remembering this dazzling little vignette of his youth, was absurd enough to christen me Giorgione. That's how I came by my identity; but the folks all call me Yone,—a baby name.

I'm a blonde, you know,—none of your silver-washed things. I wouldn't give a fico for a girl with flaxen hair; she might as well be a wax doll, and have her eyes moved by a wire; besides, they've no souls. I imagine they were remnants at our creation, and somehow scrambled together, and managed to get up a little life among themselves; but it's good for nothing, and everybody sees through the pretence. They're glass chips, and brittle shavings, slender pinkish scrids,—no name for them; but just you say blonde, soft and slow and rolling,—it brings up a brilliant, golden vitality, all manner of white and torrid magnificences, and you see me! I've watched little bugs—gold rose-chafers—lie steeping in the sun, till every atom of them must have been searched with the warm radiance, and have felt, that, when they reached that point, I was just like them, golden all through,—not dyed, but created. Sunbeams like to follow me, I think. Now, when I stand in one before this glass, infiltrated with the rich tinge, don't I look like the spirit of it just stepped out for inspection? I seem to myself like the complete incarnation of light, full, bounteous, overflowing, and I wonder at and adore anything so beautiful; and the reflection grows finer and deeper while I gaze, till I dare not do so any longer. So, without more words, I'm a golden blonde. You see me now: not too tall,—five feet four; not slight, or I couldn't have such perfect roundings, such flexible moulding. Here's nothing of the spiny Diana and Pallas, but Clytie or Isis speaks in such delicious curves. It don't look like flesh and blood, does it? Can you possibly imagine it will ever change? Oh!

Now see the face,—not small, either; lips with no particular outline, but melting, and seeming as if they would stain yours, should you touch them. No matter about the rest, except the eyes. Do you meet such eyes often? You wouldn't open yours so, if you did. Note their color now, before the ray goes. Yellow hazel? Not a bit of it! Some folks say topaz, but they're fools. Nor sherry. There's a dark sardine base, but over it real seas of light, clear light; there isn't any positive color; and once when I was angry, I caught a glimpse of them in a mirror, and they were quite white, perfectly colorless, only luminous. I looked like a fiend, and, you may be sure, recovered my temper directly,—easiest thing in the world, when you've motive enough. You see the pupil is small, and that gives more expansion and force to the irides; but sometimes in an evening, when I'm too gay, and a true damask settles in the cheek, the pupil grows larger and crowds out the light, and under these thick, brown lashes, these yellow-hazel eyes of yours, they are dusky and purple and deep with flashes, like pansies lit by fire-flies, and then common folks call them black. Be sure, I've never got such eyes for nothing, any more than this hair. That is Lucrezia Borgian, spun gold, and ought to take the world in its toils. I always wear these thick, riotous curls round my temples and face; but the great braids behind—oh, I'll uncoil them before my toilet is over.

Probably you felt all this before, but didn't know the secret of it. Now, the traits being brought out, you perceive nothing wanting; the thing is perfect, and you've a reason for it. Of course, with such an organization, I'm not nervous. Nervous! I should as soon fancy a dish of cream nervous. I am too rich for anything of the kind, permeated utterly with a rare golden calm. Girls always suggest little similitudes to me: there's that brunette beauty,—don't you taste mulled wine when you see her? and thinking of yourself, did you ever feel green tea? and find me in a crust of wild honey, the expressed essence of woods and flowers, with its sweet satiety?—no, that's too cloying. I'm a deal more like Mendelssohn's music,—what I know of it, for I can't distinguish tunes,—you wouldn't suspect it,—but full harmonics delight me as they do a wild beast; and so I'm like a certain adagio in B flat, that Papa likes.

There now! you're perfectly shocked to hear me go on so about myself; but you oughtn't to be. It isn't lawful for any one else, because praise is intrusion; but if the rose please to open her heart to the moth, what then? You know, too, I didn't make myself; it's no virtue to be so fair. Louise couldn't speak so of herself: first place, because it wouldn't be true; next place, she couldn't, if it were; and lastly, she made her beauty by growing a soul in her eyes, I suppose,—what you call good. I'm not good, of course; I wouldn't give a fig to be good. So it's not vanity. It's on a far grander scale; a splendid selfishness,—authorized, too; and papa and mamma brought me up to worship beauty,—and there's the fifth commandment, you know.

Dear me! you think I'm never coming to the point. Well, here's this rosary;—hand me the perfume-case first, please. Don't you love heavy fragrances, faint with sweetness, ravishing juices of odor, heliotropes, violets, water-lilies,—powerful attars and extracts, that snatch your soul off your lips? Couldn't you live on rich scents, if they tried to starve you? I could, or die on them: I don't know which would be best. There! there's the amber rosary! You needn't speak; look at it!

Bah! is that all you've got to say? Why, observe the thing; turn it over; hold it up to the window; count the beads,—long, oval, like some seaweed bulbs, each an amulet. See the tint; it's very old; like clots of sunshine,—aren't they? Now bring it near; see the carving, here corrugated, there faceted, now sculptured into hideous, tiny, heathen gods. You didn't notice that before! How difficult it must have been, when amber is so friable! Here's one with a chessboard on his back, and all his kings and queens and pawns slung round him. Here's another with a torch, a flaming torch, its fire pouring out inverted. They are grotesque enough;—but this, this is matchless: such a miniature woman, one hand grasping the round rock behind, while she looks down into some gulf, perhaps, beneath, and will let herself fall. Oh, you should see her with a magnifying-glass! You want to think of calm, satisfying death, a mere exhalation, a voluntary slipping into another element? There it is for you. They are all gods and goddesses. They are all here but one; I've lost one, the knot of all, the love of the thing. Well! wasn't it queer for a Catholic girl to have at prayer? Don't you wonder where she got it? Ah! but don't you wonder where I got it? I'll tell you.

Papa came in, one day, and with great mystery commenced unrolling, and unrolling, and throwing tissue papers on the floor, and scraps of colored wool; and Lu and I ran to him,—Lu stooping on her knees to look up, I bending over his hands to look down. It was so mysterious! I began to suspect it was diamonds for me, but knew I never could wear them, and was dreadfully afraid that I was going to be tempted, when slowly, bead by bead, came out this amber necklace. Lu fairly screamed; as for me, I just drew breath after breath, without a word. Of course they were for me;—I reached my hands for them.

"Why not?" asked Lu,—rather faintly now, for she knew I always carried my point.

"Stop, stop!" said papa. "You shan't crowd little Lu out of them. What do you want them for, Lu?"

"To wear," quavered Lu,—"like the balls the Roman ladies carried for coolness."

"Why, to wear, too,—to look at,—to have and to hold for better, for worse,—to say my prayers on," for a bright idea struck me, "to say my prayers on, like the Florence rosary." I knew that would finish the thing.

"Like the Florence rosary?" said papa, in a sleepy voice. "Why, this is the Florence rosary."

"I must and will, potential and imperative," I exclaimed, quite on fire. "The nonsense of the thing! Girls with lucid eyes, like shadowy shallows in quick brooks, can wear crystallizations. As for me, I can wear only concretions and growths; emeralds and all their cousins would be shockingly inharmonious on me; but you know, Lu, how I use Indian spices, and scarlet and white berries and flowers, and little hearts and notions of beautiful copal that Rose carved for you,—and I can wear sandal-wood and ebony and pearls, and now this amber. But you, Lu, you can wear every kind of precious stone, and you may have Aunt Willoughby's rubies that she promised me; they are all in tone with you; but I must have this."

"I don't think you're right," said Louise, rather soberly. "You strip yourself of great advantages. But about the rubies, I don't want anything so flaming, so you may keep them; and I don't care at all about this. I think, Sir, on the whole, they belong to Yone for her name."

And somehow Lu, who had been holding the rosary, was sitting on papa's knee, as he half knelt on the floor, and the rosary was in my hand. And then he produced a little kid box, and there lay inside a star with a thread of gold for the forehead, circlets for wrist and throat, two drops, and a ring. Oh, such beauties! You've never seen them.

"Oh, no, indeed! I'd much rather have mine, though these are splendid.
What are they?"

"Oh, they are just like that ring on your hand! You don't want two rings alike," I said. "Where did you get that ring, Lu?"

If you know aqua-marina, you know something that's before every other stone in the world. Why, it is as clear as light, white, limpid, dawn light; sparkles slightly and seldom; looks like pure drops of water, sea-water, scooped up and falling down again; just a thought of its parent beryl green hovers round the edges; and it grows more lucent and sweet to the centre, and there you lose yourself in some dream of vast seas, a glory of unimagined oceans; and you say that it was crystallized to any slow flute-like tune, each speck of it floating into file with a musical grace, and carrying its sound with it. There! it's very fanciful, but I'm always feeling the tune in aqua-marina, and trying to find it,—but I shouldn't know it was a tune, if I did, I suppose. How magnificent it would be, if every atom of creation sprang up and said its one word of abracadabra, the secret of its existence, and fell silent again. Oh, dear! you'd die, you know; but what a pow-wow! Then, too, in aqua-marina proper, the setting is kept out of sight, and you have the unalloyed stone with its sea-rims and its clearness and steady sweetness. It wasn't the stone for Louise to wear; it belongs rather to highly-nervous, excitable persons; and Lu is as calm as I, only so different! There is something more pure and simple about it than about anything else; others may flash and twinkle, but this just glows with an unvarying power, is planetary and strong. It wears the moods of the sea, too: once in a while a warm amethystine mist suffuses it like a blush; sometimes a white morning fog breathes over it: you long to get into the heart of it. That's the charm of gems, after all! You feel that they are fashioned through dissimilar processes from yourself,—that there's a mystery about them, mastering which would be like mastering a new life, like having the freedom of other stars. I give them more personality than I would a great white spirit. I like amber that way, because I know how it was made, drinking the primeval weather, resinously beading each grain of its rare wood, and dripping with a plash to filter through and around the fallen cones below. In some former state I must have been a fly embalmed in amber.

"Oh, Lu!" I said, "this amber's just the thing for me, such a great noon creature! And as for you, you shall wear mamma's Mechlin and that aqua-marina; and you'll look like a mer-queen just issuing from the wine-dark deeps and glittering with shining water-spheres."

I never let Lu wear the point at all; she'd be ridiculous in it,—so flimsy and open and unreserved; that's for me;—Mechlin, with its whiter, closer, chaste web, suits her to a T.

I must tell you, first, how this rosary came about, any way. You know we've a million of ancestors, and one of them, my great-grandfather, was a sea-captain, and actually did bring home cargoes of slaves; but once he fetched to his wife a little islander, an Asian imp, six years old, and wilder than the wind. She spoke no word of English, and was full of short shouts and screeches, like a thing of the woods. My great-grandmother couldn't do a bit with her; she turned the house topsy-turvy, cut the noses out of the old portraits, and chewed the jewels out of the settings, killed the little home animals, spoiled the dinners, pranced in the garden with Madam Willoughby's farthingale and royal stiff brocades rustling yards behind,—this atom of a shrimp,—or balanced herself with her heels in the air over the curb of the well, scraped up the dead leaves under one corner of the house and fired them,—a favorite occupation,—and if you left her stirring a mess in the kitchen, you met her, perhaps, perched in the china-closet and mumbling all manner of demoniacal prayers, twisting and writhing and screaming over a string of amber gods that she had brought with her and always wore. When winter came and the first snow, she was furious, perfectly mad. One might as well have had a ball of fire in the house, or chain-lightning; every nice old custom had been invaded, the ancient quiet broken into a Bedlam of outlandish sounds, and as Captain Willoughby was returning, his wife packed the sprite off with him,—to cut, rip, and tear in New Holland, if she liked, but not in New England,—and rejoiced herself that she would find that little brown skin cuddled up in her best down beds and among her lavendered sheets no more. She had learned but two words all that time,—Willoughby, and the name of the town.

You may conjecture what heavenly peace came in when the Asian went out, but there is no one to tell what havoc was wrought on board ship; in fact, if there could have been such a thing as a witch, I should believe that imp sunk them, for a stray Levantine brig picked her—still agile as a monkey—from a wreck off the Cape de Verdes and carried her into Leghorn, where she took—will you mind, if I say?—leg-bail, and escaped from durance. What happened on her wanderings I'm sure is of no consequence, till one night she turned up outside a Fiesolan villa, scorched with malaria fevers and shaken to pieces with tertian and quartan and all the rest of the agues. So, after having shaken almost to death, she decided upon getting well; all the effervescence was gone; she chose to remain with her beads in that family, a mysterious tame servant, faithful, jealous, indefatigable. But she never grew; at ninety she was of the height of a yard-stick,—and nothing could have been finer than to have a dwarf in those old palaces, you know.

In my great-grandmother's home, however, the tradition of the Asian sprite with her string of amber gods was handed down like a legend, and, no one knowing what had been, they framed many a wild picture of the Thing enchanting all her spirits from their beads about her, and calling and singing and whistling up the winds with them till storm rolled round the ship, and fierce fog and foam and drowning fell upon her capturers. But they all believed, that, snatched from the wreck into islands of Eastern archipelagoes, the vindictive child and her quieted gods might yet be found. Of course my father knew this, and when that night in the church he saw the girl saying such devout prayers on an amber rosary, with a demure black slave so tiny and so old behind her, it flashed back on him, and he would have spoken, if, just then, the ray had not revealed the great painting, so that he forgot all about it, and when at last he turned, they were gone. But my father had come back to America, had sat down quietly in his elder brother's house, among the hills where I am to live, and was thought to be a sedate young man and a good match, till a freak took him that he must go back and find that girl in Italy. How to do it, with no clue but an amber rosary? But do it he did, stationing himself against a pillar in that identical church and watching the worshippers, and not having long to wait before in she came, with little Asian behind. Papa isn't in the least romantic; he is one of those great fertilizing temperaments, golden hair and beard, and hazel eyes, if you will. He's a splendid old fellow! It's absurd to delight in one's father,—so bread-and-buttery,—but I can't help it. He's far stronger than I; none of the little weak Italian traits that streak me, like water in thick, syrupy wine. No,—he isn't in the least romantic, but he says he was fated to this step, and could no more have resisted than his heart could have refused to beat. When he spoke to the devotee, little Asian made sundry belligerent demonstrations; but he confronted her with the two words she had learned here, Willoughby and the town's name. The dwarf became livid, seemed always after haunted by a dreadful fear of him, pursued him with a rancorous hate, but could not hinder his marriage. The Willoughbys are a cruel race. Her only revenge was to take away the amber beads, which had long before been blessed by the Pope for her young mistress, refusing herself to accompany my mother, and declaring that neither should her charms ever cross the water,—that all their blessing would be changed to banning, and that bane would burn the bearer, should the salt-sea spray again dash round them. But when, in process of Nature, the Asian died,—having become classic through her longevity, taking length of days for length of stature,—then the rosary belonged to mamma's sister, who by-and-by sent it, with a parcel of other things, to papa for me. So I should have had it at all events, you see;—papa is such a tease I The other things were mamma's wedding-veil, that point there, which once was her mother's, and some pearls.

I was born upon the sea, in a calm, far out of sight of land, under sweltering suns; so, you know, I'm a cosmopolite, and have a right to all my fantasies. Not that they are fantasies at all; on the contrary, they are parts of my nature, and I couldn't be what I am without them, or have one and not have all. Some girls go picking and scraping odds and ends of ideas together, and by the time they are thirty get quite a bundle of whims and crotchets on their backs; but they are all at sixes and sevens, uneven and knotty like fagots, and won't lie compactly, don't belong to them, and anybody might surprise them out of them. But for me, you see, mine are harmonious, in my veins; I was born with them. Not that I was always what I am now. Oh, bless your heart! plums and nectarines, and luscious things that ripen and develop all their rare juices, were green once, and so was I. Awkward, tumble-about, near-sighted, till I was twenty, a real raw-head-and-bloody-bones to all society; then mamma, who was never well in our diving-bell atmosphere, was ordered to the West Indies, and papa said it was what I needed, and I went, too,—and oh, how sea-sick! Were you ever? You forget all about who you are, and have a vague notion of being Universal Disease. I have heard of a kind of myopy that is biliousness, and when I reached the islands my sight was as clear as my skin; all that tropical luxuriance snatched me to itself at once, recognized me for kith and kin; and mamma died, and I lived. We had accidents between wind and water, enough to have made me considerate for others, Lu said; but I don't see that I'm any less careful not to have my bones spilt in the flood than ever I was. Slang? No,—poetry. But if your nature had such a wild, free tendency as mine, and then were boxed up with proprieties and civilities from year's end to year's end, may-be you, too, would escape now and then in a bit of slang.

We always had a little boy to play with, Lu and I, or rather Lu,—because, though he never took any dislike to me, he was absurdly indifferent, while he followed Lu about with a painful devotion. I didn't care, didn't know; and as I grew up and grew awkwarder, I was the plague of their little lives. If Lu had been my sister instead of my orphan cousin, as mamma was perpetually holding up to me, I should have bothered them twenty times more; but when I got larger and began to be really distasteful to his fine artistic perception, mamma had the sense to keep me out of his way; and he was busy at his lessons, and didn't come so much. But Lu just fitted him then, from the time he daubed little adoring blotches of her face on every barn-door and paling, till when his scrap-book was full of her in all fancies and conceits, and he was old enough to go away and study Art. Then he came home occasionally, and always saw us; but I generally contrived, on such occasions, to do some frightful thing that shocked every nerve he had, and he avoided me instinctively as he would an electric torpedo; but—do you believe?—I never had an idea of such a thing, till, when sailing from the South, so changed, I remembered things, and felt intuitively how it must have been. Shortly after I went away, he visited Europe. I had been at home a year, and now we heard he had returned; so for two years he hadn't seen me. He had written a great deal to Lu,—brotherly letters they were,—he is so peculiar,—determining not to give her the least intimation of what he felt, if he did feel anything, till he was able to say all. And now he had earned for himself a certain fame, a promise of greater; his works sold; and if he pleased, he could marry. I merely presume this might have been his thought; he never told me. A certain fame! But that's nothing to what he will have. How can he paint gray, faint, half-alive things now? He must abound in color,—be rich, exhaustless: wild sea-sketches,—sunrise,—sunset,—mountain mists rolling in turbid crimson masses, breaking in a milky spray of vapor round lofty peaks, and letting out lonely glimpses of a melancholy moon,—South American splendors,—pomps of fruit and blossom,—all this affluence of his future life must flash from his pencils now. Not that he will paint again directly. Do you suppose it possible that I should be given him merely for a phase of wealth and light and color, and then taken,—taken, in some dreadful way, to teach him the necessary and inevitable result of such extravagant luxuriance? It makes me shiver.

It was that very noon when papa brought in the amber, that he came for the first time since his return from Europe. He hadn't met Lu before. I ran, because I was in my morning wrapper. Don't you see it there, that cream-colored, undyed silk, with the dear palms and ferns swimming all over it? And all my hair was just flung into a little black net that Lu had made me; we both had run down as we were when we heard papa. I scampered; but he saw only Lu; and grasped her hands. Then, of course, I stopped on the baluster to look. They didn't say anything, only seemed to be reading up for the two years in each other's eyes; but Lu dropped her kid box, and as he stooped to pick it up, he held it, and then took out the ring, looked at her and smiled, and put it on his own finger. The one she had always worn was no more a mystery. He has such little hands! they don't seem made for anything but slender crayons and watercolors, as if oils would weigh them down with the pigment; but there is a nervy strength about them that could almost bend an ash.

Papa's breezy voice blew through the room next minute, welcoming him; and then he told Lu to put up her jewels, and order luncheon, at which, of course, the other wanted to see the jewels nearer; and I couldn't stand that, but slipped down and walked right in, lifting my amber, and saying, "Oh, but this is what you must look at!"

He turned, somewhat slowly, with such a lovely indifference, and let his eyes idly drop on me. He didn't look at the amber at all; he didn't look at me; I seemed to fill his gaze without any action from him, for he stood quiet and passive; my voice, too, seemed to wrap him in a dream,—only an instant; though then I had reached him.

"Who is this?" echoed papa. "Why, this is my great West Indian magnolia, my Cleopatra in light colors, my"——

"This is she," putting his hands on my shoulders,—"Miss Giorgione
Willoughby."

"Very well, Sir," I retorted. "Now you and my father have settled the question, know my amber!" and lifting it again, it got caught in that curl.

I have good right to love my hair. What was there to do, when it snarled in deeper every minute, but for him to help me? and then, at the friction of our hands, the beads gave out slightly their pungent smell that breathes all through the Arabian Nights, you know; and the perfumed curls were brushing softly over his fingers, and I a little vexed and flushed as the blind blew back and let in the sunshine and a roistering wind;—why, it was all a pretty scene, to be felt then and remembered afterward. Lu, I believe, saw at that instant how it would be, and moved away to do as papa had asked; but no thought of it came to me.

I am used to admiration now, certainly; it is my food; without it I should die of inanition; but do you suppose I care any more for those who give it to me than a Chinese idol does for—whoever swings incense before it? Are you devoted to your butcher and milkman? We desire only the unpossessed or unattainable, "something afar from the sphere of our sorrow." But, though unconsciously, I may have been piqued by this manner of his. It was new; not a word, not a glance; I believed it was carelessness, and resolved—merely for the sake of conquering, I fancied, too—to change all that. By-and-by the beads dropped out of the curl, as if they had been possessed of mischief and had held there of themselves. He caught them.

That was the time I was so angry; for, at the second, he meant all it comprehended. He saw, I suppose, for he added at once,—

I wonder what made me think him mocking me. Frequently since then he has called me by that name.

"I don't know much about geography," I said. "Besides, these didn't come from there. Little Asian—the imp of my name, you remember—owned them."

"Ah?" with the utmost apathy; and turning to my father, "I saw the painting that enslaved you, Sir," he said.

"Why?" Here he glanced round the room, as if he weren't thinking at all of the matter in hand. "The coloring is more than one can describe, though faded. But I don't think you would like it so much now. Moreover, Sir, I cannot make copies."

I stepped towards them, quite forgetful of my pride. "Can't?" I exclaimed. "Oh, how splendid! Because then no other man comes between you and Nature; your ideal hangs before you, and special glimpses open and shut on you, glimpses which copyists never obtain."

"I don't think you are right," he said, coldly, his hands loosely crossed behind him, leaning on the corner of the mantel, and looking unconcernedly out of the window.

Wasn't it provoking? I remembered myself,—and remembered, too, that I never had made a real exertion to procure anything, and it wasn't worth while to begin then, beside not being my forte; things must come to me. Just then Lu reentered, and one of the servants brought a tray, and we had lunch. Then our visitor rose to go.

"No, no," said papa. "Stay the day out with the girls. It's Mayday, and there are to be fireworks on the other bank to-night."

"And a band, I forgot to mention. I have an engagement myself, so you'll excuse me; but the girls will do the honors, and I shall meet you at dinner."

So it was arranged. Papa went out. I curled up on a lounge,—for Lu wouldn't have liked to be left, if I had liked to leave her,—and soon, when he sat down by her quite across the room, I half shut my eyes and pretended to sleep. He began to turn over her work-basket, taking up her thimble, snipping at the thread with her scissors: I see now he wasn't thinking about it, and was trying to recover what he considered a proper state of feeling, but I fancied he was very gentle and tender, though I couldn't hear what they said, and I never took the trouble to listen in my life. In about five minutes I was tired of this playing 'possum, and took my observations.

What is your idea of a Louise? Mine is dark eyes, dark hair, decided features, pale, brown pale, with a mole on the left cheek,—and that's Louise. Nothing striking, but pure and clear, and growing always better.

For him,—he's not one of those cliff-like men against whom you are blown as a feather, I don't fancy that kind; I can stand of myself, rule myself. He isn't small, though; no, he's tall enough, but all his frame is delicate, held to earth by nothing but the cords of a strong will, —very little body, very much soul. He, too, is pale, and has dark eyes with violet darks in them. You don't call him beautiful in the least, but you don't know him. I call him beauty itself, and I know him thoroughly. A stranger might have thought, when I spoke of those copals Rose carved, that Rose was some girl. But though he has a feminine sensibility, like Correggio or Schubert, nobody could call him womanish. "Les races se féminisent." Don't you remember Matthew Roydon's Astrophill?

  "A sweet, attractive kind of grace,
  A full assurance given by looks,
  Continual comfort in a face."

I always think of that flame in an alabaster vase, when I see him; "one sweet grace fed still with one sweet mind"; a countenance of another sphere: that's Vaughan Rose. It provokes me that I can't paint him myself, without other folk's words; but you see there's no natural image of him in me, and so I can't throw it strongly on any canvas. As for his manners, you've seen them;—now tell me, was there ever anything so winning when he pleases, and always a most gracious courtesy in his air, even when saying an insufferably uncivil thing? He has an art, a science, of putting the unpleasant out of his sight, ignoring or looking over it, which sometimes gives him an absent way; and that is because he so delights in beauty; he seems to have woven a mist over his face then, and to be shut in on his own inner loveliness; and many a woman thinks he is perfectly devoted, when, very like, he is swinging over some lonely Spanish sierra beneath the stars, or buried in noonday Brazilian forests, half stifled with the fancied breath of every gorgeous blossom of the zone. Till this time, it had been the perfection of form rather than tint that had enthralled him; he had come home with severe ideas, too severe; he needed me, you see.

But while looking at him and Lu, on that day, I didn't perceive half of this, only felt annoyed at their behavior, and let them feel that I was noticing them. There's nothing worse than that; it is a very upas-breath, it puts on the brakes, and of course a chill and a restraint overcame them till Mr. Dudley was announced.

"Dear! dear!" I exclaimed, getting upon my feet. "What ever shall we do,
Lu? I'm not dressed for him." And while I stood, Mr. Dudley came in.

Mr. Dudley didn't seem to mind whether I was dressed in cobweb or sheet-iron; for he directed his looks and conversation so much to Lu, that Rose came and sat on a stool before me and began to talk.

"No more?" he said. "They wouldn't have broken your spell so, if that had been all. Do you know I actually believe in enchantments now?"

"Well," he continued, "why don't you say it? How impertinent am I? You won't? Why don't you laugh, then?"

"Dear me!" I replied. "You are so much on the 'subtle-souled-psychologist' line, that there's no need of my speaking at all."

"I shall do no such thing. I liked the West Indies because there is life there; because the air is a firmament of balm, and you grow in it like a flower in the sun; because the fierce heat and panting winds wake and kindle all latent color, and fertilize every germ of delight that might sleep here forever. That's why I liked them; and you knew it just as well before as now."

"Yes; but I wanted to see if you knew it. So you think there is life there in that dead Atlantis."

"Snow thrice bolted by the northern blast, I fancy, by which time it becomes rather misty. Exaggerated snow."

"Everything there is an exaggeration. Coming here from England is like stepping out of a fog into an almost exhausted receiver; but you've no idea what light is, till you've been in those inland hills. You think a blue sky the perfection of bliss? When you see a white sky, a dome of colorless crystal, with purple swells of mountain heaving round you, and a wilderness of golden greens royally languid below, while stretches of a scarlet blaze, enough to ruin a weak constitution, flaunt from the rank vines that lace every thicket, and the whole world, and you with it, seems breaking into blossom,—why, then you know what light is and can do. The very wind there by day is bright, now faint, now stinging, and makes a low, wiry music through the loose sprays, as if they were tense harp-strings. Nothing startles; all is like a grand composition utterly wrought out. What a blessing it is that the blacks have been imported there,—their swarthiness is in such consonance!"

"No; the native race was in better consonance. You are so enthusiastic, it is pity you ever came away."

"But a mere animal or vegetable life is not much. What was ever done in the tropics?"

"At all events, you are full of blessedness in those climates, and that is the end and aim of all action; and if Nature will do it for you, there is no need of your interference. It is much better to be than to do;—one is a strife, the other is possession."

"You mean being as the complete attainment? There is only one Being, then. All the rest of us are"——

"You ought to have been born in Abelard's time,—you've such a disputatious spirit. That's I don't know how many times you have contradicted me to-day."

"I don't know. No. But then, Lu is a good girl, and he's her minister,—a Delphic oracle. She thinks the sun and moon set somewhere round Mr. Dudley. Oh! I mean to show him my amber."

Of course, he was shocked, and wouldn't go into ecstasies at all; tripped on the adjective.

"There are gods enough in it to be divine," said Rose, taking it from Lu's hand and bringing it back to me. "All those very Gnostic deities who assisted at Creation. You are not afraid that the imprisoned things work their spells upon you? The oracle declares it suits your cousin best," he added, in a lower tone.

"All the oaf knows!" I responded. "I wish you'd admire it, Mr. Dudley.
Mr. Rose don't like amber,—handles it like nettles."

"He prefers aqua-marina," I continued. "Lu, produce yours!" For she had not heard him.

"Yes," said Mr. Dudley, rubbing his finger over his lip while he gazed, "every one must prefer aqua-marina."

"Nonsense! It's no better than glass. I'd as soon wear a set of window-panes. There's no expression in it. It isn't alive, like real gems."

He was standing now, leaning against the mantel, just as he was before lunch. Lu looked at him and smiled.

"Yone is exultant, because we both wanted the beads," she said. "I like amber as much as she."

"Oh, they belonged to Yone; and uncle gave me these, which I like better. Amber is warm, and smells of the earth; but this is cool and dewy, and"——

I took my beads and wound them round my wrist. "You haven't as much eye for color as a poppy-bee," I exclaimed, in a corresponding key, and looking up at Rose.

"You mustn't ask me for my reasons. It is not merely disagreeable, but hateful."

"The perfume is acrid; I associate it with the lower jaw of St. Basil the Great, styled a present of immense value, you remember,—being hard, heavy, shining like gold, the teeth yet in it, and with a smell more delightful than amber,"—making a mock shudder at the word.

"Not in the least. It is antipathy. Besides, the thing is unnatural; there is no existent cause for it. A bit that turns up on certain sands,—here at home, for aught I know, as often as anywhere."

"Which means Nazareth. We must teach you, Sir, that there are some things at home as rare as those abroad."

"Can you say those words and not like it? Don't it bring to you a magnificent picture of the pristine world,—great seas and other skies,—a world of accentuated crises, that sloughed off age after age, and rose fresher from each plunge? Don't you see, or long to see, that mysterious magic tree out of whose pores oozed this fine solidified sunshine? What leaf did it have? what blossom? what great wind shivered its branches? Was it a giant on a lonely coast, or thick low growth blistered in ravines and dells? That's the witchery of amber,—that it has no cause,—that all the world grew to produce it,—may-be died and gave no other sign,—that its tree, which must have been beautiful, dropped all its fruits; and how bursting with juice must they have been"——

"Be quiet. Stripped itself of all its lush luxuriance, and left for a vestige only this little fester of its gashes."

"No, again," he once more interrupted. "I have seen remnants of the wood and bark in a museum."

"Or has it hidden and compressed all its secret here?" I continued, obliviously. "What if in some piece of amber an accidental seed were sealed, we found, and planted, and brought back the lost aeons? What a glorious world that must have been, where even the gum was so precious!"

"In a picture, yes. Necessary for this. But, my dear Miss Willoughby, you convince me that the Amber Witch founded your family," he said, having listened with an amused face. "Loveliest amber that ever the sorrowing sea-birds have wept," he hummed. "There! isn't that kind of stuff enough to make a man detest it?"

"Just because, when we hold it in our hands, we hold also that furious epoch where rioted all monsters and poisons,—where death fecundated and life destroyed,—where superabundance demanded such existences, no souls, but fiercest animal fire;—just for that I hate it."

He laughed again, but replied,—"The hues harmonize,—the substances; you both are accidents; it suits your beauty."

"You mean that it harmonizes with me, because I am a symbol of its period. If there had been women then, they would have been like me,—a great creature without a soul, a"——

"Pray, don't finish the sentence. I can imagine that there is something rich and voluptuous and sating about amber, its color, and its lustre, and its scent; but for others, not for me. Yea, you have beauty, after all," turning suddenly, and withering me with his eye,—"beauty, after all, as you didn't say just now.—Mr. Willoughby is in the garden. I must go before he comes in, or he'll make me stay. There are some to whom you can't say, No."

He stopped a minute, and now, without looking,—indeed, he looked everywhere but at me, while we talked,—made a bow as if just seating me from a waltz, and, with his eyes and his smile on Louise all the way down the room, went out. Did you ever know such insolence?

SONG OF NATURE.

  Mine are the night and morning,
  The pits of air, the gulf of space,
  The sportive sun, the gibbous moon,
  The innumerable days.

  I hide in the blinding glory,
  I lurk in the pealing song,
  I rest on the pitch of the torrent,
  In death, new-born and strong.

  No numbers have counted my tallies,
  No tribes my house can fill,
  I sit by the shining Fount of life,
  And pour the deluge still.

  And ever by delicate powers
  Gathering along the centuries
  From race on race the fairest flowers,
  My wreath shall nothing miss.

  And many a thousand summers
  My apples ripened well,
  And light from meliorating stars
  With firmer glory fell.

  I wrote the past in characters
  Of rock and fire the scroll,
  The building in the coral sea,
  The planting of the coal.

  And thefts from satellites and rings
  And broken stars I drew,
  And out of spent and aged things
  I formed the world anew.

  What time the gods kept carnival,
  Tricked out in star and flower,
  And in cramp elf and saurian forms
  They swathed their too much power.

  Time and Thought were my surveyors,
  They laid their courses well,
  They boiled the sea, and baked the layers
  Of granite, marl, and shell.

  But him—the man-child glorious,
  Where tarries he the while?
  The rainbow shines his harbinger,
  The sunset gleams his smile.

  My boreal lights leap upward,
  Forthright my planets roll,
  And still the man-child is not born,
  The summit of the whole.

  Must time and tide forever run?
  Will never my winds go sleep in the West?
  Will never my wheels, which whirl the sun
  And satellites, have rest?

  Too much of donning and doffing,
  Too slow the rainbow fades;
  I weary of my robe of snow,
  My leaves, and my cascades.

  I tire of globes and races,
  Too long the game is played;
  What, without him, is summer's pomp,
  Or winter's frozen shade?

  I travail in pain for him,
  My creatures travail and wait;
  His couriers come by squadrons,
  He comes not to the gate.

  Twice I have moulded an image,
  And thrice outstretched my hand,
  Made one of day, and one of night,
  And one of the salt-sea-sand.

  I moulded kings and saviours,
  And bards o'er kings to rule;
  But fell the starry influence short,
  The cup was never full.

  Yet whirl the glowing wheels once more,
  And mix the bowl again,
  Seethe, Fate! the ancient elements,
  Heat, cold, dry, wet, and peace and pain

  Let war and trade and creeds and song
  Blend, ripen race on race,—
  The sunburnt world a man shall breed
  Of all the zones and countless days.

  No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
  My oldest force is good as new,
  And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
  Gives back the bending heavens in dew.

NEMOPHILY

An earnest plea was once entered in Maga's pages for the bodies of saints. Yet it is to be hoped that others not included in that respectable class may have physical needs also, and it is to be feared that they may not be above the necessity of a little of the same invigorating tonic. For there are not a few on this continent of ours, whom the Avvocata del Diavolo would certainly expect to enter a nolo contendere, who stand in much need of a healthy animalism. That these sinners would be benefited by what Mr. Kingsley's critics call "muscular Christianity" cannot be denied. For they are not sinners beyond all hope of amendment, by any means; and their offences being rather against the laws and light of Nature than against any of the commands of the Decalogue, it is earnestly desired that they be brought within the pale of promise, even if they never reach the sacred fane of canonization.

Indeed, at the outset, let there be a protest entered on behalf of the sinner against this unnecessary pity of the saint. It is a part of that false halo with which enthusiastic admiration (reckless of gilding and ruinously prodigal of ochre) delights to endue the favored heads of the beati. The saint himself countenances the folly, and meekly inclines his head (sideways) to the rays. It is a part of the capital of the calling to look interesting. The revered and reverend Charles Honeyman, in the hands of that acute manager, Mr. Sherrick, was bidden to sit in his pew at evening service and cough. A qualified consumption and a moderate bronchitis are no bad substitutes for eloquence, learning, and that indiscreet piety which is so careless of feminine favor as to bring into the pulpit a robust person and to the dinner-table a healthy appetite.

But the saint, if he have a reasonable sense of his pastoral duty, gets, malgré lui, a very fair share of that open-air medicine which is supposed to be the great lack of his profession. For if he be a clergyman in a rural parish of tolerable extent and with no great superfluity of wealth, he will not want for either air or exercise. The George Herbert so situated finds by no means his whole round of duty in the study. Old Mrs. Smith, sick and bedridden, lives a couple of miles from the parsonage; but the thoughtless creature actually expects a weekly visit and half-hour's reading of certain old familiar English literature, and will remind her pastor of it, if the expected day pass without his coming. Jones and his wife, who live in just the other direction, are wantonly apt, upon the insufficient plea of a long walk, to be missed from their wonted pew on a stormy Sunday, and must be looked up. Little Mary Gray has not been to Sunday-school. Cause suspected,—insufficient shoes. Bessy Bell, up the cross-road, quite over beyond Beman's Farms, is likewise delinquent, from the opposite want of a bonnet. Wilson, the cross-grained vestryman, has an idea, which never fails by Saturday night to break out into a positive rush of conviction, that the minister is neglecting his studies and "going to Rome," if he doesn't in the course of the week go to Wilson and carry him the Church papers and take a look at the Wilson prize-pigs. So good Mr. Herbert never fails, in due attestation of his "abhorrence of the Bishop of Rome and his detestable enormities," to foot it over the rocky hill and down across the rickety little bridge and past the poor-house farm, (where he stops on a little private business of his own, that perhaps makes a few old hearts and certainly one old coat-pocket the lighter,) and so on, a good piece, through the woods, to where Vestryman Wilson is bending over the hoe or swinging the axe, and thinking the while what an easy life the parson has of it.

Then Mr. Herbert gets the occasional tonic of a brisk walk over the hard-beaten snow, of a moonlight winter's night. A walk-only think of it!—over the crisp, crunching snow, to the distant outlying hamlet of Paton's Corner, where a few are gathered in the little school-house to hear him preach, and to give him the happy relief of a five-mile tramp home again.

It is really doubtful if dumb-bells, a gymnasium, and a pickerel-back racing-wherry would meet precisely the case of Mr. Herbert, however desirable for city saints who have plenty of spare sixpences for the omnibuses.

But the miserable sinner,—"where," as the shepherd exclaimed, to Mr. Weller's indignation, "is the miserable sinner?" Keeping school, keeping books, making books, standing behind counters when busy and on street-corners when disengaged, doing anything or everything but taking care of his precious body, and thereby giving his precious soul the chance of being in very bad company, and following the fate of poor Tray, and of the well-meaning stork in Dr. Aesop's fable. What shall he, or rather, what can he, do with his leisure? For leisure more or less almost every young man has,—and it is of young men, and especially of the very young men, that we are benevolently writing. If he dwell in an inland town, the boat-club is hopeless,—and boat-clubs, though capital things for the young gentlemen of Harvard and Yale and Trinity, have also their drawbacks. One cannot always be ready to move in complete unison with a dozen fellow-mortals. Pendennis is never ready when the club are desirous to row; Newcome is perpetually anxious to tempt the wave when the wave tempts nobody else. The gymnasium gets to be a wearisome round of very mill-horse-like work, after the varieties of possible dislocation of all one's bones have been exhausted. Climbing ropes and poles with nothing but cobwebs at the top, and leaping horses with only tan at the bottom, grow monotonous after six months' steady dissipation thereat. Base-ball clubs do not always find desirable commons, and the municipal fathers of the towns have a prejudice against them in the streets. What shall youth, conscious of muscle and eager for fresh air, do? Even the gloves are not fancy-free, but are very apt to bring with them the slang of the ring and the beastly associations of professional pugilism. Youth looks up to its teachers; but if its teachers in the manly art be the Game-Chicken, the Pet, the Slasher, youth, in learning to respect the brute strength of such men, will hardly learn to respect itself.

But—and here lies the purport of this article—there is hardly a town or village of New England which has not within a quarter of a mile of its suburbs a patch of woodland or a strip of sandy beach. What is to hinder the sinner, if he repent him of the foul air and cramped posture of which he has been the victim, from a little pedestrianism? Do American men and boys ever walk? Drive, it is known they do; they can always get time for that. But to walk, certainly to scramble and to climb, must be added by Mr. Phillips, in the new editions of his exquisite and inexhaustible Lecture, to the catalogue of the "Lost Arts."

Yet Nature never grows outworn,—is unwearied in the bounty which she bestows on the seeker. I said a strip of sandy beach, just now. For that I beg leave to refer the reader to Mr. Kingsley's fascinating "Glaucus," and to the delightful papers which appeared in "Blackwood" a year or two ago. My business is with the woods and fields. Certainly some who read my pages will have leisure to climb a stone wall now and then, and for them the following sketches of New England wood-walks may serve to show how much enjoyment may be got with but little outlay of appliances. Of course the most tempting thing to seek is sport. But the gun and the fishing-rod are useless in many towns, from the disappearance of all worthy objects for their exercise. The birds are wild and shy; the trout have been coculus-indicused out of the mountain-brooks to supply metropolitan hotel-tables and Delmonican larders. Let us go after more attainable things. And first, being a true nemophilist, I protest against botany. A flower worth a five-mile walk and a wet foot is worthy of something better than dissection with the Linnaean classification, afterward adding insult to injury. The botanist is not a discoverer; he is only a pedant. He finds out nothing about the plant; he serves it as we might fancy a monster doing, who should take this number of the "Atlantic" and sit down, not to read it, not to inhale the delicate fragrance of its thought, but to count its articles, examine their titles, and, having compared them with the newspaper advertisement, sweep the whole contentedly into the dust-heap. To study the plant, to see how it gets its living, why it will grow on one side of a brook in profusion, and yet refuse to seek the other bank, is not his care. It is simply to see whether he can abuse its honest English or New-English simplicity by calling it by one set or another of barbarous Latin and Greek titles. Pray, my good Sir, does a man go to see the elephant only to call him a pachydermatous quadruped?

But we are wasting time and shall never get into the woods. In the winter wild you will hardly get far into them, except at the Christmas season for greenery. Gathering this by deputy is poor business. It is all very well, if you can do no better, to engage Mr. Brown to engage some one else to bring in the needed spruce, fir, and hemlock with which to obscure the fresco deformities of St. Boniface's; but it is far better to hunt for them yourself. There is something intensely delightful in the changes of the search; for it begins dull enough. You start in the drear December weather, with a gray sky and leaden clouds softly shaded in regular billows, like an India-ink ocean, overhead, and a somewhat muddy lane before you. Then to pick one's way across the plashy meadows, and, after a ticklish pass of jumping from one reedy tussock to another, to get once more upon the firm soil, while the grass, dry and crisp under your feet, gives a pleasant whish, whish, as it does the duty of street-door-mat to your mud-beclogged sandals. Now for the stone wall. On the other side are thick set the thorny stalks of last summer's "high-bush" blackberries. A plunge and a scramble take you through in comparative safety; and stopping only to disengage your skirts from a too-fond bramble, you are in the woodland. Thick-strewn the dead leaves lie under foot. What music there is in the rustling murmur with which they greet your invading step! On, deeper and deeper into the wood,—now dodging under the green and snaky cat-briers, with their retractile thorns and vicious clinging grasp,—now dashing along the woodman's paths,—now struggling among the opposing underwood. At last a little sprig of feathery green catches the eye. It is a tuft of moss. No,—it is the running ground-pine; and clearing away, with both eager hands, leaves, sticks, moss, and all the fallen exuciae of the summertime, you tear up long wreaths of that most graceful of evergreens. Then, in another quarter of the woodland, where the underbrush has been killed by the denser shade, there rise the exquisite fan-shaped plumes of the feather-pine, of deepest green, or brown-golden with the pencil of the frost;—for cross or star or thick festoon, there is nothing so beautiful. And again you are attracted into the thickets of laurel, and wage fierce war upon the sturdy and tenacious, yet brittle branches, till you are transformed into a walking jack-o'-the-green. The holly of the English Christmas, all-besprent with crimson drops, is hard to be found in New England, and you will have to thread the courses of the brooks to seek the swamp-loving black alder, which will furnish as brilliant a berry, but without the beautiful thorny leaf. Only in one patch of woodland do I know of the holly. In the southeastern corner of Massachusetts,—if you will take the trouble to follow up a railroad-track for a couple of miles and then plunge into the pine woods, you will come upon a few lonely, stunted scraps of it. The warmer airs which the Gulf Stream sends upon that coast have, it is said, something to do therewith. Of course, if I am wrong, the botanists will take vengeance upon me; but I can only say what has been said to me. We nemophilists are apt to be careless of solemn science and go upon all sorts of uncertain tradition.

But "Christmas comes but once a year." After chancel and nave have been duly adorned, and again disrobed against the coming sobrieties of Lent, there are other temptations to the woods. Before the snow has wholly vanished from the shelter of the wood-lots, the warm, hazy, wooing days of April come upon us. On such a day,—how well in this snow-season I remember it!—I have been lured out by the hope of the Mayflower, the delicate epigae repens, miscalled the trailing arbutus. Up the rocky hill-side, from whose top you catch glimpses of the far-off sparkling sea, with a blue haze of island ranges belting it,—up among the rocks, into warm, sheltered, sunny nooks, you go upon your quest. For the Mayflower, though found in almost every township in New England, has secret and unaccountable whims of its own,—will persist in blooming in just one spot, where you ought not to expect it, and in avoiding all likely places. Yet when you come to its traditionary habitat, it is not there. Round and round we pace, hoping and despairing, till a faint, most delicate odor, indescribably suggestive of woodland freshness, catches the roused sense; or else one silvery star peeps out from under an upturned birch-leaf. Then down on hands and knees; tear up brush to right and left, the brown skeletons of the withered foliage. The ground is white with stars. Some are touched with delicate pink, some creamy white,—but all breathing out the evanescent secret of the early spring. Such the children of Plymouth used to hang in garlands about the Pilgrim stone, in honor of the never-to-be-forgotten name of the New England Argo.

Later in the year come the beautiful blue violets, which are, I am sorry to say, scentless. Yet their little white cousin, which delights in all swampy places, is sometimes, in the first days of its appearing, more regardful of the prime duty of all flowers. I have gathered tufts of them which (botanists to the contrary notwithstanding) were wellnigh as odorous as if reared in the sunniest Warwickshire lane; but, as with a perfect specimen of the cast skin of a snake, such a boon is to be hoped for only once in a lifetime. With the violets, the beautiful blush-bells of the anemone come garlanded with their graceful leaves, plentifully enough. But did the rambler ever find the sensitive fern, which resented the intrusive hand with all Mimosa's coyness? I never did but once. I have wooed many a delicate frond of all varieties of fern since, but never one so conscious. Now, too, ere the trees come into leaf, is the time to seek the boxwood, called, I hope improperly, by the ominous name of the Southern dogwood. It is worth an afternoon's ramble to come upon one of those trees, standing in an open glade of the forest, a pyramid of white or cream-colored blossoms. Before a leaf is on the tree, it clothes itself in this lovely livery, and at a little distance seems like a snowy cloud rather than a shrub.

But with June comes the most exquisite of our New England wild-flowers, the arethusa, or swamp-pink, as it is often styled, to the great confusion of its delicate, high-born nature with the great, vulgar, flaunting azalea. When June comes,—when the clethra is heaped with its bee-beloved blossoms, and the grass is green and bright as never again in the year, then the arethusa is to be sought. A most unaccountable flower, of all shades, from pale pink to a deep purple, with a lovely shape that I can liken to nothing so nearly as the fleur-de-lis on French escutcheons, it has a delicate, yet powerful, aromatic scent, as if it were an estray from the tropics. One specimen, snowy white, I have seen, and can tell you where to find another. You are to go out along the President's highway, due northward from a certain seaport of Massachusetts. Take the eastward turn at the little village which lies at the head of its harbor, and so north again by the old Friends' meeting-house, which looks in brown placidity away toward the distant shipping and the wicked steeple-houses, into the which so many of its lost lambs have been inveigled. Then be not tempted to strike off down yonder lane, to see the curious old farm-house, relic of Colony times, with its odd stone chimney, its projecting upper story and carved wooden pendants, and its shingles all pierced into decorative hearts and rounds. Its likeness is not in Barber's book,—no, nor its visible form, I believe, (it is many a year since I went that way,) on earth. It became a constellation long ago,—being translated to the stars. Keep on with good heart along the highway ridge, whence you can look down on the solemn, close-set, pine forest, which hides from you the windings of the river, and the beautiful lakelet, where the water-lilies float in the summer. Go on down the valley, past the old tavern,—relic of stage-coaching days, the square, three-story, deserted-looking tavern,—up again a couple of miles or so, till the river has dwindled to a brook and then to a marsh. Here is the place of our seeking. For under the shade of one of those huge granite rocks over which the thin soil of —— County is sprinkled, and which here and there have shaken off the superincumbent dust in indignation at the presumption of man in attempting to farm them,—under that rock—of course I shall not tell you which—you will find the White Arethusa, if you are born under a lucky star.

A little later, the crimson lady-slipper loves to spring up in pine clearings, around the base of the wood-piles which the cutters have stacked in the winter to season. To one born by the salt water there is an especial forest delight in the pine woods. For that best-loved sound of the ceaseless fall of plunging seas upon the beach comes to him there. Many a time I have walked from Harvard's leafy shades and cheerful halls out to the quiet of the Botanic Garden for the sake of hearing the wind in the pine tree-tops. Shut your eyes, and the inward vision sees once more the long line of sandy and shingly beaches, the green curving-up of the surges tipped with dazzling foam,—sees the motionless and blackened timbers of the wreck on the shore, the white wings dipping and turning along the combing tops of the waves racing in upon the sands,—sees the dry tufted beach-grass, and the wet, shining, compact slope down which slides swiftly the under-tow. And what a healthful exhilaration it is to breathe the balm-laden breath of the pine forest, and to tread the elastic slippery-soft carpet of the fallen spiny leaves! Here is the haunt of the lady-slipper, (cypripedium,) a shy, rare flower, like a little sack delicately veined, with a faint musky scent, and large-flapped leaves shading its flower.

In the hot July and August, the scarlet lobelia, the cardinal-flower, is to be found. Never was cardinal so robed. If Herbert's rose, in poetic hyperbole, with its "hue angry and brave, bids the rash gazer wipe his eye," certainly such a bed of lobelia as I once saw on the road to "Rollo's Camp" was anything but what the Scotch would call "a sight for sair een." For the space of a dozen or twenty yards grew a patch of absolutely nothing but lobelia. At a little distance it was like a scarlet carpet flung out by the roadside. If you desire to twine the threefold chord of color, as Mr. Ruskin calls it, I know of no lovelier foil for the lobelia than the white orchis, which haunts the same marshy spots. Those long spikes of feathery and balanced blossoms are the most absolute white of anything in Nature. They positively insist upon the very refinement of purity, as you look at them.

Did you ever see a pond-lily?—not the miserable draggled green-and-mud-colored buds which enterprising boys bring into the cars for sale; but the white water-lily, floating on the silent brooks, or far out in the safe depths of the mill-ponds. The "Autocrat" knows what pond-lilies are, having visited Prospero's Isle and seen the pink-tinged sisterhood of a certain mere that lies embosomed in its hills. But to know them, you must hunt for them,—tramp off to the distant stream, and then, not stand on the bank and wish and sigh, but off hose and shoon, and, careless of water-snake and snapping-turtle, wade in up to their virgin bower, and bear off the dripping, fragrant prize. None but the brave deserve—lady or lily.

But if the stream be too deep and wide, and the lilies are anchored far out among their broad pads,—a floral Venice, with the blue spikes and arrowy leaves of the pickerel-weed for campaniles and towers,—there are yet "lilies of the field" over which you may profitably meditate, remembering that Solomon Ben-David was not so arrayed. Two kinds there are,—one like the tiger-lily of the gardens, the petals curled back and showing the whole leopard-spotted corolla,—the other bell-shaped, rarer, and growing one only on a stalk. Both are to be found in open spaces, bush-grown fields, and airy, sunny spots. It is worth a hot and dusty June walk to get into one of those nooks. You can spend days and not exhaust the study which one little triangular bit of overgrown pasture affords,—spend them, not as a naturalist in close, patient study, because to such a one a square yard of moss is as exhaustless as the forests of Guiana to a Waterton, but as a nemophilist, taking simple delight in mere observation and individual discovery.

And so all sorts of curious ways are discoverable by the mere wood-lounger. At one time your way is barred by the great portcullis of the strong threaded web of the field spider, who sits like a porter in king's livery of black and gold at his gate. Then you have a peep into the winding maelström-funnel of another of the spider family. Poe must have suffered metempsychosis into the body of a blue-bottle, when he wrote his "Descent into the Maelström"; for such an insect, hanging midway down that treacherous, sticky descent, and seeing Death creeping up from the bottom to grasp him, might have a clear idea of what was undergone by the fisherman of Lofoden.

Or, if one tire of the open meadows, and the sun be too hot, think of the laurel groves,—not now, as in the Christmas-time, white with snow, but white again with thousands on thousands of argent cups, loaded with blossoms, meeting over your head in arches of flowery tracery, and one solitary tree standing deep in the woods, like a frigate packed with her silver canvas lying out to windward of the fleet of merchantmen she is convoying. The cool laurel groves! Often as one sees that sight, it is always with a fresh shock of pleasure to the frame.

Then, when autumn comes and the leaves change, there is still endless variety for the little basket or botanical-case which swings lightly on your arm or hangs across your shoulder. Owen Jones never devised any ornaments for wall or niche one half so brilliant as the color of those leaves which a dexterous hand will readily group upon a sheet of white paper, where your eye may catch it, as, after achieving a successful sentence, you look up from your study-table. Speaking of leaves, who knows how large an oak-loaf will grow in this New England? I have just sat down after measuring one gathered in a bit of copse hard by the town of M——, a bit of copse which skirts a beautiful wild ravine, with a superb hemlock and pine grove creeping down its steep bank. I have just honestly measured my leaf, and it shows fourteen inches in length by a trifle of nine and a half in breadth.

In the same ravine I found—and in any patch of woodland you may do the like—a perfect treasury of mosses. A shallow tin box or a wooden bowl filled with these and duly watered will give a winter-garden to the smallest lodging. Sun and light are, as Mr. Toots says, of "no consequence" to the moss family. But if one be above such trifles as mosses, and with Young American loftiness aspire to full-grown trees, there is still plenty to do in the most ordinary woodlands. After a chapter of Mr. Ruskin upon Claude and Poussin and Turner, there is nothing like going to the original documents. In default of the National Gallery from London and the Pitti Palace from the other side of Arno, which cannot be summoned into court at a moment's notice, we can solve at least half the problem. Mr. Ruskin may or may not be right about the Claudes; but it is very easy to see if he be right as to the trees. And if we prove him right with his theory of branches and bark, we have a fair presumption that he has eyes to see the alleged falsehoods in him of Lorraine. Now here is a chance to do a little bit of Art-criticism quite unexpensively. Discontented young gentlemen murmur about the education of this people being too practical, unaesthetic, and all that, and sigh for the culture which a foreign land only can give. But a man who has no eye for Nature will hardly learn to love her at second-hand through the mediation of canvas and colors. I should like very much to be able to walk into a Turner Gallery once a week; but, for all that, I would not give up a Connecticut Valley sunset, such as last summer could be had for the looking at. Not Turner, even, could paint those level shadows, all interfused with trembling light, that filled the hollows of the hills across the river, and brought out their wavy contour, and showed the depth and distance of the valley opening miles away. Could he throw athwart the dark mirror of the sleeping water in the gorge, which led the imprisoned river stealthily to the sea, the gliding snows of the sails rosy-white that stole swan-like from behind the bluffs? Could he bring down the rainbow till its hither abutment rested on the centre of the stream in a transparent mist of driving rain, while its keystone was lost in the stooping cloud above? Art is good, as well as long; but time is also fleeting, and, not being millionnaires, with the luxury of a run across the Atlantic at command, let us make what we can out of what we have. It is very probable that architecture, too, is a sore subject to aspiring Young America, who turns discontentedly from the stucco and pine-plank tracery of the new cathedral of St. Aërian. But let Young America go out to the meadows, and discover for himself a group of young elms. There is one I know of, not unattainable by very moderate pedestrianism from the same seaport before alluded to, where a most exquisite arrangement of arches and tracery can be seen. Six or eight elms, their long bending boughs clothed with thick, clinging leafage, mingle their tops, forming a sort of vaulted roof, such as at the intersection of nave and transepts occurs in every Gothic church which has no central tower. More exquisite curves, better studies for a healthy-minded and original architect, could hardly be found. The interlacing branches are suggestive of tracery-patterns, not to be outdone even in the flamboyant windows of York and Rouen. There is no excuse for the squat, ugly, and stupid arches one sees in almost every attempt at pointed architecture, when the elm-tree springs by every riverside in the land.

But it is time to conclude our desultory rambles. It would be pleasant to me to recall many another of my old haunts, spots which, perhaps, were never called beautiful before now, and may not be again for many a day. For they all lie in a very tame and prosaic country, nearly level, the utmost elevation getting hardly a couple of hundred feet above tidewater mark; a country with less natural beauty than belongs to most New England towns,—bare, bleak, rocky, with stunted vegetation and ungenial soil. Yet within its limits there are brooks and marshes and copses and woodlands,—rocks over which the wild columbine hangs its fuchsia-like pendants, and dells where nestle the earliest and sweetest of the wood-flowerets.

And now to come back to the miserable sinner. As schoolboy, as bank-clerk, as teacher, as worker in many ways, he has unemployed leisure in the hours of daylight,—not so many as he should have, perhaps, but still many hours in the course of the month. Shall he go to the livery-stable, the bowling-alley, or the billiard-saloon? Not being a saint, of course he can plead no high-toned sense of need of physical culture, to warrant these indulgences. He goes because he likes it, gets enjoyment, exercise, rest for a mind tasked to the full with the day's work. This he ought to have; and if butting little ivory balls about or propelling big wooden ones will give it him, let him have it, if so be that it cannot be got otherwise. There is no contamination in the cue or the ten-pin; but there is in the habits and associations of the places where they are found. Let us not be maw-wormish about it, but tell the truth as it is. The quasi-gambling principle upon which all such places are conducted stimulates the love of hazard and makes way for the betting propensity to become full-blown. Of course, one can bet, if one have money; two lumps of sugar and a few flies will enable a man to lose the fortune of the Rothschilds, if he will. That is not the question. The billiard-saloons do educate men for the gambling-house, simply because they cannot go to them without either losing their money or winning their games. Beside that, the gaseous, dusty, confined, and tobacco-scented air of those places is not to be compared with our free, open, out-doors hills and meadows, for any hygienic purposes.

But, argument apart, there is a sad New England story, so often repeated as to be almost wearisome, were it not so sad. It is of the fresh, frank, honest-hearted boy, who may be seen behind many a bank-counter. At first, so active, trustworthy, and trusted,—yet with the constant temptation of unemployed time and energies demanding supply of action. Little by little these are supplied,—supplied by the billiard-table and its concomitants. It is the same story,—first, rumors, then equivocation, then exposure. Perhaps a petty sum is all; but, to the austere justice of banking, this is as bad, nay, worse than millions. And then a brief paragraph in the newspaper, and one more ruined young man, sulking beside the family-hearthstone, his father's shame, his mother's unextinguishable sorrow,—a candidate for crime, if he have power of mind and spirit to feel, or an imbecile dependant, if he have not.

Now preaching, whether lay or clerical, will not do much to prevent this, especially if it be pitched (as it commonly is) upon too high a key. Preventing means, or used to mean, when words had a meaning, getting beforehand with anything. And if young Homespun have from the outset something he likes better, he will not take to the ivory balls in pleasant weather, and in rainy weather will be apt to prefer even quite a stupid book to the board of green cloth. Therefore, boys, go,—and girls, too, for that matter,—on flower and moss hunts!—and ye, dear middle-aged people, send them, and go also upon the same! Find something that will tempt you into the woods,—something neither berries nor sassafras,—something which cannot be eaten or sold, but which will simply give you a sense and a love of beauty. These pages have been written to show that it lies at your very doors,—that nothing but stout boots, an old coat or jacket, and an observant eye, is needed. When you come to be saints, or even to be men, there will be plenty of active work to do, if so be that you will only do it. Then, in careful regard to your bodies, you may have hard-trotting (not fast-trotting) horses, pickerel-backed boats, and a billiard-room over the stable,—if your canonization seem to require it. But the saint, if he be true saint, needs no such care. He will get work enough, hard, physical work, if only in trotting up and down the steep stairs of tenant-houses, to keep his digestion in tolerable order. It is only your pseudo-saint, who cuddles himself for the pulpit and the platform, and keeps the safety-valve down with midnight sittings while "rosining up" the furnaces with strong coffee, that will come to grief by collapse of flues. If a man, whether sinner or saint, will run races for the honor of being the fastest boat in the river of popular favor, he must take the consequences.

But for the poor, benighted, heathen sinner, desiring enjoyment that shall be honest, cheap, satisfying, and attainable, I say, in the full faith of the creed of Nemophily,—Get into the woods! No matter what you expect to find there,—go and see what you can find. Don't walk for "constitutionals," without an object at the end or on the way. Keep your feet well shod and your eyes open. Bring home all the flowers and pretty wood-growths you can, and you may find that you have been entertaining angels unawares. Find out about them all you can yourself, and then (in spite of a previous tirade against botany, be it said) go to BIGELOW'S "PLANTS OF BOSTON" and learn more.

SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW.

A fatiguing journey up six long, winding flights of smoothly-waxed stairs carried me to the door of the room I occupied in the Place ——. But no matter for the name of the Place; no one, I am confident, will visit Paris for the express purpose of satisfying himself that I am to be depended upon, and that there is a house of so many stones in the Place Maubert. Here I lived, au premier au dessous du soleil, in the enjoyment of no end of fresh air, especially in winter, and a brilliant prospect up and down the street and over the roofs of the houses across the way, which reached from the Pantheon on the one side, to the peaked roofs and factory-like chimneys of the Tuileries on the other, the dome of the Hôtel des Invalides occupying the centre of the picture. I was studying painting at that time,—learning to paint the much-admired landscapes and figure-pieces which I produce with so much ease now and dispose of with so little,—and, as a general thing, was busy, (though I had my fits of abstraction, like other men of genius, during which I did nothing but lie on my bed and smoke pipes over French novels, or join parties of pleasure into the country or within the barriers,) through the day, and often till late in the evening, in the atelier of one or another of the most renowned artists of the city.

At the head of the last flight of stairs in this house was a narrow passage-way in which I was always obliged to stop and recover my breath, after finishing the one hundred and thirty-nine steps that led to my paradise, before I could get my key into its lock; and into this passage-way opened two doors, one of which, of course, belonged to my room, and the other to some one's else. But who this some one else was I was unable to find out. Was it—and how convenient a word is ça in such a case!—male or female? I was persuaded it must be a woman, and as a woman I always used to think of her and speak of her, to myself,—and I thought and spoke of her often enough. Of course, I could have settled the question at once by knocking at her door and asking for a match, but I scorned resorting to such weak subterfuges. But how quiet she was! Occasionally, when, contrary to my usual custom, I took another nap after waking in the morning, instead of going out for exercise and a glimpse of early Paris street-life,—occasionally I used to hear her moving about on the other side of the thin partition which separated our rooms, as stealthily as though she feared she might disturb me. She would light her charcoal-stove, and perhaps glide softly by my door and down stairs, to return soon with the paper of coffee, the, bit of bread, and the egg or two which were to serve her for breakfast, and now and then she would sing to herself, but so gently that I never could hear the words of her song, nor scarcely the air. An evil spirit put gimlets into my head, but I shook them out like so much powder, and resolved to be honorable, if I was an artist. I found, however, that my curiosity was an abominable nuisance, that my morning walks were almost entirely neglected, and that I could not bear to leave my room until I had heard her go out and lock her door behind her. Every day, after her departure, I resolved that she should not go out again without being seen by me, and every time I attempted to follow her in such a way as to escape detection I lost sight of her. I nearly fell into the street as I attempted to reach far enough out of my window to see her as she came out at the street-door.

At last, one morning, when it happened, that, just as I had finished dressing myself and was ready to go out, she opened her door and ran down stairs without closing it behind her, carried away by my curiosity, I stepped out into the narrow passage-way and looked into her sanctuary. The room was a smaller one than mine,—but how much neater! The muslin curtains in her window were as white as snow; her wardrobe, which hung against the wall, was protected from the dust by a linen cloth; the floor shone like a mirror. Her canary hung in the window, and greeted me with a perfect whirlwind of roulades as I stepped into the room. Her fire was burning briskly under a pot of water, which was just coming to the boiling-point, and singing as gayly and almost as loudly as her bird. Over the back of a chair was thrown the work she had been busied with; and on the bed, almost hid by the curtains, was a pair of the prettiest little blue garters I ever saw, even in Paris,—span-new they were, and had evidently been bought no longer ago than the evening before,—and some other articles of feminine apparel, which I will not attempt to describe. I looked into her glass, I really believe, with the hope of finding there a faint reflection of her face and figure. She must have looked into it but a minute before going out. A book, like a Testament, lay on the table. I knew I should find her name on the fly-leaf, and was just on the point of satisfying myself with regard to that particular when I heard her feet upon the stairs; and, with a start which nearly carried away the curtains of her bed, I rushed from her room into my own.

How my heart beat, after I had gently closed my door and was sitting on the side of my bed, listening to the movements in the next room! It didn't seem to me as though I had been guilty of a high misdemeanor, and yet, though I had been prepared for her return, I was as much discomposed as though I had been caught peeping.

So far from being satisfied with this resolution of my doubts with regard to the sex of my neighbor, I now found myself more uneasy and curious than before. Was she young and pretty and good? and what did she do? and what was her name? My thoughts were perpetually running up those six flights and stopping baffled at her close-shut door. I drew ideal portraits of her, and introduced them into all my pictures as pertinaciously as Rubens did his wives, and would often finish out an accidental face in a study of rocks, much to my instructor's surprise and my fellow-students' amusement. It was very remarkable, however, that all these fancy sketches bore a striking resemblance to another acquaintance of mine, who will shortly be introduced, and in whom, until I moved into my now room, I had been exclusively interested,—so much so, in fact, that——But I will not anticipate.

Most of my days were spent on the opposite side of the Seine; and, as I crossed that river, by the Pont Royal, at about five o'clock, every evening, on my way to the Laiterie, at which I usually took what I called my dinner, I always stopped to buy a bunch of flowers, of violets in their season, of a charming little flower-girl, who had her stand, on the Quai Voltaire, and who, by the time my turn to be served came, had usually disposed of nearly her whole stock. Every one who looked at her bought of her. She possessed something that was more attractive even than her beauty; though I question, if, without her glossy brown hair, her soft, dark eyes, her glorious complexion, her round, dimpled cheek and chin, her gentle winning smile, and her exquisite taste in dress—I question, if, without all these, her quiet, modest demeanor and unaffected simplicity and propriety would have attracted quite as much attention as they always did.

I had not bought many bouquets of Thérèse before she began to recognize me as I came up, and to greet me with a smile and a "Bon jour, Monsieur," sweeter in tone and accent than any I had ever heard before. What a voice hers was! Its tones were like those of a silver bell; and I found that she always had my bunch of violets or heliotrope ready for me by the time I reached her.

My frugal meal over, I was in the habit of visiting a neighboring café, where I read the papers, drank my evening cup of coffee, and, as I smoked my cigar or pipe and twirled my posies in my fingers or held them to my nose, would wonder who she was who sold them to me, if she ever thought of those who bought them of her, and if she distinguished me above her other customers. It seemed to me, that, if she had the same angelic smile and happy greeting for them as she always bestowed upon me, they must one and all be her slaves; and yet I couldn't decide whether I really loved her or was only touched by a passing fancy for her.

I looked forward, however, through the day, to my interview with her with a great deal of impatience, and found myself making short cuts in the long walk which led me to her. I used to arrange, on my way, well-turned sentences with which to please her, and by which I expected to startle her into some intimation of her feelings toward me. I was angry that she was obliged to stand in so public a place, exposed to the gaze and remarks of all who chose to stop and buy of her. In fine, I was jealous, or rather was piqued, that she should receive all others exactly as she received me, and almost flattered myself that necessity forced her to meet them with the same sweet smile inclination led her to bestow on me.

This was the state of affairs at the time I moved into my new lodgings, before referred to, in the Place Maubert, and I was suffering these mental torments for Thérèse's sake, when the appearance, or rather the non-appearance, of my mysterious neighbor aggravated and complicated the symptoms and converted my slow fever into an intermittent. I had called my fair unknown Hermine;—the pronoun she, as it applied equally to every individual of the female sex, and in the French language to many things besides, soon became insufficient, and I took the liberty of calling her Hermine. I was so ashamed of my foolish passion, that I could not make up my mind even to question the porter at the door with regard to her, nor to consult any of my better initiated acquaintances as to the proper course to be pursued, but lived out a wretched succession of days and nights of feverish anxiety and expectation,—of what I knew not.

I was on my way over the Pont Royal, one evening, at my usual hour, and was just coming in sight of my bewitching flower-merchant, when a sudden, and, as I believed, a happy thought occurred to me, and I resolved to put it into instant execution. I am sure I blushed and stammered wofully as I asked for two bunches of flowers instead of my usual one, and I was confident, that, as she handed them to me without a word, but with such a look, Thérèse's brow was shaded by something more than the dark bands of her brown hair or the edge of her becoming cap, and that her lip quivered rather with a suppressed sigh than with her usual happy smile. I didn't stop to speak with her that night, but hurried away towards my room, conscious—for I did not dare to look behind me, or I am sure I should have relinquished my design—that her large, sorrowful eyes were full of the tears she had kept back while I had stood before her.

I reached my room as soon as possible, and, after assuring myself that my neighbor was still absent, carefully inserted my second nosegay into her keyhole, and rushed from the house as though I had committed burglary.

I was very young then, very romantic, and wholly wanting in assurance. I must have been, or I should never have regarded it as a crime, not against myself, but others, that I was making my days miserable and my nights sleepless on account of two young girls, one of whom I had never seen, and the other of whom was merely a flower-merchant.

When I clambered up to my room late that night, the flowers were no longer where I had put them. I had been torturing myself all the evening with the thought that Hermine might have felt offended, and that I should find them torn in pieces and thrown down at my door, or that she would be waiting for me with a severe reprimand for my boldness and impertinence. But I could find no trace of them, and went to sleep, soothed by the conviction that they had been carefully put by in a glass of water, or were occupying a place on her pillow by the side of her dainty cheek. I feared to meet Thérèse's sorrowful face again the next night, and was troubled so much by the thought of it through the day, that I fairly deserted her that evening and bought my two bouquets elsewhere. With one of these, which I had taken care should be of a finer quality than before, I repeated my experiment of the preceding night and with the same gratifying result. But the day after, forgetting, until it was too late, that I had given Thérèse fair cause to be seriously angry with me, habit carried me to my old resort again, though I had fully determined to reach home by another way, and to patronize, for the future, my new bouquetière, who was not only old and ugly, but of the masculine gender. Habit—and perhaps wish had something to do with it—was too strong, however, and I found myself turning down the Quai Voltaire at the customary hour the next evening.

Much to my surprise, and somewhat to my mortification, Thérèse greeted me with her old sunny smile. Her "Bon jour, Monsieur," was as cordial as ever; and it even seemed to me—and that didn't in the least tend to compose me—that her eyes sparkled with an archness which I had never seen in them before, and that her voice had in it a tinge of malice, as she held out to me two of her finest bunches, saying,—

I was very angry with her for being in such good-humor, and believe I was anything but aimable or polite with her. Why did she not look hurt or offended and reproach me for my desertion, instead of almost disarming my senseless anger by her gentleness?

"It seems that Monsieur forgets his old friends, sometimes," she continued, as I took the flowers she had been holding towards me, and was fumbling in my pocket for the change.

"Forget!" I stammered; for the temper I found her in had so completely ruffled mine, that I was hardly sufficiently master of myself to be able to answer her at all,—"what makes you think I forget? Am I not here this evening, as usual?"

"This evening, yes,—but last night you did not come; or were you here too late to find me? I"——she paused, and, with her color a little heightened, as though she had narrowly escaped making a disclosure, looked another way,—"Monsieur must have bought his flowers elsewhere, yesterday. Were they as fresh and sweet as mine?"

"But how do you know, Mademoiselle,"—I answered, after I had given her a long opportunity to add what I had hoped would follow that long-drawn-out "I"; (she was going to say, I was sure, that she had waited for me to come as long as was possible;)—"How do you know that I bought my flowers elsewhere, or that I bought any? And where can I find finer ones than you give me?"

"Monsieur is kind enough to say so," she returned. "Can you excuse my indiscretion? I only thought, that, as you never miss carrying a bunch of flowers home with you, and sometimes two," she added, with a wicked twinkle in the corner of her mouth, "you must have found some better than mine, last night. But Monsieur will, of course, act his own pleasure."

Thérèse had never appeared to me more charming than at that moment. I wondered afterwards how I had been able to tear myself away from her, and was almost angry that I had not thrown down my second bunch, had not vowed to her that I would never desert her again, and had not confessed that the pain I had suffered from my folly had more than equalled hers, since I was never so happy as when I could be near and see her and hear the music of her voice.

And this was my life, and these the pains I used to suffer. Two tender passions held alternate possession of my fickle heart, and a constant struggle was always waging between them for the mastery; and the impossibility of deciding in favor of either of them, which to accept and which deny, prevented my yielding to either. Thérèse, however, whose real presence I could enjoy, upon whose delicious beauty I could feast my eyes whenever the fancy seized me, and whose voice I could hear, even when separated from her, possessed a fearful advantage over her invisible rival, who maintained her position in my interest only by preserving her incognito and maintaining my curiosity strained to the highest pitch. My acquaintance with Thérèse became daily more intimate, and was soon upon such a footing as seemed to authorize my asking her to accompany me on a Sunday jaunt to one of the thousand resorts of Parisian pleasure-seekers just beyond the barriers of the city.

She accepted,—of course she did,—and the matter was finally arranged one Saturday evening for the next day. I was to find her at the house of her aunt, who lived in my neighborhood, and who, to my surprise, turned out to be the proprietress of the Laiterie I frequented. Here we were to breakfast, and afterwards take the proper conveyance to our destination, which I think was Belleville.

Sunday came, and with it came such weather as the gods seldom vouchsafe to mortals who contemplate visiting the country. It was one of those cloudless days in early June when all Nature, and yourself more than anything else in Nature, seems as though it had been taking Champagne,—not too warm, but sufficiently so to make out-of-door life a luxury, and an excursion like ours into the country almost a necessity.

Thérèse, like everything else in Nature on that summer's day, was more gloriously beautiful, in my eyes, than ever before. Hermine's ideal beauty, and with it her chance of success, faded out from my memory like an unfixed photograph, before this charming reality, and Thérèse ruled supreme. She had dressed herself with a taste which surprised even me, who had so long regarded her as irreproachable, as she was unapproachable, in that particular; and the joy she felt at the thought of a whole day's ramble in the country showed itself in every feature of her countenance, in every movement, and in every tone of her voice. There didn't live a prouder or a happier man than I was, as we made our way arm in arm towards the Place Dauphine, where we were to take the omnibus for Belleville.

We ran wild in the woods and fields all that day, we fed the fishes in the ponds, we made ourselves dizzy on the seesaws and merry-go-rounds, and at last, fairly tired out, and feeling desperately and most unromantically hungry, turned into the neatest and least frequented restaurant we could find and ordered our dinner.

Thérèse was no gourmande, luckily. Her tastes were simple and harmonized admirably with my slender means. We dined, however, like princes, and drank a bottle of Château Margeaux, instead of the vin ordinaire, which was my ordinary wine. Thérèse's gayety had fairly inoculated me, and, forgetting my usual reserve, we laughed and chatted as noisily as a couple of children.

"Upon my word," cried I, as I caught sight of a bouquet of flowers in the room we occupied, "what a couple of ninnies we have been! We have forgotten to get any flowers to carry home with us. But I suppose you see too many of them through the week to care for them to-day."

"Oh, no!" replied Thérèse. "I could never see too much of flowers; and besides, you must have a bunch to carry home to Mademoiselle this evening. She will never forgive you, if you neglect her to-day. And what would she think or say, if she knew where you are now and whom you are with? She is very fond of flowers,—when they come from you, I mean."

"Well," I stammered, and my face burned like fire. "What Mademoiselle? And what makes you think that I make presents of the flowers I get of you? I only get them for myself, and as an excuse for seeing you."

"Ah! menteur!" cried Thérèse, shaking her finger at me with mock solemnity. "Fi donc! c'est vilain. Do you think I have no eyes, or that you have none that speak as plainly as your mouth, and more truly? You try to deceive me, Monsieur!" and the little hypocrite assumed so injured and heart-broken an expression and tone, that I was almost wild with remorse, and cursed the wretch who had placed the flowers in the room, and myself for having noticed them. I should have been hurried into I don't know what expressions of attachment to her and of indifference towards every other individual of her sex, if she had not prevented me by the following startling remark.

"I know to whom you give the flowers you value so much as coming from me. It is to your next-door neighbor, who pleases you more than I do, and whom you have known, perhaps, longer than you have me. Why didn't you invite her, and not me, to come with you to-day? It would have been better."

"Ah!" cried I, "do you know her? She told you about it? Why doesn't she let me see her? Is her name Hermine?"

And almost before I knew it, I had told her the whole story of my passion for my invisible neighbor.

Thérèse pouted, and turned her back. She put her handkerchief to her face, and called me all sorts of hard names for having brought her there to listen to the confession of my love for another; and turned a deaf ear, or I thought she did, to my expostulations and my protestations that I didn't really care for Hermine,—that it was only a passing fancy, more curiosity than anything else,—and that I really loved no one but her.

She began to relent at last, though I was half inclined to be sorry, for her resentment became her even better than her good-humor.

"Well," she said, finally, "it is too tiresome to quarrel, and I will forgive; for, although you say you have never seen Hermine,—(that is a prettier name than Thérèse, isn't it?)—she has, perhaps, seen you, and may really love you "—

"But I don't love her," I cried. "I don't want to love her. I don't want to see her. Her name isn't Hermine, I know. I will never think of her again, nor make a fool of myself by putting nose-gays into her keyhole, if you will only not look so sober any more."

"She will be very sorry for that, I am sure," returned Thérèse, with a smile I could not translate; "and she will miss them very much. I judge her by myself. I always find a bunch at my door when I go home at night"—

"You! You find flowers at your door? And who puts them there?" And I took my turn at being provoked. "You haven't used me fairly, Thérèse, to make me understand all this time that you cared for no one but me. There is some one, then, whom you love and who loves you?"

"Oh, yes!" she answered, her whole face beaming with a pleasure which made me feel like committing a murder or a suicide; "oh, yes! I believe he does; he has almost told me so. And—and I know that I do. But he is so droll! He is my next-door neighbor, and has never seen me yet, and has never tried to, I believe; but he leaves a bunch of flowers at my door every evening, and calls me—Hermine."

And before she could prevent me, I held her in my arms, and, in spite of her struggles, had kissed her forehead, eyes, hair, nose, and lips before she could extricate herself, and then went round the room in a wild dance of perfect joy and relief.

"I knew I could love no one else, Thérèse-Hermine, or Hermine-Thérèse! I knew there must be some good and sufficient reason for the unaccountable attraction my neighbor was exercising over me. Why didn't you tell me sooner, méchante? I suppose you never would have done so at all, if we had not come out here to-day. Suppose I had not asked you to come with me?"

"Wouldn't you have asked me?" she answered, with so much winning grace and in such a pleading tone that I found myself obliged to repeat the operation of a few lines above. "Wouldn't you have asked me? I don't know what I should have done," she continued, sadly and thoughtfully. "Oh, yes!" she exclaimed, jumping up and clapping her hands, while her whole face was radiant with triumph. "Oh, yes! then I should have been Hermine, and you would have asked her."

Two happier young people than Thérèse and myself never, I am confident, returned by rail from a day's excursion in the country. Our happy faces, our rapid talking, and our devotion to each other, which we took no pains to conceal, attracted the attention of all about us,—and I heard one father of a family, who was returning to Paris with a half score of cross, tired, and crying children, whisper to his wife, as he pointed towards us,—"That is a couple in their honey-moon, or else lovers; how happy they are!"

And that is the way in which I stumbled into wedlock. How many others, in their pursuit of what has seemed to them the substance, have failed to discover, perhaps too late, that they were following a flitting shadow,—while I, favored mortal, in my chase of a dream, stumbled upon the greatest real good of my whole life!

THROUGH THE FIELDS TO SAINT PETER'S.

  There's a by-road to Saint Peter's. First you swing across the Tiber
  In a ferry-boat that floats you in a minute from the crowd;
  Then through high-hedged lanes you saunter; then by fields and sunny
    pastures;
  And beyond, the wondrous dome uprises like a golden cloud.

  And this morning,—Easter morning,—while the streets were thronged
    with people,
  And all Rome moved toward the Apostle's temple by the usual way,
  I strolled by the fields and hedges,—stopping now to view the
    landscape,
  Now to sketch the lazy cattle in the April grass that lay.

  Galaxies of buttercups and daisies ran along the meadows,—
  Rosy flushes of red clover,—blossoming shrubs and sprouting vines;
  Overhead the larks were singing, heeding not the bells a-ringing,—
  Little knew they of the Pasqua, or the proud Saint Peter's shrines.

  Contadini, men and women, in their very best apparel,
  Trooping one behind another, chatted all along the roads;
  Boys were pitching quoits and coppers; old men in the sun were basking:
  In the festive smile of Heaven all laid aside their weary loads.

  Underneath an ancient portal, soon I passed into the city;
  Entered San Pietro's Square, now thronged with upward crowding forms;
  Past the Cardinals' gilded coaches, and the gorgeous scarlet lackeys,
  And the flashing files of soldiers, and black priests in gloomy swarms.

  All were moving to the temple. Push aside the ponderous curtain!
  Lo! the glorious heights of marble, melting in the golden dome,
  Where the grand mosaic pictures, veiled in warm and misty softness,
  Swim in faith's religious trances,—high above all heights of Rome.

  Grand as Pergolesi chantings, lovely as a dream of Titian,
  Tones and tints and chastened splendors wreathed and grouped in sweet
    accord;
  While through nave and transept pealing, soar and sink the choral
    voices,
  Telling of the death and glorious resurrection of the Lord.

  But, ah, fatal degradation for this temple of the nations!
  For the soul is never lifted by the accord of sights and sound;
  But yon priest in gold and satin, murmuring with his ghostly Latin,
  Drags it from its natural flights, and trails its plumage on the ground.

  And to-day the Pope is heading his whole army of gay puppets,
  And the great machinery round us moving with an extra show:
  Genuflexions, censers, mitres, mystic motions, candle-lighters,
  And the juggling show of relics to the crowd that gapes below,

  Till at last they show the Pontiff, a lay figure stuffed and tinselled;
  Under canopy and fan-plumes he is borne in splendor proud
  To a show-box of the temple overlooking the Piazza;
  There he gives his benediction to the long-expectant crowd.

  Benediction! while the people, blighted, cursed by superstition,
  Steeped in ignorance and darkness, taxed and starved, looks up and begs
  For a little light and freedom, for a little law and justice,—
  That at least the cup so bitter it may drain not to the dregs!

  Benediction! while old error keeps alive a nameless terror!
  Benediction! while the poison at each pore is entering deep,
  And the sap is slowly withered, and the wormy fruit is gathered,
  And a vampire sucks the life out while the soul is fanned asleep!

  Oh, the splendor gluts the senses, while the spirit pines and dwindles!
  Mother Church is but a dry-nurse, singing while her infant moans;
  While anon a cake or rattle gives a little half-oblivion,
  And the sweetness and the glitter mingle with her drowsy tones.

  But the infant moans and tosses with a nameless want and anguish,
  While, with coarse, unmeaning bushings, louder sings the hireling
    nurse,—
  Knows no better, in her dull and superannuated blindness,—
  Tries no potion,—seeks no nurture,—but consents to worse and worse.

  If such be thy ultimation, Church of infinite pretension,—
  Such within thy chosen garden be the flowers and fruits you bear,—
  Oh, give me the book of Nature, open wide to every creature,
  And the unconsecrated thoughts that spring like daisies everywhere!

  Send me to the woods and waters,—to the studio,—to the market!
  Give me simple conversation, books, arts, sports, and friends sincere!
  Let no priest be e'er my tutor! on my brow no label written!
  Coin or passport to salvation, rather none, than beg it here!

  Give me air, and not a prison,—love for Heart, and light for Reason!
  Let me walk no slave or bigot,—God's untrammelled, fearless child!
  Yield me rights each soul is born to,—rights not given and not taken,—
  Free to Cardinals and Princes and Campagna shepherds wild.

  Like these Roman fountains gushing clear and sweet in open spaces,
  Where the poorest beggar stoops to drink, and none can say him nay,—
  Let the Law, the Truth, be common, free to man and child and woman,
  Living waters for the souls that now in sickness waste away!

  Therefore are these fields far sweeter than yon temple of Saint Peter;
  Through this grander dome of azure God looks down and blesses all;
  In these fields the birds sing clearer, to the Eternal Heart are nearer,
  Than the sad monastic chants that yonder on my ears did fall.

  Never smiled Christ's holy Vicar on the heretic and sinner
  As this sun—true type of Godhead—smiles o'er all the peopled land!
  Sweeter smells this blowing clover than the perfume of the censer,
  And the touch of Spring is kinder than the Pontiff's jewelled hand!

THE EXPERIENCE OF SAMUEL ABSALOM, FILIBUSTER.

Some time after the departure of the riflemen, a detail of eight or nine men from our company was ordered off towards the lake shore, and soon afterward another smaller one to Potosí, a little village four or five miles to the northward of Rivas, bearing orders to Captain Finney's rangers, who had gone to scout in that direction. The rest of us ate supper, and then lay listening for the boom of the little field-piece, which should tell us that the rifles had met the enemy. But the extraordinary toils and watchings of the last fortnight were too overpowering, and we were all soon buried in dreamless sleep.

In an hour or two I was awakened by horses' feet clattering over the stony pavement of the portería, or gateway to the square courtyard, in one of whose surrounding corridors we usually slept,—on blankets, cow-hides, or hard tiles, according as each man was able to furnish himself. It was the party returning from their scout on the lake. They unsaddled and fed their animals in the yard, and afterward set about frying plantains and fresh stolen pork for supper. As they talked over their provant in the room behind me, I caught most of their adventure, without the discomfort of rising or asking questions. Near the lake they had chased and captured some natives, whose behavior was suspicious and showed no good-will toward the Americans. The officer of the party, thinking them spies, had carried them part of the way to Rivas to be examined; but, fortunately, perhaps, for the captives, he afterwards relented and set them at liberty. They also talked of a small boy who had peeped out of the bushes as they rode by, and shouted to them, "Quieren for Walker?" (Are you for Walker?) and then adding energetically, "Yo no quiero filibustero god-damn!" darted away out of sight, before any one, who was so minded, could have shot the little rebel.

"Be sure," said one of the men at supper,—a noted croaker and tried coward, against whom I bear a private grudge,—"the boys have learned this from the old greasers; and we are going to have all the people of Nicaragua to fight."

Later in the night, the other party, which had been sent to Potosí, came in with panting mules, excited countenances, and one of their number stained with blood from a wound on his thigh. They told us, that, failing to find Captain Finney at Potosí, they had stretched their orders, and gone forward to Obraja, unaware that it was occupied by the enemy. At the entrance of the village, whilst riding on in complete darkness, they were challenged suddenly in Spanish. Taken by surprise, they replied in English, and, before they could turn their animals, were stunned with the glare and crash of a musket-volley, a few feet ahead of them. They recoiled, and fled with such precipitation that one of the riders was tossed over his horse's head;—however, scrambling to his feet, he found sense and good-luck to remount; and the whole party made good their flight to Rivas, with no further damage than two slight flesh-wounds,—one on the trooper, and one on his mule.

The excitement upon this arrival soon subsided, and I had again fallen into unconsciousness, when a rough shake of the shoulder aroused me, and the voice of the old sergeant dinned in my ear,—"Come here! saddle up! saddle up! You are detailed for Obraja." In a few moments I was mounted, and, with two others of the company, rode out of the gateway into the street. There we found awaiting us a fourth horseman, charged with orders for the riflemen at Obraja, and whom it was our duty to accompany as guard.

After clearing Rivas, we clattered over the road at a fast pace, rousing all the dogs at the haciendas as we passed, and leaving them baying behind us, until we came to where the Potosí road forked off to the right; thenceforward, fearing an ambush, we rode slowly and with great caution, stopping often to dismount and reconnoitre moon-lit fields beyond the roadside hedges. At length, after passing a picket of our riflemen, we came to a large adobe house directly on the roadside, where we found the main body of the detachment encamped and sleeping. The house stood something under half a mile from Obraja, and was the residence of that friendly alcalde who on the approach of the enemy had removed with his family to Rivas, and placed General Walker on his guard. As we rode into the yard, we had some ado to keep our horses from treading on the sleeping soldiers, who lay scattered all round the building, and also in its open corridor fronting toward Obraja. Dismounting here, our courier went into the house to communicate with Colonel O'Neal, the commander of the detachment,—leaving it to us either to tie up, and lie where we were until morning, or pass farther up the road, where Captain Finney's rangers were stationed. I chose to go forward and hear the rangers' story, who, we were told, had had a slight brush with the enemy in the beginning of the night.

After riding near quarter of a mile, I came to another adobe building on the roadside, occupied by a small party, and forming Colonel O'Neal's advanced post, at the distance of four hundred yards or more from Obraja. Here they told me that Captain Finney's company, whilst riding into Obraja early in the night, had been hotly fired upon, and Captain Finney himself was brought off struck in the breast, wounded mortally. The riflemen had as yet made no attack, but awaited daylight. The number of the enemy was not known; though rumor placed it between one thousand and fifteen hundred. Whatever it was, they were apprehensive; for throughout the night we heard them barricading the town with great hurry and clatter; and it gave us sad discomfort to think that in the morning there would be these walls to climb before our men could get at them. It was the occasion of much bitter cursing that there should be delay until this was accomplished, and of one man's protesting seriously that it was, and had been, General Walker's endeavor, not to whip the greasers, but to get as many Americans killed in Nicaragua as possible,—he nourishing secret and implacable hatred against them for some cause. However, I think this judgment weak and improbable, though plausible enough from some points of view.

During the night there was some firing between our party and the enemy from under cover in front, with some few wounds, and one man on our side shot through the hat,—who thereupon, pulling off the injured head-piece, and looking at it gravely, declared he would always thenceforward wear his hat with a high crown; for, said he, had this one been half an inch lower, the bullet must have struck the head:—which drollery, in consideration of the circumstances, was allowed to pass for an exceeding good stroke.

We passed a disturbed and rather uneasy night, fearful all the time of being cut off or overwhelmed. But morning breaking at length, a party of riflemen came up from Colonel O'Neal's camp below, and affairs were immediately changed for the offensive. The riflemen moved forward against the town, whilst the rangers were posted at several points along the road to guard against surprise from the bushes. Among these latter I took my stand. The squad which went forward could not have numbered above sixty men, and was armed with Mississippi rifles only,—without wheel-piece of any kind, or even bayonets. I took them for a party of skirmishers, sent ahead to clear the way; yet they were not followed or supported by any additional force that I saw then or afterwards.

As they passed up the road, I observed that the most listless and dead amongst them were at length stirred up and thoroughly awake,—though not with enthusiasm or martial impatience. Some seemed uneasy and careworn, and glanced about nervously; had their countenances not been unalterably yellow, they would certainly have been white. One fellow near the rear was trembling sadly, and carried his rifle in an unreasonable manner,—promising aimless discharges, and, perhaps, dodgings into the bushes. But this one was excusable, and I may have slandered him; for ague had shaken the life almost out of him so often that shaking was become natural, and little else could be expected of him; and, furthermore, a pale face or unsteady joints are not always weathercock to a fainting spirit. In some constitutions these may come from other emotions than fear; and it often happens that your most lamentable shaker will stand you longer at the breach than the man of iron nerve, with a white liver. I have seen such. However, the majority of these were resolute and dangerous-looking men, and, though without any marks of inordinate zeal, seemed willing enough to fight whatever appeared. They held their rifles in the hand cocked, and, as they advanced, threw their eyes sharply into the bushes on either side the road,—having received orders to shoot the first greaser that showed himself, without awaiting the word.

In a few moments after, the party having disappeared behind a turn of the road, we suddenly heard the cracking of their rifles, mingled with the deeper crash of more numerous musketry; and it was a vivid sensation, new to me, that some of those bullets were surely finding billets in the bodies of men. This seemed an encounter with a force of the enemy outside of the town; and directly we thought, from the movement of the noise, that our riflemen were driving them in. Then there was a louder and more rapid volleying of musketry, which completely drowned the rifles, and seemed to tell us that our men were come in sight of the barricades. This lasted but a moment, when it was succeeded by a scattered fire of fewer guns, and finally by irregular volleys. We knew that our men had fallen back; and we had not once thought it would be otherwise. Indeed, it had been a rarely preposterous enemy who should allow himself to be driven from behind a rampart by that handful of dispirited, men.

Whilst things were on this foot, the courier of last night came up with his guard, having been sent by Colonel O'Neal, who had remained at the alcalde's house below, to get news of the attacking party. As I was still under his orders, I joined him, and rode forward towards the combatants,—not without sundry misgivings, known to most men who are about to enter a fray for the first time,—or the twentieth time, perhaps, if the truth were confessed. We found the riflemen drawn up in the road, protected by the raised side-bank and cactus-hedge from an enemy concealed amongst some trees and bushes, a little distance to the right of the road in front. Above the trees, within pistol-shot, was visible the red roof of a church which stood on the plaza of Obraja, where were barricaded, as they said, over a thousand greaser soldiers. All other sign of the town than this one roof was shut in from view by the abundant foliage which embowered it. As we approached the riflemen, we dismounted and led our horses, fearing to attract a shower from the enemy, who lay in the bushes firing irregularly. The officer of the party told us to report to Colonel O'Neal that he had advanced within sight of the plaza, and, finding it strongly barricaded, and "swarming with greasers," he held it folly to assail it with fifty men, and so had retreated. He mentioned some loss,—very small for the noise that had been made,—of which I remember the name of one Lieutenant Webster, shot through the head. He charged us to ask Colonel O'Neal's permission to fall back on the adobe where we had passed the night, as the enemy appeared to be moving around his right, and he was fearful of being surrounded in the open road. But, directly after, seeing the enemy were in earnest to cut him off, he concluded to fall back on the house upon his own responsibility, and did so, and with the adobe walls around him probably felt secure enough against such an enemy.

We returned to the lower camp, and delivered our report to a boyish-looking person, in unepauletted red flannel shirt, but who was no other than Colonel O'Neal, the officer in command. He was popular amongst his men, and reputed a brave and energetic officer. He probably mistrusted from the first that his force was too small; and hence the delay in the attack, and the dispatch of the little party of riflemen merely to satisfy General Walker. Be that as it may, upon hearing our report, he recalled the advanced party, and immediately sent off to Rivas to say he could do nothing against the town without a reinforcement.

In the mean time those of the men who were off guard lay about under the trees and ate oranges, with which the alcalde's yard was stocked plentifully, whilst such wounded as had been brought in were laid on the floor of the house, and their wounds probed by the surgeon; whereupon, being but young soldiers mostly, there arose loud outcries and dismal bellowings. For my own part, I set about comforting my mule, who had been under saddle since leaving Rivas. I unsaddled him, brought him an armful of tortilla corn from the alcalde's kitchen-loft, some water from the well, and left him making merry as if he had nothing worse ahead of him.

Some time after mid-day the rest of our company came out from Rivas, and we immediately had orders to ride up the road and fire upon the enemy's outpost,—which, as the riflemen had been withdrawn and our advanced picket was now nearly half a mile from the town, promised to be a service of some danger. Therefore one of our commissioned officers, afterwards dismissed the service for cowardice, was here seized suddenly with the colic,—so badly, that he was unable to ride with us at his post. Other sick men being left in quarters at Rivas, we counted now but little over twenty men,—armed with Mississippi or Sharpe's rifles, and some of us with the revolvers we had brought from California. After passing the adobe building, garrisoned last night, but now empty, we advanced with great care, our leader taking often the precaution to dismount and peer with bared head over the cactus-hedge which crowned the right-hand bank of the road and shut us in on that side completely. At every turn of the road he repeated his reconnoissance, so that our advance was very slow, giving a watchful enemy almost time to place an ambush, if they had none ready prepared. It was as sweet a place for a trap as greaser's heart could wish. On our right was the impenetrable cactus-hedge, with an open space beyond, terminated at the distance of a few yards by a wood or plantain-patch. On the left was another wood, matted with tangled underbrush and vines which no horseman could penetrate. On either side half a dozen men might couch in ambush and shoot us down in perfect security.

We passed on, however, without disturbance, or sight of an enemy, until we came nearly to the edge of the town and saw the glistening roof of the church appear above the foliage,—where sat sundry carrion-loving buzzards, elbowing each other, shuffling to and fro with outspread wings, and chuckling, doubtless, over the promise of glorious times. As we go on, suddenly heads appear over the bushes less than a hundred yards in front, and we hear the vindictive whistle of Minié-balls above us. Our leader, calling upon us to fire, began himself to blaze away rapidly with his Colt's revolver. We huddled forward, with little care for order, and delivered some dozen Mississippi and Sharpe's rifles. There were nervous men in the crowd; for, after the discharge, dust was flying from the road within thirty feet of us. However, some aimed higher; and when we looked again, the heads had disappeared. One bold greaser stepped out into the road and sent his Minié-ball singing several yards above us, then darted back quickly, before any of us could have him. We waited a moment to see others, but they seemed to be satisfied;—and we were satisfied,—with prospect of a swarm bursting out on us from the town; so, sinking spurs into our weary animals, we made good pace back to the camp,—not without an alarm that a troop of well-mounted lancers was behind us.

In the course of the afternoon, General Henningsen arrived, bringing a fine brass howitzer, and a small reinforcement of infantry—as those armed with rifled muskets and bayonets were called—and artillerymen; and, after some hours' rest, he ordered a fresh attempt with the howitzer, supported by somewhere near two hundred men. This party was received with so fierce a fire at the barricade that they shrank back, leaving the howitzer behind in the road,—so that the enemy were on the point of capturing it, when a brave artilleryman touched off the piece, loaded with grape-shot, almost in their faces, and, strewing the earth with dead, sent the others flying back to the barricade. This artilleryman told me that an old officer amongst the enemy stood his ground alone after the discharge, and swore manfully at the fugitives, but they were panic-struck and took no heed; and it was his assertion, that, had a small part of the riflemen rallied and charged at this time, they might have gone over the barricade without difficulty or hindrance. As it was, the howitzer was scarcely brought off, and the attack failed ingloriously. Whether this story of the artilleryman were true or false, we heard in other ways, by general report, that the riflemen had behaved badly, and quailed as the filibusters had scarcely done before; though, after all, it will seem unreasonable to blame these two hundred or less, disease-worn and spiritless men, for not whipping ten hundred out of a barricaded town. It may be worth saying here, that, seeing things in Nicaragua from a common soldier's befogged view-point, and having only general rumor, or the tales of privates like myself, for parts of an engagement where I was not present, I may easily make mistakes in the numbers, and otherwise do Walker and his officers, or the enemy, injustice. Yet I may be excused, since I am not attempting a history of the war, but merely some account of my own experience, passive and active.

Late in the evening our company assisted to carry some wounded to Rivas. Amongst them was Captain Finney, mentioned before as the first man struck by the enemy. He seemed to be a brave and uncommonly considerate officer, and whilst being carried in on a chair, suffering with his death-wound, he showed concern for his supporters, and insisted on having them relieved upon the smallest sign of fatigue. He was taken to the quarters of a friend, where he died a few days afterward. The other wounded were carried to the hospital, and, finding no one there to take charge of them, we left them to themselves, lying or sitting upon the floor, dismal and uncared-for enough.

After dark we were again in the saddle and riding out to Obraja, in charge of a commissary's party, with provisions for the detachment of foot. But after getting a little way from the town, we were overtaken by an order from General Walker, stopping the provisions, and directing us to ride on and recall the detachment to Rivas; he having changed his mind about dislodging the enemy at this tardy hour. We reached the camp some hours into the night, and, after a little delay, calling in the pickets, and securing some native women who lived in the vicinity, to prevent their carrying word of our movement to the enemy, the detachment commenced its retrograde march,—leaving the enemy victorious, and free to go where they wished.

I remember, several times on this march, when the detachment had made some temporary halt, seeing a grim-faced dog, of the terrier species, trot along the line to the front of the column, where we rangers stood, and then, satisfied seemingly that all was well ordered, turn himself round and trot back to the rear again.

He did this with such a look and air, that it struck me he felt himself in some way responsible for our party. He was, indeed, if the tales current about him were true, the most remarkable character in all that very variegated conglomerate of characters which made up the filibuster army. He had appeared in the camp long before, coming, some said, from the Costa Ricans, with whom he became disgusted on account of their bad behavior in battle on several occasions when he was there to see. After this desertion, if it were thus, he followed the Americans faithfully, through good and bad fortune, retreat or victory; always going into battle with them,—where he actually seemed to enjoy himself,—trotting about amidst the whewing of bullets, the uptossing of turf, and the outcries of wounded men, with calm heart, and tail erect,—envied by the bravest even. On an occasion when General Walker was attacking the Costa-Ricans in Rivas, the dog entered the plaza ahead of the rest, and, finding there one of his own species, he forthwith seized him, and shook him, and put him to flight howling,—giving an omen so favorable, that the greasers were driven out of the town with ease by the others. Even his every-day life was sublime, and elevated above the habit of vulgar dogs. He allowed no man to think himself his master, or attach him individually by liberal feeding or kind treatment, but quartered indiscriminately amongst the foot, sometimes with one company, sometimes with another,—taking food from whoever gave it, but showing little gratitude, and despising caresses or attempts at familiarity. He seemed, indeed, to consider himself one amongst the rest,—one and somewhat, as they say; and his sole apparent tie with his human friends seemed to be the delight which he took in seeing them kill or killed. With this penchant, it was said, he never missed a battle, and went out with every detachment that left the camp to see that none should escape him unaware.—But enough of him,—strange dog, or devil.

The withdrawal from Obraja was opposed, so rumor said, by Henningsen and other officers; and it certainly had a most depressing effect upon the men, whilst it elated the enemy correspondingly, giving them a degree of confidence which they had never attained to before. It was agreed on all hands, by all critics whom I heard, that, having once begun this attempt, General Walker should have carried it through successfully, even if it required his whole force. However, as only part of the enemy's force was on land, the other part being supposed to be still aboard the steamers or on the island, General Walker possibly feared an attack on Rivas, should he send out a very large detachment,—remembering, too vividly, a former blunder, when he left Granada with all his army to attack the enemy at Masaya, and the enemy, making a détour, came upon his camp in Granada, and destroyed baggage, ammunition, and all it contained.

The next day the foot lay quiet in Rivas, and had rest. The rangers, however, were in the saddle almost continuously, and, what with foraging, broken sleep, and expeditions by day and night, those of us who had garrisoned Virgin Bay were become worried nearly past grumbling. On this day our own company rode out to Obraja, to visit the enemy's picket again, and afterwards to San Jorge on the lake, to guard the transportation of a row-boat thence to Rivas. The boat was one of those borrowed from the vessels in San Juan harbor for the purpose of retaking the steamers, and had been rowed up to San Jorge, and was now removed to Rivas, to prevent its seizure by the enemy,—the garrison at Virgin Bay having burnt the brig, and marched to Rivas, when the enemy first appeared on land at Obraja. So that the whole American force (except the crew of the little schooner in which General Walker and his fifty original followers first came to Nicaragua, and which was lying at this time in San Juan harbor) was now concentrated at Rivas; the enemy being eight or nine miles behind them at Obraja, or on the lake with the two steamers. As we rode through the town of San Jorge, the place seemed almost deserted, and I remember lingering with others to haversack some bunches of yellow plantains which hung in an empty house on the plaza. The delay may have come near being fatal to us, for we heard afterwards that we had been gone but a little while, when a troop of the enemy's horse rode into the place, reconnoitred, and returned in the direction in which they came. Their reconnoissance in San Jorge was explained soon afterwards.

Some time in the last half of the night following, I was detailed, along with a considerable detachment from two mounted companies, to ride on a scout toward Obraja. On the outward ride I was but half-awake, and my recollection of our course is confused: however, I think it was somewhere between Potosí and Obraja that we came to a halt, and I was aroused by some excitement in the party. Pickets were hastily posted in several directions, whilst the officers gathered about some natives awakened from a neighboring hut, and seemed to question them earnestly. We soon heard that the enemy were on the road moving from Obraja, and that a large force had a little while before passed this place going eastward. The natives, prone to exaggeration, declared that this force had been an hour in passing,—with baggage, eight pieces of cannon mounted on ox-carts, several hundred pressed native Nicaraguans, tied and guarded to prevent their running away, and a long train of women to nurse the wounded. The Chamorristas, it seemed, had been around pressing all the native men they could find into service against the Americans; and whilst we were here, two, who had been hiding all day in the bushes to avoid the conscription, came out and asked us to take them with us to Rivas,—they preferring, if forced to take sides, to join el valiente Walker.

This is the stripe of most Central American soldiers. The lower classes are lazy and cowardly, little concerned about politics, and must generally be impressed, let the cause of war be what it may. And I am persuaded, that, since General Walker never harnessed them into his service, as their own chiefs were doing perpetually, but let them swing in their hammocks and eat their plantains, (provided they lived beyond his forage-ground,) un-called-for, they were so far well satisfied with his government. However, their sympathy, supposing he had it, were worth little to him; since it takes a stronger impulsion than this to put them in motion to do anything,—a strong pulling by the nose, indeed,—such as their native rulers know how to apply.—But this is speculative, and neither here nor there.

After getting all the information concerning the enemy that was to be had from these people, the detachment returned to Rivas at a fast trot, with the two friendly natives mounted behind, on such stronger animals as were able to carry double burden. We all supposed, that, now the enemy were again out of cover and on the open road, or, leastwise, in the confusion of a new camp, there would be an immediate attack on them. But General Walker followed his own head; and, after making our report, we saw no stir, and heard nothing until morning,—when it was known that the enemy were all moved into San Jorge, with only some two miles' space between us. This place, being on the lake, was more convenient for provisions, which were easily brought by the steamers from the island of Ometepec and the towns and haciendas along the shore,—and the enemy had gained boldness to go there by our repulse at Obraja: or it may be that the force at Obraja had come down from Granada by land, and so only continued their march to San Jorge,—though the rumor was, that they had landed from the lake, as I have said.

But be that as it may, time was given them to barricade at San Jorge, till near the middle of the forenoon, and then Generals Henningsen and Sanders were sent out with some four hundred riflemen and infantry to drive them into the lake, which lay some few hundred yards behind them. During the first part of the attack, our company remained in Rivas, listening anxiously to the uproar at San Jorge,—every volley fired by the combatants being borne distinctly to us by the east wind. For some time there was a continuous rattle of musketry, with rapid detonations of deeper-mouthed cannon,—at each roar shaking our suspended hearts,—for we knew that our own men were using small arms only. After a while this abated, grew irregular, and almost ceased. An order then came for our company to mount and join the combatants. We galloped down the broad and almost level highway which passes between Rivas and San Jorge, bordered a great part of its length, on either side, by cactus-hedges, broken at various intervals by the grassy by-lanes that run out to the neighboring haciendas or parallel roads. At places where there is a slight elevation, the bottom of the road is worn several feet below the level by the carts which ply between Rivas and the lake. Opposite one of these, where the banks sloped at a sharp angle, we came upon General Henningsen and a detachment of musketeers resting on the right bank of the road, and halted beside them. The men were sitting under the shade of an adobe, refreshing themselves with oranges; and those in the nearest rank were close enough to hand us fruit and keep their seats on the grass. Five or six hundred yards up the road, the large church which stood on the plaza of San Jorge, with the door facing us, and a low wall of white stone running squarely from its side across to the right, ended the vista between banks of green foliage. Our view stretched across the plaza, which seemed to be empty and unbarricaded; and I remember the painted door of the church beyond, the red-tiled roof, the low, flanking wall of white stone, all dazily trembling in the unsteady atmosphere radiating from the heated road,—whilst a cloud of white smoke was sailing slowly away to the west. It was a hot and tranquil scene. But I always think of it with the same secret disgust with which the shipwrecked traveller looks upon the placid ocean the day after the angry storm has passed over it; for it was here I first saw the cruelty of a round shot.

When we came to a halt, there seemed to be a lull in the struggle, and no enemy was anywhere visible, nor was firing heard from any direction. The infantry, though within range of small arms from the town, were concealed by the bushes, and the enemy were scarcely aware of their presence. But when our company came galloping up the road, in full view, their attention was aroused, and we had scarcely checked our animals and exchanged a few words with the foot-soldiers, when a column of smoke shot up from the wall in front.—"Now look out!" exclaimed some one. I looked, but saw nothing to follow, and had turned my attention elsewhere, when I heard a hissing noise, as of something rushing swiftly past, and at the same time turf is thrown into the air, the horses start aside in affright, and outcries of pain and terror assail the ear. After a confused moment, I saw that the shot had struck in the line of infantry a few feet on our right. One man, the drummer of the party, was running about in the fluttered crowd with his hand hanging by a shred, crying, "Cut it off! cut it off! D—your souls, why don't some of you cut it off?" Another lay struggling on the ground, with the fleshy part of his thighs torn abruptly off, calling upon some one for God's sake to take him away from there. But the dismallest sight was a bloody shape, with face to the ground, fingers clutching the grass with aimless eagerness, and shivering silently with an invisible wound. Twisting convulsively, it rolled down into the road under our horses' feet,—and there this human form, which some call godlike, writhed and floundered like a severed worm, and disguised itself in blood and dust.

But it is dangerous to look long upon the wounded; an old soldier never rests his eye there; it is the greatest mistake of the raw one; and it was well enough for some of us that our attention was timely drawn away by alarm of another shot from the town. We spurred our horses up the bank on the left; the foot-soldiers rushed behind the adobe; and this time the shot passed harmlessly down the road. Before another, General Henningsen had ordered us all to move forward and get to cover. The foot stopped in the right branch of a by-lane which crossed the road a little way ahead. The rangers moved into the same lane,—but on the left, and divided by the highway from the foot. Here we were entirely hidden from the town by a belt of small trees and bushes. Nevertheless, the enemy's round shot, tearing through the trees, still pursued, and the Minié-balls, though thrown from smooth-bored guns, sang above and far beyond us. At this place, as near as I recollect, above a dozen men were killed and wounded,—most of them by that first round shot.

Our company shortly after was separated, and placed, for the most part, as videttes, at various points near the town. Some hours after our arrival, (which time was spent by the filibusters in drinking spirits and resting from the late unsuccessful assault,—by the enemy in barricading their position, and drinking spirits, perhaps, likewise,) General Henningsen led an attack with part of the foot,—taking several of us rangers along in the capacity of couriers, to ride off to Rivas at any important turn of the fight and report to General Walker. The enemy had taken position about the plaza, in the church, and behind the stone wall at its side, where they had by this time strengthened themselves with barricades. They had cannon looking towards every assailable point; and also on top of the church, in the cupola, they had mounted a small piece, from which they threw grape against our men advancing on any side. It proved a great source of annoyance throughout the day. Their number was not certainly known, at least among the ranks, but was rumored as high as two thousand men,—Costa-Ricans, Guatemalans, and Chamorristas.

General Henningsen moved up by a straggling street, with an adobe here and there, and the intervals filled up with fruit-trees, bushes, and cactus-hedges. Grape-shot, which may be the saddest thing, touching the body, on earth, made miserable noise above us and miserable work among us; and we couriers had leave to dismount and crawl nearer the ground. General Henningsen gained respect from us by sitting his horse alone. He was a soldier, it is said, from a boy, in European wars,—where this were a feeble skirmish; yet he wore his life here, perhaps, more loosely than in many a noisier battle. However, he seemed calm and easy enough,—never moving his head, even slightly, when the shot whizzed nearest him. General Walker, though a brave man, and cool in battle, will nevertheless dodge when a bullet hisses him fiercely. So would almost all his officers or soldiers, that I had an opportunity to notice. Yet, after all, it is a mere trick of the nerves, and only indicates familiarity and long service, or a deaf ear,—and not want of self-possession or strength of heart. The advance at length became so harassing that the party halted under cover on the roadside, whilst yet some distance from the plaza, and from this lodgment the couriers were sent off to report progress at Rivas.

My post thenceforward was, with that of others, at the head of a lane not far from the town, where we heard the voices of the combatants and the whistling of balls, but could see nothing. After some hours' comparative quiet, the drums began beating a charge again, and every gun on the ground seemed awakened and doing its best. Then there was a loud, heart-lifted shout, which rose above the din, and gave us too much joy; and, a moment after, Colonel Casey, a hard-faced, one-armed man, spurred past towards Rivas, saying, as he went, that our men were in the plaza, the greasers were running, and "we had 'em, sure as hell!" I recollect some one observing, that it were of no use to believe Colonel Casey, for he was the greatest liar in the army of Nicaragua. And shortly after, the firing having ceased, another officer, Baldwin, I think it was, came past and told us, with curses of vexation, that the men had been checked, by command, in the heat of the assault, when the greasers were already wavering,—and that the latter, recovering, had rebarricaded so strongly, that we might now all go back to Rivas and whistle.

However, this failure was not the end. Towards evening, another detachment renewed the assault, and the uproar commenced again. It seems, that, during the whole day, there was no simultaneous attack by all the detachments. Now, it was the infantry who charged,—with the riflemen in reserve, probably to prevent a rout, in case the enemy pursued a repulse; then, it was the riflemen, with the infantry in reserve; and so alternating through three or four charges;—so that there never could have been more than a very contemptible force facing the enemy at one time.

As it grew late, the wagons began to jolt past, removing the wounded to Rivas. Some were drunk and merry in spite of their wounds; and their laughter and drunken sport made strange concert with the cries and curses of the others. I remember one man going by on foot, with a small cut on the brow, from which blood was flowing copiously. He said the wound was a mere scratch,—too slight to have sent him out of the fight, had not the blood run down into his eyes and blinded him, preventing his aim. Yet this small affair brought his death shortly afterwards. The surgeons at Rivas gave him no care,—not so much as to wash his wound, or have him wash it; and the climate is so malignant to strangers, that the smallest cut, with the best care, heals only after long hesitation.

At length night came on, and our men drew off,—foiled at every attempt, having sustained great loss, and, apparently, made little impression on the enemy. They lay on their arms, however, in the outskirts, expecting to renew the attack during the night; and, to assist at this, a party of rangers had orders to leave their horses in quarters, and march on foot to join the others. Quitting our horses with regret, we walked to San Jorge, where the foot lay, awaiting the hour of attack. We found them stomach-qualmed with hunger, weary of fighting, thoroughly disheartened, and provoked against their officers. One told how an officer, whose duty it was to lead the charge, took shelter behind an orange-tree no bigger than his wrist, and shouted, "Go on, men! go on!" when he should have been saying, "Come on!" and how another, become stupid with aguardiente, had tried to force his men to a barricade, when their cartridge-boxes were empty, and their unbayonetted arms useless. There seemed also to have been slackness among the men; and some were lamenting, that the First Rifles were not what they used to be;—anciently they only wanted to see the greasers; to-day they were found taking to the bushes. They all agreed that no great number of the enemy had been killed,—whilst the filibusters, they doubted, must have lost nearly one-third of their men and many of their best officers;—among the number I recollect Major Dusenbury, highly praised.

There was one affair, however, over which they crowed and took fierce satisfaction. They told it thus:—A detached party, of about thirty of them, were seated on the roadside drinking aguardiente, preparatory to advancing. On one side was a cactus-hedge, and a grove of plantain a little in front. Whilst they sat here deeply absorbed in the aguardiente, a considerable party of the enemy got amongst the plantain-trees, and fired a hundred muskets into them at the distance of a few rods. Strange to say, the greasers were so nervous at finding no barricade between them, or were such contemptible marksmen, that not a shot took serious effect; only the demijohn of aguardiente was shivered into a thousand pieces, and the liquor ran out into the grass. The filibusters jumped up astounded and disordered; but, seeing so much good liquor running away wastefully into the grass, they grew terrible. It was an insult and injury which both men and officers appreciated. It gave every man in the troop a personal quarrel with the enemy. "Charge 'em!" shouted the captain; "we'll pay the scoundrels for the miserable trick!" At full speed they swept through a gap in the hedge, and rushed into the plantain-grove before the enemy had time to reload. But when the greasers saw them coming on fiercely, their hearts failed them, and, turning their backs, they fled towards the town. Never were filibusters or men-of-war better pleased than now! They rattled on furiously behind the nimble greasers. They sent howling death into their midst at every step of the chase. They passed bloody forms stretched here and there upon the earth. They followed the flying foe even to the edge of the town, and saw its hostile swarm running hither and thither in alarm.—Alas! General William Walker, why were you not here at this propitious moment, with all your brave spirits, invincible with rum, behind you? Then might you have rushed with the fugitives into the town, and hurled the yellow-skinned invaders into the lake! Then might the flag of Regeneration have waved even at this day over the hills and valleys of Nicaragua,—and the unfortunate author of this history have received a reward for his services!—Ay de mí! Even now, reposing in the shade of the palm-tree, fanned by the orange-scented breeze that blows over the lake, I might drink the immortal juice of the sugarcane, called aguardiente, and dream, and gaze at the cloud-wrapped cone of Ometepec!—But I must forget this.

The dead killed in this plantain-patch were all that our men obtained sight of. How many fell behind the barricades, where all the serious fighting took place, it was impossible to tell; though there was no reason to think that the enemy, fighting under cover, had suffered at all proportionably with our men, or, indeed, had suffered equally, losing man for man, except that ours were the better marksmen.

We passed a cold and sleepless night, awaiting the word to take up arms and advance; but in the mean time General Walker had changed his intention, and, when morning broke, the whole force quitted the outskirts and marched back into Rivas. The killed and wounded by the whole affair were reported officially at one hundred, or thereabout,—underrated, most probably, for effect upon the men. It was enough, however, considering the filibusters had no more than four hundred engaged. Amongst them, though not reported, was that devil-hearted dog which I have mentioned heretofore. He fell, shot through the head, whilst advancing with the others toward the barricade. He was lamented by the whole army,—by many superstitiously, even,—who said he had gone through all Walker's hard stresses so far untouched, and his end was prophetic of downfall.

And it is even true, that from this battle General Walker's prospects clouded rapidly. A proclamation, issued by the Costa-Rican government, promising fugitive filibusters free passage to the United States, found its way into Rivas, and immediately worked immense mischief, and was, indeed, the instrument of his overthrow. The men had no sooner seen it than they began to leave as fast as they found opportunities to escape. Guards were placed around the town, and spies in every company; but it was of no avail; and every morning it was rumored through the camp that this or that number had got off for Costa Rica during the night. General Walker, in a speech which he made a few days after to infuse new spirit, said that these were the cowards,—whose absence was beneficial, and from whom it was well that the army should be purged. However, this was exaggerated. It is true, doubtless, that there were many leaving merely from fear, who would have chosen to stay with him, rather than trust to the promises of a people believed to be treacherous and promise-breaking, and whose hatred they had incurred,—had the battles of San Jorge and Obraja been successful. And, indeed, the filibuster ranks were not wanting in cowards. Cowards might be induced to come on a desperate enterprise like this, through misrepresentation by Walker's own agents; through mere thoughtlessness, or mistake,—not knowing what soldier's metal was in them; or, with the bayonet of Hunger against their backs at home, they might be unmindful of any other bayonet on the distant shore of Nicaragua. (It should be musket-shot, however; for the greasers never found heart to use the bayonet.) And then again, many, who, when they first reached Nicaragua, were no cowards, after a few months' stay, became changed,—by the depressing effects of fever, by loss of confidence in their drunken officers, and by the absence of all incentive to fight stoutly for a leader so unpopular as Walker. It was a common saying, that in this army an old rule was reversed,—the veterans were worse fighters than the recruits. The soldier was at his best when he first landed upon the Isthmus, raw and healthy. After that, he rapidly deteriorated, losing spirit with every battle, until he became at last a thoroughbred coward. Seven or eight greasers to one filibuster was said to be good fighting, at one time; but now three or four to one was thought to be great odds; and before the game ended, I hear, they were become equally matched, man for man, almost. But, whatever General Walker said in his speech, this class of weak ones were not always the deserters. It required some little energy or strength of legs, with which these were unfurnished, to go over to the enemy at San Jorge, or walk down to Costa Rica; and the fact was, that from the first many of the healthiest and liveliest men, whose defection could least be borne, were leaving,—not from fear, mainly, but because by this proclamation they were offered the first opportunity to escape from a disagreeable service to which they thought themselves bound by no tie of love or honor.

It was now about time for a steamer to arrive at San Juan on the Pacific with the California passengers; and the next day, or the second day, perhaps, succeeding the battle at San Jorge, General Walker said to General Sanders, in his quiet, whining way,—"General Sanders, I am going to take two hundred and fifty riflemen and the rangers and go down to San Juan to bring up our recruits to Rivas; and if three thousand greasers are on the Transit road, I intend to go through them." Accordingly, the riflemen, the ranger regiment, and a small party of artillerymen with one of the two brass howitzers, met in the plaza, and set out on this expedition at midnight, with Generals Walker and Sanders both in the party.

The route of the detachment was the one I have mentioned before as inland through the forest, and striking the Transit road some miles west of the lake and Virgin Bay. It was firmly believed that we should meet the enemy somewhere on the Transit road,—since the hills through which it passed offered many excellent barricading-points, and it would seem a matter of great importance to them to cut us off from junction with any fresh recruits the steamer might land at San Juan. So there was much preparatory drinking amongst the officers, (yet I say it not in slander, for many were brave enough for any deed, and drank before battle only because they drank always,)—and less amongst the men solely because spirits had become scarce around Rivas, and dear; and there were very few, truly, who had not ceased long since to carry coin in their pockets. The captain of our company, who was an incautious man, and was frequently drinking more than was needful, on this occasion drank more than he was fitted to bear; and whilst the detachment was stopped some time getting the wheel-piece over a hard place in the road, his strong friend Aguardiente brought him to the ground, as he sat on his mule near the front with his company,—where he lay in eruptive state like a young toper, and so falling asleep lost his mule, which strayed into the forest to browse, causing him much embarrassment and confused search when the detachment was ready to start. Being up again, however, the sleep and stomachic alleviation proved beneficial, and we, his soldiers, followed after him in much greater comfort and confidence.

Such delays by the howitzer, and a wagon transporting spare muskets for the expected recruits, were so frequent, that we made but slow progress, and when we emerged from the woods the sun was already shining upon the broad Transit road,—I might have said like a glory on the brow of Ometepec, but my memory is bad, and I doubt whether the fact may not be that the sun rises upon this point from lower down on the lake. After entering the Transit road, the rangers were sent ahead to discover if there were an enemy in the way. Our regiment, as we called it, now together for the first time since I joined it, consisted of some seventy men, divided into three companies, all under command of Colonel Waters,—a soldierly-looking man, and, moreover, brave, and not without training in the Mexican War. Some time before the regiment had numbered one hundred, but had become thus reduced by disease and the enemy.

On this ride I remember a feeble infusion of that excellent spirit which, since the days of Sir Walter Scott, ought to belong to all horse-soldiers, moss-troopers, or mounted rangers, but which I had despaired of ever finding in General Walker's service. It is true we had no bugler, or standard-bearer, or piece of feather in the troop, or, indeed, any circumstance of war, save our revolvers and Sharpe's rifles, vermin and dirty shirts. Nevertheless the morning was splendid, with a fresh breeze behind us; the road was hard and smooth, and rang under our horses' feet; and withal I felt, that, if we should see a troop of greaser lancers ahead, in good uniform, we might run 'em down, and bullet 'em, and strip 'em, with good romantic spirit, even.

But this is a most hollow cheat which Sir Walter Scott and other book-men have played off on some weak-headed young men of our low-minded generation. There is no doubt but a man seated amongst ten thousand cavalry, who shake the earth as they charge, ought to feel himself swell, as part of an avalanche or mighty Niagara,—as part of the mightiest visible force which feeble man can enter or his spirit commingle with. This were no contemptible joy, which the thin-blooded philosopher might laugh at,—better, indeed, than most to be found here on this fog-rounded flat of ours, where some few melodies from heaven and countless blasts from hell meet, and make such strange, unequal dissonance. But, alack! alack! it is not for the feeble, or the young soldier, fresh from his plough or his yardstick, his briefs or his pestle. For how shall we who have all our lives been standing guard against the approach of death, who start horror-shaken from the dropping of a tile, whose small wounds are quickly bound up by tender mother or sister, and lamented over,—how shall we feel romantic in the midst of a shower of bullets? Enough done, if our vanity or sense of duty hold us there in any spirit, so that we do the needed trigger-work, and not turn tail and disgrace ourselves. Even the veteran's satisfaction, since the laying aside of steel armor, is not much, to be sure, or is gathered after the battle. There is some savage ecstasy, perhaps, when he sees his enemy fall, or when he sees his back; this last, indeed, a glorious sight for any soldier,—worth rushing at the cannon's mouth to look at, almost. But the man, be he veteran or other, who tells me he found pleasure on the field where the Minié-balls kill afar off, in cold blood,—I know him for one of the eccentric, stupid, or talkers for purposes of vanity.—But this will suffice.

There were three places on the road, amongst the Cordillera ridges, where, in former wars, a Costa-Rican force, flying before the filibusters, had stopped to barricade, and gathered heart to withstand their pursuers awhile,—long enough to bark the surrounding trees with musket-shot,—some of them, indeed, amid their topmost branches; for it is a greaser-failing to shoot inordinately high. Each of these sites we approached with caution, expecting to see an enemy there; but there was none, and we came down safely at length to our old shed-camp. Here we halted, and made our station, as it was more convenient for pasturage, whilst the foot passed on to San Juan, two miles beyond.

The steamer not arriving, we remained at this place several days, employed as before, with the sugar-cane and the wood-ticks, miserable enough.

In the mean time, the foot at San Juan, finding unusual temptation to escape from this place, so much nearer the Costa-Rican line, were leaving in large parties; and unwilling service was made of the rangers to intercept the fugitives, by posting them below on all the paths leading through the forest to Costa Rica. General Walker esteemed these more faithful, because they had been more considerately treated, better fed, allowed greater freedom and privilege,—having no drill, loose discipline, and exemption from guard-duty when with the foot; and, above all, their part of the service being healthier, and, though more fatiguing, far preferable, on the whole, to the other. One night I was detailed, with others, on this disagreeable duty, and remember it, for other reasons, as the most wretched night of all that I passed in Nicaragua. Our station was on the bank of a little wooded stream, some miles below San Juan. After the guard had been posted, I lay down to get some hours' sleep, which I needed,—but was no sooner on the ground than a swarm of infinitesimally small creatures, of the tick genus, whose den I had invaded, came over me, and the rest was merely one sensation of becrawled misery; so that, notwithstanding great previous loss of sleep, I went again unrefreshed. I asked an old filibuster who lay near me, how he could sleep through it. "Oh," said he, "I've got my skin dirty and callous, and this easy-walking species, that can't bite, never troubles me." On this subject I read the following in Mr. Irving's "History of Columbus" with some emotion:—"Nor is the least beautiful part of animated nature [in those tropical regions] the various tribes of insects that people every plant, displaying brilliant coats-of-mail, which sparkle to the eye like precious gems." It seems strange to me that any good should be recognized in these children of despair, which have caused me more unhappiness than all the world's vermin beside. I think this praise must be from Mr. Irving himself, looking up the picturesque. It is not possible that Columbus would have had the heart to flatter and polish up these mailed insects, who, in his day, ate him, turned him over and over, and harried him more than ever was Job by Satan.

Next morning, whilst we were roasting green plantains in the fire for breakfast, a man dressed in General Walker's blue-shirt-and-cotton-breeches uniform came upon us suddenly from out of the woods beyond the stream. He was evidently going south,—but seeing our party, with startled look, he turned, and went in the direction of San Juan. We knew him at once for a deserter, but had no zeal to arrest him; and he had already got past us, when some one ejaculated,—"D—- him, why don't he go right? That's not the road to Costa Rica!" Upon this unlucky speech, the officer in command of the detail, who, either through inattention or design, was suffering the man to pass unquestioned, ordered him to be followed and seized. He was a German, and either a dull, heavy fellow, or else stupefied by his terrible misfortune; and being unable to say a consistent word for himself, the officer sent him off under guard to San Juan, where it was well known what General Walker would do with him.

Some hours after this misadventure, as most of us took it, our detail was relieved and we rode back to camp. The man who had been taken in the act of deserting was condemned to be shot at San Juan this same evening, in presence of the whole detachment. He was led down to the beach, and seated in a chair at the water's edge. He bore himself carelessly, or with an absent, almost unconscious air, like one who felt himself acting a part in a dream. A squad of drafted riflemen was brought up in front of him, and the word was given by a sergeant. They made their aim false purposely, and but one shot took effect on the doomed man. He fell back into the water, where he lay struggling, and stained the waves red with his blood. It was a wrenching sight, too brutal far, to see the sergeant place his gun against the poor wretch's head, and end his agony!

It seemed so abominable to every spectator there that General Walker should thus seek to enforce Devil's service from his men, entrapped mostly in the first place, without wages or half maintenance, and with no claim upon them whatever, but by a contract without consideration on the one part, on the other hard labor to the death,—that this exhibition, which in another army were calculated to strengthen just authority, here only aroused indignation and disgust. This very night, after witnessing the deserter's punishment, eleven men left the company to which he belonged in a body, and were seen no more in Nicaragua. And though for selfish reasons I was concerned to see the army falling to pieces, and the load of toil and danger increasing upon the rest of us, yet both I and the rest acknowledged that there was no tie of honor or honesty to keep any man with us who wished to escape; and this deed seemed to us without decent sanction.

The steamer at length made its appearance, and, after landing us about forty recruits, departed south with the States passengers for Panamá; and afterwards, the new soldiers being all furnished with muskets, the detachment started on its return to Rivas. On the way, it was rumored amongst the men, that a reinforcement to the enemy, marching from Costa Rica, were halted at Virgin Bay, and that General Walker was going to attack them. We hurried over the Transit road as fast as the foot were able,—General Sanders, I recollect, riding far in advance, sometimes out of sight, and thus giving himself to an ambush, had the enemy placed any. By repute he was a man of extreme courage, and held his life so contemptuously that he would scarce hesitate to charge an enemy's line by himself. But I fear that this time he had other impulse than his innate valor; for there was no occasion for a solitary man, riding in these gloomy woods, to be singing and hallooing, and whirling his sword about his head, and swaying to and fro on his horse, unless he were strongly worked by aguardiente.

Reaching Virgin Bay some time after dark, we found the report of an enemy there untrue; but the pickets were got out in remarkable haste, and all the native population—some dozen women and children—were seized, to prevent discovery of us to the enemy, and I suppose there was some expectation of an attack. However, liquor being plenty amongst the hotel-keepers at Virgin Bay, the officers thought it a good place to get drunk in,—and many spent the night in that endeavor, and in playing poker; so that in the morning, walking down to the lake to water my mule, I met a colonel and a general staggering into quarters, rubbing their eyes sullenly, having just lifted themselves from the street, where the honest god Bacchus, as a poet calls him, had put them to bed the night before.

The steamer "San Carlos" still lay over at the island, under shadow of the volcano. The other probably lay at San Jorge, by the enemy. The old brig formerly anchored at Virgin Bay having been burned, there was now no hope of retaking these steamers, unless the party of Texans, which we had by this time heard was fighting its way up the Rio San Juan, should succeed in getting upon the lake with a boat from the river. But to-day we came near reaching the top of this hope unexpectedly. For whilst we still delayed in Virgin Bay, smoke began to rise from the chimneys of the "San Carlos," and in proper time she turned her prow and came across the water directly toward us. It was scarcely possible that she knew anything of our presence in Virgin Bay; and it was doubted by no one but she was coming to land there for some purpose; and then her recapture, were she full of the enemy, was certain, in the spirit we then were in: for all felt, that, could we once get the steamer into our hands, and reach the four hundred fresh Texans on the river, the filibuster star would have shot up so high that it were ill-management indeed that would ever pull it down again. Accordingly all were quickly driven into the houses, and told to lie there close, and be ready to burst forth when the steamer touched her pier. But we were miserably disappointed. She came steadily up within half a mile of land, and then, catching an alarm, turned, and put swiftly back to the island. I afterward heard that two drunken officers had rushed out into the street, and so apprised her of the danger.

After this the detachment set out towards Rivas. We advanced along the lake shore some distance, fording the mouth of the little Rio Lajas, whose waters had lost much depth since I first, passed over this road, crossing the stream in a bungo. In the forest we found, at one point, trees felled across the road, as if the enemy had here been minded to oppose us; but we passed by, seeing no one, and reached Rivas in good time, unmolested.

Arrived at Rivas, we found that a change was taking place in the character of the war. The town had been threatened by the enemy during our absence, and General Henningsen was busy putting it into a state better suited to repel any sudden attack. Pieces of artillery looked down all the principal approaches, from behind short walls of adobe blocks, raised in the middle of the street with open passage-ways on either side. Native men with machetes, watched by armed guards, were clearing away the fine groves of orange, mango, and plantain, which everywhere surrounded Rivas, and were fitted to cover the approach of an enemy. Others were tearing down or burning the houses in the outskirts, to narrow the circle of defence. The tenants of these houses—when they had any—were moved up nearer the plaza, or, if native, sometimes into the country. The native population of Rivas, however, was scanty, consisting mostly of a few women,—of the kindest and most affable sort. In what direction the men had all, or nearly all, gone, I am unable to say. Doubtless some of them were with the Chamorristas.

So many of the houses were marked out to be pulled down, that General Walker was obliged to quarter his new recruits in the church, a large stone building, and curious from the head of Washington, easily identified, carved in relief on its facade. Hitherto some native women had been accustomed to assemble in this church and worship, under care of a fat, unctuous little padre, very obsequiously courteous toward filibusters;—and well he might be; for General Walker was suspicious of all padres, and kept a stern eye upon them. Once he caught one of them, who had preached treason against him within reach of his arm, and released him again only upon payment of five thousand pesos. Another, for a like offence, was put into the guard-house, and required to ransom himself at twenty-five hundred. What became of this one, whether he paid his ransom and got out, or whether he stayed there until he lost oil and became lean on the small ration furnished him, was not rumored. Yet, with all this in his memory, when the present padre came again with his flock of women and found the church occupied by soldiers, he went away scowling, and never even lifted his shovel-hat to me when I met him.

On the night succeeding our return from San Juan, General Walker determined to try a night attack on San Jorge, hoping much from the fresh spirit and muscle of his forty Californians. To assist in this, our company had orders to be on the plaza at two o'clock, afoot, with clean rifles and forty rounds of ammunition. At one o'clock we arose and went down on the plaza, in number about twenty, the rest of the company remaining behind on account of sickness. On the way, however, the number was augmented by a second company of near twenty dismounted rangers, with Colonel Waters at their head.

Whilst we stood, in rather low spirits, waiting the hour of departure, our captain procured us a calabash of aguardiente, which, thinking upon the desperate work ahead of us and the infinite toil and sleeplessness of the last few weeks, we considered excellent, and not to be spared. Discomfort in battle is a positive evil, felt, perhaps, by all sons of Adam; and he who will use means to get rid of it and leave himself free to work is no more a coward, so far, than he who takes chloroform to prevent the pain of a tooth-pulling,—mere positive evil, likewise. Aguardiente will serve a good purpose;—provided the head be not essentially weak, or too inflammable, it ascends you into the brain, and dries you there, as one hath said, all the nervous, crudy vapors that environ it. But this captain of ours drank too injudiciously, and, indeed, so obscured himself with his drink, often, that we his men were loath to trust and follow him,—doubting that he knew where he was about to take us, or for what purpose. To-night he strapped a large canteen of aguardiente about his neck and wore it into battle,—and many times, as the danger staggered, we saw him draw courageous spirit through the neck of it, and go on befogged and reassured. Yet, withal, he was no greater coward than other men,—indeed, much braver than most,—had been wounded whilst leading a forlorn hope over a barricade,—and would, I doubt not, have fought well without aguardiente, had drinking been a mark of cowardice in the army.

At length all was ready, and, with something above three hundred riflemen and infantry, under command of Generals Walker and Sanders, we started out on the San Jorge road some hours after midnight. We kept along the highway until we began to approach the town, and then turned aside into a by-lane crossing to the left. The by-lane was interrupted at one place by a deep pool of water, through which the detachment plunging, half-leg deep, some of the weak-legged stumbled and fell, getting their cartridge-boxes under, and spoiling their ammunition.

At the end of this lane we came into another highway running toward San Jorge, along which we advanced rapidly. After a while we came to a halt, and a party was sent off; then forward again, a corner turned, and another halt,—when I heard General Walker asking some one, in composed voice, "Does he know exactly where we are?" Whilst we stood there, a sudden and hot rattle of musketry began from the front, and we again advanced swiftly, by scattered adobes, turning corners, and came in full view of a barricade some distance ahead spitting flashes of fire crosswise into the right-hand side of the street. We crossed over from left to right, and halted behind an adobe. On our right hand stood a grove of small trees, through which the assailants had probably advanced, and in which, just ahead, hot work was now going on loudly,—with Minié-balls, grape-shot, shouts, outcries, and blood enough doubtless. After some delay here, part of us rangers, led by Colonel Waters, recrossed the street, and advanced, crouching, toward the barricade spitting flames in front. We crept, double file, along a palisade of tall cactus which bordered this part of the street, against whose thorns my neighbor on the right would frequently thrust me, as the shot nipped him closely,—inconvenient, but without pain, so intense was the distraction of the moment. We had crept within a few rods of the barricade, where we had glimpse of faces through embrasures, amidst the smoke and flame, and our leader, as he afterwards said, had it on his lips to order the forward rush,—when the party attacking on our right, behind the trees, gave back, and our own mere handful was checked, and retraced its steps running. A moment later, and we had gone upon that high barricade, some score of us, without backers in the street, to draw on us the enemy's whole fire,—and very likely—unless they had foolishly fled at our first rush—to be all killed there.

On the retreat, I with some others was ordered out of the ranks to pick up a wounded officer and carry him off the ground. We took him down the street, turned a corner, and laid him on the floor of a church some distance beyond. He had an arm broken and a bad wound in his body,—a hopeless man; but upborne and defiant through aguardiente and native strength. After getting him off our hands, we returned to our company, which we found sheltering behind the adobe where we had halted when on the advance. Here we remained some time, with instructions from General Walker (whom, at this time, we seemed to follow as personal guard) to keep ourselves out of reach of the missiles flying on either side of the house. The darkness was so thick that we could see only what was passing immediately around us, and therefore were ignorant as to the position of the foot, and what was now doing amongst them. It was said, however, afterwards, that their officers strove to rally and bring them up to another charge, but that they proved mutinous, and refused to move.

They had suffered, indeed, discouragement enough. Colonel O'Neal, who had led them, was mortally wounded; the barricade was too high and dangerous; they had tried to fire it without success. Some of the forty recruits, who were in front of the party, had climbed over it; and these afterwards affirmed, that, had the others followed then, the barricade had been gained; but the older soldiers had degenerated, possessed little of these men's zeal or spirit, hesitated, and, their colonel falling, gave back. Those who had gone over the barricade were killed there, or came back with wounds,—one with a bayonet-thrust through the arm,—a most remarkable wound, in which, perhaps, Central-Americans fleshed a bayonet for the first time.

Our company, or part of it,—for most had been placed about on pickets when the attack failed,—after a while fell farther back, turned the corner before mentioned, faced about, and came to a stand in the street, with an adobe house on the left. The street in which we stood ran straight forward, and crossed the one down which we had just receded at right angles, a few feet ahead of us, so that there was here a junction of four streets, or, I might better say, roads; for there were no more than four disconnected houses in the immediate vicinity,—the one on the corner beside us, one on the corner diagonally opposite, the one up the street running left, on the far side, behind which we had a little while ago taken shelter, and the square stone church, whither we had carried the wounded man, and which stood on the far side of the street some yards behind us. The rest of the space was covered with fruit-trees and a heavy growth of hushes; and concealed behind these lay the barricades and the plaza of San Jorge. But all this was seen later; then the whole was wrapped in thick darkness, it yet lacking some short time of daybreak.

Whilst our detached company was standing there, with the foot drawn up in the road a little way before us, a single horseman came out from the enemy and galloped past our picket, stationed up the road some distance ahead of the detachment. The picket fired upon him after he had passed; he dropped under his horse's side, and galloped back, apparently unharmed; but, from the direction of their fire, the picket was naturally mistaken for the enemy by the detachment in front, who could see only the flashes through the darkness. Some stood their ground, and returned the fire, placing the picket in great danger; but the bulk, already well scared by their repulse, broke away panic-stricken, and came rushing down the road toward us, thinking the enemy were charging behind them. Our company was suddenly overwhelmed, or borne along by the current, ignorant of the cause of alarm. I brought myself up behind the corner house, where many of the others were taking shelter. But hearing some one cry out, "To the church! to the church! make a stand in the church!" I immediately ran across the road and entered the church by a side-door. As I crossed the entrance, with two or three others, General Walker came running up from the interior, with his sword out, crying,—"Where's that man came into the church? Show me that man!" There were cocked revolvers with some of us, and it was, perhaps, well for General Walker that the crowd now pouring in strongly at both front and side doors diverted him. Turning to these, he threw himself first on one, then on another, battered, tugged, and thrust them out at the door with such force as I hardly thought was in him. He was soon assisted by Sanders, Waters, and other officers, and, with the curses and vociferations of these men, the confused rush of the panic-stricken crowd in the dark, and the outcries of the wounded, who lay about on the floor, as the fugitives trampled over them, there was such a pressure as might unchart a young soldier, and strand him among his fears.

After seeing enough of it, I ran out again into the street, sore bestead, indeed, to know what I should do. Day was beginning to break, and in the gray dawn I saw the men ejected from the church running hither and thither, trying to rejoin their officers. And, there being neither standards nor drums to collect by, the sergeants stood at divers points shouting at the top of their voices the number and letter of their companies, and calling the fugitives to come into ranks. Minié-balls whizzed about in the air or knocked up the dust from the street, and firing was now and then heard near by in uncertain directions, where perhaps the enemy were vexing our pickets. I believe it had been a helter-skelter day for us all, had the enemy got in then and attacked us in the midst of this confusion. They might surely have driven us into irretrievable rout, flying on the road to Rivas, by a spirited charge of fifty good men, or much less.

Whilst I stood in doubt what course to take, I saw our captain, followed by three or four of the company, looking over the ground for the missing, and I forthwith made up and joined him. Others came in, one by one; and at length, the foot being gathered together in the adobes, and things brought to order outside, the captain led his company into the church. General Walker was still there, talking earnestly with Sanders and Waters, having cleared the church of the fugitives. As we approached, he asked the captain, who by this time had emptied his canteen of aguardiente, how many of his men were killed. The captain began cursing the foot, and telling how he had been run over, having tried to stand,—and would have made a long talc, but Colonel Waters touched him on the shoulder, and said in undertone,—"Lead your company off. You are too drunk to talk now."

Our post thenceforward was at the several doors of the church, where we kept guard for the wounded, who lay about the floor in miserable plight for lack of water. Outside, drop-shooting was still kept up by the enemy in the bushes, and returned by ours from the doors.

It was an ill-looking situation for our small, panic-shaken party, resting here within pistol-shot of an overwhelming and victorious enemy. The enemy's respect for us was too great and unreasonable. It behooved them certainly, as honest soldiers, to come forth now and drive us out of their town, in which, I think, if well commenced, there had been but little difficulty. Afterwards, indeed, when I was amongst them in Costa Rica, they declared concerning this affair that they knew we were in their power then, but refrained because they were unwilling to shed more filibuster blood, preferring rather to conquer us by proclamation, and send us back to our homes unhurt,—more expensive, to be sure, but recommended by humanity. Yet I laugh at this when I remember how they crept snake-like in the bushes, and tried to pick us off at the doors, and how they strove, without much danger to themselves, to run our pickets in on us, and get to see our backs turned, whereupon, doubtless, humanity would have been little thought of, and filibuster blood cheap enough. Indeed, once that morning, with little less than four-score horse, they came charging with hope to pass a picket of ten men; but saddles being emptied, they recoiled, and their leader being slain, whilst attempting to rally them, they fled contemptibly,—seven or eight from one. However, this is only my revenge for much exasperation and deploration that they would never come away from their pestiferous walls,—where, after all, they had a right to stay, and will not be blamed by the candid and unbebullet-whizzed reader that they did stay.

We kept our post at the doors, annoyed and apprehensive, until the sun was an hour or so high, when a party of rangers arrived from Rivas with led horses to transport the wounded,—which incumbrance it was, I suppose, that prevented our withdrawal earlier. The wounded were carried out and mounted, some with a soldier behind to support them. Colonel O'Neal, however, who had both legs broken, was carried on a litter, with a cocked revolver on each side of him; for, though he had lost much blood, there was yet spirit in him, and he wanted revenge for these death-wounds. The pickets were now all brought in hastily, and the detachment began its march, leaving, I remember, one stark form propped against the church wall, with staring eyeballs fixed, and soul wandered somewhither. This, from his clean looks, had been one of the fresh California recruits, who, indeed, had found miserable entertainment on their arrival in Nicaragua, land of oranges and sunshine,—being first and longest this night at the barricade, and leaving many of their number there.

A little way from the church we crossed a road running into San Jorge, and, looking up, saw a high log-barricade, some fifty rods off, with embrasures and black-mouthed cannon frowning down on us. Why we were not fired upon I know not, unless on that same score of humanity, or because the enemy had abandoned it during last night's assault. Farther on, whilst passing through a plantain-patch, we saw the greasers some way off in our rear, watching us, running to and fro, and seemingly exercised with preparation for attacking. However, we passed out into the road, and went on undisturbed, yet still with the enemy hovering behind us.

Coming to a place where an abrupt little mound rose at a fork in the road, our company, which brought up the rear of the detachment, had orders to conceal itself behind this, and await the pursuers, and give them check. In a moment they came galloping up the slope of a hill some two or three hundred yards back, their heads only appearing at first, then the rest down to the saddle, when we arose suddenly and gave them a volley of rifle-bullets. They dropped down quickly, either to the ground or under their horses' bellies, in which manoeuvre some of them rival the prairie Indians. Others coming up from behind, we gave them more, until they all disappeared finally. After this we saw no more of them, and arrived at Rivas without further alarm.

This was now the third repulse we had sustained within a few days, with an aggregate loss, perhaps, counting wounded, (who, as I have said, were more regretted than the dead,) not very far under two hundred men,—and it became apparent that the filibuster day was over, unless General Walker could find some stratagem in his head, or some better mode of fighting than this confident rushing upon an overwhelming enemy, under strong cover, and grown bold with success. The prospect, truly, began to look black enough. The men had lost confidence in themselves and in their officers, no longer despised the enemy, and dreaded the barricades at San Jorge so deeply that they would be led against them no more. Those who intended to desert avoided every exposure to danger, and feigned sickness whenever detailed for service. One of the rifle regiments had grown mutinous, upon some quarrel with its officers, and refused to do duty of any kind, and it was absurd to attempt to compel it by aid of the others. The natives, who had charge of the beef cattle, turned them all out of the corral, and ran away in the night, leaving the army without meat, and the commissary force, some forty horsemen, to seek for prey wherever it was to be found. And then there were ill reports heard about the party on the Rio San Juan, and its success began to be doubted. But worse than all was the fast-spreading spirit of desertion, which all saw would prove ruinous of itself, unless shortly stopped in some way.

At this juncture it might have been worth while for General Walker to form a corps for one attack of all the men in his army who felt an earnest interest in driving the enemy out, and were willing to fight desperately for the sake of it. There were scores of stout men acting as lieutenants, captains, majors, etc., of slight performance in those capacities, but who, had they been formed into companies, and asked to fight now one night, at this desperate juncture, for the haciendas General Walker had promised them, would have done willing, perhaps, and excellent service. To these might be added all those among the ranks to whom, from any cause, desertion or expulsion from Nicaragua was disagreeable,—those who distrusted the Costa-Rican promises, or feared disgrace at home, or had sick or wounded friends at Rivas, or were desperate, broken men without other home, or with what other peculiar motives there might be. With this force gathered to themselves by call for volunteers, allowed to choose their own officers, furnished with Colt's revolvers, or bayonets, or both, and led in advance, as a forlorn hope, with ladders to scale the barricades by,—it is likely the enemy might have been driven out, and the cause of Regeneration set up once more. So, at least, it was thought by some. And, indeed, it must have been extremely discouraging for one of better will to be fearful at every step that his comrades would dart aside into the bushes and leave him unsupported; it must have served to cripple the efforts of all the well-intentioned in the army, and should have been remedied. However, no call for volunteers was ventured by General Walker,—he, probably, thinking it too unreasonable to ask his men to do anything for him unforced.

There were some others who thought affairs might be retrieved, if General Walker were displaced, at least from his military command, and Henningsen, or some other, put in his stead. He was exceedingly unpopular, hated, indeed, by a great many, (I have known more than one who professed to nourish the intent of shooting him during his next battle, when the deed could be covered,) was respected only for his strong will and personal bravery, and had never been superseded, solely, perhaps, because the great majority of his men were either without energy, or were careless about everything but escape, and so felt no interest in dethroning him and setting up another, when thereby they were not helping their chance of getting out of the Isthmus. However, there was now a conspiracy commenced by some who were unwilling to leave Nicaragua, and who distrusted General Walker's ability to save the filibusters much longer.

But these underworkers had made us no sign up to the night attack on San Jorge, and the day succeeding that the writer lost sight of the filibuster camp, and knew what took place in it no more. I will tell how the withdrawal was brought about, and then extinguish my story. Near the middle of the day, after returning from San Jorge, the company rode out, under command of the sergeant, to gather forage for the animals. In order to give my own mule a respite, I mounted for this occasion a bad-winded animal, long before used up, and discarded by one of the company, and left to run about the yard. As we rode out at the gateway, one of the men advised me with some pointedness to go back and get my own animal, assuring me the one I had would fail me on this expedition. Yet, knowing he was good for the distance we usually rode foraging, I paid him no heed, and thought nothing of his somewhat singular manner until afterwards. When we had gone some distance, the same man asked me if I had heard that forty deserters had left last night for Costa Rica, adding, that it was his opinion the whole army would soon be on the same road. "Well," said I, "I suppose we'll be among the last." "I don't think I will," rejoined he, "nor the rest of this company." He said no more; but it flashed upon me then that we were even now on the road for Costa Rica; and it soon became certainty, as the sergeant turned down toward the Transit road, a direction in which we had never been allowed to forage, probably because the natives on that side had more communication with San Juan and Virgin Bay, and General Walker was unwilling that the States passengers should hear too many complaints from them. I was before aware that many of the company had been for some time revolving desertion, and had myself been sounded by one a day or two previously; but could have had no suspicion that this was to be the occasion, because several of the most forward in the matter had made excuses, and remained behind in quarters.

At length we halted in a little stream, some miles from Rivas, to water our animals, and it was here openly announced that the party was on its way to Costa Rica to take the benefit of the government proclamation. I rode back toward the rear, where I saw a dispute going on between one of the company who wanted to return to Rivas and others who insisted that he must go forward. One of them met me in the path, and told me I must go with them until they had got beyond the Transit road. They had no wish, he said, to force men to desert; but this much was needed to save themselves from danger of pursuit. I told him my mule would never carry me back from the Transit road. "We will catch you another," said he, "when we reach the Jocote rancho." The whole crowd, save two or three, were with him, and it was useless to persist. So I turned and rode forward with the rest.

At the Jocote rancho we succeeded in catching a mule, but he was given to another of the company, whose animal showed worse signs than my own, which, indeed, had borne me much better than I expected, and was not yet seriously fatigued.

We came out upon the Transit road, passed over the Cordillera ridges, and, just beyond the little river which crosses the road, two miles from San Juan, turned aside into a forest-trail leading down the coast to Costa Rica. Those of us who had been pressed thus far, after crossing the Transit road, gave over all design of returning. The bonds which drew us back were not strong, and the danger of return was considerable. We had heard that the enemy was at Virgin Bay, and that their lancers frequently passed backward and forward on the Transit road, and between San Jorge and Virgin Bay. If we returned, we should be confined to the path nearly all the way to Rivas by the impenetrable forest, and easily taken, should we meet the enemy, or liable even, one or two only, to be shot down from ambush by the hostile natives who lived on the route.

For my own part, I decided to go on with hesitation and regret, and I believe, had one been ready to return, I should have borne him willing company. I preferred even the hard service and dubious chance of General Walker to the alternative of going amongst the Costa-Ricans, where a cowardly populace would probably kick and spit upon us as dirty filibusters and deserters; and should their government even keep its promises, I had no stomach for being set ashore in the city of New York, without money in my pocket, or home that I wished to go to. My health had been good in Nicaragua, and, I believed, would remain good. The motive which sent me there was still in force; and, withal, I wished to see the filibuster game played out,—with Henningsen, or some other man than General Walker, as military director. I believed it might even take a turn so, and a sans-culotte man be furnished at last with a two-hundred-and-fifty-acre home in Nicaragua,—

and plantain food without sweat, and the elixir of joy called aguardiente! Nevertheless it was all left behind; and Samuel Absalom tore the large, dirty canvas letters M.R., signifying Mounted Ranger, off from his blue flannel shirt-breast; and his experience as filibuster in Nicaragua closed,—somewhat ingloriously.

ROBA DI ROMA.

CHAPTER V.

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS.

The Christmas Holidays have come, and with them various customs and celebrations quite peculiar to Rome. They are ushered in by the festive clang of a thousand bells from all the belfries in Rome at Ave Maria of the evening before the august day. At about nine o'clock of the same evening the Pope performs High Mass in some one of the great churches, generally at Santa Maria Maggiore, when all the pillars of this fine old basilica are draped with red hangings, and scores of candles burn in the side chapels, and the great altar blazes with light. The fuguing chants of the Papal choir sound into the dome and down the aisles, while the Holy Father ministers at the altar, and a motley crowd parade and jostle and saunter through the church. Here, mingled together, may be seen soldiers of the Swiss guard, with their shining helmets, long halberds, and party-colored uniforms, designed by Michel Angelo,—chamberlains of the Pope, all in black, with their high ruffs, Spanish cloaks, silken stockings, and golden chains,—contadini from the mountains, in their dully brilliant costumes and white tovaglie,—common laborers from the Campagna, with their black mops of tangled hair,—forestieri of every nation,—Englishmen, with long, light, pendant whiskers, and an eye-glass stuck in one eye,—Germans, with spectacles, frogged coats, and long, straight hair put behind their ears and cut square in the neck,—then Americans, in high-heeled patent-leather boots, a black dress-coat, and a black satin waistcoat,—and wasp-waisted French officers, with baggy trousers, a goat-beard, and a pretentious swagger. Nearer the altar are crowded together in pens a mass of women in black dresses and black veils, who are determined to see and hear all, treating the ceremony purely as a spectacle, and not as a religious rite. Meantime the music soars, the organ groans, the censer clicks, steams of incense float to and fro. The Pope and his attendants kneel and rise,—he lifts the Host, and the world prostrates itself. A great procession of dignitaries with torches bears a fragment of the original cradle of the Holy Bambino from its chapel to the high altar, through the swaying crowd that gape and gaze and stare and sneer and adore. And thus the evening passes. When the clock strikes midnight all the bells ring merrily, Mass commences at the principal churches, and at San Luigi dei Francesi and the Gesù there is a great illumination (what the French call un joli spectacle) and very good music. Thus Christmas is ushered in at Rome.

The next day is a great festa. All classes are dressed in their best and go to Mass,—and when that is over, they throng the streets to chat and lounge and laugh and look at each other. The Corso is so crowded in the morning, that a carriage can scarcely pass. Everywhere one hears the pleasant greeting of "Buona Festa," "Buona Pasquà." All the basso popolo, too, are out,—the women wearing their best jewelry, heavy gold ear-rings, three-rowed collane of well-worn coral and gold, long silver and gold pins and arrows in their hair, and great worked brooches with pendants,—and the men of the Trastevere in their peaked hats, their short jackets swung over one shoulder in humble imitation of the Spanish cloak, and with rich scarfs tied round their waists. Most of the ordinary cries of the day are missed. But the constant song of "Arancie! arancie dolci!" is heard in the crowd; and everywhere are the sigarari, carrying round their wooden tray of tobacco, and shouting, "Sigari! sigari dolci! sigari scelti!" at the top of their lungs; the nocellaro also cries sadly about his dry chestnuts and pumpkin-seeds. The shops are all closed, and the shopkeepers and clerks saunter up and down the streets, dressed better than the same class anywhere else in the world,—looking spick-and-span, as if they had just come out of a bandbox, and nearly all of them carrying a little cane. One cannot but be struck by the difference in this respect between the Romans on a festa-day in the Corso and the Parisians during fête in the Champs Élysées,—the former are so much better dressed, and so much happier, gayer, and handsomer.

During the morning, the Pope celebrates High Mass at San Pietro, and thousands of spectators are there,—some from curiosity, some from piety. Few, however, of the Roman families go there to-day;—they perform their religious services in their private chapel or in some minor church; for the crowd of forestieri spoils St. Peter's for prayer.[A] At the elevation of the Host, the guards, who line the nave, drop to their knees, their side-arms ringing on the pavement,—the vast crowd bends,—and a swell of trumpets sounds through the dome. Nothing can be more impressive than this moment in St. Peter's. Then the choir from its gilt cage resumes its chant, the high falsetti of the soprani soaring over the rest, and interrupted now and then by the clear musical voice of the Pope,—until at last he is borne aloft in his Papal chair on the shoulders of his attendants, crowned with the triple crown, between the high, white, waving fans; all the cardinals, monsignori, canonici, officials, priests, and guards going before him in splendid procession. The Pope shuts his eyes, from giddiness and from fasting,—for he has eaten nothing for twenty-four hours, and the swaying motion of the chair makes him dizzy and sick. But he waves at intervals his three fingers to bless the crowd that kneel or bend before him, and then goes home to the Vatican to dine with a clean conscience and a good appetite.

[Footnote A: "How," says Marforio to Pasquino, "shall I, being a true son of the Holy Church, obtain admittance to her services?" To which Pasquino returns for answer: "Declare that you are an Englishman, and swear that you are a heretic."]

It is the universal rule among priests to fast before saying Mass, and never to take the wafer or body of Christ upon a full stomach. The law is de rigueur, and is almost never broken. But sometimes the temptation of the appetite, it may be supposed, will overcome even a pious man; for priest though one be, one is also flesh-and-blood. An anecdote lately told me by the Conte Cignale (dei Selvaggi) may not be out of place in this connection, and I instance it as an undoubted exception to the general rule. A friend of his, an English artist, enamored of Italian life, was spending the summer in one of the mountain towns. Finding little society there except the physician and the parish priest, he soon became on intimate terms with them. One morning the priest called on him before he had finished breakfast. A savory dish was smoking on the table, and the fumes of the hot coffee filled the room. "I wish you could take breakfast with me," said he; "but I know you are to say Mass, and that it would be contrary to rule for you to eat until it is performed." The priest shrugged his shoulders and looked deprecatorily at the artist and at the breakfast. "Still," continued the latter, "if your scruples would allow you, I should be delighted if you would help me with this capital dish." The temptation was great; the smell was savory. The priest made a strong internal defence, but the garrison was forced at last to capitulate. "Eh!" said he, as he took his seat, "in fatto è il costume generale di non mangiare prima di dire la messa e di prendere l'ostia. Ma—in queste circostanze,"—here he looked to see that the door was well fastened,—"mi pare che si potrebbe far un letto per nostro Signore, Gesù Cristo."

It is the custom in Rome at the great festas, of which Christmas is one of the principal ones, for each parish to send round the sacrament to all its sick; and during these days a procession of priest and attendants may be seen, preceded by their cross and banner, bearing the holy wafer to the various houses. As they march along, they make the streets resound with the psalm they sing. Everybody lifts his hat as they pass, and many among the lower classes kneel upon the pavement. Frequently the procession is followed by a rout of men, women, and children, who join in the chanting and responses, pausing with the priest before the door of the sick person, and accompanying it as it moves from house to house.

At Christmas, all the Roman world which has a baiocco in its pocket eats torone and pan giallo. The shops of the pastry-cooks and confectioners are filled with them, mountains of them incumber the counters, and for days before Christmas crowds of purchasers throng to buy them. Torone is a sort of hard candy, made of honey and almonds, and crusted over with crystallized sugar; or in other words, it is a nuga with a sweet frieze coat;—but nuga is a trifle to it for consistency. Pan giallo is perhaps so called quasi lucus, it being neither bread nor yellow. I know no way of giving a clearer notion of it than by saying that its father is almond-candy and its mother a plum-pudding. It partakes of the qualities of both its parents. From its mother it inherits plums and citron, while its father bestows upon it almonds and consistency. In hardness of character it is half-way between the two,—having neither the maternal tenderness on the one hand, nor the paternal stoniness on the other. One does not break one's teeth on it as over the torone, which is only to be cajoled into masticability by prolonged suction, and often not then; but the teeth sink into it as the wagoner's wheels into clayey mire, and every now and then receive a shock, as from sunken rocks, from the raisin-stones, indurated almonds, pistachio-nuts, and pine-seeds, which startle the ignorant and innocent eater with frightful doubts. I carried away one tooth this year over my first piece; but it was a tooth which had been considerably indebted to California, and I have forgiven the pan giallo. My friend the Conte Cignale, who partook at the same time of torone, having incautiously put a large lump into his mouth, found himself compromised thereby to such an extent as to be at once reduced to silence and retirement behind his pocket-handkerchief. An unfortunate jest, however, reduced him to extremities, and, after a vehement struggle for politeness, he was forced to open the window and give his torone to the pavement—and the little boys, perhaps. Chi sa? But, despite these dangers and difficulties, all the world at Rome eats pan giallo and torone at Christmas,—and a Christmas without them would be an egg without salt. They are at once a penance and a pleasure. Not content with the pan giallo, the Romans also import the pan forte di Siena, which is a blood cousin of the former, and suffers almost nothing from time and age.

On Christmas and New Year's day all the servants of your friends present themselves at your door to wish you a "buona festa," or a "buon capo d'anno." This generous expression of good feeling is, however, expected to be responded to by a more substantial expression on your part, in the shape of four or five pauls, so that one peculiarly feels the value of a large visiting-list of acquaintances at this season. To such an extent is this practice carried, that in the houses of the cardinals and princes places are sought by servants merely for the vails of the festas, no other wages being demanded. Especially is this the case with the higher dignitaries of the Church, whose maestro di casa, in hiring domestics, takes pains to point out to them the advantages of their situation in this respect. Lest the servants should not be aware of all these advantages, the times when such requisitions may be gracefully made and the sums which may be levied are carefully indicated,—not by the cardinal in person, of course, but by his underlings; and many of the fellows who carry the umbrella and cling to the back of the cardinal's coach, covered with shabby gold-lace and carpet-collars, and looking like great beetles, are really paid by everybody rather than the padrone they serve. But this is not confined to the Eminenze, many of whom are, I dare say, wholly ignorant that such practices exist. The servants of the embassies and all the noble houses also make the circuit of the principal names on the visiting-list, at stated occasions, with good wishes for the family. If one rebel, little care will be taken that letters, cards, and messages arrive promptly at their destination in the palaces of their padroni; so it is a universal habit to thank them for their politeness, and to request them to do you the favor to accept a piece of silver in order to purchase a bottle of wine and drink your health. I never knew one of them refuse; probably they would not consider it polite to do so. It is curious to observe the care with which at the embassies a new name is registered by the servants, who scream it from anteroom to salon, and how considerately a deputation waits on you at Christmas and New Year's, or, indeed, whenever you are about to leave Rome to take your villeggiatura, for the purpose of conveying to you the good wishes of the season or of invoking for you a "buon viaggio." One young Roman, a teacher of languages, told me that it cost him annually some twenty scudi or more, to convey to the servants of his pupils and others his deep sense of the honor they did him in inquiring for his health at stated times. But this is a rare case, and owing, probably, to his peculiar position. A physician in Rome, whom I had occasion to call in for a slight illness, took an opportunity on his first visit to put a very considerable buona mano into the hands of my servant, in order to secure future calls. I cannot, however, say that this is customary; on the contrary, it is the only case I know, though I have had other Roman physicians; and this man was in his habits and practice peculiarly un-Roman. I do not believe it, therefore, to be a Roman trait. On the other hand, I must say, for my servant's credit, that he told me the fact with a shrug, and added, that he could not, after all, recommend the gentleman as a medico, though I was padrone, of course, to do as I liked.

On Christmas Eve, a Presepio is exhibited in several of the churches. The most splendid is that of the Ara Celi, where the miraculous Bambino is kept. It lasts from Christmas to Twelfth Night, during which period crowds of people flock to see it; and it well repays a visit. The simple meaning of the term Presepio is a manger, but it is also used in the Church to signify a representation of the birth of Christ. In the Ara Celi the whole of one of the side-chapels is devoted to this exhibition. In the foreground is a grotto, in which is seated the Virgin Mary, with Joseph at her side and the miraculous Bambino in her lap. Immediately behind are an ass and an ox. On one side kneel the shepherds and kings in adoration; and above, God the Father is seen surrounded by clouds of cherubs and angels playing on instruments, as in the early pictures of Raphael. In the background is a scenic representation of a pastoral landscape, on which all the skill of the scene-painter is expended. Shepherds guard their flocks far away, reposing under palm-trees or standing on green slopes which glow in the sunshine. The distances and perspective are admirable. In the middle ground is a crystal fountain of glass, near which sheep, preternaturally white, and made of real wool and cotton-wool, are feeding, tended by figures of shepherds carved in wood. Still nearer come women bearing great baskets of real oranges and other fruits on their heads. All the nearer figures are full-sized, carved in wood, painted, and dressed in appropriate robes. The miraculous Bambino is a painted doll swaddled in a white dress, which is crusted over with magnificent diamonds, emeralds, and rubies. The Virgin also wears in her ears superb diamond pendants. Joseph has none; but he is not a person peculiarly respected in the Church. As far as the Virgin and Child are concerned, they are so richly dressed that the presents of the kings and wise men seem rather supererogatory,—like carrying coals to Newcastle,—unless, indeed, Joseph come in for a share, as it is to be hoped he does. The general effect of this scenic show is admirable, and crowds flock to it and press about it all day long. Mothers and fathers are lifting their little children as high as they can, and until their arms are ready to break; little maids are pushing, whispering, and staring in great delight; contadini are gaping at it with a mute wonderment of admiration and devotion; and Englishmen are discussing loudly the value of the jewels, and wanting to know, by Jove, whether those in the crown can be real.

While this is taking place on one side of the church, on the other is a very different and quite as singular an exhibition. Around one of the antique columns of this basilica—which once beheld the splendors and crimes of the Caesars' palace—a staging is erected, from which little maidens are reciting, with every kind of pretty gesticulation, sermons, dialogues, and speechifications, in explanation of the Presepio opposite. Sometimes two of them are engaged in alternate question and answer about the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Redemption. Sometimes the recitation is a piteous description of the agony of the Saviour and the sufferings of the Madonna,—the greatest stress being, however, always laid upon the latter. All these little speeches have been written for them by their priest or some religious friend, been committed to memory, and practised with the appropriate gestures over and over again at home. Their little piping voices are sometimes guilty of such comic breaks and changes, that the crowd about them rustles into a murmurous laughter. Sometimes also one of the very little preachers has a dispitto, pouts, shakes her shoulders, and refuses to go on with her part;—another, however, always stands ready on the platform to supply the vacancy, until friends have coaxed, reasoned, or threatened the little pouter into obedience. These children are often very beautiful and graceful, and their comical little gestures and intonations, their clasping of hands and rolling up of eyes, have a very amusing and interesting effect. The last time I was there, I was sorry to see that the French costume had begun to make its appearance. Instead of the handsome Roman head, with its dark, shining, braided hair, which is so elegant when uncovered, I saw on two of the children the deforming bonnet, which could have been invented only to conceal a defect, and which is never endurable, unless it be perfectly fresh, delicate, and costly. Nothing is so vulgar as a shabby bonnet. Yet the Romans, despite their dislike of the French, are beginning to wear it. Ten years ago it did not exist here among the common people. I know not why it is that the three ugliest pieces of costume ever invented, the dress-coat, the trousers, and the bonnet, all of which we owe to the French, have been accepted all over Europe, to the exclusion of every national costume. Certainly it is not because they are either useful, elegant, or commodious.[B]

[Footnote B: That cultivated gentleman, John Evelyn, two centuries ago wrote some amusing words on this subject. After quoting the witty saying of Malvezzi,—"I vestimenti negli animali sono molto securi segni della loro natura, negli nomini del lor cervello,"—he goes on to say, "Be it excusable in the French to alter and impose the mode on others, 'tis no less a weakness and a shame in the rest of the world, who have no dependence on them, to admit them, at least to that degree of levity as to turn into all their shapes without discrimination; so as when the freak takes our Monsieurs to appear like so many farces or Jack Puddings on the stage, all the world should alter shape and play the pantomimes with them. Methinks a French tailor, with an ell in his hand, looks like the enchantress Circe over the companions of Ulysses, and changes them into as many forms…. Something I would indulge to youth; something to age and humor. But what have we to do with these foreign butterflies? In God's name, let the change be our own, not borrowed of others; for why should I dance after a Monsieur's flageolet, that have a set of English viols for my concert? We need no French inventions for the stage or for the back."—From a pamphlet entitled Tyrannus, or the Mode.

"Si le costume bourgeois," says George Sand, in Le Péché de M. Antoine, "de notre époque est le plus triste, le plus incommode et le plus disgracieux, que la mode ait jamais inventé, c'est surtout au milieu des champs que tous ses inconvénients et toutes ses laideurs révoltent…. Au milieu de ce cadre austère et grandiose, qui transporte l'imagination au temps de la poésie primitive, apparaisse cette mouche parasite, le monsieur aux habits noirs, au menton rasé, aux mains gantées, aux jambes maladroites, et ce roi de la société n'est plus qu'un accident ridicule, une tâche importune dans le tableau. Votre costume gênant et disparate inspire alors la pitié plus que les haillons du pauvre, on sent que vous êtes déplacé au grand air, et que votre livrée vous écrase."]

If one visit the Ara Celi during the afternoon of one of these festas, the scene is very striking. The flight of one hundred and twenty-four steps, which once led to the temple of Venus and Rome, is then thronged by merchants of Madonna wares, who spread them out over the steps and hang them against the walls and balustrades. Here are to be seen all sorts of curious little colored prints of the Madonna and Child of the most ordinary quality, little bags, pewter medals, and crosses stamped with the same figures and to be worn on the neck,—all offered at once for the sum of one baiocco. Here also are framed pictures of the Saints, of the Nativity, and, in a word, of all sorts of religious subjects appertaining to the season. Little wax dolls, clad in cotton-wool to represent the Saviour, and sheep made of the same materials, are also sold by the basketful. Children and contadine are busy buying them, and there is a deafening roar all up and down the steps of "Mezzo baiocco, bello colorito, mezzo baiocco, la Santissima Concezione Incoronata,"—"Diario Romano, Lunario Romano Nuovo,"—"Ritratto colorito, medaglia e quadruccio, un baiocco tutti, un baiocco tutti,"—"Bambinelli di cera, un baiocco."[C] None of the prices are higher than one baiocco, except to strangers,—and generally several articles are held up together, enumerated, and proffered with a loud voice for this sum. Meanwhile men, women, children, priests, beggars, soldiers, and villani are crowding up and down, and we crowd with them.

[Footnote C: "A half-baiocco, beautifully colored,—a half-baiocco,
the Holy Conception Crowned." "Roman Diary,—New Roman Almanac."
"Colored portrait, medal, and little picture, one baiocco, all."
"Little children in wax, one baiocco."]

At last, ascending, we reach the door which faces towards the west. We lift the great leathern curtain and push into the church. A faint perfume of incense salutes the nostrils. The golden sunset bursts in as the curtain sways forward, illuminates the mosaic floor, catches on the rich golden ceiling, and flashes here and there over the crowd on some brilliant costume or shaven head. All sorts of people are thronging there,—some kneeling before the shrine of the Madonna, which gleams with its hundreds of silver votive hearts, legs, and arms,—some listening to the preaching,—some crowding round the chapel of the Presepio,—old women, haggard and wrinkled, come tottering along with their scaldini of coals, drop down on their knees to pray, and, as you pass, interpolate in their prayers a parenthesis of begging. The church is not architecturally handsome; but it is eminently picturesque, with its relics of centuries, its mosaic pulpits and floor, its frescoes of Pinturicchio and Pesaro, its antique columns, its rich golden ceiling, its Gothic mausoleum to the Savelli, and its medieval tombs. A dim, dingy look is over all,—but it is the dimness of faded splendor; and one cannot stand there, knowing the history of the church, its exceeding antiquity, and the changes it has undergone since it was a Roman temple, without a peculiar sense of interest and pleasure.

It was here that Romulus, in the gray dawning of Rome, built the temple of Jupiter Feretrius. Here the spolia opima were deposited. Here the triumphal processions of the Emperors and generals ended. Here the victors paused before making their vows, until the message came from the Mamertine Prisons below to announce that their noblest prisoner and victim, while the clang of their triumph and his defeat rose ringing in his ears as the procession ascended the steps, had expiated with death the crime of being the enemy of Rome. Over these very steps,—nineteen centuries ago, the first great Caesar climbed on his knees after his first triumph. At their base, Rienzi, "last of the Roman tribunes," fell. And, if the tradition of the Church is to be trusted, it was on the site of the present high altar that Augustus erected the "Ara primogenito Dei" to commemorate the Delphic prophecy of the coming of our Saviour. Standing on a spot so thronged with memories, the dullest imagination takes fire. The forms and scenes of the past rise from their graves and pass before us, and the actual and visionary are mingled together in strange poetic confusion. Truly, as Walpole says, "memory sees more than our eyes in this country."

And this is one great charm of Rome,—that it animates the dead figures of its history. On the spot where they lived and acted, the Caesars change from the manikins of books to living men; and Virgil, Horace, and Cicero grow to be realities, as we walk down the Sacred Way and over the very pavement they may once have trod. The conversations "De Claris Oratoribus" and the "Tusculan Questions" seem like the talk of the last generation, as we wander on the heights of Tusculum, or over the grounds of that charming villa on the banks of the Liris, which the great Roman orator so graphically describes in his treatise "De Legibus." The landscape of Horace has not changed. Still in the winter you may see the dazzling peak of the "gelidus Algidus" and "ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte"; and wandering at Tivoli in the summer, his description,

  "Domus Albuneae resonantis,
  Et praeceps Anio, et Tiburni lucus, et uda
  Mobililius pomaria rivis,"

is as true and fresh as if his words were of yesterday. Could one better his compliment to any Roman Lalage of to-day than to call her "dulce ridentem"? In all its losses, Rome has not lost the sweet smile of its people. Would you like to know the modern rules for agriculture in Rome, read the "Georgics"; there is so little to alter, that it is not worth mentioning. So, too, at Rome, the Emperors become as familiar as the Popes. Who does not know the curly-headed Marcus Aurelius, with his lifted brow and projecting eyes, from the full, round beauty of his youth to the more haggard look of his latest years? Are there any modern portraits more familiar than the pensive, wedge-like head of Augustus, with his sharp-cut lips and nose,—or the dull phiz of Hadrian, with his hair combed down over his low forehead,—or the vain, perking face of Lucius Verus, with his thin nose, low brow, and profusion of curls,—or the brutal bull head of Caracalla,—or the bestial, bloated features of Vitellius?

These men, who were but lay-figures to us at school, mere pegs of names to hang historic robes upon, thus interpreted by the living history of their portraits, the incidental illustrations of the places where they lived and moved and died, and the buildings and monuments they erected, become like the men of yesterday. Art has made them our contemporaries. They are as near to us as Pius VII. and Napoleon. I never drive out of the old Nomentan Gate without remembering the ghastly flight of Nero,—his recognition there by an old centurion,—his damp, drear hiding-place underground, where, shuddering and quoting Greek, he waited for his executioners,—and his subsequent terrible and cowardly death, as narrated by Tacitus and Suetonius; and it seems nearer to me, more vivid, and more actual, than the death of Rossi in the court of the Cancelleria. I never drive by the Caesars' palaces, without recalling the ghastly jest of Tiberius, when he sent for some fifteen of the Senators at dead of night and commanded their presence; and when they, trembling with fear, and expecting nothing less than that their heads were all to fall, had been kept waiting for an hour, the door opened, and he, nearly naked, appeared with a fiddle in his hand, and, after fiddling and dancing to his quaking audience for an hour, dismissed them to their homes uninjured. The air seems to keep a sort of spiritual scent or trail of these old deeds, and to make them more real here than elsewhere. The old horrors of the Amphitheatre can be made real to any person of imaginative mind in the Colosseum. He has but to lend himself to the contagion of the place, and he will see the circle of ten thousand eager eyes thirsting for his blood, fill up the ruined benches and arched tiers as of yore, and hear the savage murmur of human voices, worse than the dull roar of the beasts below. The past still lives in these old walls. It is in vain to say that the ghosts of history do not haunt their ancient habitations. Places, as well as persons, have lives and influences; and the horror of murder will not away from a spot. Haunted by its crimes, oppressed and debilitated by the fierce excesses of its Empire, Rome, silent, grave, and meditative, sighs over its past, wrapped in the penitent robes of the Church.

Besides, here one feels that the modern Romans are only the children of their ancient fathers, with the same characteristics,—softened, indeed, and worn down by time, just as the sharp traits of the old marbles have worn away; but still the same people,—proud, passionate, lazy, jealous, vindictive, easy, patient, and able. The Popes are but Church pictures of the Emperors,—a different robe, but the same nature beneath;—Alexander the VI. was but a second Tiberius—Pius the VII., a modern Augustus. When I speak of the Roman people, I do not mean the class of hangers-on upon the foreigners, but the Trasteverini and the inhabitants of the provinces and mountains. No one can go through the Trastevere when the people are roused, without feeling that they are the same as those who listened to Marcus Antonius and Brutus, when the bier of Caesar was brought into the streets,—and as those who fought with the Colonna and stabbed Rienzi at the foot of the Capitol steps. The Ciceruacchio of '48 was but an ancient Tribune of the People, in the primitive sense of that title. I like, too, to parallel the anecdote of Caius Marius, when, after his ruin, he concealed himself in the marshes, and astonished his captors, who expected to find him weak of heart, by the magnificent self-assertion of "I am Caius Marius," with the story which is told of Stefano Colonna. After this great captain met with his sad reverses, and, deprived of all his possessions, fled from Rome, an attendant asked him,—"What fortress have you now?" He placed his hand on his heart and answered,—"Eccola!" The same blood evidently ran in the veins of both these men; and well might Petrarca call Colonna "a phoenix risen from the ashes of the ancient Romans."

But, somehow or other, I have wandered strangely from my subject. Scusi,—but what has all this to do with the Bambino?

The Santissimo Bambino is a very round-faced and expressionless doll, carved, as the legend goes, from a tree on the Mount of Olives, by a Franciscan pilgrim, and painted by Saint Luke while the pilgrim slept. It is difficult to say which was the worse artist of the two, the sculptor or the painter. But Saint Luke's pictures generally do not give us a high idea of his skill as a painter. The legend is a charming anachronism, unless, indeed, Saint Luke was only a spiritual presence;—but, as the whole incident was miraculous, the greater the anachronism, the greater the miracle. The Bambino, however he came into existence, is invested, according to the assertions of priests and the belief of the common people, with wonderful powers in curing the sick; and his practice is as lucrative as any physician's in Rome. His aid is in constant requisition in severe cases, and certain it is that a cure not unfrequently follows upon his visit; but as the regular physicians always cease their attendance upon his entrance, and blood-letting and calomel are consequently intermitted, perhaps the cure is not so miraculous as it might at first seem. He is borne by the priests in state to his patients; and during the Triumvirate of '49, the Pope's carriage was given to him and his attendants. I was assured by the priest who exhibited him to me at the church, that, on one occasion, having been stolen by some irreverent hand from his ordinary abiding-place in one of the side-chapels, he returned alone, by himself, at night, to console his guardians and to resume his functions. Great honors are paid to him. He wears jewels which a Colonna might envy, and not a square inch of his body is without a splendid gem. On festal occasions, like Christmas, he wears a coronet as brilliant as the triple crown of the Pope, and, lying in the Madonna's arms in the representation of the Nativity, he is adored by the people until Epiphany. Then, after the performance of Mass, a procession of priests, accompanied by a band of music, makes the tour of the church and proceeds to the chapel of the Presepio, where the bishop, with great solemnity, removes him from his Mother's arms. At this moment, the music bursts forth into a triumphant march, a jubilant strain over the birth of Christ, and he is borne through the doors of the church to the great steps. There the bishop elevates the Holy Bambino before the crowds who throng the steps, and they fall upon their knees. This is thrice repeated, and the wonderful image is then conveyed to its original chapel, and the ceremony is over.

The Eve of Epiphany, or Twelfth-Night, is to the children of Rome what Christmas Eve is to us. It is then that the Bifana comes with her presents. This personage is neither merry nor male, like Santa Claus, nor beautiful and childlike, like Christ-kindchen,—but is described as a very tall, dark woman, ugly, and rather terrible, "d' una fisionomia piuttosto imponente" who comes down the chimney, on the Eve of Epiphany, armed with a long canna and shaking a bell, to put playthings into the stockings of the good children, and bags of ashes into those of the bad. It is a night of fearful joy for all the little ones. When they hear her bell ring, they shake in their sheets; for the Bifana is used as a threat to the wilful, and their hope is tempered by a wholesome apprehension. It is supposed to be a distorted image of the visit of the kings and wise men with their presents at the Nativity, as Santa Claus may be of the shepherds, and the Christ-kindchen of Christ himself. However this may be, it is curious to observe the different characters this superstition assumes among different nations and under different influences.

The great festival of the Bifana (a corruption, undoubtedly, of Epifania) takes place on the Eve of Twelfth-Night, in the Piazza di San Eustachio,—and a curious spectacle it is. The Piazza itself, (which is situated in the centre of the city, just beyond the Pantheon,) and all the adjacent streets, are lined with booths covered with every kind of plaything for children. Most of these are of Roman make, very rudely fashioned, and very cheap; but for those who have longer purses, there are not wanting heaps of German and French toys. These booths are gayly illuminated with rows of candles and the three-wicked brass lucerne of Rome; and, at intervals, painted posts are set into the pavement, crowned with pans of grease, with a wisp of tow for wick, which blaze and flare about. Besides these, numbers of torches carried about by hand lend a wavering and picturesque light to the scene. By eight o'clock in the evening, crowds begin to fill the Piazza and the adjacent streets. Long before one arrives, the squeak of penny-trumpets is heard at intervals; but in the Piazza itself the mirth is wild and furious, and the din that salutes one's ears on entering is almost deafening. The object of every one is to make as much noise as possible, and every kind of instrument for this purpose is sold at the booths. There are drums beating, tamburelli thumping and jingling, pipes squeaking, watchmen's-rattles clacking, penny-trumpets and tin horns shrilling, and the sharpest whistles shrieking everywhere. Besides this, there are the din of voices, screams of laughter, and the confused burr and buzz of a great crowd. On all sides you are saluted by the strangest noises. Instead of being spoken to, you are whistled at. Companies of people are marching together in platoons, or piercing through the crowd in long files, and dancing and blowing like mad on their instruments. It is a perfect witches' Sabbath. Here, huge dolls dressed as Polichinello or Pantaloon are borne about for sale,—or over the heads of the crowd great black-faced jumping-jacks, lifted on a stick, twitch themselves in fantastic fits,—or, what is more Roman than all, men carry about long poles strung with rings of hundreds of giambelli, (a light cake, called jumble in English,) which they scream for sale at a mezzo baiocco each. There is no alternative but to get a drum, whistle, or trumpet, and join in the racket,—and to fill one's pockets with toys for the children and absurd presents for one's older friends. The moment you are once in for it, and making as much noise as you can, you begin to relish the jest. The toys are very odd,—particularly the Roman whistles;—some of these are made of pewter, with a little wheel that whirls as you blow; others are of terra-cotta, very rudely modelled into every shape of bird, beast, and human deformity, each with a whistle in its head, breast, or tail, which it is no joke to hear, when blown close to your ears by a stout pair of lungs. The scene is very picturesque. Above, the dark vault of night, with its far stars, the blazing and flaring of lights below, and the great, dark walls of the Sapienza and Church looking grimly down upon the mirth. Everywhere in the crowd are the glistening helmets of soldiers, who are mixing in the sport, and the chapeaux of white-strapped gendarmes, standing at intervals to keep the peace. At about half-past eleven o'clock the theatres are emptied, and the upper classes flock to the Piazza. I have never been there later than half-past twelve, but the riotous fun still continued at that hour; and, for a week afterwards, the squeak of whistles may be heard at intervals in the streets.

At the two periods of Christmas and Easter, the young Roman girls take their first communion. The former, however, is generally preferred, as it is a season of rejoicing in the Church, and the ceremonies are not so sad as at Easter. In entering upon this religious phase of their life, it is their custom to retire to a convent, and pass a week in prayer and reciting the offices of the Church. During this period, no friend, not even their parents, are allowed to visit them, and information as to their health and condition is very reluctantly and sparingly given at the door. In case of illness, the physician of the convent is called; and even then neither parent is allowed to see them, except, perhaps, in very severe cases. Of course, during their stay in the convent, every exertion is made by the sisters to render a monastic life agreeable, and to stimulate the religious sensibilities of the young communicant. The pleasures of society and the world are decried, and the charms of peace, devotion, and spiritual exercises eulogized, until the excited imagination of the communicant leaves her no rest, before she has returned to the convent and taken the veil as a nun. The happiness of families is thus sometimes destroyed; and I knew one very united and pleasant Roman family which in this way was sadly broken up. Two of three sisters were so worked upon at their first communion, that the prayers of family and friends proved unavailing to retain them in their home. The more they were urged to remain, the more they desired to go, and the parents, brothers, and remaining sister were forced to yield a most reluctant consent. They retired into the convent and became nuns. It was almost as if they had died. From that time forward, the home was no longer a home. I saw them when they took the veil, and a sadder spectacle was not easily to be seen. The girls were happy, but the parents and family wretched, and the parting was very tearful and sad. They do not seem since to have regretted the step they then took; but regret would be unavailing—and even if they felt it, they could scarcely show it. The occupation of the sisters in the monastery they have joined is prayers, the offices of the Church, and, I believe, a little instruction of poor children. But gossip among themselves, of the pettiest kind, must make up for the want of wider worldly interests. In such limited relations, little jealousies engender great hypocrisies; a restricted horizon enlarges small objects. The repressed heart and introverted mind, deprived of their natural scope, consume themselves in self-consciousness, and duties easily degenerate into routine. We are not all in all to ourselves; the world has claims upon us, which it is cowardice to shrink from, and folly to deny. Self-forgetfulness is a great virtue, and selfishness a great vice. After all, the best religious service is worthy occupation. Large interests keep the heart sound; and the best of prayers is the doing of a good act with a pure purpose.

  "He prayeth best who loveth best
  All things, both great and small;
  For the dear God who loveth us,
  He made and loveth all."

ABDEL-HASSAN.

  The compensations of calamity are made apparent after long intervals of
    time.
  The sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all fact.
   —EMERSON.

Abdel-Hassan o'er the Desert journeyed with his caravan,—
Many a richly laden camel, many a faithful serving-man.

And before the haughty master bowed alike the man and beast;
For the power of Abdel-Hassan was the wonder of the East.

It was now the twelfth day's journey, but its closing did not bring
Abdel-Hassan and his servants to the long-expected spring.

From the ancient line of travel they had wandered far away,
And at evening, faint and weary, on a waste of Desert lay.

Fainting men and famished camels stretched them round the master's tent;
For the water-skins were empty, and the dates were nearly spent.

All the night, as Abdel-Hassan on the Desert lay apart,
Nothing broke the lifeless silence but the throbbing of his heart;

All the night he heard it beating, while his sleepless, anxious eyes
Watched the shining constellations wheeling onward through the skies.

When the glowing orbs, receding, paled before the coming day,
Abdel-Hassan called his servants and devoutly knelt to pray.

Then his words were few and solemn to the leader of his train:—
"Thirty men and eighty camels, Haroun, in thy care remain.

"Keep the beasts and guard the treasure till the needed aid I bring.
God is great! His name is mighty!—I, alone, will seek the spring."

Mounted on his strongest camel, Abdel-Hassan rode away,
While his faithful followers watched him passing, in the blaze of day,

Like a speck upon the Desert, like a moving human hand,
Where the fiery skies were sweeping down to meet the burning sand.

Passed he then their far horizon, and beyond it rode alone;—
They alone, with Arab patience, lay within its flaming zone.

Day by day the servants waited, but the master never came,—
Day by day, in feebler accents, called on Allah's holy name.

One by one they killed the camels, loathing still the proffered food,
But in weakness or in frenzy slaked their burning thirst in blood.

On unheeded heaps of treasure rested each unconscious head;
While, with pious care, the dying struggled to entomb the dead.

So they perished. Gaunt with famine, still did Haroun's trusty hand
For his latest dead companion scoop sepulture in the sand.

Then he died; and pious Nature, where he lay so gaunt and grim,
Moved by her divine compassion, did the same kind thing for him.

Earth upon her burning bosom held him in his final rest,
While the hot winds of the Desert piled the sand above his breast.—

Onward in his fiery travel Abdel-Hassan held his way,
Yielding to the camel's instinct, halting not, by night or day,

'Till the faithful beast, exhausted in her fearful journey, fell,
With her eye upon the palm-trees rising o'er the lonely well:

With a faint, convulsive struggle, and a feeble moan, she died,
While her still surviving master lay unconscious by her side.

So he lay until the evening, when a passing caravan
From the dead incumbering camel brought to life the dying man.

Slowly murmured Abdel-Hassan, as they bathed his fainting head,
"All is lost, for all have perished!—they are numbered with the dead!

"I, who had such power and treasure but a single moon ago,
Now my life and poor subsistence to a stranger's bounty owe.

  "God is great! His name is mighty! He is victor in the strife!
  Stripped of pride and power and substance, He hath left me faith
    and life."—

Sixty years had Abdel-Hassan, since the stranger's friendly hand
Saved him from the burning Desert, lived and prospered in the land;

And his life of peaceful labor, in its pure and simple ways,
For his loss fourfold returned him, and a mighty length of days.

Sixty years of faith and patience gave him wisdom's mural crown;
Sons and daughters brought him honor with his riches and renown.

Men beheld his reverend aspect, and revered his blameless name;
And in peace he dwelt with strangers, in the fulness of his fame.

But the heart of Abdel-Hassan yearned, as yearns the heart of man,
Still to die among his kindred, ending life where it began.

So he summoned all his household, and he gave the brief command,—
"Go and gather all our substance;—we depart from out the land."

Then they journeyed to the Desert with a great and numerous train,
To his old nomadic instinct trusting life and wealth again.

It was now the sixth day's journey, when they met the moving sand,
On the great wind of the Desert, driving o'er that arid land;

And the air was red and fervid with the Simoom's fiery breath;—
None could see his nearest fellow in the stifling blast of death.

Blinded men from prostrate camels piled the stores to windward round,
And within the barrier herded, on the hot, unstable ground.

Two whole days the great wind lasted, when the living of the train
From the hot drifts dug the camels and resumed their way again.

But the lines of care grew deeper on the master's swarthy cheek,
While around the weakest fainted and the strongest waxéd weak;

And the water-skins were empty, and a silent murmur ran
From the faint, bewildered servants through the straggling caravan:—

"Let the land we left be blessed!—that to which we go, accurst!—
From our pleasant wells of water came we here to die of thirst?"

But the master stilled the murmur with his steadfast, quiet eye:—
"God is great," he said, devoutly,—"when He wills it, we shall die."

As he spake, he swept the Desert with his vision clear and calm,
And along the far horizon saw the green crest of the palm.

Man and beast, with weak steps quickened, hasted to the lonely well,
And around it, faint and panting, in a grateful tumult fell.

Many days they stayed and rested, and amidst his fervent prayer
Abdel-Hassan pondered deeply that strange bond which held him there.

Then there came an aged stranger, journeying with his caravan;
And when each had each saluted, Abdel-Hassan thus began:—

"Knowest thou this well of water? lies it on the travelled ways?"
And he answered,—"From the highway thou art distant many days.

  "Where thou seest this well of water, where these thorns and
    palm-trees stand,
  Once the Desert swept unbroken in a waste of burning sand;

"There was neither life nor herbage, not a drop of water lay,
All along the arid valley where thou seest this well to-day.

  "Sixty years have wrought their changes since a man of wealth
    and pride,
  With his servants and his camels, here, amidst his riches, died.

"As we journeyed o'er the Desert, dead beneath the blazing sky,
Here I saw them, beasts and masters, in a common burial lie;

"Thirty men and eighty camels did the shrouding sand infold;
And we gathered up their treasure, spices, precious stones, and gold;

"Then we heaped the sand above them, and, beneath the burning sun,
With a friendly care we finished what the winds had well begun.

"Still I hold that master's treasure, and his record, and his name;
Long I waited for his kindred, but no kindred ever came.

"Time, who beareth all things onward, hither bore our steps again,
When around this spot were scattered whitened bones of beasts and men;

"And from out the heaving hillocks of the mingled sand and mould
Lo! the little palms were springing, which to-day are great and old.

"From the shrubs we held the camels; for I felt that life of man,
Breaking to new forms of being, through that tender herbage ran.

"In the graves of men and camels long the dates unheeded lay,
Till their germs of life commanded larger life from that decay;

"And the falling dews, arrested, nourished every tender shoot,
While beneath, the hidden moisture gathered to each wandering root.

  "So they grew; and I have watched them, as we journeyed, year by year;
  And we digged this well beneath them, where thou seest it, fresh and
    clear.

"Thus from waste and loss and sorrow still are joy and beauty born,
Like the fruitage of these palm-trees and the blossom of the thorn;

"Life from death, and good from evil!—from that buried caravan
Springs the life to save the living, many a weak, despairing man."

As he ended, Abdel-Hassan, quivering through his aged frame,
Asked, in accents slow and broken, "Knowest thou that master's name?"

"He was known as Abdel-Hassan, famed for wealth and power and pride;
But the proud have often fallen, and, as he, the great have died!"

Then, upon the ground before them, prostrate Abdel-Hassan fell,
With his aged hands extended, trembling, to the lonely well,—

And the sacred soil beneath him cast upon his hoary head,—
Named the servants and the camels,—summoned Haroun from the dead,—

Clutched the unconscious palms around him, as if they were living men,—
And before him, in their order, rose his buried train again.

Moved by pity, spake the stranger, bending o'er him in his grief:—
"What affects the man of sorrow? Speak,—for speaking is relief."

Then he answered, rising slowly to that aged stranger's knee,—
"Thou beholdest Abdel-Hassan! They were mine, and I am he!"

Wondering, stood they all around him, and a reverent silence kept,
While, amidst them, Abdel-Hassan lifted up his voice and wept.

Joy and grief, and faith and triumph, mingled in his flowing tears;
Refluent on his patient spirit rolled the tide of sixty years.

As the past and present blended, lo! his larger vision saw,
In his own life's compensation, Nature's universal law.

"God is good, O reverend stranger! He hath taught me of His ways,
By this great and crowning lesson, in the evening of my days.

"Keep the treasure,—I have plenty,—and am richer that I see
Life ascend, through change and evil, to that perfect life to be,—

"In each woe a blessing folded, from all loss a greater gain,
Joy and hope from fear and sorrow, rest and peace from toil and pain.

"God is great! His name is mighty! He is victor in the strife!
For He bringeth Good from Evil, and from Death commandeth Life!"

ABOUT SPIRES.

When the children of Shem said one to another at Babel,—"Go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top shall reach unto heaven," they typified a remarkable trait of the human mind,—a desire for a tangible and material exponent of itself in its most heroic moods. In the earlier ages of the world, when humanity, as it were, was becoming conscious of itself and its godlike energies, it seems as if this desire could find no nobler expression than in towers. The same spirit of enterprise which in our own day stretches forth inquiring hands into unexplored realms of physical and intellectual being, and acknowledges in the spoils of such search its noblest and proudest attainments, in more primeval times appears to have been content with the actual and visible invasion of high building into that sky which to them was the great type of the unknown and mysterious.

The birth of these structures was not of the practical necessities of life, but of that fond desire of the soul which has ever haunted mankind with intimations of immortality. Towers thus became the boldest imaginable symbols of energy and power. And when, in the course of time, they became exigencies of society, and familiarized by the idea of usefulness, even then they could not but be recognized as expressions of the more heroic elements of human nature.

Founded in superabundant massiveness, and built in prodigality of strength, the tower seems to defy the elements and to outlive tradition. Old age restores it to more than its primeval significance; and when humbler erections have passed away and crumbled in ruins, it appears once more to rise above the customary uses of men, and to become a companion for tempests and clouds. Dismantled, deserted, and bearing,

  "Inscribed upon its visionary sides,
  This history of many a winter's storm,
  And obscure record of the path of fire,"

Nature lays claim to it, and with moss and ivy and eld, with weeds and flowers, she takes it to her bosom.

we at length associate it with no achievements of man, and its masonry becomes venerable to us, as shaped by mysterious beings,—Ghouls or Titans,—no fellow-workers of ours.

Let us for a while forget the tedious realisms around us, and eat of the dreamy Lotos. Let us look eastward over the wide waters, and behold, along the horizon, the "dim rich cities" printing themselves against the morning. Let us listen to their mellow chimes that come faintly to us, and bless those deep-toned utterances so full of the tenderness of ancient days and the melody of gray traditions. Let us bless them; for, like lyres of Amphion, at their sound arose the bell-bearing tower, which made cities beautiful and their people happy. O St. Chrysostom! there were other golden mouths than thine that preached by the Bosphorus, and their pulpits were the airy chambers of the first Christian towers. Where the muezzin every hour from the lofty minaret now calls the faithful Mahometan to prayer, were first heard those matin and vesper chimes which since then throughout Catholic Europe have accompanied the rising and the setting of the sun. Thus the Christian tower immediately becomes associated with the tenderest and most poetical ideas of monastic and pastoral religion. It seemed emulous from the beginning to be the first to catch the beams of morning, and, like the statue of Memnon, to respond to the golden touch by sounds of music. Then the fervid heart of Italy took fire, and from her bosom uprose over all her cities the beautiful campanile. Still and solemn it stood on the plains of Lombardy, like a sentinel on the outskirts of our faith, whispering to the vast of space that all was well. Over the lagunes of Venice the weary toil of two centuries piled up the tower of St. Mark. Ravenna, with barbaric pride, built her round-cinctured towers to the glory of the Exarchate. Rome followed with her square campaniles, whose arcaded chambers looked down on a hundred cloisters. Then there were La Ghirlandina at Modena, Il Torazzo at Cremona, Torre della Mangia at Siena, the Garisenda at Bologna, the Leaning Tower at Pisa. Everywhere they sought the skies with emulous heights, and ere long they arose in such number as to give a distinctive aspect to the Christian city, and to warn the traveller from afar that he approached walls within which religion was a pride and a power. Who has not admired the Giotto Campanile, called "the Beautiful," at Florence? And who has not wondered at the splendor of her citizens, whose command was, "to construct an edifice whose magnificence should be beyond the conception even of the cognoscenti, and whose height and quality of workmanship should surpass all that has been built in any style, in Greece or Rome, even at the most florid period of their power!"

But the spiritualization and glory of the tower are yet wanting. There is a very human expression about it, as it stands in the midst of those glimmering lands, with its haughty summit commanding far-distant plains,—

a very human expression of scornful pride and imperious dominion. We shall see how it outgrew its mere humanities and became an expression of immortal aspirations, a symbol of our relationship with ethereal existences.

These Italian campaniles had either flat summits, or were crowned with a low, unimportant roof. But as they approached the North of Lombardy, and found their way into Germany, France, and Britain, these roofs, through the necessities of climate, became steeper and sharper. Many of the little gray mountain-chapels in the South of Switzerland still lift up these pointed towers amid the hamlets of the valley, having gathered in the hardy flocks at eventide for seven or eight centuries. The same early modifications may yet be seen on the banks of the Rhine, where the conical, stork-haunted caps of the round towers are so picturesquely associated with that legendary scenery. Those dear, time-worn, rugged, red-tiled roofs, with their peaks coming in just where they are needed,—what could the artist do without them? Then the same necessities made the early French and Norman builders push up into the air those gaunt, quaint old camelbacks, with spindles or pinnacles astride. You cannot but love them for their strangeness and the surprise they make against the quiet sky. In Britain, too, you might have beheld this tendency, where the lordly curfew quenched the lights in castle and cot from beneath a very extinguisher of a roof. Now, as, in the natural growth of the human mind, the heart became more and more impregnated with the beauty of holiness, and the prayers of men ascended with somewhat of purer aspiration to heaven, so did they build their tower-roofs higher and higher into the air, till at length the spire was born. In one of those quaint antique towers of Normandy, Coutances, it was first fully developed; and it is curious to see how in this instance its roof-origin was still remembered: for it has tall, gabled garret-windows rising from its base, connected by rude cross-bars to the slope of the spire; and it has a kind of scaly mail, Ruskin says, which is nothing more than the copying in stone of the common wooden shingles of the house-roof. Now the proud Italian architects, disdainful though they were of the arts of the rude Northern builders, could not but admit the expressiveness of the pointed roof; so they placed a form of it on some of their campaniles, as on those of Venice and Cremona, in both these instances making it a third of the whole height. But the spire, though an effective, was as yet an unambitious structure,—scarcely more than an exaltation or an apotheosis of the roof. For a long time it continued to be merely a supplementary addition in wood to the solid masonry of the tower, and in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries was often added to substructures of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth.

Surely it is very dull in us, out of our present enlightenment, to continue to distinguish the mediaeval times as the Dark Ages, as if they were glimmering and ghostly, and men groped about in them blindly, living in a sort of dusky romance of feudality. Did you ever study De la Roche's incarnation of Mediaeval Art in his Hemicycle,—that long saintly robe with its still and serious folds, that fair dreamy face, those upturned eyes, "the homes of silent prayer," the contemplative repose? It is truly an exquisite idealization; yet there is something wanting. I believe the piety of those days was rather a passion than a sentiment. Their "beauty of holiness" was rather an active emotional impulse than a passive spiritualization, and was incomplete without a material expression, a tangible demonstration of itself. Like the fabled Narcissus, it yearned for its own image. Hence the joy and luxury of the ecclesiastical buildings of that period. They were the very blossoming of the tree of knowledge. This was, indeed, an unenlightened, perhaps a superstitious principle of worship; but it was enthusiastic, self-sacrificing, and chivalrous. It, indeed, sent the stylite to his pillar, the hermit to the wilderness, the ascetic to the scourge and hair-cloth shirt; but it also led the warrior to the Holy Land, the beggar to the castle-hearth, and the workman to the building of the House of God. It is no wonder that a religion born thus in childlike fervor, and seeking expression in outward signs, built upward. It is no wonder that out of the prosaic elements of the roof it made the spiritual essence of the spire. If we look through the whole range of architectural forms in classic or mediaeval times, we shall find no one so indicative of any human emotion as this simple outline is of the highest of all emotions,—prayer. It is a significant fact, that the sentiment of aspiration is nowhere hinted at in Classic Art, and we look in vain for it in all pagan architectures. This is not surprising. The worshippers who built in those schools demonstrated there all the noblest ideas they were capable of,—intellectual beauty, dignity, power, truth, chastity, courage, and all the other virtues cherished in their theologies; but their personal relations with any higher sphere of existence, vague and undefined as they were, called for no expression in their temples, and obtained none.

The pyramidal form has ever possessed peculiar fascinations for men, and, from its simplicity, grandeur, and power, has been used in all ages with innumerable modifications in those structures whose object was to impress and overawe,—as in the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of India and Mexico, and in all the earliest funereal monuments. It involved a rude symbolism, which recommended itself to the barbarous childhood of nations. But it was not until the pyramid was sharpened and spiritualized into the spire that it gained its completest triumph over the secret emotions of men. The Egyptians made the nearest approach to it in the obelisk. That mysterious people felt very keenly the suggestiveness of the pyramidal form, and refined the language of its sentiment into some very beautiful expressions. Yet between the mausoleums of Gizeh and the hieroglyphic shafts of Luxor and Karnac there existed a modification, the intensity of whose meaning they were not prepared to understand. Neither their civilization nor their religion required such an exponent; so they exhausted themselves with their mountainous bulks of stone and their pictured monoliths.

We know not how the first view of a Christian spire would affect the mind of an alien; but so far as our own experiences are concerned, though perhaps familiar only with the lowliest and most unpretending of its kind, we are conscious that it deeply impressed even the "unsunned temper" of our childhood. The wisest among us may not be able to define precisely these impressions, or trace to their source the admiration and satisfaction it occasions, yet all are ready to acknowledge its beautiful fitness to adorn and glorify the Christian temple. But to the thoughtful mind how suggestive it is of pleasant imagery! It is "the silent finger" that points to heaven; it is an upward aspiration of the soul; a prayer from the depths of a troubled heart; a suspirium de profundis; a hymn of thanksgiving; a pure life, throwing of the worldly and approaching the ethereal; a finite mind searching, till lost in the vastness of the unknown and unapproachable; a beautiful attempt; a voice of praise sent up from the earth, till, like the soaring lark, it "becomes a sightless song." Indeed, our unbidden thoughts, that wild-ivy of the mind, are trained upward by the spire, till it is hung round with the tenderest associations and recollections of all that is sweet and softening in our natures. Thus, when the painter has represented on his canvas some wild phase of scenery, where the gadding vine, the tangled underwood, the troubled brook, the black, frowning rock, the untamed savage growth of the forest,

impress us with awe, and a sad, homeless feeling, as if we were lost children, how eloquent is that last touch of his pencil that shows us a simple spire peeping over the tree-tops! How it comforts us! How it brings us home again, and bestows an air

But even if we were not inclined to be sentimental on the subject, even if base utilities had crowded out from our hearts the blessed capacity of shedding rosy light on things about us, the coldest esteem could not but ripen into affection, when we reflected that the spire never adorned the shrine of a pagan god, never glorified the mosque of a false prophet, never, in purity, arose from any unconsecrated ground; but when, at last, the Church of Christ felt the "beauty of holiness," then it developed out of that beauty and pointed the way to God. It exhaled from the growing perfection of the Church, as fragrance from an opening flower. It is, therefore, peculiarly holy. It is a monitor of especial grace. "It marshals us the way that we are going," like the visionary dagger of Macbeth; but the knell that sounds beneath it summons only to heaven.

Practically, it is utterly useless; and this is its honor and its unspeakable dignity. We cannot even climb it, as we could a tower; for it is nearly as unapproachable as the Oracle of God, save to the innocent birds, who love to flock and wheel about it in the sunshine, and build their nests in its "coignes of vantage," or, in the night-time, to the troops of stars which touch it in their journey through the skies. It is as beautifully idle as the lilies of the field; and yet its expressiveness touches us so nearly, the propriety of its sentiment is so striking, that, when the great test question of this living age is applied to it, and we are asked, What is its use? what is it good for? the heart is shocked at the impiety of the question, and the feelings revolt, as against an insult. Upon the arches of Canterbury Minster is carved,

NON * NOBIS * DOMINE * NON * NOBIS * SED * NOMINI * TVO * DA * GLORIAM *

Nothing can be simpler than the composition of the pure spire. The aesthetics of its development and growth are characteristically natural and apparent. They are like the history of a flower from bud to bloom under a warm sun. Let us become botanists of Art for a while, and analyze those flowers of worship, as they opened "in that first garden of their simpleness."

Considering the growth of the spire from the tower-roof, it might naturally be supposed that the earliest forms would be square or round, in plan. But no sooner had the roof passed into this new sphere of existence, than the fine intelligence of the builders perceived that it needed refinement. They saw that in a square spire there was so coarse a distinction between the tapering mass of light and the tapering mass of shadow, that the delicacy and lightness necessary to express the sentiment they desired to convey did not exist in the new feature;—in a round spire, on the other hand, they found that this distinction of light and shade was too little marked; it was vapid and effeminate, and quite without that delicious crispiness of effect which they at once obtained by cutting off the corners of the square spire, and reducing it to an octagon. With very rare exceptions, as in the southwest spire of Chartres Cathedral, this form was always used. Now it will be seen that a difficulty arises in the beginning, how to unite the octagon of the spire with the square of the tower. There are four triangular spaces at the summit of the tower left uncovered by the superstructure; and how best to treat these, simple as the task may seem, constitutes what may be called the touchstone of architectural genius in spire-building. There are several general ways of effecting this, each of them subject to such modifications, in individual instances, as to give them an ever-varying character.

Perhaps the earliest method was simply to occupy those triangular spaces with pyramidal masses of masonry, sloping back against the adjacent faces of the tower,—an expedient which Nature herself might have suggested in the first snow-storm. Then they boldly cut the Gordian knot by shaving off the corners of the tower at the top, thus creating there an octagonal platform, to which the spire would exactly correspond. Still oftener they chamfered the spire upwards from the corners of the tower: in other words, they placed, as it were, a square spire on their tower, occupying the whole of its summit, and then obtained the necessary octangularity by shaving off the angles of the spire from the apex to a certain point near the base, where the cutting was continued obliquely to the corners of the tower. The latest method was to build pinnacles on the triangular territory. In such cases the spire usually stood wholly within the outer boundaries, and parapets assisted to conceal the first springing of the spire.

The first of these methods is usually considered the most perfect and beautiful, on account of its simplicity and candor. This is called the broach; and it is the only form thus far spoken of wherein the tapering surfaces rise directly from the tower-cornice, without mutilating the tower or violating the pure outlines of the spire. The heavenward aspiration, as it were, ascends without effort from the solidity of the tower. It seems to typify a certain fitness and adaptability to heavenly things even in the gross and earthly nature of man. One cannot fail to admire its unaffected dignity, its harmonious balance, its graceful proportions.

It would be impossible within the limits of this article to give any idea of the wonderful diversity of treatment these simple generic forms received at the hands of the early builders. The changes of combination, proportion, and ornamentation were endless. For the mediaeval spirit was eminently earnest in its labor, and would not be content with copying an old shape merely because it was a good shape. It would not be satisfied with the cold repetition of a written litany of architectural forms; but its ardent piety, its thoughtful zeal, the life of its love, demanded an ever-varying expression in these visible prayers. Emerson himself might find nought to censure there, in the way of undue conformities and consistencies. Its language was written with the infinite alphabet of Nature.

We are speaking now especially of England; and we, her children, may well be proud that these divine enthusiasms of antiquity, which we thought so quaint, so rare, so far away from us, nowhere else found fairer demonstrations. The English spires bear especial witness to the zeal and aspiration of their builders. They belted them with bands of ornament, cut at first in imitation of tiles, and afterwards beautifully panelled with foliations. Moulded ribs began to run up the angles of the spires, and, when they met at the summit, would exultingly curl themselves together in the most precious cruciforms. Quaint spire-lights began to appear. Sometimes curious dormers would project from alternate sides; and the very ribs, as if, in this spring-time of Art, they felt, quickening along their lengths, the mysterious movements of a new life, sprouted out here and there with knots of leafage, timidly at first, and then with all the wealth and profusion of the harvest. The same impulse wreathed the crowning cross with a thousand midsummer fancies, till the circle of Eternity, or the triangle of Trinity, which often mingled with its arms, scarcely knew itself. The pinnacles, too, blossomed into crockets and bud-like finials, and began to gather more thickly about the roots of the spire, and from them often leaped flying-buttresses against it. During this time the spire itself was growing more and more acute, its lines becoming more and more eloquent. After the fourteenth century, the tower began to be crowned with intricate panelled tracery of parapets and battlements, from behind which the spire, an entirely separate structure, shot up into the sky. In this, the period of the perpendicular style, pinnacles, purfled to the last degree, crowded about the base of the spire, reminding one of the admiring throng gathered about the base of some old picture of the Ascension. But there is another English form which perhaps conveys this sentiment even more impressively: We refer to that whose prototype exists in the steeple of the Church of St. Nicholas at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. This, however, has four turrets, one on each angle, from which, with great lightness, leap towards each other four grand flying-buttresses, which join hands over an empty void and hold in the air a lantern and spirolet of great elegance. This is a very bold piece of construction. It has been imitated at St. Giles's, Edinburgh, at Linlithgow, in the college tower of Aberdeen, and it is especially made known to the world by Sir Christopher Wren's famous use of it in the steeple of St. Dunstan's-in-the-East, London.

The most famous spires of England and Normandy are St. Peter's at Caen, a very early specimen, St. Michael's at Coventry, Louth, that of the parochial church of Boston in Lincolnshire, that of Chichester Cathedral, the three that rise from the famous Lichfield Cathedral, and finally and especially the magnificent spire over the cross of Salisbury. In the judgment of most English connoisseurs, this is the finest in the world. It was probably erected during the reign of Edward III., a very florid period for architecture. It is the highest in England, its summit rising four hundred and four feet from the pavement of the church beneath. It is one of the earliest erected in stone, and is remarkable for skilful construction, the masonry in no part being more than seven inches thick. This spire is belted with three broad bands of panelled tracery, and there are eight pinnacles at its base, two on each corner of the tower. The ribs are fretted throughout the whole height with elegant crockets, thus imparting to the sky-line an appearance similar to the gusty spray on the borders of a rain-cloud. An admirer has said of it, "It seems as though it had drawn down the very angels to work over its grand and feeling simplicity the gems and embroidery of Paradise itself!" England once boasted the loftiest spire in the world, that of old St. Paul's, London, whose summit, five hundred and twenty feet from the ground, seemed to sail among the highest clouds; but the great fire of 1666 destroyed it, and Sir Christopher's stately metropolitan dome now rises in its place.

One could believe in the "merrie" days of Old England, were her abundant spires their only evidence. The ardent zeal that kindled so many thousand answering beacons throughout the length and breadth of the land is the best proof of that concord of souls which is true happiness. We know that the decision of the Council of Clermont about the Crusades was believed to have been instantly known through Christendom, and that the great cry, God willeth it! which shook the council-roof, was echoed from hill to hill, and at once struck awe and astonishment to the hearts of remotest lands. So in the birthplaces of our Pilgrim fathers, over these cherished spots,

arose the "star y-pointing" spire, like a voice of adoration; and then another would be raised in unison in some neighboring village, where they could see and communicate with each other in their silent language; and yet another close by among the hills; and presently, in full view from its summit, twenty more, perhaps,—till the good tidings were known through the whole country, and from hamlet to hamlet, over the streams and tree-tops, was thus echoed the great Te Deum of the land. For it was said among the people, in that antique spirit of worship, as Milton exhorted the birds in his Hymn of Thanksgiving,—

  "Join voices, all ye living souls! ye spires,
  That singing up to heaven's gate ascend,
  Bear on your wings and in your notes His praise!"

It is a beautiful proof of the spirit of sacrifice which actuated the Masonic builder of the Middle Ages, that his fairest and most precious works were not confined to the great metropolitan churches and cathedrals, where they could be seen of men, but were frequently found in quiet and secluded villages, nestled among pastoral solitudes, far away from the gaze and admiration of the world. Though the spire of Salisbury was, perhaps, an epic in Masonic poetry, yet in humble hamlets of England, beyond her most distant hills, and amid many an unnamed "sunny spot of greenery," were idyls sung no less exquisite than this. Many a village-spire, of conception no less beautiful, arose above the tree-tops among the most untrodden ways. All day long its shadow lingers in the quiet churchyard, and points among the humble graves, as if, over this dial of human life, it loved to preach silent homilies on "the passing away," even to the simplest poor. It must be inexpressibly touching to meet with these beautiful forms in the lonely wilderness, where the ivy alone, as it throws its loving arms around them, appears to recognize their grace and all their tender significance. It is like the chance discovery of a good deed done in the darkness, or like a pure life spent in the sweet and serious retirement of a little hamlet, pointing the way to heaven for its scanty flock of cottagers.

It was the custom in those days, during the celebration of Mass, at the moment when the Host was raised, to ring a peculiar bell in the tower, in order that those not gathered beneath the consecrated roof might be made aware far and wide of the awful ceremony, and be reminded to offer up their devotion in unison. And we remember what Izaak Walton said of quaint George Herbert,—how "some of the meaner sort of his parish did so love and reverence Mr. Herbert, that they would let their plough rest when his saints'-bell rung to prayer, that they might also offer their devotion to God with him, and would then return back contented to their plough." Now it seems to us that the spire is a perpetual elevation of the Host, a never-ending lifting-up of the Symbol of Redemption, a consecrating presence to field and cottage, hillside and highway, ever ready to bless the accidental glance of wayfarer or laborer, and to make in the desert of his daily life a momentary oasis of sweet and hallowed thought. Its peaceful influence extends over the whole landscape and pierces to its remotest corners.

  "A gentler life spreads round the holy spires;
  Where'er they rise, the sylvan waste retires,
  And aëry harvests crown the fertile lea."

It may be thought that St. Peter's cock, which so often answers the sunbeams from the spindly spire, and kindles and glitters there like a star, is rather empty of emblematic significance and soul-language. But what saith old Bishop Durandus?—"The cock at the summit of the church is a type of the preacher. For the cock, ever watchful, even in the depth of night, giveth notice how the hours pass, waketh the sleepers, predicteth the approach of day,—but first exciteth himself to crow by striking his sides with his wings. There is a mystery conveyed in each of these particulars: the night is the world; the sleepers are the children of this world, who are asleep in their sins; the cock is the preacher who preacheth boldly, and exciteth the sleepers to cast away the works of darkness, exclaiming, Woe to them that sleep! Awake, thou that sleepest! and then foretell the approach of day, when they speak of the Day of Judgment and the glory that shall be revealed, and, like prudent messengers, before they teach others, arouse themselves from the sleep of sin by mortifying their bodies; and as the weather-cock faces the wind, they turn themselves boldly to meet the rebellious by threats and arguments."

But it was on the Continent, especially in France, the Low Countries, and Germany, that the Gothic flower opened in fullest perfection; and it is here that we find the loftiest and most luxurious spire-forms. They were always the last part of the church completed, the finishing-touch, the last that was needed to perfection. The progress of the building of a cathedral thus embodied a beautiful symbolism. In most cases, the choir, or east end, the holiest part of the church, was the first erected, in order to sanctify and protect the high altar; and then, as the treasures of the church flowed in, after the expiration of years or centuries, the builders, tutored by a legendary science, and harmonized by a wonderful feeling of brotherhood, in the same spirit, perfected the designs of their predecessors, by leading out westward the long naves and attendant aisles, completing northward and southward the transepts, adding a chapel here and a porch there, glorifying the western front with the touches of divine genius; and when at last every niche was occupied with its statue of angel, saint, or pious benefactor, and the holy choir, with its apsis, had been re-adorned with the accumulated art of centuries, and glowed with the iris-light from painted windows,—when the mural monuments of bishops, warriors, and kings had thickened beneath the consecrated roof, and the whole structure had been hallowed by the prayers and chantings of generations,—then, at last, over the ancient tower arose the lofty spire; as if an angelic messenger had spread his wings at its base and mounted upward to heaven, shouting out the glad tidings of the completion of the House of God, and, as he arose, the voice grew fainter and fainter, till at length it melted into the sky!

The finest spires of Europe were erected as late as the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, upon towers prepared for their reception, usually, in much earlier times. This confidence of the old builders in the final completion of their structures is remarkable. They drew without stint on the piety of after ages,—a resource which has not unfrequently proved too feeble to realize their generous expectations. There are few cities in Europe which do not bear sad marks of this misplaced confidence. This is especially witnessed in the unfinished steeples. And, indeed, when we find that not only one, but two, three, four, or even five spires were sometimes required to flame upward from the same building, as in Caen Cathedral, we do not wonder that the kindling spark is often wanting. It would seem as if another fire must come down from heaven, as of old it did upon the first offering of Moses and Aaron, to inflame these censers, rich in frankincense and naphtha.

Now let us see what were the distinguishing attributes of the Continental spires. We know not why it was, but in the gray old towns of Belgium and the Low Countries there existed such exuberance of imagination, such an unbounded luxuriousness of conception, as created more images of Gothic quaintness and intricacy than elsewhere can be seen. If any architecture ever expressed the average of human thought, that of these towns is especially eloquent in its indications that their inhabitants were very happy and contented. Look at a print of any old Belgian town or street, and you will at once see our meaning. What a joyous upspringing of pinnacles and pointed roofs and spires! of no more earthly use, indeed, than so much pleasant laughter. There is no tower without its spire, no turret or gable without its pinnacle, no oriel without its pointed roof, no dormer without some such playful leaping up into the air. Every salient point attacks the sky with its long iron spindle, wrought with strange device and bearing a hospitable cup where the bird makes his nest; and every spindle sings and shrieks with a shifting vane,—so that the wind never sweeps idly over a Belgian town. This innocent and happy people did not frown through the ages from grim battlements, and awe posterity with stern and massive walls. But they loved old childlike associations and fireside tales. They loved to build curious fountains in commemoration of pleasant legends. They loved, too, the huge, delicious-toned bells of their minster-towers, and the sweet changes of melodious, never-ceasing chimes. They carved their Lares and Penates on their house-fronts very curiously, with sun-dials and hatchments, sacred texts and legends of hospitality. The narrow streets of Ghent, Louvain, Liege, Mechlin, Antwerp, Ypres, Bruges are thus full of household memories and saintly traditions. So it is not strange that a people whose daily hours were counted out with the music of belfries were fond of fretting their towers with workmanship so precious and delicate that it has been called "the petrifaction of music."

But before we proceed to tell in how florid a manner the Low Countries interpreted the simpler forms of spires, we shall describe generically in what manner not only they, but all the other European kingdoms, were indebted to the old Rhineland towns for some of these forms. When the bell-tower, in about the seventh or eighth century, began to be used in Germany, it at once received certain very important modifications on the earlier Italian campanile. The upper terminations of these latter were horizontal, on account of their flat roofs. Now in more northern climates, where the snow falls, these flat roofs would be unsafe and inconvenient. So we find that the first church-towers that arose in such Rhenish places as Oberwesel, Gelnhausen, Bacharach, Coblentz, Cologne, Bingen, "sweet Bingen on the Rhine," no longer ended in these horizontal lines, but arose in pointed shapes. Indeed, the Germans, who were great rivals of the Italians in those days, not only in matters pertaining to architecture, but to literature also, in the same independent spirit which induced them alone, of all civilized peoples, to retain through all time the cramped, angular letters of monkish transcribers, in preference to the fair and square Roman forms, took particular pride in avoiding horizontal lines entirely at the tops of their towers, as they did at the tops of their letters. Wherever they so occur, they are insignificant,—rather ornamental than constructive. Not so with the English; they kept the square tops to their towers, and contented themselves with the pointed superstructure. Let us see how Teutonic stubbornness arranged the matter. Each separate face of their towers, whether these towers were square or octangular, ended above in a gable; and from these gables, in various ways, arose the octangular pointed roof or spire. This circumstance, more than any other, tended to give a peculiar character to German Gothic. The simplest type of the gabled spire was magnificently used in the spire of St. Peter's at Hamburg. This was the finest in North Germany; it was four hundred and sixteen feet high, and, if still standing, would be the third in height in the world. But it was destroyed by the great fire of 1842. Many a traveller can bear witness to the sweet melody of the chimes that used to sound beneath it every half-hour.

In later times, between the Germans and the French, was invented the lantern,—a feature so often and so superbly used, not only on the Continent, but more lately in England, that we must needs glance at it. This consisted in a tall, perpendicular, octangular structure, placed upon the tower, quite light and open, and pierced with long windows. Here they used to swing the bells, and the place was called the lantern or louvre; thence the octangular spire arose easily and naturally. Now, notwithstanding this device, those troublesome triangular spaces still remained unoccupied at the top of the square tower. The manner in which this difficulty was remedied was exceedingly ingenious and beautiful. It was by building on them very delicate pinnacles or turrets, peopled, perhaps, as at Freiburg, with a silent and serene concourse of saints in rich niches, or inclosing, as at Strasburg, spiral open-work stairs. These structures accompanied the tall lantern through its whole height; thus rendering the entire group a memory, as it were, of the square tower below, while, at the same time, it beautifully foreshadowed the octangular character of the sky-seeking spire above,—a significant symbolism.

Now, when the Belgians and their neighbors received the spire thus from the fatherland, they at once began to express in it the joy of their worship by all the embroidery and tender imagery and grotesque conceits it was capable of receiving. They varied as many changes on it as they did on their bells. They concealed the first springing of their spires behind clustering pinnacles, flying-buttresses, canopied niches with gigantic statues, galleries with battlements and parapets pierced and mantled in lacework of flamboyant tracery, pointed gables alive with crockets and finials, and long, quaint dormers,—all with a bewildering intricacy of enrichment. And they inherited from the Germans a love for the gargoyle, which haunted the springing of the spire at the corners with visions of very hideous diablerie. It may well be believed that these florid builders did not suffer the spire to arise serious and serene from the midst of this delicious tangle of architecture. They tricked it out with all the frostwork of Gothic genius. Not only did they use in its decoration spire-lights, crockets, ribs and cinctures, bands of gablets, and masses of reticulated relief, but, with wonderful skill, they pierced each face from base to apex in foliated patterns of great richness, so that the whole spire became a web of delicate open-work, through which the light was sprinkled in beautiful shapes, varying with every movement of the beholder. Their plainer spires of wood they were fond of covering with glazed tiles of various tints arranged in quaint taste. And they would vary the outline by making it curve inward, giving a fine sweep thus from the base to an apex of great slenderness. Sometimes they would give it, with exaggerated refinement, the entasis of the Greek column. There are instances of this last treatment both in France and England.

But it was not only in exuberance of enrichment and quaintness of form that these enthusiastic workmen uttered their inspirations. They built their spires to a most amazing height. Indeed, the loftiest steeples in the world arose in level tracts of country, where they could be seen at immense distances, as not only in Belgium and thereabout, but on the flat margins of the upper and lower Rhine, as at Strasburg and Cologne. In these countries, and about the North of France, there was a generous rivalry as to which city should lift up highest the cross of God. But as soon as the sacred passion for spire-building was corrupted by this new element of human emulation, some strange things happened. The people of Beauvais, for instance, desiring to beat the people of Amiens, set to work, we are told, to build a tower on their cathedral as high as they possibly could. The same thing had been done once before on the plains of Shinar. One foresees the result, of course; "it fell, for it was founded upon the sand, and great was the fall thereof." And so with the good people of Louvain. They built three spires to their cathedral, of which the central one reached the unparalleled height of five hundred and thirty-three feet, according to Hope, and the side-towers four hundred and thirty feet. This tremendous group, however, fell, or, threatening destruction, was taken down, in 1604. We remember what the Wanderer said so finely in the "Excursion":—

  "We must needs confess
  That 'tis a thing impossible to frame
  Conceptions equal to the soul's desire;
  And the most difficult of tasks to keep
  Heights which the soul is competent to gain."

But we find that ecclesiastical edifices were not the only ones which were adorned with this high building; for town-halls were not infrequently distinguished by immensely lofty spires, as at Brussels. It is curious to see, however, how easily the less exalted impulses which erected them may be discovered. They do not soar, they climb up panting into the sky, like the famous passage up through Chaos, in Milton, "with difficulty and labor hard." They have not the light, airy gliding upward of the religious spire, whose feeling George Herbert had in his mind, when he sang of prayer:—

  "Of what an easy, quick accesse,
  My blessed Lord, art thou! how suddenly
  May our requests thine eare invade!"

Not so; but it is all human rivalry, a succession of diminishing towers, steps piled one above another, where the mind every now and then may stop to breathe, and then fight its way onward again;—not an Ascension, like that from Bethany; rather the toil of a very human, though very laudable ambition.

Unfinished spires were in Europe very common legacies from generation to generation. Descendants were called upon to embody the great conceptions of their forefathers. But the ancestral spirit too often failed in the land, the wing of aspiration was broken, the crane rotted in its place, the great conceptions were forgotten, or lived only as vague and dreamy inheritances; and the half-completed spires stood like Sphinxes, and none knew their riddles! They are very melancholy memorials. Like the broken columns over the graves of the departed, fallen short of their natural uses, they seem only the funeral monuments of a race that is dead. The empty air is stilled over them in expectation, and the imagination makes vain pictures, and fills out their crescent of splendid purposes. They have been called "broken promises to God." Too often, perhaps, they were rather monuments of the feebleness of those who would scale heaven with anything but adoration upon their lips. There were Ulm, indeed, and Cologne, and Mechlin, as artistic intentions, eminently grand and beautiful; and in the early part of the sixteenth century Belgium was famous for designs of open-work spires, which, if erected, would have surpassed in height and richness all hitherto existing. But it is worthy of note that at this period the purity of the Church had become so sullied with priestcraft and the plenitude of Papal power, that it no longer possessed within its violated bosom those sacred impulses of piety which whilom sent up the simple spire, like a pure messenger, to whisper the aspirations of men to the stars. "Gay religions, full of pomp and gold," could neither feel nor utter the grave tenderness of the early inspirations. And so, when the German monk affixed his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg Church, the spire had ceased to be an utterance of prayerful aspiration. It had lost its peculiar significance as an involuntary expression of worship, and had become liable to all the accidents and contingencies that attend the efforts of a merely human ambition. The whole story is an architectural version of the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican who went down to the temple to pray.

Of the finished spires, the loftiest in the world are, first, that of Strasburg Minster, 474 feet; second, that of St. Stephens at Vienna, 469 feet; third, that of Notre Dame at Antwerp, 466 feet; then that of Salisbury, 404 feet; Freiburg in the Breisgau, 380-1/2 feet; and then follow the distinguished heights of Landshut, Utrecht, Rouen, Chartres, Brugrels, Soissons, and others. The highest spire in our own country is that of Trinity Church, New York, 284 feet. We do not "sweep the cobwebs from the sky" so effectually as when men built according to the scale of spiritual exaltation rather than that of practical feet and inches,—after the stature of the soul, rather than that of the man.

The architects of the revival of classic architecture, with the learned language of the five orders, with pediments and attics, consoles and urns, labored to express the childlike sentiment of the spire. But even the great Sir Christopher Wren, with his sixty steeple-towers, and all his followers to this day, have not succeeded in a translation so unnatural. Spirituality and the artless grace of inspiration are wanting to the spires of the Renaissance, and so they struggle up painfully into the sky. And it is very rare to find those who have gone back even to Gothic models building a spire which touches our affections, or claims affinity with any of our nobler emotions; so sensitive is this unique structure to the approach of any element foreign to the early conditions of its existence.

As for the great Strasburg example, that Jungfrau of all spires, German traditions have very properly babbled many strange stories about the erection of it. These constitute an episode so characteristic in the history of spire-building, that this essay would be incomplete, were they not briefly told here.

In the legendary days of yore, nothing was more common than to meet that personage known as the Devil walking up and down the earth, in innocent guise, but ripe for all sorts of mischief, especially where the people were building up mighty monuments to the glory of the good God. Very naturally, the sacred spire was a special object of his aversion; and, for some reason or other, that of Strasburg was honored with peculiar marks of his hatred. Two ancient churches, which stood on the site of the present minster, had been successively destroyed by fire; and although, in the one case, this had been kindled by the torch of an invading army, and in the other by a thunderbolt, yet the infernal agency, in both cases, nobody ever thought of doubting. So it was the effort of Bishop Werner to combat these evil influences; and he accordingly inflamed the pride and indignation of the people to such a degree, that throughout the land all concerted to defeat the wicked designs of the Adversary. In two centuries and a half the whole cathedral was completed, save the tower, the corner-stone of which was forthwith laid with great pomp by Bishop Conrad of Lichtenberg, on the 25th of May, 1277. Doubtless the Arch-Fiend laid many cunning schemes to entrap the illustrious architect, Erwin of Steinbach; but, unlike his brother in the craft at Cologne, he came out unscathed; so we must believe that throughout the whole work he was actuated by the most unselfish spirit of devotion, infernal machinations to the contrary notwithstanding. Now it must be confessed that the Enemy had a hard time of it, since we read that the good Bishop Conrad fought against him with all the powers of the Church, and granted absolution for all sins, past, present, and future, for forty thousand years, to whatever person should contribute to the building of the spire by money, material, or labor. Owing to the scarcity of parchment, these grants of absolution were made out on asses' skins; and it will be seen, that, in the great struggle, these instruments retained in a very eminent degree that quality of stubborn resistance which had cost them in their original state many a beating from the driver's staff. The greatest enthusiasm was kindled among rich and poor; year after year, thousands of pilgrims flocked hither from all Germany to offer their aid, without reward or recompense, to the building of the tower; and out of the farthest boundaries, even from Austria, came wagons loaded with building-materials, the gratuitous offerings of the pious. Rich legacies were left to the work, and many a cloister devoted a fourth part of its yearly revenues to the same object So much for asses' skins!

Meanwhile the Devil was not idle. In the night-winds he and his legions would shriek and yell and rattle among the scaffolding and cranes in vain. In the latter part of the thirteenth century, he shook the structure with a frightful earthquake, which terrified all Alsatia, and, although whole streets were thrown down in Strasburg, yet the foundations of the Wunderbau, as the Germans love to call it, were not loosened, and no stone was moved from its place. A few years afterward, in 1289, he once more made use of his favorite element, and laid in ashes the market-place of Strasburg all around the minster. More fortunate than its great compeers, St. Paul's of London, and St. Peter's of Hamburg, it miraculously experienced but trifling damage.

Well, the great Erwin died at last, when he had built the tower as high as the roof-ridge of the nave. His son succeeded him, finished the tower to the platform, when he, too, was gathered to his fathers in 1339. John Hültz followed as master; and finally his nephew, Hültz II., in 1439, finished the grand pyramid, fixed the colossal cross in its place, and crowned the whole with a gigantic statue of the Virgin. Thus, from the laying of the foundation-stone till all was completed, were one hundred and sixty years; yet throughout this time the work was never discontinued, and five successive generations labored upon its walls.

But the wrath of the Arch-Enemy, as may well be believed, waxed greater as this prodigious structure gradually developed itself in all its lordliness and strength, and was not at all appeased at its triumphant completion. Ever since then he has visited its stately height with especial marks of his malice. The most furious tempests have raged about it, and more than sixty times has it been struck by lightning, and five times have earthquakes shaken its foundations. But in vain. "The Golden Legend" tells us how Lucifer and the Powers of the Air stormed about the spire, and how he cried,—

  "Hasten! hasten!
  O ye spirits!
  From its station drag the ponderous
  Cross of iron that to mock us
  Is uplifted high in air!"

  "Oh, we cannot!
  For around it
  All the Saints and Guardian Angels
  Throng in legions to protect it;
  They defeat us everywhere!"

At one point, however, the evil spirits were successful; the colossal statue of the Virgin, which crowned the dizzy summit, and was familiar with the secrets of the upper air, and which, like its dread Enemy,

  "above the rest,
  In shape and gesture proudly eminent,
  Stood like a tower,"—

after having for fifty years borne the insults of these airy powers, till it had lost all its original brightness, and its face

was taken down, and the present cross put in its place. And there it stands to this day, high up in the silence of midair, where the voices of the city below are rendered small and thin by the distance,—four hundred and seventy-four feet above the heads of the populace, who, in their littleness, crawl about and traffic at its base. This amazing summit, "moulded in colossal calm," in its unapproachable grandeur, seems to forget the city from which it rises, and to hold communion only with that vast circle of "crowded farms and lessening towers" which it surveys. It is a worthy companionship; on the one hand, the great Vosgian chain, the closed gates of France,—on the other, afar off, the hills of the Black Forest, and, more near, Father Rhine, winding his silver thread among the villages and vineyards of Germany.

There is (or was) an enormous key suspended just beneath the cross of Strasburg Cathedral, its use, and why it was placed there, having passed away from the memory of man. If it were not to open the gates of heaven for those who built this ladder of light and those who worship in its shadow, it remains a riddle and a blank. Let us accept the interpretation, and, made mild-eyed by the lens of tender memories, we shall behold in every spire a means of grace and a hope of glory.

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.

PRELIMINARY CORRESPONDENCE.

THE PUBLISHERS TO THE AUTHOR.

Will you contract to do us a tale or a novel, at the rate of say 10 pp. per month, with some popular subject, such as philanthropy, or the Broad Church movement, or fashionable weddings, or the John Brown invasion, brought in so as to make a taking thing of it? When finished, to come to a 12mo of 350 pp. more or less. A good article of novel is always salable about Christmas time, and we can do it up by Dec. 1, 1860. Our Mr. Goader has been round among the hands that do the light jobbing,—finds several ready to undertake the contract, at say 75c. @ 3.00 per page;—but want the job done in first-rate style, and think you could furnish us a good article. Our firm has great facilities for working a novel, tale, or any kind of fancy stuff. What w'd be y'r terms in cash payment, 1st of every month?

P.S. Would any additional compensation induce you to allow each number to be illustrated by a colored engraving?

THE AUTHOR TO THE PUBLISHERS.

GENTLEMEN,—

In reply to your polite request, I have to say, that under no circumstances can I entertain your proposition to write a fictitious narrative. I could, however, relate some very interesting events which have come to my knowledge, and which, if told in a connected form, might undoubtedly be taken by the public for a work of fiction. I think my narrative, with some collateral matter I should introduce, would take up a reasonable space in about a dozen numbers of the Oceanic Miscellany. I cannot listen to your proposal about the engraving. If you accept my offer to write out, in the form of a story, the incidents of real life to which I have referred, we will arrange the terms at a private interview. I consider the first day of a month as unobjectionable as any other in the same month, as a time for receiving payment of any sum that may be due me under the proposed contract.

CONFIDENTIAL EDITOR OF THE OCEANIC MISCELLANY TO THE AUTHOR.

MY DEAR PROF.,—

We have had lots of bob-tail stories,—docked short in from one to three months. Can't you give us a switch-tail one, that will hang on so as to touch next December? Something imaginary, based on your recollections,—the incidents of the War of 1812, for instance;—but, at any rate, a regular "to be continued" "pièce de résistance"

THE AUTHOR TO THE CONFIDENTIAL EDITOR.

MY DEAR ED.,—

I really wouldn't undertake to tell an "imaginary" story, or to write a romance, or anything of the kind. I might be willing to relate some curious matters that have come to my knowledge, arranging them in a collective form, so that they would probably pass with most readers for fictitious, and perhaps excite very much the same kind of interest they would if genuine fictions. I don't remember much about the "last war"; but I suppose both of us may recollect the illumination when peace was declared in 1815.

THE PUBLISHERS TO THE AUTHOR.

THE AUTHOR TO THE READER.

Finding myself in possession of certain facts which possess interest sufficient to warrant their publication, I am led to ask myself whether I shall put them in the form of a narrative. There are, evidently, two sides to this question. In the first place, I have a number of friends who write me letters, and tell me openly to my face, that they want me to go on writing. It doesn't make much difference to them, they say, what I write about,—only they want me to keep going. They have got used to seeing me, in one shape or another,—and I am a kind of habit with them, like a nap after dinner. They tell me not to be frightened about it,—to begin as dull as I like, and that I shall warm up, by-and-by, as old Dutchman used to, who could hardly put one leg before the other when he started, but, after a while, got so limbered and straightened out by his work, that he dropped down into the forties, and, I think they say, into the thirties. L'appétit vient en mangeant, one of them said who talks French,—which, you know, means, that eating makes one hungry. I remember, when I sat down to that last book of mine, which you may perhaps have read, although I had the facts of the story, of course, all in my head, it seemed to me that I should never have the patience to tell them all; and yet, before I was through, I got so full of the scenes and characters I was talking about, that I had to bolt my door and lay in an extra bandanna, before I could trust myself to put my recollections and thoughts on paper. You don't expect a locomotive is going to start off with a train of thirty or forty thousand passengers, without straining a little,—do you? That isn't the way; but this is. Puff! The wheels begin to turn, but very slowly. Papas hold up their little Johnnys to the car-windows to be kissed. Puff——Puff! People shake hands from the platform to the cars, walking along by their side. Puff—puff—puff! Now, then, Ma'am! pass out that tumbler pretty spry, out of which you have been swallowing that eternal "drink o' wotter," to which the human female of a certain social grade is so odiously addicted. Puff, puff, puff, puff! Too late, old gentleman I unless you can do a mile in a good deal less than three minutes, carrying weight, in the shape of a valise in one hand and a carpet-bag in the other. That's the way with anything that's got any freight to carry. It's slow when it sets out;—but steam is steam,—and what's bred in the boiler will show in the driving-wheel, sooner or later.

If I had to make up a story, now, it would be a very different matter. I could never conceive how some of those romancers go to work, in cold blood, to draw, out of what they call their imagination, a parcel of impossible events and absurd characters. That is not my trouble; for I have come into relation with a series of persons and events which will save me the pains of drawing on my invention, in case I shall see fit to follow the counsel of my too partial friends. I am only afraid I should not disguise the circumstances enough, if I were to arrange these facts in the narrative form. Some of them are of such a nature, that they cannot be supposed to have happened more than once in the experience of a generation; and I feel that the greatest caution and delicacy are necessary in the manner of their presentation, not to offend the living or wrong the memory of the dead.

It is very easy for you, the Reader, to sit down and run over the pages of a monthly narrative as a boy "skips" a stone,—and the flatter and thinner your capacity, the more skips, perhaps, you will make. But I tell you, for a man who has live people to deal with, and hearts that are beating even while he handles them,—a man who can go into families and pull up by the roots all the mysteries of their dead generations and their living sons' and daughters' secret history,—responsible for what he says, here and elsewhere,—open to a libel suit, if he isn't pretty careful in his personalities, or to a visit from a brother or other relative, wishing to know, Sir, and so forth,—or to a paragraph in the leading journal of that whispering-gallery of a nation's gossip, Little Millionville, to the effect that—We understand the personages alluded to in the tale now publishing in the Oceanic Miscellany are the Reverend Dr. S—-h and his accomplished lady, the distinguished financier, Mr. B—-n,—and so through the whole list of characters;—I say, for a man who writes the pages you skim over, it is a mighty different piece of business. Why, if I do tell all I know about some things that have come to my cognizance, I shall make you open your eyes and spread your pupils, as if you had been to the Eye Infirmary, and the doctors there had anointed your lids with the extract of belladonna. Mark what I tell you! I have happened to become intimately acquainted with circumstances of a very extraordinary nature,—not, perhaps, without precedent, but such as very few have been called upon to witness. Suppose that I should see fit to tell these in connection with the story of which they form a part? I may render myself obnoxious to persons whom it is not safe to offend,—persons that won't come out in the public prints, perhaps, but will poke incendiary letters under your doors,—that won't step up to you in broad daylight, and lug a Colt out of their pocket, or draw a bowie-knife from their back, where they had carried it under their coat, but who will dog you about to do you a mischief unseen,—who will carry air-guns in the shape of canes, and hang round the place where you get your provisions, and practise with long-range rifles out in the lonely fields,—rifles that crack no louder than a parlor-pistol, but spit a bit of lead out of their mouths half a mile and more, so that you wait as you do for the sound of the man's axe who is chopping on the other side of the river, to see the fellow you have "saved" clap his hand to his breast and stagger over. It makes me nervous to think of such things. I don't want to be suspicious of every queer taste in my coffee, and to shiver if I see a little powdered white sugar on the upper crust of my pastry. I don't want, every time I hear a door bang, to think it is a ragged slug from an unseen gun-barrel.

If Dick V—— was not killed on the Pampas, as they have always said he was, I should never sleep easy after telling my story. For such a fellow as he was would certainly see through all the disguises I could cover up a real-life story with, and then——. He has learned the use of the lasso too well for me to want to trust my neck anywhere within a rod of him, if there were light enough for him to see, and nothing between us, and nobody near.

And besides, there were a good many opinions handled by some of these people I should have to talk about. Now, of course, a magazine like the Oceanic is no place for opinions. Look out for your Mormon subscribers, if you question the propriety of Solomon's domestic arrangements! And if you say one word that touches the Sandemanians, be sure their whole press will be down on you; for, as Sandemanianism is the undoubted and absolutely true religion, it follows, of course, that it is as sore as a scalded finger, and must be handled like a broken bone.

Add to this that I have always had the greatest objection to writing anything which those who were not acquainted with the facts might call a romance or a tale. We think very ill of a man who offers us as a truth some single statement which we find he knew to be false. Now what can we think of a man who tells three volumes, or even one, full of just such lies? Of course the primâ-facie aspect of the case is, that he is guilty of the most monstrous impertinence; and, in point of fact, I confess the greatest disgust towards any person of whom I hear the assertion that he has written a story, unless I hear something more than that. He is bound to show extenuating or justifying circumstances, as much as the man who writes what he calls "poems." For, as the world is full of real histories, and every day in every great city begins and ends a score or half a dozen score of tragic dramas, it is a huge piece of assumption to undertake to make one out of one's own head. A man takes refuge under your porch in a rain-storm, and you offer him the use of your shower-bath!

Also, I cannot help remembering, that, on the whole, I have been more intensely bored with works of fiction,—beginning with "Gil Blas," and ending with—on the whole, I won't even mention it,—than I ever was by the Latin Grammar or Rollin's History. Naturally, therefore, I should not wish to threaten my friends with the punishment I have endured from others. But then, as I said before, if I write down the circumstances that have come to my knowledge, with some account of persons, opinions, and conversations, no one can accuse me of writing a novel,—a thing which I never meant to do, under any circumstances.

——After having carefully weighed my friends' arguments and my own objections, I have come to the conclusion to do pretty much as I like about it. Now the truth is, I have grown to be rather fonder of you, the Reader, than I have ever been willing to confess. You are such a good, kind creature,—it takes so little to please you,—you laugh and cry so very obligingly at just the right time,—you send me such charming notes, such dear little copies of verses,—nay, (shall I venture to say it?) such prodigal tokens of kindness, some of you, that I——in short, I love you very much, and cannot make up my mind to part with you. Rather than do this, as I could not and would not write a romance, I have made up my mind to tell you something of some persons and events of which I have known enough,—of some of them, I might say, too much. Of course, you must trust wholly to my discretion and sense of propriety, in dealing with living personages, recent events, and subjects still in dispute. Trusting that none of my friends will pay any attention to any idle rumors tending to fix the personages or localities of which I shall speak, and reminding my readers that the narrative will constitute only a part of what I have to say, inasmuch as there will be no small amount of reflections introduced, and perhaps of conversations reported, I begin this connected statement of facts with an essay on a social phenomenon not hitherto distinctly recognized.

CHAPTER I.

THE BRAHMIN CASTE OF NEW ENGLAND

There is nothing in New England corresponding at all to the feudal aristocracies of the Old World. Whether it be owing to the stock from which we were derived, or to the practical working of our institutions, or to the abrogation of the technical "law of honor," which draws a sharp line between the personally responsible class of "gentlemen" and the unnamed multitude of those who are not expected to risk their lives for an abstraction,—whatever be the cause, we have no such aristocracy here as that which grew up out of the military systems of the Middle Ages.

What our people mean by "aristocracy" is merely the richer part of the community, that live in the tallest houses, drive real carriages, (not "kerridges,") kid-glove their hands, and French-bonnet their ladies' heads, give parties where the persons who call them by the above title are not invited, and have a provokingly easy way of dressing, walking, talking, and nodding to people, as if they felt entirely at home, and would not be embarrassed in the least, if they met the Governor, or even the President of the United States, face to face. Some of these great folks are really well-bred, some of them are only purse-proud and assuming,—but they form a class, and are named as above in the common speech.

It is in the nature of large fortunes to diminish rapidly, when subdivided and distributed. A million is the unit of wealth, now and here in America. It splits into four handsome properties; each of these into four good inheritances; these, again, into scanty competences for four ancient maidens,—with whom it is best the family should die out, unless it can begin again as its grandfather did. Now a million is a kind of golden cheese, which represents in a compendious form the summer's growth of a fat meadow of craft or commerce; and as this kind of meadow rarely bears more than one crop, it is pretty certain that sons and grandsons will not get another golden cheese out of it, whether they milk the same cows or turn in new ones. In other words, the millionocracy, considered in a large way, is not at all an affair of persons and families, but a perpetual fact of money with a variable human element, which a philosopher might leave out of consideration without falling into serious error. Of course, this trivial and fugitive fact of personal wealth does not create a permanent class, unless some special means are taken to arrest the process of disintegration in the third generation. This is so rarely done, at least successfully, that one need not live a very long life to see most of the rich families he knew in childhood more or less reduced, and the millions shifted into the hands of the country-boys who were sweeping stores and carrying parcels when the now decayed gentry were driving their chariots, eating their venison over silver chafing-dishes, drinking Madeira chilled in embossed coolers, wearing their hair in powder, and casing their legs in white-topped boots with silken tassels.

There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to call it so, which has a far greater character of permanence. It has grown to be a caste,—not in any odious sense,—but, by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct organization and physiognomy, which not to recognize is mere stupidity, and not to be willing to describe would show a distrust of the good-nature and intelligence of our readers, who like to have us see all we can and tell all we see.

If you will look carefully at any class of students in one of our colleges, you will have no difficulty in selecting specimens of two different aspects of youthful manhood. Of course I shall choose extreme cases to illustrate the contrast between them. In the first, the figure is perhaps robust, but often otherwise,—inelegant, partly from careless attitudes, partly from ill-dressing,—the face is uncouth in feature, or at least common,—the mouth coarse and unformed,—the eye unsympathetic, even if bright,—the movements of the face clumsy, like those of the limbs,—the voice unmusical,—and the enunciation as if the words were coarse castings, instead of fine carvings. The youth of the other aspect is commonly slender,—his face is smooth, and apt to be pallid,—his features are regular and of a certain delicacy,—his eye is bright and quick,—his lips play over the thought he utters as a pianist's fingers dance over their music,—and his whole air, though it may be timid, and even awkward, has nothing clownish. If you are a teacher, you know what to expect from each of these young men. With equal willingness, the first will be slow at learning; the second will take to his books as a pointer or a setter to his field-work.

The first youth is the common country-boy, whose race has been bred to bodily labor. Nature has adapted the family organization to the kind of life it has lived. The hands and feet by constant use have got more than their share of development,—the organs of thought and expression less than their share. The finer instincts are latent and must be developed. A youth of this kind is raw material in its first stage of elaboration. You must not expect too much of any such. Many of them have force of will and character, and become distinguished in practical life; but very few of them ever become great scholars. A scholar is almost always the son of scholars or scholarly persons.

That is exactly what the other young man is. He comes of the Brahmin caste of New England. This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy to which I have referred, and which I am sure you will at once acknowledge. There are races of scholars among us, in which aptitude for learning, and all these marks of it I have spoken of, are congenital and hereditary. Their names are always on some college catalogue or other. They break out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up after they seem to have died out. At last some newer name takes their place, it may be,—but you inquire a little and you find it is the blood of the Edwardses or the Chauncys or the Ellerys or some of the old historic scholars, disguised under the altered name of a female descendant.

I suppose there is not an experienced instructor anywhere in our Northern States who will not recognize at once the truth of this general distinction. But the reader who has never been a teacher will very probably object, that some of our most illustrious public men have come direct from the homespun-clad class of the people,—and he may, perhaps, even find a noted scholar or two whose parents were masters of the English alphabet, but of no other.

It is not fair to pit a few chosen families against the great multitude of those who are continually working their way up into the intellectual classes. The results which are habitually reached by hereditary training are occasionally brought about without it. There are natural filters as well as artificial ones; and though the great rivers are commonly more or less turbid, if you will look long enough, you may find a spring that sparkles as no water does which drips through your apparatus of sands and sponges. So there are families which refine themselves into intellectual aptitude without having had much opportunity for intellectual acquirements. A series of felicitous crosses develops an improved strain of blood, and reaches its maximum perfection at last in the large uncombed youth who goes to college and startles the hereditary class-leaders by striding past them all. That is Nature's republicanism; thank God for it, but do not let it make you illogical. The race of the hereditary scholar has exchanged a certain portion of its animal vigor for its new instincts, and it is hard to lead men without a good deal of animal vigor. The scholar who comes by Nature's special grace from an unworn stock of broad-chested sires and deep-bosomed mothers must always overmatch an equal intelligence with a compromised and lowered vitality. A man's breathing and digestive apparatus (one is tempted to add muscular) are just as important to him on the floor of the Senate as his thinking organs. You broke down in your great speech, did you? Yes, your grandfather had an attack of dyspepsia in '82, after working too hard on his famous Election Sermon. All this does not touch the main fact: our scholars come chiefly from a privileged order, just as our best fruits come from well-known grafts,—though now and then a seedling apple, like the Northern Spy, or a seedling pear, like the Seckel, springs from a nameless ancestry and grows to be the pride of all the gardens in the land.

Let me introduce you to a young man who belongs to the Brahmin caste of
New England.

CHAPTER II.

THE STUDENT AND HIS CERTIFICATE.

Bernard C. Langdon, a young man attending Medical Lectures at the school connected with one of our principal colleges, remained after the Lecture one day and wished to speak with the Professor. He was a student of mark,—first favorite of his year, as they say of the Derby colts. There are in every class half a dozen bright faces to which the teacher naturally directs his discourse, and by the intermediation of whose attention he seems to hold that of the mass of listeners. Among these some one is pretty sure to take the lead, by virtue of a personal magnetism, or some peculiarity of expression, which places the face in quick sympathetic relations with the lecturer. This was a young man with such a face; and I found,—for you have guessed that I was the "Professor" above-mentioned,—that, when there was anything difficult to be explained, or when I was bringing out some favorite illustration of a nice point, (as, for instance, when I compared the cell-growth, by which Nature builds up a plant or an animal, to the glass-blower's similar mode of beginning,—always with a hollow sphere, or vesicle, whatever he is going to make,) I naturally looked in his face and gauged my success by its expression.

It was a handsome face,—a little too pale, perhaps, and would have borne something more of fulness without becoming heavy. I put the organization to which it belongs in Section C of Class 1 of my Anglo-American Anthropology (unpublished). The jaw in this class is but slightly narrowed,—just enough to make the width of the forehead tell more decidedly. The moustache often grows vigorously, but the whiskers are thin. The skin is like that of Jacob, rather than like Esau's. One string of the animal nature has been taken away, but this gives only a greater predominance to the intellectual chords. To see just how the vital energy has been toned down, you must contrast one of this section with a specimen of Section A of the same class,—say, for instance, one of the old-fashioned, full-whiskered, red-faced, roaring-big Commodores of the last generation, whom you remember, at least by their portraits, in ruffled shirts, looking as hearty as butchers and as plucky as bull-terriers, with their hair combed straight up from their foreheads, which were not commonly very high or broad. The special form of physical life I have been describing gives you a right to expect more delicate perceptions and a more reflective nature than you commonly find in shaggy-throated men, clad in heavy suits of muscles.

The student lingered in the lecture-room, looking all the time as if he wanted to say something in private, and waiting for two or three others, who were still hanging about, to be gone.

Something is wrong!—I said to myself, when I noticed his expression.—Well, Mr. Langdon,—I said to him, when we were alone,—can I do anything for you to-day?

You can, Sir,—he said.—I am going to leave the class, for the present, and keep school.

Why, that's a pity, and you so near graduating! You'd better stay and finish this course, and take your degree in the spring, rather than break up your whole plan of study.

I can't help myself, Sir,—the young man answered.—There's trouble at home, and they cannot keep me here as they have done. So I must look out for myself for a while. It's what I've done before, and am ready to do again. I came to ask you for a certificate of my fitness to teach a common school, or a high school, if you think I am up to that. Are you willing to give it to me?

Willing? Yes, to be sure,—but I don't want you to go. Stay; we'll make it easy for you. There's a fund will do something for you, perhaps. Then you can take both the annual prizes, if you like,—and claim them in money, if you want that more than medals.

I have thought it all over,—he answered,—and have pretty much made up my mind to go.

A perfectly gentlemanly young man, of courteous address and mild utterance, but means at least as much as he says. There are some people whose rhetoric consists of a slight habitual understatement. I often tell Mrs. Professor that one of her "I think it's sos" is worth the Bible-oath of all the rest of the household that they "know it's so." When you find a person a little better than his word, a little more liberal than his promise, a little more than borne out in his statement by his facts, a little larger in deed than in speech, you recognize a kind of eloquence in that person's utterance not laid down in Blair or Campbell.

This was a proud fellow, self-trusting, sensitive, with family-recollections that made him unwilling to accept the kind of aid which many students—would have thankfully welcomed. I knew him too well to urge him, after the few words which implied that he was determined to go. Besides, I have great confidence in young men who believe in themselves, and are accustomed to rely on their own resources from an early period. When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the World, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it come off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away timid adventurers. I have seen young men more than once, who came to a great city without a single friend, support themselves and pay for their education, lay up money in a few years, grow rich enough to travel, and establish themselves in life, without ever asking a dollar of any person which they had not earned. But these are exceptional cases. There are horse-tamers, born so, as we all know; there are woman-tamers who bewitch the sex as the pied piper bedeviled the children of Hamelin; and there are world-tamers, who can make any community, even a Yankee one, get down and let them jump on its back as easily as Mr. Rarey saddled Cruiser.

Whether Langdon was of this sort or not I could not say positively; but he had spirit, and, as I have said, a family-pride which would not let him be dependent. The New England Brahmin caste often gets blended with connections of political influence or commercial distinction. It is a charming thing for the scholar, when his fortune carries him in this way into some of the "old families" who have fine old houses, and city-lots that have risen in the market, and names written in all the stock-books of all the dividend-paying companies. His narrow study expands into a stately library, his books are counted by thousands instead of hundreds, and his favorites are dressed in gilded calf in place of plebeian sheepskin or its pauper substitutes of cloth and paper.

The Reverend Jedediah Langdon, grandfather of our young gentleman, had made an advantageous alliance of this kind. Miss Dorothea Wentworth had read one of his sermons which had been printed "by request," and became deeply interested in the young author, whom she had never seen. Out of this circumstance grew a correspondence, an interview, a declaration, a matrimonial alliance, and a family of half a dozen children. Wentworth Langdon, Esquire, was the oldest of these, and lived in the old family-mansion. Unfortunately, that principle of the diminution of estates by division, to which I have referred, rendered it somewhat difficult to maintain the establishment upon the fractional income which the proprietor received from his share of the property. Wentworth Langdon, Esq., represented a certain intermediate condition of life not at all infrequent in our old families. He was the connecting link between the generation which lived in ease, and even a kind of state, upon its own resources, and the new brood, which must live mainly by its wits or industry, and make itself rich, or shabbily subside into that lower stratum known to social geologists by a deposit of Kidderminster carpets and the peculiar aspect of the fossils constituting the family furniture and wardrobe. This slack-water period of a race, which comes before the rapid ebb of its prosperity, is familiar to all who live in cities. There are no more quiet, inoffensive people than these children of rich families, just above the necessity of active employment, yet not in a condition to place their own children advantageously, if they happen to have families. Many of them are content to live unmarried. Some mend their broken fortunes by prudent alliances, and some leave a numerous progeny to pass into the obscurity from which their ancestors emerged; so that you may see on hand-carts and cobblers' stalls names which, a few generations back, were upon parchments with broad seals, and tombstones with armorial bearings.

In a large city, this class of citizens are familiar to us in the streets. They are very courteous in their salutations; they have time enough to bow and take their hats off,—which, of course, no business-man can afford to do. Their beavers are smoothly brushed, and their boots well polished; all their appointments are tidy; they look the respectable walking gentleman to perfection. They are prone to habits,—to frequent reading-rooms, insurance-offices,—to walk the same streets at the same hours,—so that one becomes familiar with their faces and persons, as a part of the street-furniture.

There is one curious circumstance, that all city-people must have noticed, which is often illustrated in our experience of the slack-water gentry. We shall know a certain person by his looks, familiarly, for years, but never have learned his name. About this person we shall have accumulated no little circumstantial knowledge;—thus, his face, figure, gait, his mode of dressing, of saluting, perhaps even of speaking, may be familiar to us; yet who he is we know not. In another department of our consciousness, there is a very familiar name, which we have never found the person to match. We have heard it so often, that it has idealized itself, and become one of that multitude of permanent shapes which walk the chambers of the brain in velvet slippers in the company of Falstaff and Hamlet and General Washington and Mr. Pickwick. Sometimes the person dies, but the name lives on indefinitely. But now and then it happens, perhaps after years of this independent existence of the name and its shadowy image in the brain, on the one part, and the person and all its real attributes, as we see them daily, on the other, that some accident reveals their relation, and we find the name we have carried so long in our memory belongs to the person we have known so long as a fellow-citizen. Now the slack-water gentry are among the persons most likely to be the subjects of this curious divorce of title and reality,—for the reason, that, playing no important part in the community, there is nothing to tie the floating name to the actual individual, as is the case with the men who belong in any way to the public, while yet their names have a certain historical currency, and we cannot help meeting them, either in their haunts, or going to and from them.

To this class belonged Wentworth Langdon, Esq. He had been "dead-headed" into the world some fifty years ago, and had sat with his hands in his pockets staring at the show ever since. I shall not tell you, for reasons before hinted, the whole name of the place in which he lived. I will only point you in the right direction, by saying that there are three towns lying in a line with each other, as you go "down East," each of them with a Port in its name, and each of them having a peculiar interest which gives it individuality, in addition to the Oriental character they have in common. I need not tell you that these towns are Newburyport, Portsmouth, and Portland. The Oriental character they have in common consists in their large, square, palatial mansions, with sunny gardens round them. The two first have seen better days. They are in perfect harmony with the condition of weakened, but not impoverished, gentility. Each of them is a "paradise of demi-fortunes." Each of them is of that intermediate size between a village and a city which any place has outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking up and down the main street ceases to be a matter of public curiosity and private speculation, as frequently happens, during the busier months of the year, in considerable commercial centres like Salem. They both have grand old recollections to fall back upon,—times when they looked forward to commercial greatness, and when the portly gentlemen in cocked hats, who built their decaying wharves and sent out their ships all over the world, dreamed that their fast-growing port was to be the Tyre or the Carthage of the rich British Colony. Great houses, like Lord Timothy Dexter's, in Newburyport, remain as evidence of the fortunes amassed in these places of old. Other mansions—like the Rockingham House in Portsmouth (look at the white horse's tail before you mount the broad staircase) show that there was not only wealth, but style and state, in these quiet old towns during the last century. It is not with any thought of pity or depreciation that we speak of them as in a certain sense decayed towns; they did not fulfil their early promise of expansion, but they remain incomparably the most interesting places of their size in any of the three northernmost New England States. They have even now prosperity enough to keep them in good condition, and offer the most attractive residences for quiet families, which, if they had been English, would have lived in a palazzo at Genoa or Pisa, or some other Continental Newburyport or Portsmouth.

As for the last of the three Ports, or Portland, it is getting too prosperous to be as attractive as its less northerly neighbors. Meant for a fine old town, to ripen like a Cheshire cheese within its walls of ancient rind, burrowed by crooked alleys and mottled with venerable mould, it seems likely to sacrifice its mellow future to a vulgar material prosperity. Still it remains invested with many of its old charms, as yet, and will forfeit its place among this admirable trio only when it gets a hotel with unequivocal marks of having been built and organized in the present century.

——It was one of the old square palaces of the North, in which Bernard Langdon, the son of Wentworth, was born. If he had had the luck to be an only child, he might have lived as his father had done, letting his meagre competence smoulder on almost without consuming, like the fuel in an air-tight stove. But after Master Bernard came Miss Dorothea Wentworth Langdon, and then Master William Pepperell Langdon, and others, equally well named,—a string of them, looking, when they stood in a row in prayer-time, as if they would fit a set of Pandean pipes, of from three feet upward in dimensions. The door of the air-tight store has to be opened, under such circumstances, you may well suppose! So it happened that our young man had been obliged, from an early period, to do something to support himself, and found himself stopped short in his studies by the inability of the good people at home to furnish him the present means of support as a student.

You will understand now why the young man wanted me to give him a certificate of his fitness to teach, and why. I did not choose to urge him to accept the aid which a meek country-boy from a family without ante-Revolutionary recollections would have thankfully received. Go he must,—that was plain enough. He would not be content otherwise. He was not, however, to give up his studies; and as it is customary to allow half-time to students engaged in school-keeping,—that is, to count a year, so employed, if the student also keep on with his professional studies, as equal to six months of the three years he is expected to be under an instructor before applying for his degree,—he would not necessarily lose more than a few months of time. He had a small library of professional books, which he could take with him.

So he left my teaching and that of my estimable colleagues, carrying with him my certificate, that Mr. Bernard C. Langdon was a young gentleman of excellent moral character, of high intelligence and good education, and that his services would be of great value in any school, academy, or other institution, where young persons of either sex were to be instructed.

I confess, that expression, "either sex," ran a little thick, as I may say, from my pen. For, although the young man bore a very fair character, and there was no special cause for doubting his discretion, I considered him altogether too good-looking, in the first place, to be let loose in a room-full of young girls. I didn't want him to fall in love just then,—and if half a dozen girls fell in love with him, as they most assuredly would, if brought into too near relations with him, why, there was no telling what gratitude and natural sensibility might bring about.

Certificates are, for the most part, like ostrich-eggs; the giver never knows what is hatched out of them. But once in a thousand times they act as curses are said to,—come home to roost. Give them often enough, until it gets to be a mechanical business, and, some day or other, you will get caught warranting somebody's ice not to melt in any climate, or somebody's razors to be safe in the hands of the youngest children.

I had an uneasy feeling, after giving this certificate. It might be all right enough; but if it happened to end badly, I should always reproach myself. There was a chance, certainly, that it would lead him or others into danger or wretchedness. Any one who looked at this young man could not fail to see that he was capable of fascinating and being fascinated. Those large, dark eyes of his would sink into the white soul of a young girl as the black cloth sunk into the snow in Franklin's famous experiment. Or, on the other hand, if the rays of a passionate nature should ever be concentrated on them, they would be absorbed into the very depths of his nature, and then his blood would turn to flame and burn his life out of him, until his cheeks grew as white as the ashes that cover a burning coal.

I wish I had not said either sex in my certificate. An academy for young gentlemen, now; that sounds cool and unimaginative. A boys' school; that would be a very good place for him;—some of them are pretty rough, but there is nerve enough in that old Wentworth blood; he can give any country fellow, of the common stock, twenty pounds, and hit him out of time in ten minutes. But to send such a young fellow as that out a girl's-nesting! to give this falcon a free pass into all the dove-cotes! I was a fool,—that's all.

I brooded over the mischief which might come out of these two words until it seemed to me that they were charged with destiny. I could hardly sleep for thinking what a train I might have been laying, which might take a spark any day, and blow up nobody knows whose peace or prospects. What I dreaded most was one of those miserable matrimonial misalliances where a young fellow who does not know himself as yet flings his magnificent future into the checked apron-lap of some fresh-faced, half-bred country-girl, no more fit to be mated with him than her father's horse to go in double harness with Flora Temple. To think of the eagle's wings being clipped so that he shall not ever lift himself over the farm-yard fence! Such things happen, and always must,—because, as one of us said awhile ago, a man always loves a woman, and a woman a man, unless some good reason exists to the contrary. You think yourself a very fastidious young man, my friend; but there are probably at least five thousand young women in these United States, any one of whom you would certainly marry, if you were thrown much into her company, and nobody more attractive were near, and she had no objection. And you, my dear young lady, justly pride yourself on your discerning delicacy; but if I should say that there are twenty thousand young men, any one of whom, if he offered his hand and heart under favorable circumstances, you would

I should be much more imprudent than I mean to be, and you would, no doubt, throw down a story in which I hope to interest you.

I had settled it in my mind that this young fellow had a career marked out for him. He should begin in the natural way, by taking care of poor patients in one of the public charities, and work his way up to a better kind of practice,—better, that is, in the vulgar, worldly sense. The great and good Boerhaave used to say, as I remember very well, that the poor were his best patients; for God was their paymaster. But everybody is not as patient as Boerhaave, nor as deserving; so that the rich, though not, perhaps, the best patients, are good enough for common practitioners. I suppose Boerhaave put up with them when he could not get poor ones, as he left his daughter two millions of florins when he died.

Now if this young man once got into the wide streets, he would sweep them clear of his rivals of the same standing; and as I was getting indifferent to business, and old Dr. Kilham was growing careless, and had once or twice prescribed morphine when he meant quinine, there would soon he an opening into the Doctors' Paradise,—the streets with only one side to them. Then I would have him strike a bold stroke,—set up a nice little coach, and be driven round like a London first-class doctor, instead of coasting about in a shabby one-horse concern and casting anchor opposite his patients' doors like a Cape-Ann fishing-smack. By the time he was thirty, he would have knocked the social pawns out of his way, and be ready to challenge a wife from the row of great pieces in the background. I would not have a man marry above his level, so as to become the appendage of a powerful family-connection; but I would not have him marry until he knew his level,—that is, again, looking at the matter in a purely worldly point of view, and not taking the sentiments at all into consideration. But remember, that a young man, using large endowments wisely and fortunately, may put himself on a level with the highest in the land in ten brilliant years of spirited, unflagging labor. And even to stand at the very top of your calling in a great city is something,—that is, if you like money and influence, and a seat on the platform at public lectures, and gratuitous tickets to all sorts of places where you don't want to go, and, what is a good deal better than any of these things, a sense of power, limited, it may be, but absolute in its range, so that all the Caesars and Napoleons would have to stand aside, if they came between you and the exercise of your special vocation.

That is what I thought this young fellow might have come to; and now I have let him go off into the country with my certificate, that he is fit to teach in a school for either sex! Ten to one he will run like a moth into a candle, right into one of those girls'-nests, and get tangled up in some sentimental folly or other, and there will be the end of him. Oh, yes! country doctor,—half a dollar a visit,—ride, ride, ride all day,—get up at night and harness your own horse,—ride again ten miles in a snow-storm,—shake powders out of two phials, (pulv. glycyrrhiz., pulv. gum. acac. aa: partes equates,)—ride back again, if you don't happen to get stuck in a drift,—no home, no peace, no continuous meals, no unbroken sleep, no Sunday, no holiday, no social intercourse, but one eternal jog, jog, jog, in a sulky, until you feel like the mummy of an Indian who had been buried in the sitting posture, and was dug up a hundred years afterwards! "Why didn't I warn him about love and all that nonsense?" Why didn't I tell him he had nothing to do with it, yet awhile? Why didn't I hold up to him those awful examples I could have cited, where poor young fellows that could just keep themselves afloat have hung a matrimonial millstone round their necks, taking it for a life-preserver?

ANDENKEN.

  Through the silent streets of the city,
  In the night's unbusy noon,
  Up and down in the pallor
  Of the languid summer moon,

  I wander and think of the village,
  And the house in the maple-gloom,
  And the porch with the honeysuckles
  And the sweet-brier all abloom.

  My soul is sick with the fragrance
  Of the dewy sweet-brier's breath:
  Oh, darling! the house is empty,
  And lonesomer than death!

  If I call, no one will answer;
  If I knock, no one will come;—
  The feet are at rest forever,
  And the lips are cold and dumb.

  The summer moon is shining
  So wan and large and still,
  And the weary dead are sleeping
  In the graveyard under the hill.

II.

  We looked at the wide, white circle
  Around the autumn moon,
  And talked of the change of weather,—
  It would rain, to-morrow, or soon.

  And the rain came on the morrow,
  And beat the dying leaves
  From the shuddering boughs of the maples
  Into the flooded eaves.

  The clouds wept out their sorrow;
  But in my heart the tears
  Are bitter for want of weeping,
  In all these autumn years.

III.

  It is sweet to lie awake musing
  On all she has said and done,
  To dwell on the words she uttered,
  To feast on the smiles I won,

  To think with what passion at parting
  She gave me my kisses again,—
  Dear adieux, and tears and caresses,—
  Oh, love! was it joy or pain?

  To brood, with a foolish rapture,
  On the thought that it must be
  My darling this moment is waking
  With tenderest thoughts of me!

  O sleep I are thy dreams any sweeter?
  I linger before thy gate:
  We must enter at it together,
  And my love is loath and late.

IV.

  The bobolink sings in the meadow,
  The wren in the cherry-tree:
  Come hither, thou little maiden,
  And sit upon my knee;

  And I will tell thee a story
  I read in a book of rhyme;—
  I will but feign that it happened
  To me, one summer-time,

  When we walked through the meadow,
  And she and I were young;—
  The story is old and weary
  With being said and sung.

  The story is old and weary;—
  Ah, child! is it known to thee?
  Who was it that last night kissed thee
  Under the cherry-tree?

  Like a bird of evil presage,
  To the lonely house on the shore
  Came the wind with a tale of shipwreck,
  And shrieked at the bolted door,

  And flapped its wings in the gables,
  And shouted the well-known names,
  And buffeted the windows
  Afeard in their shuddering frames.

  It was night, and it is daytime,—
  The morning sun is bland,
  The white-cap waves come rocking, rocking,
  In to the smiling land.

  The white-cap waves come rocking, rocking,
  In the sun so soft and bright,
  And toss and play with the dead man
  Drowned in the storm last night.

VI.

  I remember the burning brushwood,
  Glimmering all day long
  Yellow and weak in the sunlight,
  Now leaped up red and strong,

  And fired the old dead chestnut,
  That all our years had stood,
  Gaunt and gray and ghostly,
  Apart from the sombre wood;

  And, flushed with sudden summer,
  The leafless boughs on high
  Blossomed in dreadful beauty
  Against the darkened sky.

  We children sat telling stories,
  And boasting what we should be,
  When we were men like our fathers,
  And watched the blazing tree,

  That showered its fiery blossoms,
  Like a rain of stars, we said,
  Of crimson and azure and purple.
  That night, when I lay in bed,

  I could not sleep for seeing,
  Whenever I closed my eyes,
  The tree in its dazzling splendor
  Against the darkened skies.

  I cannot sleep for seeing,
  With closed eyes to-night,
  The tree in its dazzling splendor
  Dropping its blossoms bright;

  And old, old dreams of childhood
  Come thronging my weary brain.
  Dear foolish beliefs and longings;—
  I doubt, are they real again?

  It is nothing, and nothing, and nothing,
  That I either think or see;—
  The phantoms of dead illusions
  To-night are haunting me.

CENTRAL BRITISH AMERICA.

Even before the announcement of the discovery of gold upon the Frazer River and its tributaries, the people of Canada West had induced the Parliament of England to institute the inquiry, whether the region of British America, extending from Lakes Superior and Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains, is not adapted by fertility of soil, a favorable climate, and natural advantages of internal communication, for the support of a prosperous colony of England.

The Parliamentary investigation had a wider scope. The select committee of the House of Commons was appointed "to consider the state of those British possessions in North America which are under the administration of the Hudson Bay Company, or over which they possess a license to trade"; and therefore witnesses were called to the organization and management of the Company itself, as well as the natural features of the country under its administration.

On the 31st of July, 1857, the committee reported a large body of testimony, but without any decisive recommendations. They "apprehend that the districts on the Red River and the Saskatchewan are among those most likely to be desired for early occupation," and "trust that there will be no difficulty in effecting arrangements between her Majesty's government and the Hudson Bay Company, by which those districts may be ceded to Canada on equitable principles, and within the districts thus annexed to her the authority of the Hudson Bay Company would of course entirely cease." They deemed it "proper to terminate the connection of the Hudson Bay Company with Vancouver Island as soon as it could conveniently be done, as the best means of favoring the development of the great natural advantages of that important colony; and that means should also be provided for the ultimate extension of the colony over any portion of the adjacent continent, to the west of the Rocky Mountains, on which permanent settlement may be found practicable."

These suggestions indicate a conviction that the zone of the North American continent between latitudes 49° and 55°, embracing the Red River and the Saskatchewan districts, east of the Rocky Mountains, and the area on their western slope, since organized as British Columbia, was, in the judgment of the committee, suitable for permanent settlement. As to the territory north of the parallel of 55°, an opinion was intimated, that the organization of the Hudson's Bay Company was best adapted to the condition of the country and its inhabitants.

Within a year after the publication of this report, a great change passed over the North Pacific coast. The gold discovery on Frazer's River occurred; the Pacific populations flamed with excitement; British Columbia was promptly organized as a colony of England; and, amid the acclamations of Parliament and people, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton proclaimed, in the name of the government, the policy of continuous colonies from Lake Superior to the Pacific, and a highway across British America, as the most direct route from London to Pekin or Jeddo.

The eastern boundary of British Columbia was fixed upon the Rocky Mountains. The question recurred, with great force, What shall be the destiny of the fertile plains of the Saskatchewan and the Red River of the North? Canada pushed forward an exploration of the route from Fort William, on Lake Superior, to Fort Garry, on the Red River, and, under the direction of S.J. Dawson, Esq., civil engineer, and Professor J.Y. Hinde, gave to the world an impartial and impressive summary of the great natural resources of the basin of Lake Winnipeg. The merchants of New York were prompt to perceive the advantages of connecting the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes—with the navigable channels of Northwest America, now become prominent and familiar designations of commercial geography. A report to the New York Chamber of Commerce very distinctly corrected the erroneous impression, that the valleys of the Mississippi and St. Lawrence rivers exhausted the northern and central areas which are available for agriculture. "There is in the heart of North America," said the report, "a distinct subdivision, of which Lake Winnipeg may be regarded as the centre. This subdivision, like the valley of the Mississippi, is distinguished for the fertility of its soil, and for the extent and gentle slope of its great plains, watered by rivers of great length, and admirably adapted for steam-navigation. It has a climate not exceeding in severity that of many portions of Canada and the Eastern States. It will, in all respects, compare favorably with some of the most densely peopled portions of the continent of Europe. In other words, it is admirably fitted to become the seat of a numerous, hardy, and prosperous community. It has an area equal to eight or ten first-class American States. Its great river, the Saskatchewan, carries a navigable water-line to the very base of the Rocky Mountains. It is not at all improbable that the valley of this river may yet offer the best route for a railroad to the Pacific. The navigable waters of this great subdivision interlock with those of the Mississippi. The Red River of the North, in connection with Lake Winnipeg, into which it falls, forms a navigable water-line, extending directly north and south nearly eight hundred miles. The Red River is one of the best adapted to the use of steam in the world, and waters one of the finest prairie regions on the continent. Between the highest point at which it is navigable, and St. Paul, on the Mississippi, a railroad is in process of construction; and when this road is completed, another grand division of the continent, comprising half a million square miles, will be open to settlement."

The sanguine temper of these remarks illustrates the rapid progress of public sentiment since the date of the Parliamentary inquiry, only eighteen months before. Of the same tenor, though fuller in details, were the publications on the subject in Canada and even in England. The year 1859 opened with greatly augmented interest in the district of Central British America. The manifestation of this interest varied with localities and circumstances.

In Canada, no opportunity was omitted, either in Parliament or by the press, to demonstrate the importance to the Atlantic and Lake Provinces of extending settlements into the prairies of Assinniboin and Saskatchewan,—thereby affording advantages to Provincial commerce and manufactures like those which the communities of the Mississippi valley have conferred upon the older American States. Nevertheless, the Canadian government declined to institute proceedings before the English Court of Chancery or Queen's Bench, to determine the validity of the charter of the Hudson's Bay Company,—assigning, as reasons for not acceding to such a suggestion by the law-officers of the crown, that the proposed litigation might be greatly protracted, while the public interests involved were urgent,—and that the duty of a prompt and definite adjustment of the condition and relations of the Red River and Saskatchewan districts was manifestly incumbent upon the Imperial authority.

This decision, added to the indisposition of Lower Canada to the policy of westward expansion, is understood to have convinced Sir E.B. Lytton that annexation of the Winnipeg basin to Canada was impracticable, and that the exclusive occupation by the Hudson's Bay Company could be removed only by the organization of a separate colony. The founder of British Columbia devoted the latter portion of his administration of the Colonial Office to measures for the satisfactory arrangement of conflicting interests in British America. In October, 1858, he proposed to the directors of the Hudson's Bay Company that they should be consenting parties to a reference of questions respecting the validity and extent of their charter, and respecting the geographical extent of their territory, to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The Company "reasserted their right to the privileges granted to them by their charter of incorporation," and refused to be a consenting party to any proceeding which might call in question their chartered rights.

Under date of November 3, 1858, Lord Caernarvon, Secretary of State for the Colonies, by the direction of Sir E.B. Lytton, returned a dispatch, the tenor of which is a key not only to Sir Edward's line of policy, but, in all probability, to that of his successor, the Duke of Newcastle. Lord Caernarvon began by expressing the disappointment and regret with which Sir E.B. Lytton had received the communication, containing, if he understood its tenor correctly, a distinct refusal on the part of the Hudson's Bay Company to entertain any proposal with a view of adjusting the conflicting claims of Great Britain, of Canada, and of the Company, or to join with her Majesty's government in affording reasonable facilities for the settlement of the questions in which Imperial no less than Colonial interests were involved. It had been his anxious desire to come to some equitable and conciliatory agreement, by which all legitimate claims of the Company should be fairly considered with reference to the territories or the privileges they might be required to surrender. He suggested that such a procedure, while advantageous to the interests of all parties, might prove particularly for the interest of the Hudson's Bay Company. "It would afford a tribunal preeminently fitted for the dispassionate consideration of the questions at issue; it would secure a decision which would probably be rather of the nature of an arbitration than of a judgment; and it would furnish a basis of negotiation on which reciprocal concession and the claims for compensation could be most successfully discussed."

With such persuasive reiteration, Lord Caernarvon, in the name and at the instance of Sir E.B. Lytton, insisted that the wisest and most dignified course would be found in an appeal to and a decision by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, with the concurrence alike of Canada and the Hudson's Bay Company. In conclusion, the Company were once more assured, that, if they would meet Sir E.B. Lytton in finding the solution of a recognized difficulty, and would undertake to give all reasonable facilities for trying the validity of their disputed charter, they might be assured that they would meet with fair and liberal treatment, so far as her Majesty's government was concerned; but if, on the other hand, the Company persisted in declining these terms, and could suggest no other practicable mode of agreement, Sir E.B. Lytton held himself acquitted of further responsibility to the interests of the Company, and proposed to take the necessary steps for closing a controversy too long open, and for securing a definitive decision, due alike to the material development of British North America and to the requirements of an advancing civilization.

The communication of Lord Caernarvon stated in addition, that, in the case last supposed, the renewal of the exclusive license to trade in any part of the Indian territory—a renewal which could be justified to Parliament only as part of a general agreement adjusted on the principles of mutual concession—would become impossible.

These representations failed to influence the Company. The Deputy-Governor, Mr. H.H. Barens, responded, that, as, in 1850, the Company had assented to an inquiry before the Privy Council into the legality of certain powers claimed and exercised by them under their charter, but not questioning the validity of the charter itself, so, at this time, if the reference to the Privy Council were restricted to the question of the geographical extent of the territory claimed by the Company, in accordance with a proposition made in July, 1857, by Mr. Labouchere, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, the directors would recommend to their shareholders to concur in the course suggested; but must decline to do so, if the inquiry involved not merely the question of the geographical boundary of the territories claimed by them, but a challenge of the validity of the charter itself, and, as a consequence, of the rights and privileges which it professed to grant, and which the Company had exercised for a period of nearly two hundred years. Mr. Barens professed that the Company had at all times been willing to entertain any proposal that might be made to them for the surrender of any of their rights or of any portion of their territory; but he regarded it as one thing to consent for a consideration to be agreed upon to the surrender of admitted rights, and quite another to volunteer a consent to an inquiry which should call those rights in question.

A result of this correspondence has been the definite refusal of the Crown to renew the exclusive license to trade in Indian territory. The license had been twice granted to the Company, under an act of Parliament authorizing it, for periods of twenty-one years,—once in 1821, and again in 1838. It expired on the 30th of May, 1859. In consequence of this refusal, the Company must depend exclusively upon the terms of their charter for their special privileges in British America. The charter dates from 1670,—a grant by Charles II. to Prince Rupert and his associates, "adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay,"—and is claimed to give the right of exclusive trade and of territorial dominion to Hudson's Bay and tributary rivers. By the expiration of the exclusive license of Indian trade, and the termination in 1859 of the lease of Vancouver's Island from the British government, the sway and influence of the Company are greatly restricted, and the feasibility of some permanent adjustment is proportionately increased.

There is no necessity for repeating here the voluminous argument for and against the charter of the Hudson's Bay Company. The interest of British colonization in Northwest America far transcends any technical inquiry of the kind, and the Canadian statesmen are wise in declining to relieve the English cabinet from the obligation to act definitely and speedily upon the subject. The organization of the East India Company was no obstacle to a measure demanded by the honor of England and the welfare of India; and certainly the parchment of the Second Charles will not deter any deliberate expression by Parliament in regard to the colonization of Central British America. Indeed, the managers of the Hudson's Bay Company are always careful to recognize the probability of a compromise with the government. The late letter of Mr. Barens to Lord Caernarvon expressed a willingness, at any time, to entertain proposals for the surrender of franchises or territory; and in 1848, Sir J.H. Pelly, Governor of the Company, thus expressed himself in a letter to Lord Grey:—"As far as I am concerned, (and I think the Company will concur, if any great national benefit would be expected from it,) I would be willing to relinquish the whole of the territory held under the charter on similar terms to those which it is proposed the East India Company shall receive on the expiration of their charter,—namely, securing the proprietors an interest on their capital of ten per cent."

At the adjournment of the Canadian Parliament and the retirement of the
Derby Ministry, in the early part of 1859, the position and prospects of
English colonization in Northwest America were as follows:—

1. Vancouver's Island and British Columbia had passed from the occupation of the Hudson's Bay Company into an efficient colonial organization. The gold-fields of the interior had been ascertained to equal in productiveness, and greatly to exceed in extent, those of California. The prospect for agriculture was no less favorable,—while the commercial importance of Vancouver and the harbors of Puget's Sound is unquestionable.

2. The eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and the valleys of the Saskatchewan and Red River were shown by explorations, conducted under the auspices of the London Geographical Society and the Canadian authorities, to be a district of nearly four hundred thousand square miles, in which a fertile soil, favorable climate, useful and precious minerals, fur-bearing and food-yielding animals, in a word, the most lavish gifts of Nature, constituted highly satisfactory conditions for the organization and settlement of a prosperous community.

3. In regard to the Hudson's Bay Company, a disposition prevailed not to disturb its charter, on condition that its directory made no attempts to enforce an exclusive trade or to interfere with the progress of settlements. All parties anticipated Parliamentary action. Letters from London spoke with confidence of a bill, drafted and in circulation among members of Parliament, for the erection of a colony between Lakes Superior and Winnipeg and the eastern limits of British Columbia, with a northern boundary resting on the parallel of 55°; and which, although postponed by a change of ministry, was understood to represent the views of the Duke of Newcastle, the successor of Sir E.B. Lytton.

4. In Canada West, a system of communication from Fort William to Fort Garry, and thence to the Pacific, was intrusted to a company—the "Northwest Transit"—which was by no means inactive. A mail to Red River, over the same route, was also sustained from the Canadian treasury; and Parliament, among the acts of its previous session, had conceded a charter for a line of telegraph through the valleys of the Saskatchewan, with a view to an extension to the Pacific coast, and even to Asiatic Russia.

Simultaneously with these movements in England and Canada, the citizens of the State of Minnesota, after a winter of active discussion, announced a determination to introduce steam-navigation on the Red River of the North. Parties were induced to transport the machinery and cabins, with timber for the hull of a steamer, from the Upper Mississippi, near Crow Wing, to the mouth of the Cheyenne, on the Red River, where the boat was reconstructed. The first voyage of the steamer was from Fort Abercrombie, an American post two hundred miles northwest of Saint Paul, down north to Fort Garry, during the month of June. The reception of the stranger was attended by extraordinary demonstrations of enthusiasm at Selkirk. The bells of Saint Boniface rang greeting, and Fort Garry blasted powder, as if the Governor of the Company were approaching its portal. This unique, but interesting community, fully appreciated the fact that steam had brought their interests within the circle of the world's activities.

This incident was the legitimate sequel to events in Minnesota which had transpired during a period of ten years. Organized as a Territory in 1849, a single decade had brought the population, the resources, and the public recognition of an American State. A railroad system, connecting the lines of the Lake States and Provinces at La Crosse with the international frontier on the Red River at Pembina, was not only projected, but had secured in aid of its construction a grant by the Congress of the United States of three thousand eight hundred and forty acres a mile, and a loan of State credit to the amount of twenty thousand dollars a mile, not exceeding an aggregate of five million dollars. Different sections of this important extension of the Canadian and American railways were under contract and in process of construction. In addition, the land-surveys of the Federal government had reached the navigable channel of the Red River; and the line of frontier settlement, attended by a weekly mail, had advanced to the same point. Thus the government of the United States, no less than the people and authorities of Minnesota, were represented in this Northwest movement.

Still, its consummation rests with the people and Parliament of England. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton was prepared with a response to his own memorable query,—"What will he do with it?" Shall the Liberal party be less prompt and resolute in advancing the policy, announced from the throne in 1858, of an uninterrupted series of British colonies across the continent of North America? This will be determined by the Parliamentary record of 1860.

ART.

PALMER'S "WHITE CAPTIVE."

Once on a time a maiden dwelt with her father,—they two, and no more,—in a rude log-cabin on the skirts of a grand old Western forest,—majestic mountains behind them, and the broad, free prairie in front.

Cut off from all Christian companionship and the informing influences of civilized arts, all their news was of red men and of game, their entertainments the ever-varying moods of Nature, their labors of the rudest, their dangers familiar, their solacements simple and solitary. Alone the sturdy hunter beat the woods all day, on the track of panthers, bears, and deer; alone, all day, his pretty daughter kept the house against perils without and despondency within,—the gun and the broom alike familiar to her hand.

Commissioned to illumine the murk wilderness around her with the glow of her Christian loveliness and faith, Nature had touched her with inspirations of refinement, with a culture as unconscious as the growing of the grass, and the clear intuitions of a spiritual life full of heaven-born inclinations. Nature, too, had endowed her with fine lines of beauty, attitudes of grace, movements of dignity and love, and all the charmfulness that had learned its shapes from flowers and its arts from birds. Nature's officers, the elements, had bestowed on her each his appropriate gift,—the Air its crispness, the Earth its variety, the Sun its brightness and its ruddy glow, the very Water from the well its freshness and its fluent forms; the stars repeated their friendliness in her eyes, the grass dimpled her pliant feet, the breeze tossed her brown hair in triumphs of the unstudied becoming, and from the wildness all about her she had her wit and her delightful ways; Morning lent her her cheerfulness, Evening her pensiveness, and Night her soul.

But Night, that had given her the Christian soul, true and wise, self-reliant and aspiring, brought also the surprise and the peril that should put it to the proof; for once, when the hunter was belated on his path, and sudden midnight had caught him beyond the mountain, far from the rest of his hearth and the song of his darling, came the red Pawnees, a treacherous crew,—doubly godless because ungrateful, who had broken the hunter's bread and slept on the hunter's blanket,—and laid waste his hearth, and stole away his very heart. For they dragged her many a fearful mile of darkness and distraction, through the black woods, and grim recesses of the rocks; and there they stripped her naked, and bound her to a stake, as the day was breaking. But the Christian heart was within her, and the Christian soul upheld her, and the Christian's God was by her side; and so she stood, and waited, and was brave.

And here still she stands, as the sculptor's soul sat down before her, in a vision of faith and tenderness, to receive her image,—stands and waits for the pity and the help of you and me, her brothers and her lovers. We long to rescue her and take her to our hearts; we are touched by her predicament, as Michelet tells us the heart of the beholder is moved by the bound Andromeda of Puget,—that great artist in whom dwelt the suffering soul of a depraved age, and who all his life long sculptured forlorn captives,—"Ah, would I had been there to rescue the darling!"

But we are told of the Andromeda, that, unconscious and almost dead, she knows not where she is, nor who has come to set her free; for, paralyzed by the chafing of her chains, and even more by fear, she cannot stand, and seems utterly exhausted.

Not so with our Andromeda. Horror possesses her, but indignation also; she is terrified, but brave; she shrinks, but she repels; and while all her beautiful body trembles and retreats, her countenance confronts her captors, and her steady gaze forbids them. "Touch me not!" she says, with every shuddering limb and every tensely-braced muscle, with lineaments all eloquent with imperious disgust,—"Touch me not!"

Her lips quiver, and tears are in her eyes, (we do not forget that it is of marble we are speaking,—there are tears in her eyes,) but they only linger there; she is not weeping now; her chin trembles, and one of her hands is convulsively clenched,—but it is with the anguish of her sore besetting, not the spasm of mortal fear. Though Heaven and Earth, indeed, might join to help her, we yet know that the soul of the maiden will help itself,—that her hope clings fast, and her courage is undaunted, and her faith complete.

Among her thronged emotions we look in vain for shame. Her nakedness is a coarse chance of her overwhelming situation, for which she is no more concerned than for her galled wrists or her dishevelled hair. What is it to such a queen as she, that the eyes of grinning brutes are blessed by her perfect beauties?

The qualities which constitute true greatness in a statue such as this are, if we apprehend them aright,—first, that sublime simplicity of Idea which omnipotently sways the beholder, and alike inspires his coarseness or his culture; next, that personality, that moving humanness of feeling, which holds him by his very heart-strings, and makes him forget its marble, to accept its flesh and blood; and, finally, that wondrous skill of nice manipulation, which, neglecting nothing in the myriad of anatomical and physiological details,—not even the faintest sigh or the dimmest tremor,—tells, fibre by fibre, a tale that all may read, and comes to us with a story "to hold children from play and old men from the chimney-corner."

Tried by this definition, we believe the "White Captive" proves its claim to genuine greatness, and that it will presently take its place, with the world's consent, in the front rank of modern statues,—good among the best, in the flesh-and-bloodness and the soul of it. It is original, it is faithful, it is American; our women may look upon it, and say, "She is one of us," with more satisfaction than the Greek women could have derived from the Venus de' Medici, with its insignificant head and its impossible spine.

Especially true to the American type, as compared in statues with the familiar Greek, the head of the "White Captive" is large; but that it is too large, or in excess of the least of a thousand female heads that have been gathered around it since it was first exposed to the public scrutiny, we have failed to discover in repeated and careful examinations; and we are constrained to commend such as may be exercised on that point to the critical flippancies of the jaunty gentlemen who find the hips at once too broad and too narrow, the bosom too full and too young, the arms too meagre and too stout.

FOREST PHOTOGRAPHS.

We call the attention of our readers to a series of twelve photographic views of forest and lake scenery published by Mr. J.W. Black, Boston, from negatives taken by Mr. Stillman in the Adirondack country. The points of view are chosen with the fine feeling of an artist, and the tangled profusion and grace of the forest, with the moment's whim of sunfleck and shadow, are given with exquisite delicacy. Whatever the all-beholding sun could see in those woodland depths we have here,—sketches of the shaggy Pan snatched at unawares in sleep. One may study these pictures till he becomes as familiar as a squirrel with fern and tree-bark and moose-wood and lichen, till he knows every trunk and twig and leaf as intimately as a sunbeam.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Plutarch's Lives. The Translation called Dryden's. Corrected from the
Greek, and Revised, by A.H. CLOUGH, sometime Fellow and Tutor of
Oriel College, Oxford, and late Professor of the English Language and
Literature at University College, London. Boston: Little, Brown, &
Company. 1859. Five vols. 8vo.

In these five handsome volumes, we have, at length, a really good edition in English of Plutarch's Lives. One of the most delightful books in the world, one of the few universal classics, appears for the first time in our language in a translation worthy of its merits.

Mr. Clough, whose name is well known, not only by scholars, but also by the lovers of poetry, has performed the work of editor with admirable diligence, fidelity, and taste. The labor of revision has been neither slight nor easy. It has, indeed, amounted to not much less than would have been required for the making of a new translation. The versions in the translation that bears Dryden's name, made, as they were, by various hands, and apparently not submitted to the revision of any competent scholar, were unequal in execution, and were disfigured by many mistakes, as well as by much that was slovenly in style. At the time they were made, scholarship in England was not at a high point. Bentley had not yet lifted it out of mediocrity, and the translators were not stimulated by the fear either of severe criticism or of comparison of their labors with any superior work. The numerous defects of this translation are spoken of by the Langhornes, in the Preface to their own, with a somewhat jealous severity, which gives unusual vigor to their sentences. "The diversities of style," say they, "were not the greatest fault of this strange translation. It was full of the grossest errors. Ignorance on the one hand, and hastiness or negligence on the other, had filled it with absurdities in every Life, and inaccuracies on almost every page." This is a hard, perhaps an extreme judgment; but it serves to show the difficulties that would attend a revision of such a work. These difficulties Mr. Clough has fairly met and overcome. We do not mean to say that he has reduced the whole book to a perfect uniformity, or even to entire elegance and exactness of style; but he has corrected inaccuracies, he has removed the chief marks of negligence or haste; and, after a careful comparison of a considerable portion of the work as it now appears with the Greek text, we have no hesitation in saying that this translation answers not merely to the demands of modern scholarship, but forms a book at once essentially accurate and delightful for common reading.[A] We think, moreover, that Mr. Clough was right in choosing the so-called Dryden's translation as the basis of his work. Its style is not old enough to have become antiquated, while yet it possesses much of the savor and raciness of age. The book is interesting from Dryden's connection with it, but still more so—considering how slight that connection was, his only contribution to it being the Life of Plutarch—from the fact, that the translations of some of the Lives were made by famous men, as that of Alcibiades by Lord Chancellor Somers, and that of Alexander by the excellent John Evelyn; while others were made by men who, if not famous, are at least well remembered by the lovers of the literature of the time,—as that of Numa by Sir Paul Rycaut, the Turkey merchant, and the continuer of Dr. Johnson's favorite history of the Turks,—that of Otho by Pope's friend, the medical poet, Dr. Garth,—that of Solon by Creech, the translator of Lucretius,—that of Lysander by the Honorable Charles Boyle, whose name is preserved in the alcohol of Bentley's classical satire,—and that of Themistocles by Edward, the son of Sir Thomas Browne.

[Footnote A: For the sake of illustration of the care and labor given by Mr. Clough to the revision, we open at random on the Life of Dion, Vol. V., p. 291, and, comparing it with the original Dryden, we find, that in ten pages, to the end of the Life, there are but three, and they short sentences, in which changes of more or less consequence have not been made. These changes amount sometimes to entire new translation, sometimes consist merely in the correction of a few words. Throughout, the hand of the thorough scholar is apparent. The earlier volumes of the series would, probably, rarely exhibit such considerable alterations.]

But Mr. Clough's labors have not been merely those of reviser and corrector. He has added greatly to the value of the work by occasional concise foot-notes, as well as by notes contained in an appendix to each volume. So excellent, indeed, are these notes, so full of learning and information, conveyed in an agreeable way, that we cannot but feel a regret (not often excited by commentators) that their number is not greater. In addition to these, the fifth volume contains a very carefully prepared and full Index of Proper Names, which is followed by a list for reference as to their pronunciation.

When this version, to which Dryden gave his name, was made, there was no other in English but that of Sir Thomas North, which had been made, not from the Greek, but from the French of Amyot, and was first published in 1579. It was a good work for its time, and worthy of being dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, although, as the knight declares, "she could better understand it in Greek than any man can make it English." Its style is rather robust than elegant, partaking of the manly vigor of the language of its time, and now and then exhibiting something of that charm of quaint simplicity which belongs to its original, Montaigne's favorite Amyot. "Of all our French writers," says the incomparable essayist, "I give, with justice, I think, the palm to Jacques Amyot";[B] and thereupon he goes on to praise the purity of his style, as well as the depth of his learning and judgment. But, although Amyot had "a true imagination" of his author, he was not always exact in giving his meaning. The learned Dr. Guy Patin says: "On dit que M. de Meziriac avoit corrigé dans son Amyot huit mille fautes, et qu'Amyot n'avoit pas de bons exemplaires, ou qu'il n'avoit pas bien entendu le Grec de Plutarque."[C]

Amyot's eight thousand errors were not diminished in passing into Sir Thomas North's English; but their number mattered little to the readers of those days, who found in the thick folio enough of interest to spare them from making inquiry as to the exactness of its rendering of the meaning of Plutarch. From the time of its first publication, for more than a hundred years, it was one of the most popular books of the period, as was proved by the appearance of six successive editions in folio.[D] Some of these clumsy volumes may, no doubt, have been put to uses as ignoble as that which Chrysale, in "Les Femmes Savantes," suggests for his sister's similar copy of Amyot:—

  "Vos livres éternels ne me contentent pas;
  Et, hors un gros Plutarque à mettre mes rabats,
  Vous devriez bruler tout ce meuble inutile";—

but duller books of the same size, of which there were many in those days of patient readers, would have had an equal value for such economical purposes as this, and "The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans by that Grave Learned Philosopher & Historiographer Plutarch" were too entertaining to young and old to be left for any length of time quietly upon the shelf. They were the familiar reading of boys who were to become the actors in the great drama of the Rebellion and the Commonwealth, or who a little later were to frequent the dissolute court of Charles, presenting in their own lives, whether in camp or court, as patriots or as traitors, parallels to those which they had read in the weighty pages of the old biographer.

[Footnote D: In 1579, 1595, 1602, 1631, 1657, 1676. Mr. Hooper, in his Introduction to Chapman's Homer, London, 1857, says, that "the edition of 1657 was published under the superintendence of the illustrious Selden." We do not know his authority for this statement. The fact, if it be one, is very remarkable, as Selden's death took place in 1654.]

Nor in more recent times has North's version failed of admirers. Godwin declared, that, till this book fell into his hands, he had no genuine feeling of Plutarch's merits, or knowledge of what sort of a writer he was. But the chief interest of this translation at the present day, except what it possesses as a storehouse of good mother-English, comes from the fact that it was one of the books of Shakespeare's moderate library, and one which he had thoroughly read, as is manifest from the use that he made of it in his own works, especially in "Coriolanus," "Julius Caesar," and "Antony and Cleopatra." It was from the worthy knight's folio that he got much of his little Latin and less Greek. He helped himself freely to what was to his purpose; and a comparison of the passages which he borrowed from with the scenes founded upon them is interesting, as showing his use of the very words of the author before him, and as exhibiting the new appearances which those words take on under his plastic hand. We have no space for long extracts; but a short illustration will serve to show that Shakespeare is the best translator of Plutarch into English that we have had. Compare these two passages:—

"Therefore, when she [Cleopatra] was sent unto by divers letters, both from Antonius himself and also from his friends, she made so light of it, and mocked Antonius so much, that she disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus; the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the musick of flutes, bowboys, citherns, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of herself, she was laid under a pavillion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus, commonly drawn in picture; and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with which they fanned wind upon her. Her ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled like the Nymphs Nereides (which are the Myrmaids of the waters) and like the Graces; some steering the helm, others tending the tackle and ropes of the barge, out of the which there came a wonderful passing sweet savour of perfumes, that perfumed the wharf's side, pestered with innumerable multitudes of people. Some of them followed the barge all along the river side; others also ran out of the city to see her coming in. So that in the end there ran such multitudes of people one after another to see her, that Antonius was left post alone in the market-place, in his imperial seat to give audience."—NORTH'S Plutarch, Life of Antonius, p. 763. Ed. of 1676.

Enobarbus. When she first met Mark Antony, she pursed up his heart upon the river of Cydnus.

  Eno. I will tell you.
  The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
  Burnt on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
  Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
  The winds were lovesick; with them the oars were silver,
  Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
  The water, which they beat, to follow faster,
  As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
  It beggar'd all description: she did lie
  In her pavilion, (cloth of gold, of tissue,)
  O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
  The fancy outwork Nature: on each side her
  Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
  With divers-color'd fans, whose wind did seem
  To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
  And what they undid, did.

  Eno. Her gentlewomen, like the Nereids,
  So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes,
  And made their bends adornings: at the helm
  A seeming mermaid steers; the silken tackle
  Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands,
  That yarely frame the office. From the barge
  A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
  Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
  Her people out upon her, and Antony,
  Enthron'd i' th' market-place, did sit alone,
  Whistling to the air, which, but for vacancy,
  Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
  And made a gap in Nature.

The operations of Shakespeare's creative imagination are rarely to be observed more distinctly than in such instances as this, where we see the precise source from which he drew, in all its original limitations and native character. Books were to him like ingots of gold, which, passing through the mint of his brain, came out thence stamped coin, current for all time. Viewing some of his plays, it may be said, with no real, though with apparent contradiction, that no man ever borrowed more from books, and yet none ever owed less to them. For the Roman times Plutarch served him, as Holinshed and Hall supplied him for his English histories. Under Plutarch's guidance he walked through the streets of ancient Rome, and became familiar with the conduct of her men. He is more Roman than Plutarch himself, and by divine right of imagination he makes himself a citizen of the Eternal City. While Shakespeare was using Plutarch to such advantage, on the other hand, Ben Jonson seems to have borrowed little or nothing from him in his Roman plays. He got what he wanted out of the Latin authors, and he succeeded in Latinizing his plays,—in giving to his characters the dress, but not the spirit of Rome.

It was toward the end of the seventeenth century that Dryden's translation appeared, and for about fifty years it held much the same place with the reading public that North's had filled for previous generations. It was, no doubt, in this version that Mrs. Fitzpatrick amused herself during her seclusion in Ireland, as she tells Sophia Western, with reading "a great deal in Plutarch's Lives." But this was at length superseded by the translation of the brothers Langhorne, which, spite of its want of vivacity, its labored periods, and formal narrative, has retained its place as the popular version of Plutarch up to the present day. One can hardly help wishing—so little of Plutarch's spirit survives in their dull pages—that a similar fate had overtaken these excellent men to that which carried off the gentle Abbé Ricard with the grippe, when he had published but half of his translation of the Philosopher of Cheronaea.

It is a proof of the intrinsic charm of Plutarch's Lives, that thus, notwithstanding the imperfect manner in which they have been, up to this time, presented to English readers, they should have been so constantly and so generally read.[E] They have given equal delight to all ages and to all classes. The heavy folio has been taken from its place on the lower shelves in the quiet libraries of English country-houses, and been read by old men at their firesides, by girls in trim gardens, by boys who cared for no other classic. The cheap double-column octavo has travelled in peddlers' carts to all the villages of New England, to the backwoodsman's cabin in the West. It has taken its place on the clock-shelf, with only the Bible, the "Pilgrim's Progress," and the Almanac for its companions. No other classic author, with, perhaps, the single exception of Aesop, has been so widely read in modern times; and the popular knowledge of the men of Greece and Rome is derived more from Plutarch than from all other ancient authors put together. The often-repeated saying of Theodore Gaza, who, being once asked, if learning should suffer a general shipwreck, and he had the choice of saving one author, which he would select, is said to have replied, "Plutarch,"—"and probably might give this reason," says Dryden, "that in saving him he should secure the best collection of them all,"—this saying is but a sort of prophecy of the decision of the common world, who have chosen Plutarch from all the rest, and find, as Amyot says, "no one else so profitable and so pleasant to read as he."[F]

[Footnote E: We have not spoken of Mr. Long's translations of Select Lives from Plutarch, which were published in the series of Knight's Weekly Volumes, under the title of The Civil Wars of Rome, because, although executed in a manner deserving the highest praise, they presented to English readers but a limited number of Plutarch's biographies. Mr. Clough says, justly, in his Preface, that his own work would not have been needed, had not Mr. Long confined his translations within so narrow a compass.]

[Footnote F: "De tous les auteurs," says the Baron de Grimm, "qui nous restent de l'antiquité, Plutarque est, sans contredit, celui qui a recueilli le plus de vérités de fait et de spéculation. Ses oeuvres sont une mine inépuisable de lumieres et de connaissance; c'est vraiment l'encyclopédie des anciens." Mémoires Historiques, etc., I., 312.]

Nor is it merely the common mass of readers who have chosen Plutarch as their favorite ancient. The list of great and famous men who have made him their companion is a long one. Men of action and men of thought have taken equal satisfaction in his pages. Petrarch, the first scholar of the Revival, held him in high esteem, and drew from him much of his uncommon learning. Erasmus, the first scholar of the Reformation, made his writings a special study, and translated from the Greek a large portion of his Moral Works. Montaigne has taken pains to tell us of his affection for him, and his Essays are full of the proofs of it. "I never seriously settled myself," he says, "to the reading of any book of solid learning but Plutarch and Seneca."[G] And in another essay he adds,—"The familiarity I have had with these two authors, and the assistance they have lent to my age, and to my book wholly built up of what I have taken from them, oblige me to stand up for their honor."[H] And again he declares,—"The hooks I chiefly use to form my opinions are Plutarch, since he became French, and Seneca."[I] The genial humanity and liberal wisdom of Plutarch claimed the sympathy of Montaigne, while his discursive style and love of story-telling suited no less the taste of his disciple. Montaigne, as it were, makes Plutarch a modern, and uses his books to illustrate the passing times. He introduces him to new characters, and reads his judgment upon them. He finds in him a hundred things that others had not seen. It is a wide step from Montaigne to Rousseau, and yet, spite of the naturalness of the one and the artificiality of the other, there were some points of resemblance between them, and they harmonize in their love for a common master, Rousseau has written of Plutarch as Montaigne felt,—"Dans le petit nombre de livres que je lis quelquefois encore, Plutarque est celui qui m'attache et me profite le plus. Ce fut la première lecture de mon enfance, et sera la dernière de ma vieillesse; c'est presque le seul auteur que je n'ai jamais lu sans en tirer quelque fruit."[J] Plutarch's Lives was one of the few books recommended to Catharine II. of Russia, as she herself tells us, wherewith to solace and instruct herself during the first wretched years of her miserable married life. It is, perhaps, not impossible to trace in some passages of her later life the results of what she then read.

And thus we might go on accumulating the names of men and women whom all the world knows, who have confessed their obligations to the old biographer,—philosophers like Bacon, warriors like Bussy d'Amboise, poets like Wordsworth; while many a one has owed much to him who has made no open acknowledgment of his debt. Montaigne somewhere complains of the unlicensed stealings from his author; and Udall, in his Preface to the Apophthegms of Erasmus, declares,—"It is a thing scarcely believable, how much, and how boldly as well, the common writers that from time to time have copied out his [Plutarch's] works, as also certain that have thought themselves liable to control and amend all men's doings, have taken upon them in this author, who ought with all reverence to be handled of them, and with all fear to have been preserved from altering, depraving, or corrupting."[K]

[Footnote K: The following passage presents a view of some of the uses to which Plutarch's narratives were turned during the Middle Ages. "Or personne n'ignore que les chroniqueurs du moyen âge compilaient les faits les plus remarquables de l'Écriture Sainte ou des histoires profanes pour les mêler à leurs récits. C'est ainsi que ceux qui ont écrit la vie de Du Guesclin ont mis sur le compte de ce héros ce que Plutarque rapporte de plus mémorable des grands hommes de l'antiquité."—SOUVESTRE. Les Derniers Bretons. I. 147.]

The question naturally arises, What are the qualities in Plutarch which have made him so universal a favorite, which have attracted towards him men of such opposite tempers and different lives? It is not enough to say that all real biography is of interest,—that every man has curiosity about the life of every other man, and finds in it illustrations of his own. Other writers of lives have not had the same fortune with Plutarch. For one reader of Suetonius or of Diogenes Laërtius, there are a thousand of Plutarch. Nor is it that the subjects of his biographies are greater or more famous than all other men. Some of the noblest and best known men of Greece and Rome are omitted from Plutarch's list.[L] The true grounds of the general popularity of Plutarch's Lives are not to be found in their subjects so much as in his manner of treating them, and in the qualities of his own nature, as exhibited in his book. At the tomb of Achilles, Alexander declared that he esteemed him happy in having had so famous a poet to proclaim his actions; and scarcely less fortunate were they who had such a biographer as Plutarch to record their lives. He himself has given us his conception of the true office of a biographer, and in this has explained in great part the secret of his excellence. "It must be borne in mind," he says, "that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore, as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men; and, while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others."[M]

[Footnote L: In Rogers's Recollections, Grattan is reported as saying,—"Of all men, if I could call up one, it should be Scipio Africanus. Hannibal was perhaps a greater captain, but not so great and good a man. Epaminondas did not do so much. Themistocles was a rogue." It is curious that Themistocles is the only one of these men of whom we have a biography by Plutarch. His Lives of Scipio and Epaminondas are lost. Hannibal did not come within the scope of his design.]

It is his fidelity to this principle, his dealing with events and circumstances chiefly as they illustrate character, his delineation of the features of the souls of men, that constitutes Plutarch's highest merit as a biographer. He is no historian; he often neglects chronology, and disregards the sequence of events; he omits many incidents, and he avoids the details of national and political affairs. The progress of the advance or decline of states is not to be learned from his pages. But if his Lives be read in chronological order, much may be inferred from them of the moral condition and changes of the communities in which the men flourished whose characters and actions he describes. Biography is thus made to cast an incidental light upon history. The successes of Alexander give evidence of the lowering of the Greek spirit, and illustrate the immemorial weakness of Oriental tyrannies. The victories and the defeats of Pyrrhus alike display the vigor of Republican Rome. The character and the fate of Mark Antony show that vigor at its ebb, and foretell the near fall of the Roman liberties. Thus in his long series of lives of noble Grecians and Romans, the motives and principles which lay at the foundation of the characters of the men who moulded the fate of Greece and Rome, the reciprocal influences of their times upon these men and of these men upon their times, may all be traced with more or less distinctness and certainty. It was not Plutarch's object to exhibit them in sequent evolution, but, in attaining the object which he had in view, he could not fail to make them manifest to the thoughtful reader. His book, though not a history, is invaluable to historians.

But the character of Plutarch himself, not less than his method of writing biography, explains his universal popularity, and gives its special charm and value to his book. He was a man of large and generous nature, of strong feeling, of refined tastes, of quick perceptions. His mind had been cultivated in the acquisition of the best learning of his times, and was disciplined by the study of books as well as of men. He deserves the title of philosopher; but his philosophy was of a practical rather than a speculative character,—though he was versed in the wisest doctrines of the great masters of ancient thought, and in some of his moral works shows himself their not unworthy follower. Above all, he was a man of cheerful, genial, and receptive temper. A lover of justice and of liberty, his sympathies are always on the side of what is right, noble, and honorable. He believed in a divine ordering of the world, and saw obscurely through the mists and shadows of heathenism the indications of the wisdom and rectitude of an overruling Providence. To him man did not appear as the sole arbiter of his own destiny, but rather as an unconscious agent in working out the designs of a Higher Power; and yet, as these designs were only dimly and imperfectly to be recognized, the noblest man was he who was truest to the eternal principles of right, who was most independent of the chances and shiftings of fortune, who, "fortressed on conscience and impregnable will," strove to live in the manliest and most self-supported relations with the world, neither fearing nor hoping much in regard to the uncertainties of the future, and who

In his whole character, Plutarch shows himself one of the best examples of the intelligent heathen of the later classic period. His Writings contain the practical essence of the results of Greek and Roman life and thought. His intellect, equally removed from superstition and from skepticism, was open with a large receptiveness, which sometimes approaches to credulity, to the traditions of early wonders, to the reports of recent miracles, and to the stories of the deeds and sayings of men.[N] The evidence upon which he reports is often insufficient to establish the statements that he makes; but his readiness to tell the current stories gives to his biographies a peculiar interest, adding to their entertainment, and at the same time to their value as representations of common beliefs and popular fancies. He is one of the best story-tellers of antiquity, and from his works a series of "Percy Anecdotes" of ancient men might easily be compiled. "Such anecdotes will not," says he, in his Life of Timoleon, "be thought, I conceive, either foreign to my purpose of writing lives, or unprofitable in themselves, by such readers as are not in too much haste, or busied and taken up with other concerns." It is this fulness of anecdote, which, perhaps, more than any other quality of his writings, makes him the favorite of boys as well as of men. He treasures up pithy sayings, and his own reflections are often epigrammatic in expression, and always full of good sense.

[Footnote N: There are two remarkable passages in the Life of Coriolanus which illustrate Plutarch's opinions upon these points. The first (ii. 91) treats of the divine influence on the human will and action; the second (ii. 97-98) relates to the mode of regarding events seemingly incredible. This latter is peculiarly distinguished by its good sense and clear statement. It closes with the memorable saying, "Knowledge of divine things for the most part, as Heraclitus says, is lost to us by incredulity."]

In his Life of Demosthenes, in a passage which is pleasant on account of its personal reference, Plutarch speaks of the advantage that it would be for a writer like himself to reside in some city addicted to liberal arts, and populous, where he might have access to many books, and to many persons from whom he might gather up such facts as books do not contain. "But as for me," he says, "I live in a little town, where I am willing to continue, lest it should grow less." And he goes on to excuse himself for his imperfect knowledge of the Roman tongue, which unfits him to draw a comparison between the orations of Demosthenes and of Cicero. But, although his acquaintance with the structure and powers of the language may have been insufficient to enable him to venture on literary criticism, his acquaintance with the books of the Romans was considerable, and he had thoroughly studied the Greek authors who had written on Roman affairs. His own library, or the libraries to which he had access at Chaeronea, must have been well furnished with the books most important for his studies. He is said to quote two hundred and fifty authors, some eighty of whom are among those whose works have been wholly or partly lost. He made careful use of his materials, which were, of course, more abundant for his Greek than for his Roman narratives. "If we would put the Lives of Plutarch to a severe test," says Mr. Long, than whom no one is better qualified to speak with authority upon the subject, "we must carefully examine his Roman Lives. He says that he knew Latin imperfectly, and he lived under the Empire, when many of the educated Romans had but a superficial acquaintance with the earlier history of their state. We must therefore expect to find him imperfectly informed on Roman institutions; and we can detect him in some errors. Yet, on the whole, his Roman Lives do not often convey erroneous notions; if the detail is incorrect, the general impression is true. They may be read with profit by those who seek to know something of Roman affairs, and have not knowledge enough to detect an error. They probably contain as few mistakes as most biographies which have been written by a man who is not the countryman of those whose lives he writes."

Yet, spite of his general accuracy and his impartial temper, the representations which Plutarch makes of the characters which he describes are not always to be accepted as fair delineations. Unconscious prejudice, or misconception of circumstances and relations, sometimes leads him into apparent injustice. Thus, for example, while he bears hardly upon Demosthenes, and sets out many of his actions in too unfavorable lights, he, on the other hand, interprets the conduct and character of Phocion with manifest indulgence, and presents a flattered portrait of a man whose death turned popular reproaches into pity, but was insufficient to redeem the faults of his life.

Mr. Grote, in his History, passes a very different judgment upon these two men from that to which one would be led by the perusal of Plutarch's narratives merely. And it is an illustration, at once, of the honesty of the ancient biographer, and of the ability of the modern historian, that Mr. Grote should not infrequently derive from Plutarch's own account the means for correcting his false estimate of the motives and the actions of those whom he misjudged.

"Much has been said of Plutarch's inaccuracy; and it cannot be denied that he is careless about numbers, and occasionally contradicts his own statements. A greater fault, perhaps, is his passion for anecdote; he cannot forbear from repeating stories the improbability of which he is the first to recognize, which, nevertheless, by mere repetition, leave unjust impressions. He is unfair in this way to Demosthenes and Pericles,—against the latter of whom, however, he doubtless inherited the prejudices which Plato handed down to the philosophers.

"It is true, also, that his unhistorical treatment of the subjects of his biography makes him often unsatisfactory and imperfect in the portraits he draws. Much, of course, in the public lives of statesmen can find its only explanation in their political position; and of this Plutarch often knows and thinks little. So far as the researches of modern historians have succeeded in really recovering a knowledge of relations of this sort, so far, undoubtedly, these biographies stand in need of their correction. Yet, in the uncertainty which must attend all modern restorations, it is agreeable, and surely also profitable, to recur to portraits drawn ere new thoughts and views had occupied the civilized world, without reference to such disputable grounds of judgment, simply upon the broad principles of the ancient moral code of right and wrong. …. We have here the faithful record of the historical tradition of Plutarch's age. This is what, in the second century of our era, Greeks and Romans loved to believe about their warriors and statesmen of the past. As a picture, at least, of the best Greek and Roman moral views and moral judgments, as a presentation of the results of Greek and Roman moral thought, delivered, not under the pressure of calamity, but as they existed in ordinary times, and actuated plain-living people, in country places, in their daily life, Plutarch's writings are of indisputable value."

Of all the biographies contained in his work, none might excite greater suspicion of incorrectness than that of Timoleon, on account of the extraordinary character both of the man and of the incidents of his career. His story reads like a romance of the ancient times, like a legend of some half-mythical hero, rather than like the true account of an actual man. There is, perhaps, none among his Lives which Plutarch has written with greater spirit, with livelier sympathies, than this. And yet, in spite of all its seeming improbability, there is little reason to question its essential truth. It corresponds, with some minor exceptions, with all that can be ascertained from other ancient authors who wrote concerning the deliverer of Sicily; and even Mitford, with all his zeal in the cause of tyrants, can find little to detract from the praise of Timoleon, or to diminish our confidence in the truth of Plutarch's account of him.

But, in addition to the interest that belongs to these biographies, from their intrinsic qualities, as affected by the character of Plutarch,—beside the interest which the common reader or the student of biography and history may find in them, they possess a still deeper interest for the student of human nature, in its various modifications, under varying influences, and in different ages, from exhibiting to him, in a long series, many of the chief characters of the heathen world in such form as fits them for comparison with the prominent men of Christian times. The question of the effect of Christianity upon the characters and lives of the leading actors in modern history is not more important than it is difficult of solution. Plutarch, better than any other ancient writer, affords the means of estimating the motives, the principles, the objects, of the men of the old time. We see in his pages what they were; we see the differences between them and the men of later days. How far are those differences exhibitions of inferiority or of superiority? How far do they result from the influence of secondary causes? how far from the change in religious belief?

No man who knows much of the course of history will venture to insist greatly on any essential change for the better having been wrought as yet by Christianity in the manner in which the affairs of the world are carried on. Christianity has not yet been fairly tried. Nations calling themselves Christian are still governed on heathen principles. Christianity has been for the most part perverted and misunderstood. The grossest errors have been taught in its name, are still taught in its name. Falsehood has claimed the authority of truth, and its claim has been granted. The stream which flowed out pure from its source has been caught in foul cisterns, has been led into narrow channels, has been made stagnant in desolate pools and wide-spread weedy marshes. The doctrine of Christ has had thus far in the world but very few hearers who have understood it. Many a modern creed might well go back to heathenism for improvement. This perversion of Christianity is a chief element in the difficulty of tracing the real influence of true Christian teaching upon character. It is this which compels us to draw a parallel, not so much between the actual characters of ancient and modern times, if we would rightly understand the differences between them, as between what we may assume to be the ideal standards of the heathen and the Christian. But to treat this subject with the fulness and in the manner which it deserves would lead us too far from Plutarch, and we have done enough in suggesting it as matter for reflection to those who read his Lives.

One of the most marked differences in the position of the ancient and the modern man is that which has been quietly and gradually brought about by science; but its effect is little recognized by the mass of men or the most wide-spread churches. It is the difference of his recognized relations to the universe. While this earth was supposed to be the central point and main effort of creation, while the earth itself was unknown, and all the regions of space were regarded as void and untenanted, save by the inventions of fancy, man may have seemed to himself a creature of large proportions and of considerable importance. He measured himself with the gods and the half-gods, and found himself not much their inferior. In reading Plutarch, one cannot fail to be struck with the manly self-reliance of his best men of action. Their piety had no weakness of self-abasement in it. They possessed a piety toward themselves as well as toward the gods. Timoleon, who was attended by the good-fortune that waits on noble character, erected in the house which the Syracusans bestowed upon him an altar to [Greek: Automatia], which, as Mr. Clough well remarks, in a note, "is almost equivalent to Spontaneousness. His successes had come, as it were, of themselves." The act was an acknowledgment of divine favor, and an assertion at the same time of his individual independence of action. This spirit of self-dependence was the grandest feature of Greek and Roman heathenism; and it is in this, if in anything, that a superiority of character is manifest in the men of ancient times. The famous passage in Seneca's tragedy, in which Medea asserts herself as sufficient to stand alone against the universe, contains its essence and is its complete expression.

Nutr. Abiere Colchi; conjugis nulla est fides; Nihilque superest opibus e tantis tibi.

Med. Medea superest; hic mare et terras vides, Ferrumque, et ignes, et deos, et fulmina. Medea, Act ii. 162-167.

Here is self-reliance at its highest point; the strength of resolute will measuring itself singly and undauntedly against all forces, human and divine.

But, as a necessary consequent of this spirit, as its implied complement in the balance of human nature, we find, as a distinct trait in the lives of many of the manliest ancients, an occasional prevalence of a spirit of despondency, a recognition of the ultimate weakness of man when brought by himself face to face with the wall of opposing circumstance and the resistless force of Fate. Will is strong, but the powers outside the will are stronger. Manliness may not fail, but man himself may be broken. Neither the teachings of natural religion, nor the doctrines of philosophy, nor the support of a sound heart are sufficient for man in the crisis of uttermost trial. Without something beyond these, higher than these, without a conscious dependence on Omnipotence, man must sink at last under the buffets of adverse fortune. Take the instances of these great men in Plutarch, and look at the end of their lives. How many of them are simple confessions of defeat! Themistocles sacrifices to the gods, drinks poison, and dies. Demosthenes takes poison to save himself from falling into the hands of his enemies. Cicero proposes to slay himself in the house of Caesar, and is murdered only through want of resolution to kill himself. Brutus says to the friend who urges him to fly,—"Yes, we must fly; yet not with our feet, but with our hands," and falls upon his sword. Cato lies down calmly at night, reads Plato on the Soul, and then kills himself; while, after his death, the people of Utica cry out with one voice that he is "the only free, the only undefeated man." It may be said that even in suicide these men displayed the manliness of their tempers. True, but it was the manliness of the deserter who runs the risk of being shot for the sake of avoiding the risks and fatigues of service in war.[O]

[Footnote O: There is a striking passage in Seneca's treatise De Consolatione, which may, perhaps, be not unfairly regarded as the expression of a sentiment common among the better heathens in regard to death,—a sentiment of profound sadness. He says,—"Mors dolorum omnium solutio est et finis, ultra quam mala nostra non exeunt, quae nos in illam tranquillitatem, in qua antequam nasceremur jacuimus, reponit." xix. 4.]

Again, we must be content rather to hint at than to develop the matter for reflection and study that Plutarch affords, and unwillingly pass by, without even a glance at them, large domains of thought that lie within his pages. We are glad to believe, that, through the excellent edition before us, his Lives will be more widely read than ever. In this country, where the tendency of things is to the limited, but equal development of each individual in social and political life, and hence to the production of a uniform mediocrity of character and of action, these biographies are of special value, as exhibiting men developed under circumstances widely contrasted with our own, and who may serve as standards by which to measure some of our own deficiencies or advantages. Here were the men who stood head and shoulders above the others of their times; we see them now, "foreshortened in the tract of time,"—not as they appeared to their contemporaries, but in something like their real proportions. But the greatness of those proportions for the most part remains unchanged. How will it be with our great men two thousand years hence? Will the numerous "most distinguished men of America" appear as large then as they do now? Will the speeches of our popular orators be read then? Will the most famous of our senators be famous then? Will the ablest of our generals still be gathering laurels?

There is a story told by the learned Andrew Thevet, chief cosmographer to Henry III., King of France and Poland, to the effect that one Triumpho of Camarino did most fantastically imagine and persuade himself that really and truly one day "he was assembled in company with the Pope, the Emperor, and the several Kings and Princes of Christendom, (although all that while he was alone in his own chamber by himself,) where he entered upon, debated, and resolved all the states' affairs of Christendom; and he verily believed that he was the wisest man of them all; and so he well might be, of the company." The fantastical imagination of this Triumpho furnishes a good illustration of the reality of companionship which one who possesses Plutarch may have in his own chamber with the greatest and most interesting men of ancient times. If he be worthy, he may make the best of them his intimates. He may live with them as his counsellors and his friends. Whether he will believe that he is "the wisest man of them all" is doubtful; but, however this may be, he will find himself in their company growing wiser, stronger, tenderer, and truer.

It has been well said, that "Plutarch's Lives is the book for those who can nobly think and dare and do."

The Lost and Found; or Life among the Poor. By SAMUEL B. HALLIDAY. New York: Blakeman & Mason. 1859.

It has been asserted—most emphatically by those who have most fairly tried it—that no house was ever built large enough for two families to live in decently and comfortably. Yet in this present year of grace, 1859, half a million of men and women—two-thirds of the population of New York—are compelled, by reason of their own poverty and the avarice of certain capitalists, to live in what are technically known as "tenement-houses," or, more pertinently, "barracks,"—hulks of brick, put up by Shylocks anxious for twenty per cent., and lived in—God knows how—by from four to ninety-four families each. Of 115,986 families residing in the city of New York, only 15,990 are able to enjoy the luxury of an independent home; 14,362 other families live in comparative comfort, two in a house; 4,416 buildings contain three families each, and yet do not come under the head of tenements; and the 11,965 dwelling-houses which remain are the homes of 72,386 families, being an average of seven families, or thirty-five souls to each house!

But this is only an average. In the eleventh ward, 113 rear houses (houses built on the backs of deep lots, and separated only by a narrow and necessarily dark and filthy court from the front houses, which are also "barracks,") contain 1,653 families, or nearly 15 families or 70 souls each; 24 others contain 407 families, being an average of 80 souls to each; and in another ward, 72 such houses contain no less than 19 families or 95 souls each!

This seems shocking. But this is by no means the worst! There are 580 tenement-houses in New York which contain, by actual count, 10,933 families, or about 85 persons each; 193 others, which accommodate 111 persons each; 71 others, which cover 140 each; and, finally, 29—these must be the most profitable!—which have a total population of no less than 5,449 souls, or 187 to each house!

That part of Fifth Avenue which holds the chief part of the wealth and fashion of New York has an extent of about two miles, or, counting both sides of the street, four miles. These four miles of stately palaces are occupied by four hundred families; while a single block of tenement-houses, not two hundred yards out of Fifth Avenue, contains no less than seven hundred families, or 3,500 souls! Seven such blocks, Mr. Halliday pertinently remarks, would contain more people than the city of Hartford, which covers an area of several miles square.

Such astounding facts as these the industrious Buckle of the year 3000, intent upon a history of our American civilization, will quote to the croakers of that day as samples of our nineteenth-century barbarism.

"But," some one may object, "if the houses were comfortably arranged, and land was really scarce, after all, these people were not so badly off."

The "tenement-house," which is now one of the "institutions" of New York, stands usually upon a lot 25 by 100 feet, is from four to six stories high, and is so divided internally as to contain four families on each floor,—each family eating, drinking, sleeping, cooking, washing, and fighting in a room eight feet by ten and a bed-room six feet by ten; unless, indeed,—which very frequently happens, says Mr. Halliday,—the family renting these two rooms takes in another family to board, or sub-lets one room to one or even two other families!

One of the largest and most recently built of the New York "barracks" has apartments for 126 famines. It was built especially for this use. It stands on a lot 50 by 250 feet, is entered at the sides from alleys eight feet wide, and, by reason of the vicinity of another barrack of equal height, the rooms are so darkened that on a cloudy day it is impossible to read or sew in them without artificial light. It has not one room which can in any way be thoroughly ventilated. The vaults and sewers which are to carry off the filth of the 126 families have grated openings in the alleys, and door-ways in the cellars, through which the noisome and deadly miasmata penetrate and poison the dank air of the house and the courts. The water-closets for the whole vast establishment are a range of stalls without doors, and accessible not only from the building, but even from the street. Comfort is here out of the question; common decency has been rendered impossible; and the horrible brutalities of the passenger-ship are day after day repeated,—but on a larger scale. And yet this is a fair specimen. And for such hideous and necessarily demoralizing habitations,—for two rooms, stench, indecency, and gloom, the poor family pays—and the rich builder receives—"thirty-five per cent, annually on the cost of the apartments!"

When a city has half a million of inhabitants who must content themselves with such quarters as these, which, even the beasts of the field would perish in, does any man wonder that 18,000 women were arrested in the last year? that in the three months ending January 31st, 1859, 13,765 arrests were made by the city police, of which over one-third were females, one in six under twenty years of age, and more than one-half under thirty? that in 1855 there was one death in every 26-1/3 of the population? that in 1858 the five city dispensaries were called on to treat (gratuitously) 65,442 infant patients? that, in 1855, 1,938 infants were stillborn, and 6,390, or 1 in 99 of the population, did not live the first year out? while, at the present time, 20,000 children roam the streets, and never enter a schoolroom? With such homes, is there cause for surprise that husbands murder their wives? that mothers abuse their children,—and would kill them, too, were they not profitable little slaves, as Mr. Halliday shows? that men and women live in drunken stupor upon the spoils of young children,—often not their own,—sent out to beg, to steal, or do worse yet? that even the very fag-end of humanity, the sentiment of "honor among thieves," perishes here?

For twenty years, Mr. Halliday has labored among these poor creatures, as the "agent" or missionary of the "American Female Guardian Society and Home for the Friendless," an association of noble-minded and unusually practical men and women. If any of our readers fear lest the fountain of benevolence may dry up within him, we commend Mr. Halliday's book to his perusal. He will find there some little stories which have a pathos beyond tears; some facts—happening, mayhap, within ten minutes' walk of his own fireside—quite as strange as the strangest fiction of Mr. Cobb or Mr. Emerson Bennett. We have not space left for any account of Mr. Halliday's labors. His Society provides not only boys and girls, but even men and women under certain circumstances, with present assistance and shelter, and afterwards a home and work in the country, at a distance from the temptations and miseries of the city. It is curious to read that Mr. Halliday receives frequent orders from various States—even the most distant West—for "a baby," "a boy," "a little girl." It is good to know that in that way many bright young souls are saved from the horrors of "tenement" life, and placed in kind hands; and it is touching to read, that, while many of these little ones are remarkable for good looks and bright spirits, all are reported as singularly quiet, sedate, and submissive. We are glad to know that the types of the paper published by the Society are set up by the women who have a refuge in its Home; and we were sorry to read of one boy, who always ran away from everybody and every place, being at last secured in the House of Refuge, where, being now nearly eleven years old, the monster! "he seems dejected, and I have never seen him smile," says Mr. Halliday. This boy—and a good many others who like the streets and the free air better than the black-hole of a tenement—should go to sea. The sea is an honorable trade, (it used to be a profession,) and the merchants of New York could not do a wiser or a better thing than in providing a school-ship where such lads could be taught the rudiments of seamanship and navigation, or, in default of that, sending them as apprentices in their vessels.

We have two complaints to enter against Mr. Halliday: first, that he has given his book a title which will deter most sensible people from opening it; and, second, that in his valuable report on the tenement-houses, he does not give the names of those enterprising personages who make thirty-five per cent, at the expense, not only of their poor tenants, but of every tax-payer in New York.

The New American Cyclopaedia: a Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge. Edited by GEORGE RIPLEY and CHARLES A. DANA. Vol. VI. Cough—Education. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 8vo. pp. 772.

More than one-third of the task assumed by the editors of this work is now completed; and the best testimony in its favor is, that, although it has been freely criticized, sometimes with closeness and severity, and sometimes with studied harshness and evident malice, its reputation has risen among candid and competent readers with the appearance of each volume. Faults, negative and positive, may undoubtedly be discovered in it; but the same is true, in a greater or less degree, of every other production of human labor; and the eyes neither of malice nor of hypercriticism have been able to find any sufficient reason why this Cyclopaedia should not be accepted as the beat popular dictionary of general knowledge in the English language. As the work advances, the comprehensiveness of its plan, the honesty of its purpose, and the truly catholic and liberal spirit which animates it, become more and more apparent; and the names of the authors of the articles (a list of which is to be published, we believe, with the last volume) sufficiently show the determination of the editors to secure the cooperation of the first talent in the country. Among the contributors to the present volume are the Rev. Dr. Bellows, Edmund Blunt, Dion Bourcicault, Professor Dana of Yale College, Edward Everett, Professor Felton of Cambridge, Parke Godwin, Richard Hildreth, George S. Hillard, William Henry Hurlbut, and Professors Lowell and Parsons of Cambridge.

Of the articles, we especially notice Cranmer, remarkable for the candor and the coolness of perception with which the character of its benevolent and gifted, but inconsistent and vacillating subject, is discussed:—Cromwell, which gives a completer, more authentic, and less prejudiced account of the eventful life of the great Puritan leader than is to be found in any other publication known to us:—Crusades, a complete picture in little of those great fitful blazes of religious enthusiasm by which it flickered into its final extinction; (for, afterward, only a semblance of it was made a stalking-horse by politicians;) and this article is quite a model of epitome:—Cuneiform Inscriptions, in which the writer has presented concisely and clearly the fruits of a careful examination of all the many theories that have been broached with regard to these important and puzzling records of the ancient world, without revealing a preference, if he have one, for any; a wise course, where, in a case of such consequence, the views of learned men are so conflicting, but one not always easily followed:—Damascus Blades, a very interesting, and, for general purposes, a very full description of the peculiarities of those famous, and, it appears, not too much lauded weapons:—Deaf and Dumb, a very copious article of eleven pages, rich in historical and biographical detail, and giving full accounts of the various methods of instruction adopted for this class of persons in all times and countries, with a large body of statistical information upon the subject; an article of great interest, but perhaps undue length:—Death, which conveys much information on a subject as to which the grossest and most deplorable misconceptions prevail; an article equally remarkable for its careful and minute presentation of the phenomena of death and for the placid and philosophical spirit in which it is written:—Deluge, in which, with the ingenuity before shown in the treatment of similar subjects, the various accounts of that event, and the facts and theories relating to it, are laid before the reader in a manner to which no one, of whatever creed, can object, and a new and very ingenious and rational mode of accounting for the phenomenon in question is proposed;—Dog, the fulness of which makes it acceptable to the lover of natural history, the sporting man, and the general reader:—and the last article, Education, one of great value, which describes the systems of instruction pursued in all ages and countries, and which, without entering upon the support of any one of them, presents to the reader such an impartial and detailed summary of the distinguishing features of them all, that he can form an intelligent opinion upon them for himself.

The volume is so meritorious, that we have not looked for faults; but, as we turned the leaves, we noticed a few such as the following:—that the river Dove, in England, should be mentioned as "noted for its picturesque scenery," and yet its association with Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton, its chief glory, be passed unnoticed; and that Discord should be defined as, "in music, a combination of sounds inharmonious and unpleasing to the ear"; whereas, although, out of music, discord means a sound inharmonious and displeasing to the ear, in music discord is the golden bond of harmony, the life and soul of expression, that for which the ear yearns with a yearning that is inexpressible, and enjoys with poignancy of pleasure. We asked, too, if Thomas Dowse should be honored with a page and a half, in which his fall from a tree, his rheumatic fever, and the head winds which prevented him from visiting Europe are chronicled,—while the eminent French painter, Couture, whose use of the pallet is marked by such striking originality, that it has produced an impression upon the works of a generation of painters, has twelve lines! And we can hardly be accused of hypercriticism, in directing the attention of the editors to a sentence like the following, in the article Diptera, p. 498, 2d col.:—"Though this order contains the bloodthirsty mosquito, the disgusting flesh-fly, and many insects depositing their eggs in the bodies of living animals, it is a most useful one, supplying food to insectivorous birds, and themselves [who? what?] consuming decomposing animal and vegetable substances," etc. But these are instances of oversight in not very important matters, or of inaccuracy of expression, or of difference of judgment between the editors and ourselves as to plan, which even in our judgment do not affect the value of the work in which they occur. Graver errors could be found in almost every work of great scope that ever came from the press. We indicate them that we may afford some help toward a nearer approximation to that perfection which is unattainable.

Tom Brown at Oxford: a Sequel to School-Days at Rugby. By THOMAS HUGHES, etc. Part I. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1859.

Many men write successful books; but very few have the power of making a book succeed by naturalness, simplicity, and quiet strength, as Mr. Hughes found the secret of doing in his "School-Days at Rugby." It is so easy to be eloquent,—scarce a modern French novelist but has the gift of it by the ream; so easy to be philosophical,—one has only to begin a few substantives with capitals; and withal it is so hard to be genial and agreeable. Since Goldsmith's day, perhaps only Irving and Thackeray had achieved it, till Mr. Hughes made himself the third. It is no easy thing to write a book that shall seem so easy,—to describe your school-days with such instinctive rejection of the unessential, that whoever has been a boy feels as if he were reading the history of his own, and that your volume shall be no more exotic in America than in England. Yet this Mr. Hughes accomplished; and it was in a great measure due to the fact, that beneath the charm of style the reader felt a real basis of manliness and sincerity.

His second book, "The Scouring of the White Horse," was less successful,—in part from the narrower range of its interest, and still more, perhaps, because it lacked the spontaneousness of the "School-Days." In his first book there was no suggestion of authorship; it seemed an inadvertence, something which came of itself;—but the second was made, and the kind fairy that stood godmother to its elder brother had been sent for and accordingly would not come.

In this first number of his new story Mr. Hughes seems to have found his good genius again, or his good genius to have found him. We meet our old friend Tom Brown once more, and commit ourselves trustingly to the same easy current of narrative and incident which was so delightful in the story of his Rugby adventures. We have no doubt the book will be instructive as well as entertaining; for we believe the author has had some practical experience as teacher in "The Working-Men's College,"—an excellent institution, in which instruction is given to the poor after work-hours, and which, beside Mr. Hughes, has had another man of genius, Mr. Ruskin, among its unpaid professors. The work is to be published simultaneously in this country and in England.

Avolio; a Legend of the Inland of Cos, with other Poems, Lyrical, Miscellaneous, and Dramatic. By PAUL H. HAYNE. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1859. pp. 244.

There is a great deal of real poetic feeling and expression in this volume, and, we think, the hope of better things to come. The author has not yet learned, and we could not expect it, that writers of verse tell us all they can think of, and writers of poetry only what they cannot help telling. The volume would have gained in quality by losing in quantity, but to give too much is the mistake of all young writers, and it is, perhaps, only by making it once for themselves that they can learn to sift. It is so hard at first, when all the sand seems golden! Of old the Muses were three, each of whom must reject something from the poem, but when verse-writing became easier and more traditional, their number was raised to nine, that they might be the harder to please. And what a difficult jury they are! and how long they stay out over their verdict!

But, after all, it seems to us that Mr. Hayne has the root of the matter in him; and we shall look to meet him again, bringing a thinner, yet a fuller book. The present volume shows thoughtfulness, culture, sensibility to natural beauty, and great refinement of feeling. We like the first poem, which is also the longest, best of all. The subject is an imaginative one,—and the choice of a subject is one great test of genuine aptitude and ability. In this poem, and in some of the sonnets, (which are good both in matter and construction,) Mr. Hayne shows a genuine vigor of expression and maturity of purpose. There is a tone of sadness in the volume, as if the author were surrounded by an atmosphere uncongenial to letters. The reader cannot fail to be struck with this, and also with the oddity of two or three political sonnets, in which Mr. Hayne calls on his fellow-citizens to rally for the defence of slavery in the name of freedom. The book is dedicated, in a very graceful and cordial sonnet, to Mr. E.P. Whipple; and it is seldom that South Carolina sends so pleasant a message to Massachusetts. Mr. Hayne need only persevere in self-culture to be able to produce poems that shall win for him a national reputation.

Fairy Dreams; or Wanderings in Elfland. By JANE G. AUSTIN. With Illustrations by Hammatt Billings. Boston: J.E. Tilton & Co. 1859.

This is a pretty book for children, written with no little feeling and fancy, and in a graceful style. The chimney-corner has been abolished by the economical furnace-register, and Santa Claus, if he come at all, must do it like an imp of the pit. The volumes for children to pore over, as they bake by the stove, or stew over the black hole in the floor, have also suffered an economic and practical change. No more fires, no more pretty fancies, seems to have been the doom. Parents who think, as we do, that children inhale practicality with our American atmosphere, and that a little encouragement of the imaginative side of their nature is not amiss, will be glad to drop Mrs. Austin's book into the proper stocking. The stories are well told; that, especially, of the Gray Cat is full of fanciful invention. The book is very prettily manufactured also, though we think publishers are carrying their fondness for tinted paper too far. Salmon-color is too much; the deepest tint allowable is that of cream from a cow that has grazed among buttercups.

Twelve Years of a Soldier's Life in India: Being Extracts from the Letters of the late Major W.S.R. HODSON, B.A., Trinity College, Cambridge; First Bengal European Fusileers, Commandant of Hodson's Horse. Including a Personal Narrative of the Siege of Delhi and Capture of the King and Princes. Edited by his Brother, the Rev. GEORGE H. HODSON, M.A., Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. From the Third and Enlarged English Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1860. 16mo. pp. 444.

This book should be widely read; or we might better say, this book will be widely read,—so widely, indeed, that there is no need for us to repeat its story here, or to give an abstract of its contents. Hodson was a man worth knowing, and his letters show him to us as he was. The special qualities of which Englishmen are proud, as the traits of national character, belonged in an uncommon degree to him. He was eminently truthful, staunch, and brave; he had a clear eye, a strong and ready hand, cool judgment, stern decision, and a tender heart. He might have borne the old Douglas motto on his shield.

He was trained under as good teachers as a young man ever had. At Rugby, under Dr. Arnold; then, for a year or two, living among the ennobling associations of Trinity College; then at Guernsey, as a young soldier, under Sir William Napier; then in India, with James Thomason, Lieutenant-Governor of the Northwest Provinces, one of the best rulers that India ever knew, "facile princeps of the whole Indian service"; and finally passing from him to serve under Sir Henry Lawrence, the noblest soldier of India, a man for whom common words of praise are insufficient,—Hodson had an unrivalled set of masters, and his life proves him to have been worthy of them.

The British rule in India is of such sort as to test the qualities of its officers to the last point. If they have anything good in them, it is sure to be brought into full action. Such responsibilities are thrown on them as at once to stimulate them to exertion of their best powers. Men who in the ordinary fields of work might remain all their lives mere commonplace mediocrities, under the discipline of Indian service, find out and show their real value. The Indian mutiny exhibited how common the rare qualities of foresight, energy, and enduring courage, and the still higher qualities of submission, patience, and faith, had become among those against whom the natives rose like a flood to overwhelm them in destruction. The little bands of English at Cawnpore, at Lucknow, and at many a less famous station, stood like rocks against the dashing of the storm. The qualities that enabled them to win the admiration even of their enemies, and to call forth the respect and the sorrow of the world, were the result, not of sudden stress, but of long and habitual training. The reader of Hodson's memoir will gain a knowledge of the processes by which such characters are developed.

The letters which make up the larger part of this book are written with animation and simplicity, and are full of spirited accounts of adventure, of rough and various service. The narrative which they afford of the siege of Delhi is of absorbing interest. The picture of the little army of besiegers, wasted by continual disease and exposure to the heats of an Indian summer,—worn by the constant sallies and attacks of a host of enemies trained in arms,—saddened by the receipt of evil tidings from all quarters,—feeling that upon their final success rested not only the hope of the continuance of British supremacy in India, but the very lives of those dear to them,—and, worst of all, compelled to submit to a succession of incompetent generals, whose timidity and irresolution baffled the best designs of officers and the dashing bravery of the troops;—the pictures which Hodson gives of this little army, of its unflagging spirit and resolution, and its valorous deeds, are drawn with such truth as to bring the successive scenes vividly before the imagination. Hodson himself was one of the best and most useful of a noble corps of officers. His modesty does not hide the grounds of the enthusiasm which was felt for him by his men,—of the admiration that he excited among his fellows. The story of the capture of the King and Princes, after the fall of Delhi, is one of the most interesting stories of daring ever told. You hold your breath as you read it. It was a gallant deed, done in the most gallant way.

Altogether, the book is one of thoroughly manly tone and temper,—a book to make those who read it manlier, to put to shame the cowardice of easy life, to make men more honest, more enduring, more energetic, by the example which it sets before them. Hodson's life was short, but its result will last. There was no sham about it, no meanness,—nothing but what was large, true, and generous. As one turns the last page, it is with no regret that such a man should have died in the fight, for he was a Christian soldier. He was the preux chevalier of our times. The words in which Sir Ector mourns for his brother, Sir Lancelot, are fit for his epitaph. "'Ah, Sir Lancelot,' said hee, 'thou were head of all christen knights! An now I dare say,' said Sir Ector, 'that, Sir Lancelot, there thou liest, thou were never matched of none earthly knight's hands; and thou were the curtiest knight that ever bare shield; and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrood horse; and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that ever strook with sword; and thou were the goodliest person that ever came among presse of knights; and thou were the meekest man and the gentlest that ever eate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortall foe that ever put speare in the rest.'"

Friends in Council. A Series of Readings and Discourse thereon. A New Series. 2 vols. Boston: James Munroe & Co. 1860.

The best class of readers in England and America are sure to give a cordial welcome to a new book by Mr. Helps. Nothing better need be said of this second series of "Friends in Council" than that it is a worthy sequel of the first. It is the work of a man of large experience and wide culture,—of one who is at the same time a student and a man of the world, versed in history and practically acquainted with affairs. Refined thoughtfulness and common sense combine to give value to all that Mr. Helps writes, and he is master of a style at once manly and elegant, quiet and strong. Two famous lines, which occur in a passage quoted in these volumes, serve well to characterize their merits:—

"Though deep, yet clear,—though gentle, yet not dull,—
Strong without rage,—without o'erflowing, full."

Such books have a special worth in these days of hasty writing. They admit one to the companionship of thoughtful, well-mannered gentlemen. One feels that he has been in good company, after reading them; and, whatever he may have gained of wisdom from the friends he has met in council, he is also improved in temper and in manners by their society.

The conversations which form the setting of the essays in these volumes enable Mr. Helps to present in an easy and effective way various sides of the important questions that he discusses. Completeness of statement is rarely to be obtained upon any of the deeper topics of life. If the golden side be displayed, the silver side is likely to be hidden. The same man holds various, though not irreconcilable opinions upon the same subject, according to the different lights in which he views it or the different phases it presents. The most honest man must sometimes appear inconsistent for the sake of truth; and the clearer a man's own convictions, the wider will be his charity for those of others. Mr. Helps exhibits admirably this natural and necessary diversity of thought, existing even where there is a coincidence of principle and of aim.

The essays upon War and Despotism are, perhaps, the ablest in these volumes, and deserve to be seriously viewed in the light of passing events. They are distinguished by freedom from exaggeration and by their moderation of statement. As in so many of the productions of the best English writers at the present day, something of despondency in regard to the condition of the world is to be traced in them. And truly, to one who looks at the state of Europe and of our own country, there is more need for faith than ground of hope.

But at this Christmas season, this season of peace and good-will, let all our readers read the essay on Pleasantness. And if they will but take its teachings to heart, we can wish them, with the certainty of the fulfilment of our wish, a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

The Marvellous Adventures and Rare Conceits of Master Tyll Owlglass. Newly collected, etc., by KENNETH R.H. MACKENZIE. With Illustrations by Crowquill. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1860. pp. xxxix., 255.

This is a very beautiful edition of a very amusing book. The preface and notes of Mr. Mackenzie will commend it to scholars, while the stories themselves will divert both young and old. A book of this kind, which can keep life in itself for more than three hundred years, must have some real humor and force at bottom. It is as good a specimen of mediaeval fun as could anywhere be found. With nothing like the satiric humor of the "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum," it appeals to a much larger circle of readers. We are very glad to meet it again in so handsome a dress, and with such really clever illustrations. It is just the book for a Christmas gift.

Reynard the Fox, after the German Version of Goethe. By THOMAS JAMES ARNOLD, Esq. With Illustrations from the Designs of Wilhelm von Kaulbach. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 346 and 348 Broadway. 1860. pp. 226.

It is very well that Mr. Arnold should tell us on the title-page that his version is after that of Goethe. Nothing could be truer,—and it is a very long way after, too. By substituting the slow and verbose pentameter of what is called the classic school of English poetry for the remarkably forth-right and simple eight-syllabic measure of the original, the translator has contrived to lose almost wholly that homely flavor of the old poet, which Goethe carefully preserved. We do not mean to say that this is altogether a bad version, as such things go; on the contrary, it has a great deal of spirit, as it could hardly fail to have, unless it belied its model altogether;—but it is as far as possible from giving any notion of the characteristic qualities of "Reinaert de Vos." If Mr. Arnold must change the measure, Chaucer's "Nonnes Preestes Tale" would have been a safer guide to follow.

The book, in spite of its American title-page, is wholly of English manufacture. It is a very handsome volume, and Kaulbach's illustrations are copied with tolerable success, though with inevitable inferiority to the German originals. Kaulbach is hardly so happy an animal-painter as Grandville, but he has at least given his subjects in this case a more human expression than in his monstrous caricatures of Shakspeare.

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