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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15,
+January, 1859, by Various
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: January 12, 2004  [eBook #10695]
+[Date last updated: July 17, 2005]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOLUME 3, ISSUE
+15, JANUARY, 1859***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Joshua Hutchinson, Keith M. Eckrich, and Project
+Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
+
+A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+Agrarianism
+
+Bulls and Bears
+Bundle of Old Letters, A
+
+Calculus, The Differential and Integral
+Charge with Prince Rupert
+Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith
+Coffee and Tea
+
+Did I?
+
+El Llanero
+
+Gymnasium, The
+
+Holbein and the Dance of Death
+
+Illustrious Obscure, The
+In a Cellar
+In the Pines
+
+Juanita
+
+Letter to a Dyspeptic, A
+Lizzy Griswold's Thanksgiving
+
+Men of the Sea
+Mien-yaun
+Minister's Wooing, The
+
+New Life of Dante, The
+
+Odds and Ends from the Old World
+Olympus and Asgard
+Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?
+
+Palfrey's and Arnold's Histories
+Plea for the Fijians, A
+Professor at the Breakfast-Table, The
+
+Roba di Roma
+
+Shakespeare's Art
+Smollett, Some Unedited Memorials of
+Stereoscope and Stereograph, The
+
+Trip to Cuba, A
+Two Sniffs
+
+Utah Expedition, The
+
+White's Shakspeare
+Why did the Governess Faint?
+Winter Birds, The
+
+
+POETRY.
+
+Achmed and his Mare
+At Sea
+
+Bloodroot
+
+Chicadee
+
+Double-Headed Snake of Newbury, The
+Drifting
+
+Hamlet at the Boston
+
+Inscription for an Alms-Chest
+
+Joy-Month
+
+Last Bird, The
+Left Behind
+
+Morning Street, The
+
+Our Skater Belle
+
+Palm and the Pine, The
+Philter, The
+Prayer for Life
+
+Sphinx, The
+Spring
+
+Two Years After
+
+Walker of the Snow, The
+Waterfall, The
+
+
+REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
+
+Allibone's Dictionary of Authors
+Arabian Days' Entertainments
+Avenger, The
+
+Bacon, The Works of
+Bitter-Sweet
+Bryant, Durand's Portrait of
+Bunsen's Gott in der Geschichte
+
+Cotton's Illustrated Cabinet Atlas
+Courtship of Miles Standish
+
+Dexter's Street Thoughts
+Duyckinck's Life of George Herbert
+
+Emerson, Rowse's Portrait of
+Ernest Carroll
+
+Furness's Thoughts on the Life and Character of Jesus
+
+Hamilton's Lecture on Metaphysics
+Hymns of the Ages
+
+Index to Catalogue of Boston City Library
+
+Lytton, R.B., (Owen Meredith,) Poems by
+
+Mathematical Monthly, The
+Morgan's, Lady, Autobiography
+Mothers and Infants, Nurses and Nursing
+Mustee, The
+
+Prescott's Philip II
+
+Sawyer's New Testament
+Seddon, Thomas, Memoir and Letters of
+Sixty Years' Gleanings from Life's Harvest
+Stratford Gallery, The
+Symbols of the Capital
+
+Truebner's Bibliographical Guide to American Literature
+
+Vernon Grove
+
+Whittier, Barry's Portrait of
+Wilson's Conquest of Mexico
+
+
+LIST OF BOOKS
+
+
+
+THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
+
+A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
+
+VOL. III.--JANUARY, 1859.--NO. XV.
+
+
+
+OLYMPUS AND ASGARD.
+
+How remote from the nineteenth century of the Christian era lies the
+old Homeric world! By the magic of the Ionian minstrel's verse that
+world is still visible to the inner eye. Through the clouds and murk of
+twenty centuries and more, it is still possible to catch clear glimpses
+of it, as it lies there in the golden sunshine of the ancient days. A
+thousand objects nearer in the waste of past time are far more muffled,
+opaque, and impervious to vision. As you enter it through the gates of
+the "Ilias" and "Odusseia," you bid a glad adieu to the progress of the
+age, to railroads and telegraph-wires, to cotton-spinning, (there might
+have been some of that done, however, in some Nilotic Manchester or
+Lowell,) to the diffusion of knowledge and the rights of man and
+societies for the improvement of our race, to humanitarianism and
+philanthropy, to science and mechanics, to the printing-press and
+gunpowder, to industrialism, clipper-ships, power-looms, metaphysics,
+geology, observatories, light-houses, and a myriad other things too
+numerous for specification,--and you pass into a sunny region of
+glorious sensualism, where there are no obstinate questionings of
+outward things, where there are no blank misgivings of a creature
+moving about in worlds not realized, no morbid self-accusings of a
+morbid methodistic conscience. All there in that old world, lit "by the
+strong vertical light" of Homer's genius, is healthful,
+sharply-defined, tangible, definite, and sensualistic. Even the divine
+powers, the gods themselves, are almost visible to the eyes of their
+worshippers, as they revel in their mountain-propped halls on the far
+summits of many-peaked Olympus, or lean voluptuously from their
+celestial balconies and belvederes, soothed by the Apollonian lyre, the
+Heban nectar, and the fragrant incense, which reeks up in purple clouds
+from the shrines of windy Ilion, hollow Lacedaemon, Argos, Mycenae,
+Athens, and the cities of the old Greek isles, with their shrine-capped
+headlands. The outlooks and watch-towers of the chief deities were all
+visible from the far streets and dwellings of their earthly
+worshippers, in that clear, shining, Grecian atmosphere. Uranography
+was then far better understood than geography, and the personages
+composing the heavenly synod were almost as definitely known to the
+Homeric men as their mortal acquaintances. The architect of the
+Olympian palaces was surnamed Amphigueeis, or the Halt. The Homeric
+gods were men divinized with imperishable frames, glorious and immortal
+sensualists, never visited by qualms of conscience, by headache, or
+remorse, or debility, or wrinkles, or dyspepsia, however deep their
+potations, however fiercely they indulged their appetites. Zeus, the
+Grand Seignior or Sultan of Olympus and father of gods and men,
+surpassed Turk and Mormon Elder in his uxoriousness and indiscriminate
+concubinage. With Olympian goddess and lone terrestrial nymph and
+deep-bosomed mortal lass of Hellas, the land of lovely women, as Homer
+calls it, did he pursue his countless intrigues, which he sometimes had
+the unblushing coolness and impudence to rehearse to his wedded wife,
+Here. His _list_ would have thrown Don Giovanni's entirely into the
+shade. Here, the queen of Olympus, called the Golden-Throned, the
+Venerable, the Ox-Eyed, was a sort of celestial Queen Bess, the
+undaunted she-Tudor, whose father, bluff Harry, was not a bad human
+copy of Zeus himself, the Rejoicer in Thunder.
+
+In that old Homeric heaven,--in those quiet seats of the gods of the
+heroic world, which were never shaken by storm-wind, nor lashed by the
+tempest that raved far below round the dwellings of wretched
+mortals,--in those quiet abodes above the thunder, there was for the
+most part nought but festal joy, music, choral dances, and emptying of
+nectar-cups, interrupted now and then by descents into the low-lying
+region of human life in quest of adventure, or on errands of divine
+intervention in the affairs of men, for whom, on the whole, Zeus and
+his court entertained sentiments of profound contempt. Once in a while
+Zeus and all his courtiers went on a festal excursion to the land of
+the blameless Ethiops, which lay somewhere over the ocean, where they
+banqueted twelve days. Why such a special honor as this was shown to
+these Ethiops is not explained. Within their borders were evidently the
+summer resorts, Newport and Baden-Baden, frequented by the Olympians.
+Only in great crises was the whole mythic host of the Grecian religion
+summoned to meet in full forum on the heights of the immemorial
+mountain. At such times, all the fountains, rivers, and groves of
+Hellas were emptied of their guardian daemons, male and female, who
+hastened to pay their homage to and receive their orders from the
+Cloud-Gatherer, sitting on his throne, in his great skyey Capitolium,
+and invested with all the pomp of mythic majesty, his ambrosial locks
+smoothly combed and brushed by some Olympian _friseur_, his eagle
+perched with ruffled plumes upon his fist, and everything else so
+arranged as most forcibly to impress the country visitors and rural
+incumbents with salutary awe for the occupant of their sky-Vatican.
+Whether these last were compelled to salute the Jovine great toe with a
+kiss is not recorded, there being no account extant of the ceremonial
+and etiquette of Olympus. Whatever it was, doubtless it was rigidly
+enforced; for the Thunderer, it would seem, had a Bastile, or lock-up,
+with iron doors and a brazen threshold specially provided for
+contumacious and disobedient gods.
+
+Zeus, although he could claim supreme dominion under the law of
+primogeniture, was originally only a coequal ruler with his two
+brothers, Hades, king of the underworld, and Ennosigaeus, monarch of
+the salt sea-foam. They were alike the sons and coequal heirs of
+Kronos, or Time, and the Moerae, or Destinies, had parcelled out the
+universe in three equal parts between them. But the position of Zeus in
+his serene air-realm gave him the advantage over his two brothers,--as
+the metropolitan situation of the Roman see in the capital of the world
+gave its diocesan, who was originally nothing more than the peer of the
+Bishops of Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage, and Constantinople, an
+opportunity finally to assert and maintain a spiritual lordship. This
+is a case exactly in point. It is certainly proper to illustrate a
+theocratic usurpation by an hierarchic one. Zeus, with his eagle and
+thunder and that earthquaking nod, was too strong for him of the
+trident and him of the three-headed hound. The whole mythic host
+regarded Jove's court as a place of final resort, of ultimate appeal.
+He was recognized as the Supreme Father, Papa, or Pope, of the Greek
+mythic realm. The nod of his immortal head was decisive. His azure
+eyebrows and ambrosial hair were full of fate.
+
+The wars of mortals in Hellas and Dardanland were matters of more
+interest to the Olympian celestials than any other mere human
+transactions. These occasioned partisanships, heartburnings, and
+factions in the otherwise serene Olympian palaces. Even Father Zeus
+himself acknowledged a bias for sacred Ilium and its king and people
+over all the cities of terrestrial men beneath the sun and starry
+heaven. In the ten-years' war at Troy, the Olympians were active
+partisans upon both sides at times, now screening their favorites from
+danger, and now even pitting themselves against combatants of more
+vulnerable flesh and blood. But in the matter of vulnerability they
+seem not to have enjoyed complete exemption, any more than did Milton's
+angels. Although they ate not bread nor drank wine, still there was in
+their veins a kind of ambrosial blood called _ichor_, which the prick
+of a javelin or spear would cause to flow freely. Even Ares, the genius
+of homicide and slaughter, was on one occasion at least wounded by a
+mortal antagonist, and sent out of the melee badly punished, so that he
+bellowed like a bull-calf, as he mounted on a dusty whirlwind to
+Olympus. Over his misadventures while playing his own favorite game
+certainly there were no tears to be shed; but when, prompted by
+motherly tenderness, Aphrodite, the soft power of love,--she of the
+Paphian boudoir, whose recesses were glowing with the breath of Sabaean
+frankincense fumed by a hundred altars,--she at whose approach the
+winds became hushed, and the clouds fled, and the daedal earth poured
+forth sweet flowers,--when such a presence manifested herself on the
+field of human strife on an errand of motherly affection, and attempted
+to screen her bleeding son from the shafts of his foes with a fold of
+her shining _peplum_, surely the audacious Grecian king should have
+forborne, and, lowering his lance, should have turned his wrath
+elsewhere. But no,--he pierced her skin with his spear, so that,
+shrieking, she abandoned her child, and was driven, bleeding, to her
+immortal homestead. The rash earth-born warrior knew not that he who
+put his lance in rest against the immortals had but a short lease of
+life to live, and that his bairns would never run to lisp their sire's
+return, nor climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
+
+Homer, in the first books of his "Ilias," permits us to glance into the
+banqueting-hall of Olympus. The two regular pourers of nectar, to wit,
+Hebe and Ganymede, are off duty. Hephaestus the Cripple has taken their
+place; and as he halts about from guest to guest, inextinguishable
+laughter arises among the gods at his awkward method of "passing the
+rosy." His lameness was owing to that sunset fall on the isle of Lemnos
+from the threshold of heaven. So, all day long, says the poet, they
+revelled, Apollo and the Muses performing the part of a ballet-troop.
+It is pleasing to learn that the Olympians kept early hours,
+conforming, in this respect, to the rule of Poor Richard. Duly at set
+of sun they betook themselves to their couches. Zeus himself slept, and
+by his side Here of the Golden Throne.
+
+Who would wish to have lived a pagan under that old Olympian
+dispensation, even though, like the dark-eyed Greek of the Atreidean
+age, his fancy could have "fetched from the blazing chariot of the Sun
+a beardless youth who touched a golden lyre and filled the illumined
+groves with ravishment"?--even though, like him, he might in
+myrtle-grove and lonely mountain-glen have had favors granted him even
+by Idalian Aphrodite the Beautiful, and felt her warm breath glowing
+upon his forehead, or been counselled by the blue-eyed Athene, or been
+elevated to ample rule by Here herself, Heaven's queen? That Greek
+heaven was heartless, libidinous, and cold. It had no mild divinities
+appointed to bind up the broken heart and assuage the grief of the
+mourner. The weary and the heavy-laden had no celestial resource
+amongst its immortal revellers and libertines, male and female. There
+was no sympathy for mortal suffering amongst those divine sensualists.
+They talked with contempt and unsympathizing ridicule of the woes of
+the earthborn, of the brevity of mortal life, and of its miseries. A
+boon, indeed, and a grateful exchange, was the Mother Mild of the Roman
+Catholic Pantheon, the patroness of the broken-hearted, who inclines
+her countenance graciously to the petitions of womanly anguish, for the
+voluptuous Aphrodite, the haughty Juno, the Di-Vernonish Artemis, and
+the lewd and wanton nymphs of forest, mountain, ocean, lake, and river.
+Ceres alone, of the old female classic daemons, seemed to be endowed
+with a truly womanly tenderness and regard for humankind. She, like the
+Mater Dolorosa, is represented in the myths to have known bereavement
+and sorrow, and she, therefore, could sympathize with the grief of
+mothers sprung from Pyrrha's stem. Nay, she had envied them their
+mortality, which enabled them to join their lost ones, who could not
+come back to them, in the grave. Vainly she sought to descend into the
+dark underworld to see her "young Persephone, transcendent queen of
+shades." Not for her weary, wandering feet was a single one of the
+thousand paths that lead downward to death. Her only consolation was in
+the vernal flowers, which, springing from the dark earthly mould,
+seemed to her to be
+
+  "heralds from the dreary deep,
+  Soft voices from the solemn streams,"
+
+by whose shores, veiled in eternal twilight, wandered her sad child,
+the queen of the realm of Dis, with its nine-fold river, gates of
+adamant, and minarets of fire. The heartlessness of all the ethnic
+deities, of whatever age or nation, is a noticeable feature, especially
+when contrasted with the unfathomable pity of their Exterminator, who
+wept over the chief city of his fatherland, and would have gathered it,
+as a hen gathereth her chickens, under the wings of his love, though
+its sons were seeking to compass his destruction. Those old ethnic
+deities were cruel, inexorable, and relentless. They knew nothing of
+mercy and forgiveness. They ministered no balm to human sorrow. The
+daemons who wandered in human shape over the classic lands of old were
+all fickle and malevolent. They oftentimes impelled their victims to
+suicide. The ghouls that haunt the tombs and waste places of the
+regions where they were once worshipped are their lineal descendants
+and modern representatives. The vampires and pest-hags of the Levant
+are their successors in malignity. The fair humanities of the old
+religion were fair only in shape and exterior. The old pagan gods were
+friendly only to kings, heroes, and grandees; they had no beatitude for
+the poor and lowly. Human despair, under their dispensation, knew no
+alleviation but a plunge from light and life into the underworld,
+--rather than be monarch of which, the shade of Achilles avers,
+in the "Odusseia," that it would prefer to be the hireling and
+drudge of some poor earthly peasant. Elysium was only for a privileged
+few.
+
+It has been said that the old ethnic creeds were the true religion
+"growing wild,"--that the human soil was prepared by such kind of
+spiritual crops and outgrowths, with their tares and weeds intermingled
+with wheat, for the seed that was finally to be sown by the Divine
+Sower,--that, erroneous as they were in a thousand respects, they were
+genuine emanations of the religious nature in man, and as such not to
+be stigmatized or harshly characterized,--that without them the human
+soil could not have been made ready for the crop of unmixed truth. This
+may be true of some of them, though surely not of the popular form of
+the old Greek ethnic faith. Its deities were nothing better than the
+passions of human nature projected upon ethereal heights, and
+incarnated and made personal in undecaying demonic shapes,--not
+conditioned and straitened like the bodies of man, but enjoying
+perpetual youth and immunity from death in most cases, with permission
+to take liberties with Space and Time greater even than are granted to
+us by steam and telegraph-wires.
+
+The vulgar Grecian polytheism was all material. It had no martyrs and
+confessors. It was not worth dying for, as it was good for nothing to
+live by. The religion of Hellas was the religion of sensualistic beauty
+simply. It was just the worship for Pheidias and Praxiteles, for the
+bard of Teos and the soft Catullus, for sensual poet, painter, and
+sculptor. But "the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle," although we
+gather most of our knowledge of Olympus and the Olympians from his
+verse, was worthy of a loftier and purer heaven than the low one under
+which he wandered from city to city, singing the tale of Troy divine,
+and hymns and paeans to the gods. The good and the true were mere
+metaphysical abstractions to the old Greek. What must he have been when
+it would not have been safe for him to leave his wife alone with the
+best and highest of his gods? The ancient Hellenes were morally most
+vicious and depraved, even when compared with contemporary heathen
+nations. The old Greek was large in brain, but not in heart. He had
+created his gods in his own image, and they were--what they were. There
+was no goodness in his religion, and we can tolerate it only as it is
+developed in the Homeric rhapsodies, in the far-off fable-time of the
+old world, and amongst men who were but partially self-conscious. In
+that remote Homeric epoch it is tolerable, when cattle-stealing and war
+were the chief employments of the ruling caste,--and we may add,
+woman-stealing, into the bargain. "I did not come to fight against the
+Trojans," says Achilles, "because I had suffered any grievance at their
+hands. They never drove off my oxen and horses or stole my harvests in
+rich-soiled Phthia, the nurse of heroes; for vale-darkening mountains
+and a tumultuous sea separate us."
+
+Into that old Homeric world we enter through the portals of the "Ilias"
+and "Odusseia," and see the peaks of Olympus shining afar off in white
+splendor like silvery clouds, not looking for or expecting either a
+loftier or a purer heaven. Somewhere on the bounds of the dim
+ocean-world we know that there is an exiled court, a faded sort of St.
+Germain celestial dynasty, geologic gods, coevals of the old Silurian
+strata,--to wit, Kronos, Rhea, Nox, _et al._ Here these old,
+unsceptred, discrowned, and sky-fallen potentates "cogitate in their
+watery ooze," and in "the shady sadness of vales,"--sometimes visited
+by their successors for counsel or concealment, or for the purpose of
+establishing harmony amongst them. The Sleep and Death of the Homeric
+mythology were naturally gentle divinities,--sometimes lifting the
+slain warrior from the field of his fame, and bearing him softly
+through the air to his home and weeping kindred. This was a gracious
+office. The saintly legends of the Roman Church have borrowed a hint
+from this old Homeric fancy. One pleasant feature of the Homeric
+battles is, that, when some blameless, great-souled champion falls, the
+blind old bard interrupts the performances for a moment and takes his
+reader with him away from the din and shouting of the battle,
+following, as it were, the spirit of the fallen hero to his distant
+abode, where sit his old father, his spouse, and children,--thus
+throwing across the cloud of battle a sweet gleam of domestic, pastoral
+life, to relieve its gloom. Homer, both in the "Ilias" and "Odusseia,"
+gives his readers frequent glimpses into the halls of Olympus; for
+messengers are continually flashing to and fro, like meteors, between
+the throne of Zeus and the earth. Sometimes it is Hermes sandalled with
+down; sometimes it is wind-footed Iris, who is winged with the emerald
+plumes of the rainbow; and sometimes it is Oneiros, or a Dream, that
+glides down to earth, hooded and veiled, through the shadow of night,
+bearing the behests of Jove. But however often we are permitted to
+return to the ambrosial homestead of the ever-living gods in the wake
+of returning messengers, we always find it the same calm region, lifted
+far up above the turbulence, the perturbations, the clouds and storms
+of
+
+  "That low spot which men call earth,"
+
+--a glorious aerial Sans-Souci and house of pleasaunce.
+
+It is curious that the atheistic Lucretius has given us a most glowing
+description of the Olympian mansions; but perhaps the Olympus of the
+Epicurean poet and philosopher is somewhat higher up and more
+sublimated and etherealized than the Olympus of Homer and of the
+popular faith. In a flash of poetic inspiration, he says, "The walls of
+the universe are cloven. I see through the void inane. The splendor
+(_numen_) of the gods appears, and the quiet seats which are not shaken
+by storm-winds nor aspersed by rain-clouds; nor does the whitely
+falling snow-flake, with its hoar rime, violate _their summery warmth_,
+but an ever-cloudless ether laughs above them with widespread
+radiance." Lucretius had all these lineaments of his Epicurean heaven
+from old Homer. They are scattered up and down the "Ilias" and
+"Odusseia" in the shape of _disjecta membra_. For instance, the Olympus
+which he beholds through a chasm in the walls of the universe, towering
+into the pure empyrean, has some of the features of Homer's island
+Elysiums, the blissful abodes of mortal heroes who have been divinized
+or translated. The Celtic island-valley of Avalon, the abode of King
+Arthur, "with its orchard-lawns and bowery hollows," so exquisitely
+alluded to by Tennyson, is a kindred spot with the Homeric Elysian
+plain. Emerson says, "The race of gods, or those we erring own, are
+shadows floating up and down in the still abodes." This is exactly the
+meaning of Lucretius also. They are all air-cities, these seats of the
+celestials, whatever be the creed,--summery, ethereal climes, fanned
+with spice-winds and zephyrs. Meru, Kaf, Olympus, Elboorz,--they are
+all alike. The ethnic superior daemons were well termed the powers of
+the air. Upward into the far blue gazes the weary and longing saint and
+devotee of every faith. Beyond the azure curtains of the sky, upward
+into the pure realm, over the rain-cloud and the thunder and the silver
+bars of the scirrhus, he places his quiet seats, his mansions of rest.
+
+The German poet, Schiller, who was a worshipper of Art and sensualistic
+beauty, and who regarded the sciences as the mere handmaids of Art,
+exalting the aesthetic above the moral nature in man, quite naturally
+regretted that he had not lived in the palmy days of the
+anthropomorphic creed of Hellas, before the dirge of Pan was chanted in
+the Isle of Naxos. His "Gods of Greek Land" is as fine a piece of
+heathenish longing as could well be written at so late a day. His heart
+was evidently far away from the century in which he lived, and pulsated
+under that distant Grecian sky of which he somewhere speaks. For
+artistic purposes the myths of Greece formed a glorious faith. Grace
+and symmetry of form were theirs, and they satiated the eye with
+outward loveliness; but to the deep fountains of feeling and sentiment,
+such as a higher faith has unsealed in the heart, they never
+penetrated. What a poor, narrow little world was that myth-haunted one
+of the Grecian poet and sculptor, and even philosopher, compared with
+the actual world which modern science is revealing from year to year!
+What a puny affair was that Grecian sun, with its coachman's apparatus
+of reins, fire-breathing nags, and golden car, which Schiller looks
+back to, in the spirit of Mr. Weller, Senior, when compared with the
+vast empyreal sphere and light-fountain of modern science, with its
+retinue of planets, ships of space, freighted with souls! Science the
+handmaid of Art! Well might the mere artist and worshipper of
+anthropomorphic beauty shrink appalled, and sigh for a lodge under some
+low Grecian heaven and in the bosom of some old myth-peopled Nature, as
+he trembled before the apocalypses of modern sidereal science, which
+has dropped its plummet to unimaginable depths through the nebulous
+abysses of space, shoaled with systems of worlds as the sea is with its
+finny droves. The Nature and the Physical Universe of the old ethnic
+Greek formed only a little niche and recess, on the walls of which the
+puny human image was easily reflected in beautiful and picturesque and
+grotesque shadows, which were mistaken for gods. But the Nature and
+Universe revealed by modern Christian science are too vast and profound
+to mirror anything short of the image of the Omnipotent himself.
+
+Still there is a period in the life of every imaginative youth, when he
+is a pagan and worships in the old Homeric pantheon,--where self-denial
+and penance were unknown, and where in grove and glen favored mortal
+lover might hear the tread of "Aphrodite's glowing sandal." The
+youthful poet may exclaim with Schiller,--
+
+  "Art thou, fair world, no more?
+  Return, thou virgin-bloom on Nature's face!
+  Ah, only on the minstrel's magic shore
+  Can we the footstep of sweet Fable trace!
+  The meadows mourn for the old hallowing life;
+  Vainly we search the earth of gods bereft;
+  Where once the warm and living shapes were rife,
+  Shadows alone are left!
+  Cold, from the North, has gone
+  Over the flowers the blast that chilled their May;
+  And, to enrich the worship of the One,
+  A universe of gods must pass away!
+  Mourning, I search on yonder starry steeps,
+  But thee, no more, Selene, there I see!
+  And through the woods I call, and o'er the deeps,
+  And--Echo answers me." [Bulwer's Translation.]
+
+The Elysian beauty and melancholy grace which Wordsworth throws over
+the shade of Alcestis were gleams borrowed from a better world than the
+mythic Elysium. Neither Olympus nor Erebus disdained the pleasures of
+sense.
+
+Shakspeare, in his "Midsummer-Night's Dream," has mingled the
+mythologies of Hellas and Scandinavia, of the North and the South,
+making of them a sort of mythic _olla podrida_. He represents the tiny
+elves and fays of the Gothic fairyland, span-long creatures of dew and
+moonshine, the lieges of King Oberon, and of Titania, his queen, as
+making an irruption from their haunted hillocks, woods, meres, meadows,
+and fountains, in the North, into the olive-groves of Ilissus, and
+dancing their ringlets in the ray of the Grecian Selene, the chaste,
+cold huntress, and running by the triple Hecate's team, following the
+shadow of Night round the earth. Strangely must have sounded the horns
+of the Northern Elfland, "faintly blowing" in the woods of Hellas, as
+Oberon and his grotesque court glanced along, "with bit and bridle
+ringing," to bless the nuptials of Theseus with the bouncing Amazon.
+Strangely must have looked the elfin footprints in the Attic green.
+Across this Shakspearean plank, laid between Olympus and Asgard, or
+more strictly Alfheim, we gladly pass from the sunny realm of Zeus into
+that of his Northern counterpart, Odin, who ought to be dearer and more
+familiar to his descendants than the Grecian Jove, though he is not.
+The forms which throng Asgard may not be so sculpturesquely beautiful,
+so definite, and fit to be copied in marble and bronze as those of
+Olympus. There may be more vagueness of outline in the Scandinavian
+abode of the gods, as of far-off blue skyey shapes, but it is more
+cheerful and homelike. Pleasantly wave the evergreen boughs of the
+Life-Tree, Yggdrasil, the mythic ash-tree of the old North, whose
+leaves are green with an unwithering bloom that shall defy even the
+fires of the final conflagration. Iduna, or Spring, sits in those
+boughs with her apples of rejuvenescence, restoring the wasted strength
+of the gods. In the shade of its topmost branches stands Asgard, the
+abode of the Asen, who are called the Rafters of the World,--to wit,
+Odin, Thor, Freir, and the other higher powers, male and female, of the
+old Teutonic religion. In Asgard is Valhalla, the hall of elect heroes.
+The roots of this mundane ash reach as far downwards as its branches do
+upwards. Its roots, trunk, and branches together thrid the universe,
+shooting Hela, the kingdom of death, Midgard, the abode of men, and
+Asgard, the dwelling of the gods, like so many concentric rings.
+
+This ash was a psychological and ontological plant. All the lore of
+Plato and Kant and Fichte and Cousin was audible in the sigh of its
+branches. Three Norns, Urt, Urgand, and Skuld, dwelt beneath it, so
+that it comprehended time past, present, and future. The gods held
+their councils beneath it. By one of its stems murmured the Fountain of
+Mimir, in Niflheim or Mistland, from whose urn welled up the ocean and
+the rivers of the earth. Odin had his outlook in its top, where kept
+watch and ward the All-seeing Eye. In its boughs frisked and gambolled
+a squirrel called _Busybody_, which carried gossip from bough to root
+and back. The warm Urdar Fountain of the South, in which swam the sun
+and moon in the shape of two swans, flowed by its celestial stem in
+Asgard. A tree so much extended as this ash of course had its parasites
+and _rodentia_ clinging to it and gnawing it; but the brave old ash
+defied them all, and is to wave its skywide umbrage even over the ruins
+of the universe, after the _dies irae_ shall have passed. So sings the
+Voluspa. This tree is a worthy type of the Teutonic race, so green, so
+vigorous, so all-embracing. We should expect to find the chief object
+in the Northern myth-world a tree. The forest was ever dear to the sons
+of the North, and many ancient Northern tribes used to hold their
+councils and parliaments under the branches of some wide-spreading oak
+or ash. Like its type, Yggdrasil, the Teutonic race seems to be
+threading the earth with the roots of universal dominion, and, true to
+hereditary instincts, it is belting the globe with its colonies,
+planting it, as it were, with slips from the great Mundane Ash, and
+throwing Bifroest bridges across oceans, in the shape of
+telegraph-cables and steamships.
+
+Asgard is a more homelike place than Olympus. Home and fireside, in
+their true sense, are Teutonic institutions. Valhalla, the hall of
+elect heroes, was appropriately shingled with golden shields. Guzzlers
+of ale and drinkers of _lagerbier_ will be pleased to learn that this
+Northern Valhalla was a sort of celestial beer-saloon, thus showing
+that it was a genuine Teutonic paradise; for ale would surely be found
+in such a region. In the "Prose Edda," Hor replies to Gangler--who is
+asking him about the board and lodgings of the heroes who had gone to
+Odin in Valhalla, and whether they had anything but water to drink--in
+huge disdain, inquiring of Gangler whether he supposed that the
+Allfather would invite kings and jarls and other great men, and give
+them nothing to drink but water. How do things divine and supernatural,
+when conceived of by man and cast in an earthly, finite mould,
+necessarily assume human attributes and characteristics! Strong drinks,
+the passion of the Northern races in all ages, are of course found in
+their old mythic heaven, in their fabled Hereafter,--and even boar's
+flesh also. The ancient Teuton could not have endured a heaven with
+mere airy, unsubstantial joys. There must be celestial roasts of strong
+meat for him, and flagons of his ancestral ale. His descendants to this
+day never celebrate a great occasion without a huge feed and
+corporation dinners, thus establishing their legitimate descent from
+Teutonic stock. The Teutonic man ever led a life of vigorous action;
+hence his keen appetite, whetted by the cold blasts of his native
+North. What wonder, then, at the presence of sodden boar's flesh in his
+ancient Elysium, and of a celestial goat whose teats yielded a strong
+beverage? The Teuton liked not fasting and humiliation either in
+Midgard or Asgard. He was ever carnivorous and eupeptic. We New
+Englanders are perhaps the leanest of his descendants, because we have
+forsaken too much the old ways and habits of the race, and given
+ourselves too much to abstractions and transcendentalism. The old
+Teuton abhorred the abstract. He loved the concrete, the substantial.
+The races of Southern Europe, what are now called the Latin races, were
+more temperate than the Teutonic, but they were far less brave, honest,
+and manly. Their sensuality might not be so boisterous, but it was more
+bestial and foul. Strength and manliness, and a blithe, cheery spirit,
+were ever the badges of the Teuton. But though originally gross and
+rough, he was capable of a smoother polish, of a glossier enamel, than
+a more superficial, trivial nature. He was ever deeply thoughtful, and
+capable of profounder moods of meditation than the lightly-moved
+children of the South. Sighs, as from the boughs of Yggdrasil, ever
+breathed through his poetry from of old. He was a smith, an artificer,
+and a delver in mines from the beginning. The old Teutonic Pan was far
+more musical and awe-inspiring than his Grecian counterpart The
+Noon-spirit of the North was more wild than that of the South. How all
+the ancient North was alive in its Troll-haunted hillocks, where
+clanged the anvil of the faery hill-smith, and danced and banqueted the
+Gnome and Troll,--and in its streams and springs, musical with the
+harps of moist-haired Elle-women and mermaids, who, ethnic daemons
+though they were, yet cherished a hope of salvation! The myth-spirits
+of the North were more homely and domestic than those of the South, and
+had a broader humor and livelier fancies. The Northern Elf-folk were
+true natives of the soil, grotesque in costume and shape.
+
+The Teuton of to-day is the lineal descendant of the old worshipper of
+Thor. Mioellnir, the hammer of Thor, still survives in the gigantic
+mechanisms of Watt, Fulton, and Stephenson. Thor embodied more Teutonic
+attributes than Odin. The feats which Thor performed in that strange
+city of Utgard, as they are related in the old "Prose Edda," were
+prophetic of the future achievements of the race, of which he was a
+chief god. Thor once went on a journey to Joetunheim, or Giant-land,--a
+primitive outlying country, full of the enemies of the Asgard dynasty,
+or cosmical deities. In the course of the journey, he lodged one night
+with his two companions in what he supposed to be a huge hall, but
+which turned out to be the glove of a giant named Skrymir, who was
+asleep and snoring as loud as an earthquake, near by. When the giant
+awoke, he said to Thor, who stood near,--"My name is Skrymir, but I
+need not ask thy name, for I know that thou art the god Thor. But what
+hast thou done with my glove?" Sure enough, on looking, Thor found that
+he had put up that night in Skrymir's handshoe, or glove. The giant and
+Thor breakfasted amicably together and went on their way till night,
+when Skrymir gave up his wallet of provisions to Thor and his two
+companions, and bade them supply themselves,--he meanwhile composing
+himself to sleep, snoring so loudly that the forest trembled. Thor
+could not undo the giant's wallet, and in his wrath he smote the
+somnolent lubber with his mallet, a crushing blow. Skrymir simply
+awoke, and inquired whether a leaf had not fallen upon his head from
+the oak-tree under which he was lying. Conceive the chagrin and shame
+of Thor at this question! A second time Thor let fly at the giant with
+his mallet. This time it sank into his skull up to the handle, but with
+no more satisfactory result. The giant merely inquired whether an acorn
+had not dropped on his head, and wanted to know how Thor found himself,
+whether he slept well or not; to which queries Thor muttered an answer,
+and went away, determined to make a third and final effort with his
+mallet, which had never failed him until then. About daybreak, as
+Skrymir was taking his last snooze, Thor uplifted his hammer, clutching
+it so fiercely that his knuckles became white. Down it came, with
+terrific emphasis, crushing through Skrymir's cheek, up to the handle.
+Skrymir sat up and inquired if there were not birds perched on the tree
+under which he had been lodging; he thought he felt something dropping
+on his head,--some moss belike. Alas for Thor and his weapon! For once
+he found himself worsted, and his mightiest efforts regarded as mere
+flea-bites; for Skrymir's talk about leaves and acorns and moss was
+merely a sly piece of humor, levelled at poor crestfallen Thor, as he
+afterwards acknowledged. After this incident, Thor and his two
+companions, the peasant's children, Thjalfi and Roeska, and Skrymir went
+their ways, and came to the high-gated city of Utgard, which stood in
+the middle of a plain, and was so lofty that Thor had to throw back his
+head to see its pinnacles and domes. Now Thor was by no means small;
+indeed, in Asgard, the city of the AEsir, he was regarded as a giant;
+but here in Utgard Skrymir told him he had better not give himself any
+airs, for the people of that city would not tolerate any assumption on
+the part of such a mannikin!
+
+Utgard-Loki, the king of the city, received Thor with the utmost
+disdain, calling him a stripling, and asked him contemptuously what he
+could do. Thor professed himself ready for a drinking-match. Whereupon
+Utgard-Loki bade his cup-bearer bring the large horn which his
+courtiers had to drain at a single draught, when they had broken any of
+the established rules and regulations of his palace. Thor was thirsty,
+and thought he could manage the horn without difficulty, although it
+was somewhat of the largest. After a long, deep, and breathless pull
+which he designed as a finisher, he set the horn down and found that
+the liquor was not perceptibly lowered. Again he tried, with no better
+result; and a third time, full of wrath and chagrin, he guzzled at its
+contents, but found that the liquor still foamed near to the brim. He
+gave back the horn in disgust. Then Utgard-Loki proposed to him the
+childish exercise of lifting his cat. Thor put his hands under Tabby's
+belly, and, lifting with all his might, could only raise one foot from
+the floor. He was a very Gulliver in Brobdignag. As a last resort, he
+proposed to retrieve his tarnished reputation by wrestling with some
+Utgardian; whereupon the king turned into the ring his old nurse, Elli,
+a poor toothless crone, who brought Thor to his knees, and would have
+thrown him, had not the king interfered. Poor Thor! The next morning he
+took breakfast in a sad state of mind, and owned himself a shamefully
+used-up individual. The fact was, he had strayed unconsciously amongst
+the old brute powers of primitive Nature, as he ought to have perceived
+by the size of the kids they wore. He had done better than he was aware
+of, however. The three blows of his hammer had fallen on nothing less
+than a huge mountain, instead of a giant, and left three deep glens
+dinted into its surface; the drinking-horn, which he had undertaken to
+empty, was the sea itself, or an outlet of the sea, which he had
+perceptibly lowered; while the cat was in reality the Midgard Serpent,
+which enringed the world in its coils, and the toothless she-wrestler
+was Old Age! What wonder that Thor was brought to his knees? On finding
+himself thus made game of, Thor grew wroth, but had to go his ways, as
+the city of Utgard had vanished into thin air, with its cloud-capped
+towers and enormous citizens. Thor afterwards undertook to catch the
+Midgard Serpent, using a bull's head for bait. The World-Snake took the
+delicious morsel greedily, and, finding itself hooked, writhed and
+struggled so that Thor thrust his feet through the bottom of his boat,
+in his endeavors to land his prey.
+
+There is a certain grotesque humor in Thor's adventures, which is
+missed in his mythologic counterpart of the South, Hercules. It is the
+old rich "world-humor" of the North, genial and broad, which still
+lives in the creations of the later Teutonic Muse. The dints which Thor
+made on the mountain-skull of Skrymir were types and forerunners of the
+later feats of the Teutonic race, performed on the rough, shaggy,
+wilderness face of this Western hemisphere, channelling it with watery
+highways, tunnelling and levelling its mountains, and strewing its
+surface with cities. The old Eddas and Voluspas of the North are full
+of significant lore for the sons of the Northmen, wherever their lot is
+cast. There they will find, that, in colonizing and humanizing the face
+of the world, in zoning it with railroads and telegraph-wires, in
+bridging its oceans with clipper-ships, and steamboats, and in weaving,
+forging, and fabricating for it amid the clang of iron mechanisms, they
+are only following out the original bent of the race, and travelling in
+the wake of Thor the Hammerer.
+
+While the Grecian and Roman myths are made familiar by our
+school-books, it is to be regretted that the wild and glorious mythic
+lore of our ancient kindred is neglected. To that you must go, if you
+would learn whence came
+
+      "the German's inward sight,
+  And slow-sure Britain's secular might,"
+
+and it may be added, the Anglo-American's unsurpassed practical energy,
+skill, and invincible love of freedom. From the fountains of the
+ash-tree Yggdrasil flowed these things. Some of the greatest of modern
+Teutonic writers have gone back to these fountains, flowing in these
+wild mythic wastes of the Past, and have drunk inspiration thence.
+Percy, Scott, and Carlyle, by so doing, have infused new sap from the
+old life-tree of their race into our modern English literature, which
+had grown effete and stale from having had its veins injected with too
+much cold, thin, watery Gallic fluid. Yes, Walter Scott heard the
+innumerous leafy sigh of Yggdrasil's branches, and modulated his harp
+thereby. Carlyle, too, has bathed in the three mystic fountains which
+flow fast by its roots. In an especial manner has the German branch of
+the Teuton kindred turned back to those old musical well-springs
+bubbling up in the dim North, and they have been strengthened and
+inspired by the pilgrimage. "Under the root, which stretches out
+towards the Joetuns, there is Mimir's Well, in which Wisdom and Wit lie
+hidden." Longfellow, too, has drunk of Mimir's Well, and hence the rare
+charm and witchery of his "Evangeline," "Hiawatha," and "Golden
+Legend." This well in the North is better than Castalian fount for the
+children of the North.
+
+How much more genial and lovable is Balder, the Northern Sun-god, than
+his Grecian counterpart, the lord of the unerring bow, the Southern
+genius of light, and poesy, and music! Balder dwelt in his palace of
+Breidablick, or Broadview; and in the magical spring-time of the North,
+when the fair maiden Iduna breathed into the blue air her genial
+breath, he set imprisoned Nature free, and filled the sky with silvery
+haze, and called home the stork and crane, summoning forth the tender
+buds, and clothing the bare branches with delicate green. "Balder is
+the mildest, the wisest, and the most eloquent of all the AEsir," says
+the "Edda." A voice of wail went through the palaces of Asgard when
+Balder was slain by the mistletoe dart. Hermod rode down to the kingdom
+of Hela, or Death, to ransom the lost one. Meantime his body was set
+adrift on a floating funeral pyre. Hermod would have succeeded in his
+mission, had not Lok, the Spirit of Evil, interposed to thwart him. For
+this, Lok was bound in prison, with cords made of the twisted
+intestines of one of his own sons; and he will remain imprisoned until
+the Twilight of the Gods, the consummation of all things.
+
+On the shoulders of Odin, the supreme Scandinavian deity, sat two
+ravens, whispering in his ears. These two ravens are called Hugin and
+Munin, or Thought and Memory. These "stately ravens of the saintly days
+of yore" flew, each day, all over the world, gathering "facts and
+figures," doubtless for their August master. It is a beautiful fable,
+and reminds one of Milton's "thoughts which wander through eternity."
+The dove of the Ark, and the bird which perched on the shoulder of the
+old Plutarchan hero Sertorius, are recalled by this Scandinavian
+legend:--
+
+  "Hugin and Munin
+  Each down take their flight
+  Earth's fields over."
+
+Nobler birds, these dark ravens of the Northern Jove, than the
+bolt-bearing eagle of his Grecian brother. So much deeper, more
+significant, and musical are the myths of the stern, dark, and tender
+North than those of the bright and fickle South!
+
+Notwithstanding that Valhalla was full of invincible heroes, and that
+the celestial city of Asgard was the abode of the chief gods, still it
+had a watchman who dwelt in a tower at the end of the Bridge Bifroest.
+Heimdall was his name, and he was endowed with the sharpest ear and eye
+that ever warder possessed. He could hear grass and wool grow with the
+utmost distinctness. The AEsir, notwithstanding their supreme position,
+had need of such a warder, with his Gjallar-horn, mightier than the
+Paladin Astolfo's, that could make the universe reecho to its blast.
+The truth was, over even the high gods of Asgard hung a Doom which was
+mightier than they. It was necessary for them to keep watch and ward,
+therefore, for evil things were on their trail. There were vast,
+mysterious, outlying regions beyond their sway: Niflheim or Mistland,
+Muspellheim or Flameland, and Joetunheim, the abode of the old
+earth-powers, matched with whom, even Thor, the strongest of the Asen,
+was but a puny stripling. Over this old Scandinavian heaven, as over
+all ethnic celestial abodes, the dark Destinies lorded it with
+unquestioned sway. From the four corners of the world, at last, were to
+fly the snow-flakes of the dread Fimbul, Winter, blotting the sun, and
+moaning and drifting night and day. Three times was Winter to come and
+go, bringing to men and gods "a storm-age, a wolf-age." Then cometh
+Ragnaroek, the Twilight of the Gods! Odin mounts his war-steed. The vast
+ash Yggdrasil begins to shiver through all its height. The beatified
+heroes of Valhalla, who have ever been on the watch for this dread era,
+issue forth full of the old dauntless spirit of the North to meet the
+dread agents of darkness and doom. Garm, the Moonhound, breaks loose,
+and bays. "High bloweth Heimdall his horn aloft. Odin counselleth
+Mimir's head." The battle joins. In short, the fiery baptism prophesied
+in the dark scrolls of Stoic sage and Hebrew and Scandinavian scald
+alike wraps the universe. The dwarfs wail in their mountain-clefts. All
+is uproar and hissing conflagration.
+
+  "Dimmed's now the sun;
+  In ocean earth sinks;
+  From the skies are cast
+  The sparkling stars;
+  Fire-reek rageth
+  Around Time's nurse,
+  And flickering flames
+  With heaven itself shall play."
+
+By "Time's nurse," in the foregoing lines from the "Voluspa," is meant
+the Mundane Tree Yggdrasil, which shall survive unscathed, and wave
+mournfully over the universal wreck. But in the "Edda" Hor tells
+Gangler that "another earth shall appear, most lovely and verdant, with
+pleasant fields, where the grain shall grow unsown. Vidar and Vali
+shall survive. They shall dwell on the Plain of Ida, where Asgard
+formerly stood. Thither shall come the sons of Thor, bringing with them
+their father's mallet. Baldur and Hoedur shall also repair thither from
+the abode of Death. There shall they sit and converse together, and
+call to mind their former knowledge and the perils they underwent."
+
+Perhaps we might give the Eddaic Twilight of the Gods a more human and
+strictly European interpretation. May it not also foreshadow the great
+Armageddon struggle which is evidently impending between the Teutonic
+races in Western Europe, with their Protestantism, free speech,
+individual liberty, right of private judgment, and scorn of all
+thraldom, both material and mental, on the one side, and the dark
+powers of absolutism, repression, and irresponsible authority in church
+and state, on the other? How Russia, the type of brute-force, presses
+with crushing weight on intellectual Germany! Soon she will absorb the
+old kingdoms of Scandinavia,--to wit, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. On
+the shores of Norway the ruler of the Sclavonic race will hang over
+Scotland and England, like a bird of prey about to swoop upon his
+victim. All despots and absolutists will array themselves under his
+banner or be his auxiliaries. The old hierarchies will be banded with
+him to crush out Protestantism, which is a plant of Teutonic growth.
+Old Asia, with her rancor and despotic traditions, recognizes in the
+Russian imperial rule a congenial rallying-point against the
+progressive and hated Anglo-Saxonism and Protestantism of the West. A
+decisive struggle is surely impending between freedom and absolutism,
+between the bigoted adherents of the old faiths and the nations that
+have cut loose from them. Perhaps this struggle may be prefigured in
+the old Northern myth of the Twilight of the Gods.
+
+All the old mythic cosmogonies are strangely suggestive and full of
+mystic import,--that of Northern Odinism more than any other. In that
+dim Niflheim, for instance, with its well-springs of the waters of the
+upper world confusedly bubbling, and its metallic ore-veins, and dusk,
+vaporous atmosphere, whence issued the old Nibelungen heroes of the
+great Teutonic epos, there is much that is suggestive. May not one
+discover in this old cosmogonic myth a dim hint of the nebular
+hypothesis of creation, as it is called? Certainly, Niflheim, the
+Mistland, and Muspellheim, the Flameland, commingled together, would
+produce that hot, seething, nebulous fire-mist, out of which, the
+physicists say, was evolved, by agglomeration and centrifugal and
+centripetal attraction, our fair, harmonious system of worlds bounded
+by outermost Neptune, thus far the Ultima Thule of the solar system.
+Perhaps Asgard, translated from mythic into scientific language, means
+the Zodiacal Light, and the Bridge Bifroest, the Milky Way.
+
+How curious, to trace in the grotesque mythic cosmogonies of India,
+Greece, and Scandinavia, modern geology, botany, chemistry, etc.,--the
+vast and brutal giants of the Eddas and other old mythic scriptures
+being recognized as impersonations of the forces of Nature! The old
+mythic cosmogonists and the modern geologists and astronomers do not
+differ amongst themselves so much, after all. The mythic physicists had
+personal agents at work, in place of our simple elemental ones; the
+result is the same. Take the mythic cosmogonies of ancient Greece,
+Scandinavia, and India, and the geologies and astronomies of the
+present day, and compare their pages, changing things personal into
+things impersonal. The expulsion and banishment of the old shapeless
+mundane deities by a new and more beautiful race of gods, the cosmical
+divinities, the powers and rulers of an ordered world, are intelligible
+enough when translated into our modern geological nomenclature. The
+leaves of the Stone Book, as the rocky layers of the earth have been
+called, and the blue hieroglyphic page of heaven, also, are more
+intelligibly read by the aid of the mythic glosses of old religion, of
+Saga, Rune, and Voluspa. They spell the telluric records aright in
+their own peculiar language. The assaults of the Typhons and Joetuns
+upon the celestial dynasty, and their attempts to scale the fiery
+citadels of the gods by making ladders of mountains, indicate clearly
+enough the different revolutions read by geology in the various strata
+and rocky layers piled upon the primitive granite of the globe, the
+bursting through of eruptions from the central fire, extruding and
+uplifting mountains, and the subsidence of the ocean from one
+ripple-marked sea-beach to another lower down. In those dim geologic
+epochs, where annals are written on Mica Slate, Clay Slate, and
+Silurian Systems, on Old Red Sandstones and New, on Primary and
+Secondary Rocks and Tertiary Chalk-beds, there were topsy-turvyings
+amongst the hills and gambollings and skippings of mountains, to which
+the piling of Pelion upon Ossa was a mere cobblestone feat. Alps and
+Apennines then played at leap-frog. Vast basaltic masses were
+oftentimes extruded into the astonished air from the very heart and
+core of the world. In truth, the old mythic cosmogonies of the ancient
+East, South, and North are not a whit too grotesque in their
+descriptions of the embryo earth, when it lay weltering in a sort of
+uterine film, assuming form and regular lineaments.
+
+There is nothing more drear, monstrous, wild, dark, and lonely in the
+descriptions of the mythologic than of the scientific page. What more
+wild and drear is there, even in Indian cosmogonic fable, than that
+strange carbonigenous era of the globe, whose deposits, in the shape of
+petrified forests, now keep us warm and cook our food, and whose relics
+and souvenirs are pressed between the stone leaves of the secondary
+rock for preservation by the Omnipotent Herbalist? Land and water were
+then distinguishable,--but as yet there was no terrestrial animal,
+nothing organic but radiata and molluscs, holly-footed and head-footed,
+and other aquatic monstrosities, mailed, plated, and buckler-headed,
+casting the shovel-nosed shark of the present Cosmos entirely into the
+shade, in point of horned, toothed, and serrated horrors. These
+amorphous creatures glided about in the seas, and vast sea-worms, or
+centipedal asps, the parents of modern krakens and sea-serpents,
+doubtless, accompanied them. There stood that unfinished world reeking
+with charcoal fumes, its soft, fungous, cryptogamic vegetation
+efflorescing with fierce luxuriance in that ghastly carbonic
+atmosphere. Rudimental palms and pines of mushroom growth stood there
+motionless, sending forth no soft and soul-like murmurs into the lurid
+reek; for as yet leaves and flowers and blue skies and pure breezes
+were not,--nothing but whiffs of mephitic and lethal vapor ascending,
+as from a vast charcoal brazier. No lark or linnet or redbreast or
+mocking-bird could live, much less warble, in those carbonic times. The
+world, like a Mississippi steamer, was coaling, with an eye to the
+needs of its future biped passengers. The embryotic earth was then
+truly a Niflheim, or Mistland,--a dun, fuming region. Those were the
+days, perhaps, when Nox reigned, and the great mundane egg was hatching
+in the oven-like heat, from which the winged boy Eros leaped forth,
+"his back glittering with golden plumes, and swift as eddying air." We
+have it on good authority, that the Adirondack Mountains of New York,
+and the Grampian Hills of Scotland, where Norval was to feed his
+flocks, had already upheaved their bare backs from the boiling caldrons
+of the sea, thus stealing a march on the Alps and many other more
+famous mountains.
+
+How opposite and remote from each other are the mythologic ages and the
+nineteenth century! The critical and scientific spirit of the one is in
+strange contrast with the credulous, blindly reverent spirit of the
+other. Mythology delegated the government of the world to inferior
+deities, the subjects of an omnipotent Fate or Necessity; while, to
+show how extremes meet, mere science delegates it to chemical and
+physiological agencies, and ends, like the mythic cosmogonies, in some
+irrepressible spontaneous impulse of matter to develope itself in the
+ever-changing forms of the visible universe. Myriads of gods were the
+actors in "the rushing metamorphosis" of the old myth-haunted Nature;
+while chemic and elemental forces perform the same parts in the
+masquerade of the modern _Phasis_. Both mythology and science,
+therefore, stick fast in secondary causes.
+
+Myths are the religion of youth, and of primitive, unsophisticated
+nations; while science may be called the religion of the mature man,
+full of experience and immersed in the actual. The Positivism of Comte,
+like the old myth-worship, sets up for its deity human nature
+idealized, adorned with genius and virtue. The Positivist worships
+virtuous human nature, conditioned and limited as it is; while the
+Mythist worshipped it reflected on the outer world and endowed with
+supernatural attributes, clothed with mist-caps and wishing-caps that
+gave it dominion over space and time. The restless, glittering,
+whimsical sprites of fairy mythology, that were believed of old to have
+so large a share in shaping the course of Nature and of human life,
+have vanished from the precincts of the schoolmaster at least. They
+could not endure the clear eyebeam of Science, which has searched their
+subterranean abodes, withering them up and metamorphosing them into
+mere physiological forces. Reason and scientific investigation have no
+patience with the things of faith and imagination. Our poets now have
+to go back to the Past, to the standpoints of the old pagan bards.
+Tennyson lives in the land of the Lotophagi, in the Arabian Nights of
+the Bagdad of Caliph Haroun, and in the orchard lawns of King Arthur's
+Avalon. So, too, Longfellow must inhale the golden legendary air of the
+Past. The mere humanitarian bards, who try to make modern life trip to
+the music of trochees, dactyles, and spondees, fail miserably.
+Industrialism is not poetical. Our modern life expresses itself in
+machines, in mathematical formulas, in statistics and with scientific
+precision generally. Art and poetry are pursued in the spirit of past
+ages, and concern themselves with the symbols, faiths, and ideal
+creations of the Past.
+
+It is true, however, that all past ages of the world are
+contemporaneous in this age. For example, we have in this nineteenth
+century the patriarchal age of the world still surviving in the desert
+tents of the Arab,--while the mythic, anthropomorphic period is still
+extant in Persia, China, and India, and even among the nations of the
+West, in the rustic nooks and corners of the Roman Catholic countries
+of Europe. But the existing nations, which still preserve that old
+ethnic worship and the mediaeval superstitions, are mere lingerers and
+camp-followers in the march of humankind. Under the ample skirts of the
+Roman Church still cower and lurk the superstitions of the old ethnic
+world, baptized to be sure, and called by new names. The Roman see has
+ever had a lingering kindness for the fair humanities of old religion,
+which live no longer in the faith of Protestant reason and free
+inquiry. She compromised with them of old, and they have clung about
+her waist ever since. She has put her uniform upon them, and made them
+do service in her cause, and keep alive with their breath the fast
+expiring embers of faith and imaginative credulity, which she so much
+loves and commends. Like an equivocal and ambiguous nature, the old
+Mother Church, as she is called, is upward fair and Christian, but
+downward foul and ethnic. She attacks human nature on the side of the
+heart, the senses, and those old instincts which Coleridge says bring
+back the old names. Reason and intellection, sharpened by science, she
+abhors; but so large a part of mankind still linger in the rear of the
+vanguard nations, that she has yet a long lease of life to run, with
+myriads of adherents to cling to her with fanatical tenacity,--nay,
+with proselytes from amongst the poetical, the artistic, and
+imaginative, who voluntarily prefer to the broad sunshine of science
+the twilight gloom of her sanctuaries, in order there the better to woo
+the old inspiration of art, superstitious faith, and poesy. The old
+ethnic instincts of human nature are formidable auxiliaries of the
+Mother Church. Puseyism would rehallow the saintly wells even of
+Protestant, practical England, and send John Bull again on a pilgrimage
+to the shrines of Canterbury and Walsingham. Compare a Yankee,
+common-school-bred, and an Austrian peasant, if you would learn how the
+twelfth and nineteenth centuries live together in the current year. The
+one is self-reliant, helpful, and versatile, not freighted with any
+old-world rubbish; while the other is abject, and blindly reverent, and
+full of the old mythic imagination that is in strong contrast with the
+keen common-sense of the Protestant, who dispels all twilight fantasies
+with a laugh of utter incredulity. The one sees projected on the outer
+world his own imaginings, now fair, now gloomy; while the other sees in
+the world, land to be cut up into corner-lots for speculation, and
+water for sawmills and cotton-mills, and to float clipper-ships and
+steamers. The one is this-worldly; the other is other-worldly. The one
+is armed and equipped at all points to deal with the Actual, to subdue
+it and make the most of it; he aims for success and wealth, for
+elegance, plenty, and comfort in his home;--while the other is
+negligent, a frequenter of shrines, in all things too superstitious,
+overlooking and slighting mere physical comfort, and content with
+misery and dirt. The Romish peasant lives begirt by supernatural
+beings, who demand a large share of his time and thoughts for their
+service; while the thrifty Protestant artisan or agriculturist is a
+practical naturalist, keeping his eye fixed on the main chance.
+Brownson would have us believe that he is morally and spiritually the
+inferior of the former. For this light of common day, which now shines
+upon the world, the multiplication-table, and reading and writing, are
+far better than amulet, rosary, and crucifix.
+
+After all, this light of common day, which the bards and saints so much
+condemn and disdain, when subjected to the microscopic and telescopic
+ken of modern science, opens as large a field for wonder and for the
+imagination to revel in as did the old marvels, fables, and fictions of
+the Past. The True is beginning to be found as strange, nay, stranger
+than the purely Imaginative and Mythic. The Beautiful and the Good will
+yet be found to be as consistent with the strictly True and Actual,
+with the plain Matter-of-Fact as it is called, as they have been, in
+the heroic ages of human-achievement and endurance, with the glorious
+cheats and delusions that nerved man to high emprise. The modern
+scientific discoverer and inventor oftentimes finds himself engaged in
+quests as strange as that of the Holy Grail of Round-Table fiction. To
+the Past, with its mythic delusions, simplicity, and dense ignorance of
+Nature, we can never return, any more than the mature man can shrink
+into the fresh boy again. Nor is it to be regretted. The distant in
+time, like the distant in space, wears a halo, a vague, blue
+loveliness, which is all unreal. The tired wayfarer, who is weary with
+the dust, the din, and stony footing of the Actual and the Present, may
+sometimes fondly imagine, that, if he could return to the far Past, he
+would find all smooth and golden there; but it is a pleasant delusion
+of that glorious arch-cheat, the Imagination. Yet if we cannot go back
+to the Past, we can march forward to a Future, which opens a deeper and
+more wondrous and airier vista, with its magicians of the Actual
+casting into shade the puny achievements of old necromancy and mythic
+agencies.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+JUANITA.
+
+Yes! I had, indeed, a glorious revenge! Other people have had home,
+love, happiness; they have had fond caresses, tender cares, the bright
+faces of children shining round the board. I had none of these; my
+revenge has stood to me in place of them all. And it has stood well.
+
+Love may change; loved ones may die; the fair-faced children may grow
+up hard-hearted and ungrateful. But my revenge will not deceive or
+disappoint me; it cannot change or pass away; it will last through Time
+into Eternity.
+
+I was left an orphan in early childhood. My father was an officer in
+the American Navy; my mother a Spaniard. She was very beautiful, I
+always heard; and her miniature, which my father's dying hand placed
+about my neck, proclaimed her so. A pale, clear, olive tint, eyes of
+thrilling blackness, long, lustrous hair, and a look of mingled
+tenderness and melancholy made it, in my thought, the loveliest face
+that mortal eyes could see.
+
+My parents left me no fortune, and I fell to the care of my father's
+only brother, a man of wealth and standing. I have no story to tell of
+the bitterness of dependence,--of slights, and insult, and privation.
+My uncle had married, somewhat late in life, a young and gentle woman;
+when I was twelve years old she became the mother of twins,--two lovely
+little girls. No one, unacquainted with the family history, could have
+supposed that I was other than the elder sister of Florence and
+Leonora. Every indulgence was granted me, every advantage of dress and
+education bestowed upon me. So far as even I could see, my uncle and
+aunt regarded me as their own child. Nor was I ungrateful, but repaid
+them with a filial reverence and affection.
+
+I did not inherit the fulness of my mother's beauty, but had yet some
+traits of her,--the pale, clear skin, the large, black eyes, the glossy
+and abundant hair. Here the resemblance ceased. I have heard my uncle
+say,--how often!--"Your mother, Juanita, had the most perfect form I
+ever saw, except in marble"; all Spanish women, indeed, he told me, had
+a full, elastic roundness of shape and limb, rarely seen among our
+spare and loose-built nation. I was American in form, at least,--slight
+and stooping, with a certain awkwardness, partly to be imputed to my
+rapid growth, partly to my shyness and reserve. I was insatiably fond
+of reading, little attracted toward society. When my uncle's house, as
+often happened, was full of gay company, I withdrew to my own room, and
+read my favorite authors in its pleasant solitude. I was ill at ease
+with lively, fashionable people,--very much at home with books. Thanks
+to my uncle's care, I was well educated, even scholarly, for my age and
+sex. My studious habits, far from being discouraged, were praised by
+all the household, and I was looked upon as a prodigy of cleverness and
+industry.
+
+A widow lady, of the name of Haughton, came to live in the little
+cottage near us when I was fifteen years old. She was well-born, but
+poor, and had known many sorrows. My aunt, Mrs. Heywood, soon became
+interested in her, and took pleasure in offering her those numerous
+attentions which a wealthy neighbor can so easily bestow, and which are
+so grateful to the recipient. Mrs. Haughton and her sons were frequent
+guests at our house; and we, too, spent many pleasant hours in the
+vine-covered porch of the cottage. I had few companions, and John and
+William Haughton were very welcome to me. They were somewhat older than
+I,--John twenty-two, and William two years younger; and I was thus just
+able to escape regarding them with that profound contempt which the
+girl of fifteen usually feels for "boys." After knowing them awhile I
+felt how baseless such contempt would be; for they possessed a depth
+and maturity of character rarely seen except in men of much experience.
+John was grave and thoughtful; his livelier brother often said he had
+come into the world some centuries too late,--that he was meant for an
+Augustine or a Pascal, so studious was he, and so saintly. Do not fancy
+that he was one of those stiff, bespectacled, pedantic youths who
+cannot open their lips without a classic allusion or a Greek quotation;
+nothing could be farther from the truth. He was quiet and retiring;
+very few guessed how beneath that exterior, so unassuming, lay hid the
+noblest aspirations, the most exalted thought. It was John I should
+have loved.
+
+But it was William who won my heart, even without an effort. I, the
+pale, serious girl, loved with a wild idolatry the gay and careless
+youth. Never, from that day till now, have I seen a man so perfect in
+all manly beauty. Strength and symmetry were united in his tall,
+athletic figure; his features were large, but nobly formed; his hair,
+of a sunny hue, fell in rich masses over a broad, white brow. So might
+Apollo have looked in the flush of his immortal youth.
+
+At first I gazed at him only with the enthusiasm which his extreme
+beauty might well awaken in the heart of a romantic maiden; then I grew
+to see in the princely type of that beauty a reflection of his mind.
+Did ever any fond fool so dote upon her Ideal as I on mine? All
+generous thoughts, all noble deeds, seemed only the fit expression of
+his nature. Then I came to mingle a reverence with my admiration. We
+were friends; he talked to me much of his plans in life,--of the future
+that lay before him. What an ambitious spirit burned within him!--a
+godlike ambition I thought it then. And how my weak, womanish heart
+thrilled with sympathy to his! With what pride I listened to his words!
+with what fervor I joined in his longings!
+
+There came a time when I trembled before him. I could no longer walk
+calmly arm-in-arm with him under the linden-trees, hearkening joyfully.
+I dared not lift my eyes to his face; I turned pale with suppressed
+feeling, if he but spoke my name--Juanita--or took my hand in his for
+friendly greeting. What a hand it was!--so white, and soft, and
+shapely, yet so powerful! It was the right hand for him,--a fair and
+delicate seeming, a cruel, hidden strength. When he spoke of the future
+my heart cried out against it; it was intolerable to me. In its bright
+triumphs I could have no part; thereto I could follow him only with my
+love and tears. The present alone was mine, and to that I passionately
+clung. For I never dreamed, you see, that he could love me.
+
+My manner toward him changed; I was fitful and capricious. I dreaded,
+above all things, that he should suspect my feelings. Sometimes I met
+him coldly; sometimes I received his confidences with an indifferent
+and weary air. This could not last.
+
+One night--it was a little time before he left us--he begged me to walk
+with him once more under the lindens. I made many excuses, but he
+overruled them all. We left the brilliantly-lighted rooms and stood
+beneath the solemn shadow of the trees. It was a warm, soft night; the
+harvest moon shone down upon us; a south wind moaned among the
+branches. We walked silently on till we reached a rustic seat, formed
+of gnarled boughs fantastically bound together; here he made me sit
+down and placed himself beside me.
+
+"Juanita," he said, in a tone so soft, so thrillingly musical, that I
+shall never forget it, "what has come between us? Are you no longer my
+friend?"
+
+I tried to answer him, and could not; love and grief choked my
+utterance.
+
+"Look at me," he said.
+
+I looked. The moon shone full on his face; his eyes were bent on mine.
+What a serpent-charm lurked in their treacherous blue depths! If,
+looking at me thus, he had bidden me kill myself at his feet, I must
+have done it.
+
+"Juanita," he said, with a smile of conscious power, "you love me! But
+why should that destroy our happiness?"
+
+He held out his arms; I threw myself on his bosom in an agony of shame
+and joy. Oh, Heaven! could it be possible that he loved me at last?
+
+Long, long, we sat there in the moonlight, his arms around me, my hand
+clasped in his. Poor hand! even by that faint radiance how dark and
+thin it looked beside his, so white and rounded! How gloriously
+beautiful was he! what a poor, pale shadow I! And yet he loved me! He
+did not talk much of it; he spoke more of the future,--_our_ future. It
+all lay before him, a bright, enchanted land, wherein we two should
+walk together. We had not quite reached it, but we surely should, and
+that ere long.
+
+The steps toward it were prosaic enough, save as his imagination
+brightened them. An early friend of his dead father, a distinguished
+lawyer, wishing to further William's advancement in life, gave him the
+opportunity of studying his profession with him,--offering him, at the
+same time, a home in his own family. From these slender materials
+William's fancy built air-castles the most magnificent. He would study
+assiduously; with such a prize in view, he fondly said, his patience
+would never weary. He felt within himself the consciousness of talent;
+and talent and industry _must_ succeed. A bright career was before
+him,--fame, fortune; and all were to be laid at my feet; all would be
+valueless, if not shared with me.
+
+"Ah, William," I asked, with a moment's sorrowful doubt, "are you sure
+of that? Are you certain that it is not fame you look forward so
+eagerly to possess, instead of me?"
+
+"How _dare_ you say such a thing?" he answered, sternly. I did not mind
+the sternness; there was love behind it.
+
+"And what am I to do while you are thus winning gold and glory?" I
+asked, at length.
+
+"I will tell you, Juanita. In the first place, you are _not_ to waste
+your time and spirits in long, romantic reveries, and vain pining
+because we cannot be together."
+
+"Indeed, I will not!" was my quick reply, though I colored deeply. I
+was ashamed that he thought me in danger of loving him too well. "I
+know you think me foolish and sentimental; but I assure you I will try
+to be different, since you wish it."
+
+"That is my own dear girl! You must go out,--you must see people,--you
+must enjoy yourself. You must study, too; don't let your mind rust
+because you are engaged. It will be quite time enough for that when we
+are married."
+
+"You need not be afraid; I shall always wish to please you, William,
+and so I shall always endeavor to improve."
+
+"Good child!" he said, laughing. "But you will not always be such an
+obedient infant, Juanita. You will find out your power over me, and
+then you will want to exercise it, just for the pleasure of seeing me
+submit. You will be despotic about the veriest trifles, only to show me
+that my will must bow to yours."
+
+"That will never be! I have no will of my own, where you are concerned,
+William. I only ask to know your wishes, that I may perform them."
+
+"Is that indeed so?" he said, with a new tenderness of manner. "I am
+very glad; for, to tell the truth, my love, I fear I should have little
+patience with womanish caprices. I have reasons always for what I do
+and for what I require, and I could not long love any one who opposed
+them."
+
+Again I assured him that he need feel no such dread. How happy we
+were!--yes, I believe he loved me enough then to be happy, even as I
+was.
+
+It was so late before we thought of going in, that a messenger was sent
+to seek us, and many a fine jest we had to encounter when we reached
+the drawing-room.
+
+The next day, William spoke to my uncle, who seemed to regard the
+matter in a light very different from ours. He said, we were a mere boy
+and girl, that years must elapse before we could marry, and by that
+time we should very probably have outgrown our liking for each other;
+still, if we chose, we might consider ourselves engaged; he did not
+know that he had any objection to make. This manner of treating the
+subject was not a flattering one; however, we had his consent,--and
+that was the main point, after all.
+
+So we were troth-plight; and William went forth on his career of labor
+and success, and I remained at home, loving him, living for him,
+striving to make my every act what he would have it. I went into
+company as he had bidden me; I studied and improved myself; I grew
+handsomer, too. All who saw me noticed and approved the alteration in
+my appearance. I was no longer awkward and stooping; my manner had
+acquired something of ease and gracefulness; a faint bloom tinged my
+cheek and made my dark eyes brighter. I was truly happy in the change;
+it seemed to render me a little more suited to him, who was so proudly,
+so splendidly handsome.
+
+I remembered what he had said too well to spend much time in
+love-dreams; but my happiest moments were when I was alone, and could
+think of him, read his letters, look at his picture, and fancy the
+joyfulness of his return.
+
+His letters!--there the change first showed itself. At first they were
+all, and more than all, I could wish. I blushed to read the ardent
+words, as I did when he had spoken them. But by-and-by there was a
+different tone: I could not describe it; there was nothing to complain
+of; and yet I felt--so surely!--that something was wrong. I never
+thought of blaming him; I dreaded lest I had in some way wounded his
+affection or his pride. I asked no explanation; I thought to do so
+might annoy or vex him, for his was a peculiar nature. I only wrote to
+him the more fondly,--strove more and more to show him how my whole
+heart was his. But the change grew plainer as months passed on; and
+some weeks before the time appointed for his return, the letters ceased
+altogether.
+
+This conduct grieved me, certainly, yet I was more perplexed than
+unhappy. It never occurred to me to doubt his love; I thought there
+must be some mistake, some offence unwittingly given, and I looked to
+his coming to clear away all doubt and trouble. But I longed so for
+that coming!--it seemed as if the weeks would never end. I knew he
+loved me; but I needed to hear him say it once more,--to have every
+shadow dispelled, and nothing between us but the warmest affection and
+fullest confidence.
+
+In such a mood I met him. The house was full of guests, and I could not
+bear to see him for the first time before so many eyes. I had watched,
+as may well be believed, for his arrival, and a little before dark had
+seen him enter his mother's house. He would surely come over soon; I
+ran down the long walk, and paced up and down beneath the trees,
+awaiting him. As soon as he came in sight I hastened toward him; he met
+me kindly, but the change that had been in his letters was plainer yet
+in his manner. It struck a chill to my heart.
+
+"I suppose you have a house full of company, as usual," he remarked
+presently, glancing at the brilliant windows.
+
+"Yes, we have a number of friends staying with us. Will you go in and
+see them? There are several whom you know."
+
+"Thank you,--not to-night; I am not in the mood. And I have a good deal
+to say to you, Juanita, that deeply concerns us both."
+
+"Very well," I replied; "you had better tell me at once."
+
+We walked on to the old garden-chair, and sat down as we had done that
+memorable night. We were both silent,--I from disappointment and
+apprehension. He, I suppose, was collecting himself for what he had to
+say.
+
+"Juanita," he spoke at last, taking my hand in his, "I do not know how
+you will receive what I am about to tell you. But this I wish you to
+promise me: that you will believe I speak for our best happiness,
+--yours as well as mine."
+
+"Go on," was all my reply.
+
+"A year ago," he continued, "we sat here as we do now, and, spite of
+doubts and misgivings and a broken resolution, I was happier than I
+shall ever be again. I had loved you from the first moment I saw you,
+with a passion such as I shall never feel for any other woman. But I
+knew that we were both poor; I knew that marriage in our circumstances
+could only be disastrous. It would wear out your youth in servile
+cares; it would cripple my energies; it might even, after a time,
+change our love to disgust and aversion. And so, though I believed
+myself not indifferent to you, I resolved never to speak of my love,
+but to struggle against it, and root it out of my heart. You know how
+differently it happened. Your changed manner, your averted looks, gave
+me much pain. I feared to have offended you, or in some way forfeited
+your esteem. I brought you here to ask an explanation. I said,
+'Juanita, are you no longer my friend?' You know what followed; the
+violence of your emotion showed me all. You remember?"
+
+Did I not?--and was it not generous of him to remind me then?
+
+"I saw you loved me, and the great joy of that knowledge made me forget
+prudence, reason, everything. Afterwards, when alone, I tried to
+justify to myself what I had done, and partially succeeded. I argued
+that we were young and could wait; I dreamed, too, that my ardor could
+outrun time, and grasp in youth the rewards of mature life. In that
+hope I left you.
+
+"Since then my views have greatly changed. I have seen something--not
+much, it is true--of men and of life, and have found that it is an easy
+thing to dream of success, but a long and difficult task to achieve it.
+That I have talent it would be affectation to deny; but many a poor and
+struggling lawyer is my equal. The best I can hope for, Juanita, is a
+youth of severe toil and griping penury, with, perhaps, late in
+life,--almost too late to enjoy it,--competence and an honorable name.
+And even that is by no means secure; the labor and the poverty may last
+my life long.
+
+"You have been reared in the enjoyment of every luxury which wealth can
+command. How could you bear to suffer privations, to perform menial
+labors, to be stinted in dress, deprived of congenial society, obliged
+to refrain from every amusement, because you were unable to afford the
+expense? How should you like to have a grinding economy continually
+pressing upon you, in every arrangement of your household, every detail
+of your daily life? to have your best days pass in petty cares and
+sayings, all your intellect expended in the effort to make your paltry
+means do the greatest possible service?"
+
+It was not a pleasant picture, but, harshly drawn as it was, I felt in
+the fulness of my love that I could do all that, and more, for him. Oh,
+yes! for him and with him I would have accepted any servitude, any
+suffering. Yet a secret something withheld me from saying so; and how
+glad I soon was that I had kept silence!
+
+"You make no reply, Juanita," he said. "Well, I might put on a pretence
+of disinterestedness, and say that I was unwilling to bind you to such
+a fate, and therefore released you from your engagement. It would not
+be altogether a pretence, for nothing could be more painful to me than
+to see the brightness of your youth fading away in the life I have
+described. But I think of myself, too; comforts, luxuries, indulgences,
+I value highly. Since my father's death I have tasted enough of poverty
+to know something of its bitterness; and to be doomed to it for life is
+appalling to me. The sordid cares of narrow means are so distasteful,
+that I cannot contemplate them with any degree of patience. After a day
+of exhausting mental effort, to return to a dingy, ill-furnished
+home,--to relieve professional labors by calculations about the
+gas-bill or the butcher's account,--I shrink from such a miserable
+prospect! I love the elegant, the high-bred, the tasteful, in women; I
+am afraid even my love for you would alter, Juanita, to see you day by
+day in coarse or shabby clothing, performing such offices as are only
+suited to servants,--whom we could not afford to keep.
+
+"I have thought of it a great deal, and it seems to me that it is
+useless and hopeless, that it would be the wildest folly, to continue
+our engagement. With our tastes and habits, we must seek in marriage
+the means of comfort, the appliances of luxury. Others may find in it
+the bewildering bliss we might have known, had fortune been favorable
+to us; but, as it is, I think the best, the wisest, the happiest thing
+we can do is--to part!"
+
+Oh, Heaven! this from him!
+
+"Still, Juanita, if you think otherwise," he went on after a moment's
+pause,--"if you prefer to hold me to our engagement, I am ready to
+fulfil it when you wish."
+
+It was like a man to say this, and then to feel that he had acted
+uprightly and honorably!
+
+I said nothing for a time; I could not speak. All hell woke in my
+heart. I knew then what lost spirits might feel,--grief, and wounded
+pride, and rage, hatred, despair! In the midst of all I made a vow; and
+I kept it well!
+
+How I had loved this man!--with what a self-forgetting, adoring love!
+He had been my thought, day and night. I would have done
+anything,--sacrificed, suffered anything,--yes, sinned even,--to please
+his lightest fancy. And he cast me coldly off because I had no
+fortune!--trampled my heart into the dust because I was poor!
+
+"You make no answer, Juanita," he said, at length.
+
+"I am thinking," I replied, looking up and laughing slightly, "how to
+say that I quite agree with you, and have been planning all day how I
+should manage to tell you the very same thing."
+
+Miserable falsehood! But I spoke it so coolly, that he was thoroughly
+deceived. He never suspected the truth,--my deep love, my outraged
+pride.
+
+"It is just as you have said, William. We have elegant tastes, and no
+means of gratifying them. What should we do together? Only make each
+other miserable. You need a rich wife, I a rich husband, who can supply
+us with the indulgences we demand. To secure these we can well make the
+sacrifice of a few romantic fancies."
+
+"I am glad you think so," he replied, yet somewhat absently.
+
+"You must wait awhile for Florence," I continued; "she is four years
+old, and twelve years hence you will yet be quite a personable
+individual. And Florence will have a fortune worth waiting for, I
+assure you. Or perhaps you have somebody more eligible already in view.
+Come, William, be frank,--tell me all about it."
+
+"I did not expect this levity, Juanita," he answered, severely. "You
+must know that I have never thought of such a thing. And believe me,"
+he said, in a tenderer tone, "that, among all the beautiful women I
+have seen,--and some have not disdained to show me favor,--none ever
+touched my heart for a moment. Had we any reasonable prospect of
+happiness, I could never give you up; I love you better a thousand
+times than anything in the world."
+
+"Except yourself," I said, mockingly; and I looked at him with a
+mischievous smile, while a storm of passion raged in my heart and my
+brain seemed on fire. "Be it so! I do not complain of such a splendid
+rival. But really, William, I cannot boast of constancy like yours,
+even; though I suppose most people would consider that rather a poor,
+flawed specimen. It hurt my dignity very much when Uncle Heywood called
+our attachment a boy-and-girl affair; but I soon found that he knew
+best about it. For a time I kept my love very warm and glowing; but it
+was not long ere the distractions you bade me seek in society proved
+more potent than I wished. I found there were other things to be
+enjoyed than dreams of you, and even--shall I confess it? I can now, I
+suppose--other people to be admired as well as you!"
+
+"Indeed!" he said, with ill-concealed annoyance. "You had a great
+talent for concealment, then; your letters showed no trace of the
+change."
+
+"I know they didn't," I answered, laughing. "I hated very much to admit
+even to myself that I had altered; it seemed, you know, so capricious
+and childish,--in short, so far from romantic. I kept up the illusion
+as long as I could; used to go off alone to read your letters, look at
+your picture, and fancy I felt just as at first. Then when I sat down
+to write, and remembered how handsome you were, and all that had
+happened, the old feelings would come back, and for the time you were
+all I cared for. But I am very glad we have had this explanation, and
+understand each other. We shall both be happier for it."
+
+I had a little taste of vengeance, even then, when I saw how his vanity
+was wounded. He tried to look relieved,--I dare say he tried to feel
+so,--but I question very much whether he was pleased with himself that
+he had been so cool and philosophical. He did not wish to make me
+wretched; but he had expected I would be so, as a matter of course. To
+find me so comfortable under the infliction perplexed and disconcerted
+him.
+
+"This will not make any coldness between us, I hope?" he said, at last.
+"We will be friends still, dear Juanita?"
+
+"Yes," I replied, "we will be friends, dear William. We are a great
+deal more in our true relations thus than as lovers."
+
+"And your uncle's family," he inquired,--"shall we explain all to
+them?"
+
+"There is no need of that," I answered, carelessly. "Let things pass.
+After a time they will perhaps notice that there is a change, and I can
+tell them that we are both tired of the engagement. They will ask no
+further questions."
+
+"Thank you," he said. "It will save me some embarrassment."
+
+"Yes," I replied, looking at him steadily, "I think it would have been
+a rather awkward topic for you to broach."
+
+His eye fell before mine; through all the sophistry he had used, I
+think some slight sense of the baseness of his conduct forced itself
+upon his mind.
+
+"Now I must return to the house," I said, rising; "will you not come
+with me? My uncle and aunt will expect to see you, and Anna Gray is
+here. You can make your first essay toward the rich match this
+evening."
+
+"Nonsense!" he said, impatiently, yet he accompanied me. I knew he did
+not like to lose sight of me.
+
+Never had I exerted myself so much to please any one, as I did that
+night to charm and attract him;--not, indeed, by any marked attention;
+that would have failed of its object. But I talked and danced; I
+displayed for his benefit all that I had acquired of ease and manner
+since he left. I saw his astonishment, that the pale, quiet girl who
+was wont to sit in some corner, almost unnoticed, should now be the
+life of that gay circle. I made him admire me most at the very moment
+he had lost me forever,--and so far, all was well.
+
+I went to my room that night a different creature. That place had been
+a kind of sanctuary to me. By its vine-draped window I had loved to sit
+and think of him, to read the books he liked, and fashion my mind to
+what he could approve. But the spot which I had left, a hopeful and
+loving girl, I returned to, a forsaken and revengeful woman. My whole
+nature was wrought up to one purpose,--to repay him, to the last iota,
+all he had made me suffer, all the humiliation, the despair. It was
+strange how this purpose upbore and consoled me; for I needed
+consolation. I hated him, yet I loved him fiercely, too; I despised
+him, yet I knew no other man would ever touch my heart. He had been, he
+always must be, everything to me,--the one object to which all my
+thoughts tended, to which my every action was referred.
+
+I took from a drawer his letters and his few love-gifts. The paper I
+tore to fragments and threw into the empty fireplace. I lighted the
+heap, and tossed the gifts, one after another, into the flame. Last of
+all, I drew his portrait from my bosom. I gazed at it an instant,
+pressed it to my lips. No,--I would not destroy this,--I would keep it
+to remind me.
+
+I remember thinking, as I watched the flickering flame, that this was
+something like a witch's incantation. I smiled at the idea.
+
+The next morning there was only a heap of light ashes left in the
+grate. I pursued my purpose determinedly and with unflagging zeal. I
+did not know exactly how it would be realized, but I felt sure I should
+achieve it. My first care was to cultivate to the utmost every faculty
+I possessed. My education had been hitherto of rather a substantial
+order; I had few accomplishments. To these I turned my care. "What has
+a woman," I thought, "to do with solid learning? It never tells in
+society." I had observed the rapt attention with which William listened
+to music. Hitherto I had been only a passable performer, such as any
+girl of sixteen might be. But under the influence of this new motive I
+studied diligently; the best masters were supplied me; and soon my
+progress both astonished and delighted myself and all who heard me.
+
+I have before said that a change for the better had taken place in my
+person; this I strove by every means in my power to increase. I rode, I
+walked, I plied the oars vigorously upon our little lake. My health
+grew firm, my cheeks more blooming, my form fuller and majestic. I took
+the greatest pains with my toilet. It was wonderful to see, day by day,
+as I looked into the mirror, the alteration that care and taste could
+effect in personal appearance. Could this erect, stately figure, with
+its air of grace and distinction, be one with the thin, stooping form,
+clad in careless, loose-fitting garb, which I so well remembered as
+myself? Could that brilliant face, with its bands of shining hair, that
+smile of easy self-confidence, belong to me? What, had become of the
+pale, spiritless girl? My uncle sometimes asked the question, and,
+looking at me with a fond, admiring glance, would say,--"You were made
+for an empress, Juanita!" I knew then that I was beautiful, and
+rejoiced in the knowledge; but no tinge of vanity mingled with the joy.
+I cultivated my beauty, as I did my talents, for a purpose of which I
+never lost sight.
+
+It was now I learned for the first time that John Haughton loved me.
+When it became generally understood that William and I were no longer
+engaged, John came forward. I do not know what he, so good, so
+high-minded, saw in me; but certainly he loved me with a true
+affection. When he avowed it, a strange joy seized me; I felt that now
+I held in my hand the key of William's destiny. Now I should not lose
+my hold on him; we could not drift apart in the tide of life. As John's
+bride, John's wife, there must always be an intimate connection between
+us. So I yielded with well-feigned tenderness to my lover's suit,--only
+stipulating, that, as some time must elapse before our marriage, no one
+should know of our attachment,--not even William, or his mother,--nor,
+on my part, any of my uncle's family. He made no objection; I believe
+he even took a romantic pleasure in the concealment. He liked to see me
+moving about in society, and to feel that there was a tie between us
+that none dreamed of but ourselves. Poor John! he deserved better of
+Fate than to be the tool of my revenge!
+
+William came home, soon after our engagement, for his annual visit. He
+was succeeding rather better than his dismal fancies had once
+prognosticated. He was very often at our house,--very much my friend. I
+saw through all that clearly enough; I knew he loved me a hundred-fold
+more passionately than in our earlier days; and the knowledge was to me
+as a cool draught to one who is perishing of thirst. I did all in my
+power to enhance his love; I sang bewildering melodies to him; I talked
+to him of the things he liked, and that roused his fine intellect to
+the exercise of its powers. I rode with him, danced with him; nor did I
+omit to let him see the admiration with which others of his sex
+regarded me. I was well aware that a man values no jewel so highly as
+that which in a brilliant setting calls forth the plaudits of the
+crowd. I talked to him often of his prospects and hopes; his ambition,
+all selfish as it was, fascinated me by its pride and daring. "Ah,
+William!" I sometimes thought, "you made a deadly mistake when you cast
+me off! You will never find another who can so enter, heart and soul,
+into all your brilliant projects!"
+
+He came to me, one morning, rather earlier than his wont. I was
+reading, but laid aside my book to greet him.
+
+"What have you there, Juanita? Some young-ladyish romance, I suppose."
+
+"Not at all,--it is a very rational work; though I presume you will
+laugh at it, because it contains a little sentiment,--you are grown so
+hard and cold, of late."
+
+"Do you think so?" he asked, with a look that belied the charge.
+
+He took up the volume, and, glancing through it, read now and then a
+sentence.
+
+"What say you to this, Juanita? 'If we are still able to love one who
+has made us suffer, we love him more than ever.' Is that true to your
+experience?"
+
+"No," I answered, for I liked at times to approach the topic which was
+always uppermost in my mind, and to see his perfect unconsciousness of
+it. "If any one had made me suffer, I should not stop to inquire
+whether I were able to love him still or not; I should have but one
+thought left,--revenge!"
+
+"How very fierce!" he said, laughing. "And your idea of revenge
+is--what? To stab him with your own white hand?"
+
+"No!" I said, scornfully. "To kill a person you hate is, to my mind,
+the most pitiful idea of vengeance. What! put him out of the world at
+once? Not so! He should live," I said, fixing my eyes upon him,--"and
+live to suffer,--and to remember, in his anguish, why he suffered, and
+to whose hand he owed it!"
+
+It was a hateful speech, and would have repelled most men; for my life
+I dared not have made it before John. But I knew to whom I was talking,
+and that he had no objection to a slight spice of _diablerie_.
+
+"What curious glimpses of character you open to me now and then," he
+said, thoughtfully. "Not very womanly, however."
+
+"Womanly!" I cried. "I wonder what a man's notion of woman is! Some
+soft, pulpy thing that thrives all the better for abuse? a spaniel that
+loves you more, the more you beat it? a worm that grows and grows in
+new rings as often as you cut it asunder? I wonder history has never
+taught you better. Look at Judith with Holofernes,--Jael with
+Sisera,--or if you want profane examples, Catherine de Medicis,
+Mademoiselle de Brinvilliers, Charlotte Corday. There are women who
+have formed a purpose, and gone on steadily toward its accomplishment,
+even though, like that Roman girl,--Tullia was her name?--they had to
+drive over a father's corpse to do it."
+
+"You have known such, perhaps," said Richard.
+
+"Yes," I answered, with, a gentle smile, "I have. They wished no harm,
+it might be, to any one, but people stood in their way. It is as if you
+were going to the arbor after grapes, and there were a swarm of ants in
+the path. You have no malice against the ants, but you want the
+grapes,--so you walk on, and they are crushed."
+
+I was thinking of John and of his love, but William did not know that.
+"You are a strange being!" he said, looking at me with a mixture of
+admiration and distrust.
+
+"Ah! Well, you see my race is somewhat anomalous,--a blending of the
+Spaniard and the Yankee. Come, I will be all Spanish for a time; bring
+me the guitar. Now let me sing you a _romance_."
+
+I struck the tinkling chords, and began a sweet love-ditty. Fixing my
+eyes on his, I made every word speak to his heart from mine. I saw his
+color change, his eyes melt;--when the song ended, he was at my feet.
+
+I know not what he said; I only know it was passion, burning and
+intense. Oh, but it was balm both to my love and hate to hear him! I
+let him go on as long as he would,--then I said, gently caressing his
+bright hair,--
+
+"You forget, dear William, all those lessons of prudence you taught me
+not so very long ago."
+
+He poured forth the most ardent protestations; he begged me to forget
+all that cold and selfish reasoning. Long since he had wished to offer
+me his hand, but feared lest I should repel him with scorn. Would I not
+pardon his former ingratitude, and return his love?
+
+"But you forget, my friend," I said, "that circumstances have not
+altered, but only your way of viewing them; we must still be poor and
+humble. Don't you remember all your eloquent picturings of the life we
+should be obliged to lead? Don't you recollect the dull, dingy house,
+the tired, worn-out wife in shabby clothing"----
+
+"Oh, hush, Juanita! Do not recall those wretched follies! Besides,
+circumstances have somewhat changed; I am not so very poor. My income,
+though small, will be sufficient, if well-managed, to maintain us in
+comfort and respectability."
+
+"Comfort and respectability!" I exclaimed, with a shudder. "Oh,
+William, can you imagine that such words apply to me? The indulgences
+of wealth are necessary to me as the air I breathe. I suppose you would
+be able to shield me from absolute suffering; but that is not enough.
+Do not speak of this again, for both our sakes. And now, good friend,"
+I added, in a lighter tone, "I advise you to get up as soon as may be;
+we are liable to interruption at any time; and your position, though
+admirable for a _tableau_, would be a trifle embarrassing for ordinary
+life."
+
+He started to his feet, and would have left me in anger, but I recalled
+him with a word. It was good to feel my power over this man who had
+slighted and rejected me. Before we parted that day he had quite
+forgiven me for refusing him and making him ridiculous; I thought a
+little of the spaniel was transferred to him. I saw, too, he had a
+hope, which I carefully forbore to contradict, that I preferred him to
+any other, and would accept him, could he but win a fortune for me. And
+so I sent him out into the world again, full of vain, feverish desires
+after the impossible. I gave him all the pains of love without its
+consolations. It was good, as far as it went.
+
+John and I, meanwhile, got on very peacefully together. He was not
+demonstrative, nor did he exact demonstration from me. I had promised
+to marry him, and he trusted implicitly to my faith; while his love was
+so reverent, his ideal of maiden delicacy so exalted, that I should
+have suffered in his esteem, I verily believe, had my regard been shown
+other than by a quiet tenderness of manner.
+
+About this time my uncle's family went abroad. They wished me to
+accompany them, but I steadily declined. When they pressed me for a
+reason, I told them of my engagement to John, and that I was unwilling
+to leave him for so long a time. The excuse was natural enough, and
+they believed me; and it was arranged that during the period of their
+absence I should remain with a sister of Mrs. Heywood.
+
+The time passed on. I saw William frequently. Often he spoke to me of
+his love, and I scarcely checked him; I liked to feed him with false
+hopes, as once he had done to me. He did not speak again of marriage; I
+knew his pride forbade it. I also knew that he believed I loved him,
+and would wait for him.
+
+I heard often from our travellers, and always in terms of kindness and
+affection. At last their speedy return was announced; they were to sail
+in the "Arctic," and we looked joyfully forward to the hour of their
+arrival. Too soon came the news of the terrible disaster; a little
+while of suspense, and the awful certainty became apparent. My kind,
+indulgent uncle and all his family, whom I loved as I would my own
+parents and sisters, were buried in the depths of the Atlantic.
+
+I will not attempt to describe my grief; it has nothing to do with the
+story that is written here. When, after a time, I came back to life and
+its interests, a startling intelligence awaited me. My uncle had died
+intestate; his wife and children had perished with him; as next of kin,
+I was sole heir to his immense estate. When my mind fully took in the
+meaning of all this I felt that a crisis was at hand. Day by day I
+looked for William.
+
+I had not long to wait. I was sitting by my window on a bright October
+day, reading a book I loved well,--"Shirley," one of the three immortal
+works of a genius fled too soon. As I read, I traced a likeness to my
+own experience; Caroline was a curious study to me. I marvelled at her
+meek, forgiving spirit; if I would not imitate, I did not condemn her.
+
+Then I heard the gate-latch click; I looked out through the
+vine-leaves, all scarlet with the glory of the season, and saw William
+coming up the walk. I knew why he was there, and, still retaining the
+volume in my hand, went down to meet him.
+
+We walked out in the grounds; it was a perfect afternoon; all the
+splendor of autumn, without a trace of its swift-coming decay. Gold,
+crimson, and purple shone the forests through their softening haze; and
+the royal hues were repeated on the mountain, reflected in the river.
+The sky was cloudless and intensely blue; the sunlight fell, with red
+glow, on the fading grass. A few late flowers of gorgeous hues yet
+lingered in the beds and borders; and a sweet wind, that might have
+come direct from paradise, sighed over all. William and I walked on,
+conversing.
+
+At first we spoke of the terrible disaster and my loss; he could be
+gentle when he chose, and now his tenderness and sympathy were like a
+woman's. I almost forgot, in listening, what he was and had been to me.
+I was reminded when he began to speak of ourselves; I recalled it
+fully, when again, with all the power that passion and eloquence could
+impart, he declared his love, and begged me to be his.
+
+I looked at him; to my eye he seemed happy, hopeful, triumphant;
+handsomer he could not be, and to me there was a strange fascination in
+his lofty, masculine beauty. I felt then, what I had always known, that
+I loved him even while I hated him, and for an instant I wavered. Life
+with him! It looked above all things dear, desirable! But what! Show
+such a weak, such a _womanish_ spirit? Give up my revenge at the very
+moment that it was within my grasp,--the revenge I had lived for
+through so many years? Never!--I recalled the night under the lindens,
+and was myself again.
+
+"Dear William," I said, gently, "you amaze and distress me. Such love
+as a sister may give to an only brother you have long had from me. Why
+ask for any other?"
+
+"'A sister's love!'" he cried, impatiently. "I thought, Juanita, you
+were above such paltry subterfuges! Is it as a brother I have loved you
+all these long and weary years?"
+
+"Perhaps not,--I cannot say. At any rate," I continued, gravely, "a
+sisterly affection is all I can give you now."
+
+"You are trifling with me, Juanita! Cease! It is unworthy of you."
+
+He seized my hand, and clasped it to his breast. How wildly his heart
+beat under my touch! I trembled from head to foot,--but I said, in a
+cold voice, "You are a good actor, William!"
+
+"You cannot look in my eyes and say you believe that charge," he
+answered.
+
+I essayed to do it,--but my glance fell before his, so ardent, so
+tender. Spite of myself, my cheeks burned with blushes. Quietly I
+withdrew my hand and said, "I am to be married to John in December."
+
+Ah, but there was a change then! The flush and the triumph died out of
+his face, as when a lamp is suddenly extinguished. Yet there was as
+much indignation as grief in his voice when he said,--
+
+"Heaven forgive you, Juanita! You have wilfully, cruelly deceived me!"
+
+"Deceived you!" I replied, rising with dignity. "Make no accusation. If
+deceived you were, you have simply your own vanity, your own folly, to
+blame for whatever you may suffer."
+
+"You have listened to my love, and encouraged me to hope"----
+
+"Silence! I did love you once,--your cold heart can never guess how
+well, how warmly. I would have loved on through trial and suffering
+forever; no one could have made me believe anything against you;
+nothing could have shaken my fidelity, or my faith in yours. It was
+reserved for yourself to work my cure,--for your own lips to pronounce
+the words that changed my love to cool contempt."
+
+"Oh, Juanita," he cried, passionately, "will you always be so
+vindictive? Will you forever remind me of that piece of insane folly?
+Let it go,--it was a boy's whim, too silly to remember."
+
+"You were no boy then," I answered. "You had a mature prudence,--a
+careful thoughtfulness for self. Or if otherwise, in your case the
+child was indeed father to the man."
+
+"Your love is dead, then, I suppose?" he questioned, with a bitter
+smile.
+
+I handed him the book I had been reading. It was marked at these words:
+"Love can excuse anything except meanness; but meanness kills love,
+cripples even natural affection; without esteem, true love cannot
+exist."
+
+William raised his head with an air of proud defiance. "And in what
+sense," he asked, "do such words apply to me?"
+
+"You are strangely obtuse," I said. "You see no trace of yourself in
+that passage--no trace of meanness in the man who cast off the
+penniless orphan, with her whole heart full of love for him, yet pleads
+so warmly with the rich heiress, when he knows she is pledged to
+another?"
+
+"You have said enough, Juanita," he replied, with concentrated passion.
+"This is too much to bear, even from you, from whom I have already
+endured so much. You _know_ you do not believe it."
+
+"I _do_ believe it," was my firm reply. It was false, but what did I
+care? It served my purpose.
+
+"I might bid you remember," he said, "how I urged you to be mine when
+my prospects had grown brighter, and you were poor as before. I might
+appeal to the manner in which my suit has been urged for years, as a
+proof of my innocence of this charge that you have brought against me.
+But I disdain to plead my cause with so unwomanly a heart,--that
+measures the baseness of others by what it knows of its own."
+
+He went, and for a time I was left in doubt whether my victory had been
+really achieved. Then I thought it all over, and was reassured. He
+could not simulate those looks and tones,--no, nor that tumult of
+feeling which had made his heart throb so wildly beneath my hand. He
+loved me,--that was certain; and no matter how great his anger or his
+indignation, my refusal must have cut him to the soul. And the charge I
+had made would rankle, too. These thoughts were my comfort when John
+told me, with grief and surprise, that his brother had joined the
+Arctic expedition under Dr. Kane. I knew it was for no light cause he
+would forsake the career just opening so brightly before him.
+
+John and I were married in December, as had been our intention. We led
+a quiet, but to him a happy, life. He often wondered at my content with
+home and its seclusion, and owned what fears he had felt, before our
+marriage, lest I, accustomed to gayety and excitement, should weary of
+him, the thoughtful, book-loving man. It seemed he had made up his mind
+to all manner of self-sacrifice in the way of accompanying me to
+parties, and having guests at our own house. I did not exact much from
+him; I cared little for the gay world in which William no longer moved.
+I read with John his favorite books; I interested myself in the
+sciences which he pursued with such enthusiasm. It was no part of my
+plan to inflict unnecessary misery on any one, and I strove with all my
+power to make happy the man whom I had chosen. I succeeded fully; and
+when we sat on the piazza in the moonlight, my head resting on his
+shoulder, my hand clasped in his, he would tell me how infinitely
+dearer the wife had grown to be than even the lover's fancy had
+portrayed her.
+
+And my thoughts were far away from the bland airs and brightening moon
+amid the frozen solitudes of the North. Where was William? what was he
+doing? did he think of me? and how? What if he should perish there, and
+we should never meet again? Life grew blank at the thought; I put it
+resolutely away.
+
+I had drunk of the cup of vengeance; it was sweet, but did not satisfy.
+I longed for a fuller draught; but might it not be denied to my fevered
+lips? Perhaps, amid the noble and disinterested toils of the
+expedition, his heart would outgrow all love for me, and when we met
+again I should see my power was gone. I pondered much on this; I
+believed at last that the solitude, the isolation, would be not
+unpropitious to me. From the little world of the ice-locked vessel his
+thoughts would turn to the greater world he had left, and I should be
+remembered. When he returned we should be much together. His mother was
+dead; our house was the only place he could call his home. Not even for
+me, I felt assured, would he cast off the love of his only brother. I
+had not done with him yet. So quietly and composedly I awaited his
+return.
+
+He came at last, and his manner when we met smote me with a strange
+uneasiness. It was not the estrangement of a friend whom I had injured,
+but the distant politeness of a stranger. Was my influence gone? I
+determined to know, once for all. When we chanced to be alone a moment
+I went to his side. "William," I asked, laying my hand on his arm, and
+speaking in a tender, reproachful tone, "why do you treat me so?"
+
+With a quick, decided motion, he removed my hand,--then looked down on
+me with a smile. "'You are strangely obtuse,'" he said, quoting my own
+words of two years before. "What can Mrs. Haughton desire from a base
+fortune-hunter with whom she is unhappily connected by marriage, but a
+humility that does not presume on the relationship?"
+
+I saw a bold stroke was needed, and that I must stoop to conquer. "Oh,
+William," I said, sorrowfully, "you called me vindictive once, but it
+is you who are really so. I was unhappy, harassed, distracted
+between"----
+
+"Between what?"
+
+"I do not know--I mean I cannot tell you," I stammered, with
+well-feigned confusion. "Can you not forgive me, William? Often and
+often, since you left me that day, I have wished to see you, and to
+tell you how I repented my hasty and ungenerous words. Will you not
+pardon me? Shall we not be friends again?"
+
+"I am not vindictive," he said, more kindly,--"least of all toward you.
+But I cannot see how you should desire the friendship of one whom you
+regard as a mercenary hypocrite. When you can truthfully assure me that
+you disbelieve that charge, then, and not till then, will I forgive you
+and be your friend."
+
+"Let it be now, then," I said, joyfully, holding out my hand. He did
+not reject it;--we were reconciled.
+
+William had come home ill; the hardships of the expedition and the
+fearful cold of the Arctic Zone had been too much for him. The very
+night of his return I noticed in his countenance a frequent flush
+succeeded by a deadly pallor; my quick ear had caught, too, the sound
+of a cough,--not frequent or prolonged, but deep and hollow. And now,
+for the first time in my long and dreary toil, I saw the path clear and
+the end in view.
+
+Every one knows with what enthusiasm the returned travellers were
+hailed. Amid the felicitations, the praises, the banquets, the varied
+excitements of the time, William forgot his ill-health. When these were
+over, he reopened his office, and prepared to enter once more on the
+active duties of his profession. But he was unfit for it; John and I
+both saw this, and urged him to abandon the attempt for the
+present,--to stay with us, to enjoy rest, books, society, and not till
+his health was fully reestablished undertake the prosecution of
+business.
+
+"You forget, my good sister," he laughingly said to me one day,--(he
+could jest on the subject now,)--"that I have not the fortune of our
+John,--I did not marry an heiress, and I have my own way to make. I had
+got up a few rounds of the ladder when an adverse fate dragged me down.
+Being a free man once more, I must struggle up again as quickly as may
+be."
+
+"Oh, for that matter," I returned, in the same tone, "I had some part,
+perhaps, in the adverse fate you speak of; so it is but fair that I
+should make you what recompense I can. I am an admirable nurse; and you
+will gain time, if you will deliver yourself up to my care, and not go
+back to Coke and Chitty till I give you leave. Seriously, William, I
+fear you do not know how ill you are, and how unsafe it is for you to
+go on with business."
+
+He yielded without much persuasion, and came home to us. Those were
+happy days. William and I were constantly together. I read to him, I
+sung to him, and played chess with him; on mild days I drove him out in
+my own little pony-carriage. Did he love me all this time? I could not
+tell. Never by look or tone did he intimate that the old affection yet
+lived in his heart. I fancied he felt as I with him,--perfect content
+in my companionship, without a thought or wish beyond. We were made for
+each other; our tastes, our habits of mind and feeling, fully
+harmonized; had we been born brother and sister, we should have
+preferred each other to all the world, and, remaining single for each
+other's sakes, have passed our lives together.
+
+So the time wore on, sweetly and placidly, and only I seemed to notice
+the failure in our invalid; but I watched for it too keenly, too
+closely, to be blinded. The occasional rallies of strength that gave
+John such hope, and cheered William himself so greatly, did not deceive
+me; I knew they were but the fluctuations of his malady. Changes in the
+weather, or a damp east wind, did not account to me for his relapses; I
+knew he was in the grasp of a fell, a fatal disease; it might let him
+go awhile, give him a little respite, as a cat does the mouse she has
+caught,--but he never could escape,--his doom was fixed.
+
+But you may be sure I gave him no hint of it, and he never seemed to
+suspect it for himself. One could not believe such blindness possible,
+did we not see it verified in so many instances, year after year.
+
+Often, now, I thought of a passage in an old book I used to read with
+many a heart-quake in my girlish days. It ran thus:--"Perhaps we may
+see you flattering yourself, through a long, lingering illness, that
+you shall still recover, and putting off any serious reflection and
+conversation for fear it should overset your spirits. And the cruel
+kindness of friends and physicians, as if they were in league with
+Satan to make the destruction of your soul as sure as possible, may,
+perhaps, abet this fatal deceit." We had all the needed accessories:
+the kind physician, anxious to amuse and fearful to alarm his
+patient,--telling me always to keep up his spirits, to make him as
+cheerful and happy as I could; and the cruel friends--I had not far to
+seek for them.
+
+For a time William came down-stairs every morning, and sat up during
+the greater part of the day. Then he took to lying on the sofa for
+hours together. At last, he did not rise till afternoon, and even then
+was too much fatigued to sit up long. I prepared for his use a large
+room on the south side of the house, with a smaller apartment within
+it; to this we carried his favorite books and pictures, his easy-chair
+and lounge. My piano stood in a recess; a guitar hung near it. When all
+was finished, it looked homelike, pleasant; and we removed William to
+it, one mild February day.
+
+"This is a delightful room," he said, gazing about him. "How pleasant
+the view from these windows will be as spring comes on!"
+
+"You will not need it," I said, "by that time."
+
+"I should be glad, if it were so," he replied; "but I am not quite so
+sanguine as you are, Juanita."
+
+He did not guess my meaning; how should he, amused, flattered, kept
+along as he had been? To him, life, with all its activities, its
+prizes, its pleasures, seemed but a little way removed; a few weeks or
+months and he should be among them again. But I knew, when he entered
+that room, that he never would go forth again till he was borne where
+narrower walls and a lowlier roof should shut him in.
+
+I had an alarm one day. "Juanita," said the invalid, when I had
+arranged his pillows comfortably, and was about to begin the morning's
+reading, "do not take the book we had yesterday. I wish you would read
+to me in the Bible."
+
+What did this mean? Was this proud, worldly-minded man going to humble
+himself, and repent, and be forgiven? And was I to be defrauded thus of
+my just revenge? Should he pass away to an eternal life of holiness and
+joy,--while I, stained through him and for his sake with sins
+innumerable, sank ever lower and lower in unending misery and despair?
+Oh, I must stop this, if it were not yet too late.
+
+"What!" I said, pretending to repress a smile, "are you getting alarmed
+about yourself, William? Or is Saul really going to be found among the
+prophets, after all?"
+
+He colored, but made no reply. I opened the Bible and read two or three
+of the shorter Psalms,--then, from the New Testament, a portion of the
+Sermon on the Mount.
+
+"It must have been very sweet," I observed, "for those who were able to
+receive Jesus as the true Messiah, and his teachings as infallible, to
+hear these words from his lips."
+
+"And do you not so receive them?" William asked.
+
+"We will not speak of that; my opinion is of no weight."
+
+"But you must have thought much of these things," he persisted; "tell
+me what result you have arrived at."
+
+"Candidly, then," I said, "I have read and pondered much on what this
+book contains. It seems to me, that, if it teaches anything, it clearly
+teaches, that, no matter how we flatter ourselves that we are doing as
+we choose, and carrying out our own designs and wishes, we are all the
+time only fulfilling purposes that have been fixed from all eternity.
+Since, then, we are the subjects of an Inexorable Will, which no
+entreaties or acts of ours can alter or propitiate, what is there for
+us to do but simply to bear as best we can what comes upon us? It is a
+short creed."
+
+"And a gloomy one," he said.
+
+"You are right; a very gloomy one. If you can rationally adopt a
+cheerfuller, pray, do it. I do not wish for any companion in mine."
+
+There was silence for a time, and then I said, with affectionate
+earnestness, "Dear William, why trouble yourself with these things in
+your weak and exhausted state? Surely, the care of your health is
+enough for you, now. By-and-by, when you have in some measure regained
+your strength, look seriously into this subject, if you wish. It is an
+important one for all. I am afraid I gave you an overdose of anodyne
+last night, and am to blame for your low spirits of this morning. Own,
+William," I said, smilingly, "that you were terribly hypped, and
+fancied you never could recover."
+
+He looked relieved as I spoke thus lightly. "I should find it sad to
+die," he said. "Life looks bright to me even yet."
+
+This man was a coward. He dreaded that struggle, that humiliation of
+spirit, through which all must pass ere peace with Heaven is achieved.
+Yet more, perhaps, he dreaded that deeper struggle which ensues when we
+essay to tear Self from its throne in the heart, and place God thereon.
+As he said, life looked bright to him; and all his plans and purposes
+in life were for himself, his own advancement, his own well-being. It
+would have been hard to make the change; and he thought it was not
+necessary now, at least.
+
+No more was said upon the subject. Our days went on as before. There
+was a little music, some light reading, an occasional call from a
+friend,--and long pauses of rest between all these. And slowly, but
+surely, life failed, and the soul drew near its doom.
+
+I knew now that he loved me still; he talked of it sometimes when he
+woke suddenly, and did not at once remember where he was; I saw it,
+too, in his look, his manner; but we never breathed it to each other,
+and he did not think I knew.
+
+One night there was a great change; physicians were summoned in haste;
+there were hours of anxious watching. Toward morning he seemed a little
+better, and I was left alone with him. He slumbered quietly, but when
+he awoke there was a strange and solemn look in his face, such as I had
+never seen before. I knew what it must mean.
+
+"When Dr. Hammond comes, let me see him alone," he whispered.
+
+I made no objection; nothing could frustrate my purpose now.
+
+The physician came,--a kind old man, who had known us all from infancy.
+He was closeted awhile with William; then he came out, looking deeply
+moved.
+
+"Go to him,--comfort him, if you can," he said.
+
+"You have told him?" I asked.
+
+"Yes,--he insisted upon hearing the truth, and I knew he had got where
+it could make no difference. Poor fellow! it was a terrible blow."
+
+I wanted a few moments for reflection; I sent John in my stead. I
+locked myself in my own room, and tried to get the full weight of what
+I was going to do. I was about to meet him who had rejected my heart's
+best love, no longer in the flush and insolence of health and strength,
+but doomed, dying,--with a dark, hopeless eternity stretching out
+before his shuddering gaze. And when he turned to me in those last
+awful moments for solace and affection, I was to tell him that the girl
+he loved, the woman he adored, had since that one night kept the
+purpose of vengeance hot in her heart,--that for years her sole study
+had been to baffle and to wound him,--and that now, through all those
+months that she had been beside him, that he had looked to her as
+friend, helper, comforter, she had kept her deadly aim in view. _She_
+had deceived him with false hopes of recovery; _she_ had turned again
+to the world the thoughts which he would fain have fixed on heaven;
+while he was loving her, she had hated him. She had darkened his life;
+she had ruined his soul.
+
+Oh, was not this a revenge worthy of the name?
+
+I went to him. He was sitting in the great easy-chair, propped with
+pillows; John had left the room, overcome by his feelings. Never shall
+I forget that face,--the despair of those eyes.
+
+I sat down by him and took his hand.
+
+"The Doctor has told you?" I murmured.
+
+"Yes,--and what is this world which I so soon must enter? I believe too
+much to have one moment's peace in view of what is coming. Oh, why did
+I not believe more before it was too late?"
+
+I kept silence a few minutes; then I said,--
+
+"Listen, William,--I have something to tell you."
+
+He looked eagerly toward me;--perhaps he thought even then, poor dupe,
+that it was some word of hope, that there was some chance for his
+recovery.
+
+Then I told him all,--all,--my lifelong hatred, my cherished purpose.
+Blank amazement was in the gaze that he turned upon me. I feared that
+impending death had blunted his senses, and that he did not fully
+comprehend.
+
+"You will remember now what I once told you," I cried, with savage joy;
+"for so surely as there is another world, in that world shall you live,
+and live to suffer, and to remember in your anguish why you suffer, and
+to whose hand you owe it."
+
+He understood well enough now. "Fiend!" he exclaimed, with a look of
+horror, and started to his feet. The effort, the emotion, were too
+much. Blood gushed from his lips; a frightful spasm convulsed his
+features; he fell back; he was gone!
+
+Yes,--he was gone! And my life's work was complete!
+
+I cannot tell what happened after that. I suppose they must have found
+him, and laid him out, and buried him; but I remember nothing of it.
+Since then I have lived in this great, gloomy house, with its barred
+doors and windows. Never since I came here have I seen a face that I
+knew. Maniacs are all about me; I meet them in the halls, the gardens;
+sometimes I hear the fiercer sort raving and dashing about their cells.
+But I do not feel afraid of them.
+
+It is strange how they all fancy that the rest are mad, and they the
+only sane ones. Some of them even go so far as to think that _I_ have
+lost my reason. I heard one woman say, not long ago,--"Why, she has
+been mad these twenty years! She never was married in her life; but she
+believes all these things as if they were really so, and tells them
+over to anybody who will listen to her."
+
+Mad these twenty years! So young as I am, too! And I never married, and
+all my wrongs a maniac's raving! I was angry at first, and would have
+struck her; then I thought, "Poor thing! Why should I care? She does
+not know what she is saying."
+
+And I go about, seeing always before me that pallid, horror-stricken
+face; and wishing sometimes--oh, how vainly!--that I had listened to
+him that bright October day,--that I had been a happy wife, perchance a
+happy mother. But no, no! I must not think thus. Once I look at it in
+that way, my whole life becomes a terror, a remorse. I will not, must
+not, have it so.
+
+Then let me rejoice again, for I have had my revenge,--a great, a
+glorious revenge!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+LEFT BEHIND.
+
+  It was the autumn of the year;
+  The strawberry-leaves were red and sere;
+  October's airs were fresh and chill,
+  When, pausing on the windy hill,
+  The hill that overlooks the sea,
+  You talked confidingly to me,
+  Me, whom your keen artistic sight
+  Has not yet learned to read aright,
+  Since I have veiled my heart from you,
+  And loved you better than you knew.
+
+  You told me of your toilsome past,
+  The tardy honors won at last,
+  The trials borne, the conquests gained,
+  The longed-for boon of Fame attained:
+  I knew that every victory
+  But lifted you away from me,--
+  That every step of high emprise
+  But left me lowlier in your eyes;
+  I watched the distance as it grew,
+  And loved you better than you knew.
+
+  You did not see the bitter trace
+  Of anguish sweep across my face;
+  You did not hear my proud heart beat
+  Heavy and slow beneath your feet;
+  You thought of triumphs still unwon,
+  Of glorious deeds as yet undone;--
+  And I, the while you talked to me,
+  I watched the gulls float lonesomely
+  Till lost amid the hungry blue,
+  And loved you better than you knew.
+
+  You walk the sunny side of Fate;
+  The wise world smiles, and calls you great;
+  The golden fruitage of success
+  Drops at your feet in plenteousness;
+  And you have blessings manifold,--
+  Renown, and power, and friends, and gold;
+  They build a wall between us twain
+  Which may not be thrown down again;--
+  Alas! for I, the long years through,
+  Have loved you better than you knew.
+
+  Your life's proud aim, your art's high truth
+  Have kept the promise of your youth;
+  And while you won the crown which now
+  Breaks into bloom upon your brow,
+  My soul cried strongly out to you
+  Across the ocean's yearning blue,
+  While, unremembered and afar,
+  I watched you, as I watch a star
+  Through darkness struggling into view,
+  And loved you better than you knew.
+
+  I used to dream, in all these years,
+  Of patient faith and silent tears,--
+  That Love's strong hand would put aside
+  The barriers of place and pride,--
+  Would reach the pathless darkness through,
+  And draw me softly up to you.
+  But that is past. If you should stray
+  Beside my grave, some future day,
+  Perchance the violets o'er my dust
+  Will half betray their buried trust,
+  And say, their blue eyes full of dew,
+  "She loved you better than you knew."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+COFFEE AND TEA.
+
+Facts, and figures representing facts, are recognized as stubborn
+adversaries when arrayed singly in an argument; in aggregate, and in
+generalizations drawn from aggregates, they are often unanswerable.
+
+To the nervous reader it may seem a startling, and to the reformatory
+one a melancholy fact, that every soul in these United States has
+provided for him annually, and actually consumes, personally or by
+proxy, between six and seven pounds of coffee, and a pound of tea;
+while in Great Britain enough of these two luxuries is imported and
+drunk to furnish every inhabitant, patrician or pauper, with over a
+pound of the former, and two of the latter.
+
+Coffee was brought to Western Europe, by way of Marseilles, in 1644,
+and made its first appearance in London about 1652. In 1853, the
+estimated consumption of coffee in Great Britain, according to official
+returns, was thirty-five million pounds, and in the United States, one
+hundred and seventy-five million pounds, a year.
+
+Tea, in like manner, from its first importation into England by the
+Dutch East India Company, early in the seventeenth century, and from a
+consumption indicated by its price, being sixty shillings a pound, has
+proportionately increased in national use, until, in 1854, the United
+States imported and retained for home consumption twenty-five million
+pounds, and England fifty-eight million pounds.
+
+Two centuries have witnessed this almost incredible advance. The
+consumption of coffee alone has increased, in the past twenty-five
+years, at the rate of four _per cent. per annum_, throughout the world.
+
+We pay annually for coffee fifteen millions of dollars, and for tea
+seven millions. Twenty-two millions of dollars for articles which are
+popularly accounted neither fuel, nor clothing, nor food!
+
+"What a waste!" cries the reformer; "nearly a dollar apiece, from every
+man, woman, and child throughout the country, spent on two useless
+luxuries!"
+
+Is it a waste? Is it possible that we throw all this away, year after
+year, in idle stimulation or sedation?
+
+It is but too true, that the instinct, leading to the use of some form
+of stimulant, appears to be universal in the human race. We call it an
+instinct, since all men naturally search for stimulants, separately,
+independently, and unceasingly,--because use renders their demands as
+imperious as are those for food.
+
+Next to alcohol and tobacco, coffee and tea have supplied more of the
+needed excitement to mankind than any other stimulants; and, taking the
+female sex into the account, they stand far above the two former
+substances in the ratio of the numbers who use them.
+
+In Turkey coffee is regarded as the essence of hospitality and the balm
+of life. In China not only is tea the national beverage, but a large
+part of the agricultural and laboring interest of the country is
+engaged in its cultivation. Russia follows next in the almost universal
+use of tea, as would naturally result from its proximity and the common
+origin of a large part of its population. Western Europe employs both
+coffee and tea largely, while France almost confines itself to the
+former. The _cafes_ are more numerous, and have a more important social
+bearing, than any other establishments in the cities of France. Great
+Britain uses more tea than coffee. The former beverage is there thought
+indispensable by all classes. The poor dine on half a loaf rather than
+lose their cup of tea; just as the French peasant regards his
+_demi-bouteille_ of Vin Bleu as the most important part of his meal.
+
+Tea first roused the rebellion of these American Colonies; and tea made
+many a half Tory among the elderly ladies of the Revolution. It has,
+indeed, been regarded, and humorously described by the senior Weller,
+as the indispensable comforter and friend of advanced female life. Dr.
+Johnson was as noted for his fondness for tea as for his other excesses
+at the table. Many sober minds make coffee and tea the _pis a tergo_ of
+their daily intellectual labor; just as a few of greater imagination or
+genius seek in opium the spur of their ephemeral efforts. In the United
+States, the young imbibe them from their youth up; and it is quite as
+possible that a part of the nation's nervousness may arise from this
+cause, as it is probable that our wide-spread dyspepsia begins in the
+use of badly-cooked solid food, immediately on the completion of the
+first dentition.
+
+All over this country we drink coffee and tea, morning and night; at
+least, the majority of us do. They are expensive; their palpable
+results to the senses are fleeting; they are reported innutritious;
+nay, far worse, they are decried as positively unwholesome. Yet we
+still use them, and no one has succeeded in leading a crusade against
+them at all comparable with the onslaughts on other stimulants, made in
+these temperance days. The fair sex raises its voice against tobacco
+and other masculine sedatives, but clings pertinaciously to this
+delusion.
+
+It becomes, then, an important question to decide whether the choice of
+civilization is justified by experience or science,--and whether some
+effect on the animal economy, ulterior to a merely soothing or
+stimulant action, can be found to sanction the use of coffee and tea.
+And this is a question in so far differing from that of other
+stimulants, that it is not to be discussed with the moralist, but
+solely with the economist and the sanitarian.
+
+More even than us, economically, does it concern the overcrowded and
+limited states of Europe, where labor is cheap, and the necessaries of
+life absorb all the efforts, to decide whether so much of the earnings
+of the poor is annually thrown away in idle stimulation.
+
+It concerns us in a sanitary point of view, more than in any other way,
+and more than any other people. We are rich, spare in habit, and of
+untiring industry. We can afford luxurious indulgences, we are very
+susceptible to nervous stimuli, and we overwork.
+
+Our national habit is feeble. Debility is recognized as the prevailing
+type of our diseases. Nervous exhaustion is met by recourse to all
+kinds of stimulation. We are apt to think coffee and tea as harmless,
+or rather as slow in their deleterious action, as any. Are they nothing
+more?
+
+As debility marks the degeneration of our physical constitution, so
+does a morbid sensitiveness at all earthly indulgence, a tendency to
+reform things innocent, although useless, betray the weakness of the
+moral health of our day. An ascetic spirit is abroad; our amateur
+physiologists look rather to a mortification than an honest building-up
+of the flesh. They prefer naked muscle to rounded outline, and seek
+rather to test than to enjoy their bodies. Fearing to be Epicureans,
+they become Spartans, as far as their feebler organizations will allow
+them, and very successful Stoics, by the aid of Saxon will. By a faulty
+logic, things which in excess are hurtful are denied a moderate use.
+Habits innocent in themselves are to be cast aside, lest they induce
+others which are injurious.
+
+There is but little danger that Puritan antecedents and a New England
+climate should tend to idle indulgence or Epicurean sloth. We think
+there is a tendency to reform too far. We confess our preference for
+the physique of Apollo to that of Hercules. We acknowledge an amiable
+weakness for those bounties of Nature which soothe or comfort us or
+renew our nervous energy, and which, we think, injure us no more than
+our daily bread, if not immoderately used.
+
+Science almost always finds some foundation in fact for popular
+prejudices. For years, men have continued wasting their substance on
+coffee and tea, insisting that they strengthened as well as comforted
+them, in spite of the warnings of the sanitarian, who looked on them
+solely as stimulants or sedatives, and of the economist, who bewailed
+their extravagant cost.
+
+Physiology, relying on organic chemistry, has at least justified by
+experiment the choice of the civilized world. Coffee and tea had been
+regarded by the physiologist and the physician as stimulants of the
+nervous system, and to a less extent and secondarily of the
+circulation, and that was all. To fulfil this object, and to answer the
+endless craving for habitual excitants of the cerebral functions, they
+had been admitted reluctantly to the diet of their patients, rather as
+necessary evils than as positive goods. It was reserved for the
+all-searching German mind to discover their better qualities; and it is
+only within the last five years, that the self-sacrificing experiments
+of Dr. Boecker of Bonn, and of Dr. Julius Lehmann, have raised them to
+their proper place in dietetics, as "Accessory Foods." This term, which
+we borrow from the remarkable work on "Digestion and its Derangements,"
+by Dr. Thomas K. Chambers, of London, is only the slightest of the many
+obligations which we hasten to acknowledge ourselves under to this
+author, as will appear from citations in the course of this article.
+
+The labors of earlier physiologists and chemists, as Carpenter, Liebig,
+and Paget, had resulted in the classification of nutritive substances
+under different heads, according to the purposes they served in the
+physical economy. Perhaps the most convenient, though not an
+unexceptionable division, is into the Saccharine, Oleaginous,
+Albuminous, and Gelatinous groups. The first includes those substances
+analogous in composition to sugar, being chemically composed of
+hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. Such are starch, gum, cellulose, and so
+forth, which are almost identical in their ultimate composition, and
+admit of ready conversion into sugar by a simple process of vital
+chemistry. The oleaginous group comprises all oily matters, which are
+even purer hydro-carbons than the first-mentioned class. The third, or
+albuminous group, includes all substances closely allied to albumen,
+and hence containing a large proportion of nitrogen in addition to the
+other three elements. The last group consists also of nitrogenized
+substances, which resemble gelatine in many of their characteristics.
+The first two groups are called non-azotized, as they contain no
+nitrogen; the last two, azotized, containing nitrogen. "All articles of
+food that are to be employed in the production of heat must contain a
+larger proportion of hydrogen than is sufficient to form water with the
+oxygen that they contain, and none are appropriate for the maintenance
+of any tissues (except the adipose) unless they contain nitrogen."
+Hence the obvious restriction of the first two classes to the
+heat-producing function, and of the last two (or azotized) to the
+reparation of the tissues.
+
+We have, then, the two natural divisions of calorifacient and plastic
+foods: the one adapted to sustain the heat of the body, and enable us
+to maintain a temperature independent of that of the medium we may be
+in; the other to build up, repair, and preserve in their natural
+proportions the various tissues, as the muscular, fibrous, osseous, or
+nervous, which compose our frames. These two kinds of food we must have
+in due proportion and quantity in order to live. Neither the animal nor
+the vegetable kingdom furnishes the one to the exclusion of the other.
+We derive our supplies of each from both. More than this, we consume
+and appropriate certain incidental elements, which find their place and
+use in the healthy system. Iron floats in our blood, sulphur lies
+hidden in the hair and nails, phosphorus scintillates unseen in the
+brain, lime compacts our bones, and fluorine sets the enamelled edges
+of our teeth. At least one-third of all the known chemical elements
+exist in some part of the human economy, and are taken into the stomach
+hidden in our various articles of food. This would seem enough for
+Nature's requirements. It is enough for all the brute creation. As men,
+and as thinkers, we need something more.
+
+In all the lower orders of creation the normal state is preserved.
+Health is the rule, and sickness the rare exception. Demand and supply
+are exactly balanced. The contraction of the voluntary muscles, and the
+expenditure of nervous power consequent on locomotion, the temperate
+use of the five senses, and the quiet, regular performance of the great
+organic processes, limit the life and the waste of the creature. But
+when the brain expands in the dome-like cranium of the human being, a
+new and incessant call is made on the reparative forces. The nervous
+system has its demands increased a hundred-fold. We think, and we
+exhaust; we scheme, imagine, study, worry, and enjoy, and
+proportionately we waste.
+
+In the rude and primitive nations this holds good much less than among
+civilized people. Yet even among them, the faculties whose possession
+involves this loss have been ever exercised to repair it by artificial
+means. In the busy life of to-day how much more is this the case!
+Overworked brains and stomachs, underworked muscles and limbs, soon
+derange the balance of supply and demand. We waste faster than
+enfeebled digestion can well repair. We feel always a little depressed;
+we restore the equilibrium temporarily by stimulation,--some with
+alcohol and tobacco, others with coffee and tea. Now it is to these
+last means of supply that the name has been given of "accessory foods."
+
+"Accessories are those by whose use the moulting and renewing (that is,
+the metamorphosis) of the organic structures are modified, so as best
+to accommodate themselves to required circumstances. They may be
+subdivided into those which _arrest_ and those which _increase_
+metamorphosis." It is under the former class that are placed alcohol,
+sugar, coffee, and tea. Again, says Dr. Chambers,--"Not satisfied with
+the bare necessaries," (the common varieties of plastic and
+calorifacient food,) "we find that our species chiefly are inclined by
+a _soi-disant_ instinct to feed on a variety of articles the use of
+which cannot be explained as above; they cannot be found in the
+organism; they cannot, apparently, without complete disorganization, be
+employed to build up the body. These may be considered as extra diet,
+or called accessory foods..... These are what man does not want, if the
+protracting from day to day his residence on earth be the sole object
+of his feeding. He could live without them, grow without them, think,
+after a fashion, without them. A baby does. Would he be wise to try and
+imitate it?
+
+"Thus, there is no question but that easily assimilable brown meat is
+the proper food for those whose muscular system is subjected to the
+waste arising from hard exercise; and if plenty of it is to be got, and
+the digestive organs are in sufficiently good order to absorb enough to
+supply the demand, it completely covers the deficiency. Water, under
+these circumstances, is the best drink; and a 'total abstainer,' with
+plenty of fresh meat, strong exercise, and a vigorous digestion, will
+probably equal anybody in muscular development. But should the
+digestion not be in such a typical condition, should the exercise be
+oversevere and the victuals deficient, then the waste must be limited
+by some arrester of metamorphosis; if it is not, the system suffers,
+and the man is what is called 'overworked.'.... Intellectual labor also
+exercises the demand for food, and at the same time, unfortunately,
+injures the assimilating organs; so that, unless a judicious diet is
+employed, waste occurs which cannot be replaced."
+
+Waste, we may be told, is life, and the rapidity of change marks the
+activity of the vital processes. True, if each particle consumed is at
+once and adequately replaced. Beyond that point, let the balance once
+tend to over-consumption, and we approach the confines of decay. Birds
+live more and faster than men, and insects probably most of all; yet
+many of the latter are ephemeral.
+
+Every-day experience had long pointed to the recurring coincidence,
+that, of the annual victims of pulmonary consumption, few were to be
+found among the habitual consumers of ardent spirits. Science
+volunteered the explanation, that alcohol supplied a hydro-carbonaceous
+nutriment similar to that furnished by the cod-liver oil, which,
+serving as fuel, spared the wasting of the tissues, just in proportion
+to its own consumption and assimilation. Other aid it was supposed to
+lend, by stimulating the function of nutrition to renewed energy. Later
+investigations have proved that it exercises a yet more important
+influence as an arrester of metamorphosis. It was on arriving at this
+conclusion, that Dr. Boecker was led to institute a series of careful
+experiments to determine the influence of water on the physical
+economy, and the real value of salt, sugar, coffee, tea, and other
+condiments, as articles of food. "The experimenter appears to have used
+the utmost precision, and details so conscientiously the mode adopted
+of making his estimates, that additional knowledge may perhaps alter
+the conclusions drawn, but can never diminish the value of the
+experiments." They are not open to the objections of mistaken
+sensations, and honest, though ludicrous, misapprehension of fallible
+symptoms, to which the testing of drugs homeopathically is liable, and
+of which another instance has just occurred in London, in the "proving"
+of the new medicinal agent, gonoine. They rather resemble in accuracy a
+quantitative, as well as a qualitative, analysis. We will cite first
+the experiments on tea, and quote from the interesting narrative of Dr.
+Chambers.
+
+"After Dr. Boecker had determined by some preliminary trials what
+quantity of food and drink was just enough to satiate his appetite
+without causing loss of weight to his body,--that is to say, was
+sufficient to cover exactly the necessary outgoings of the
+organism,--he proceeded to special experiments, in which, during
+periods of twenty-four hours, he took the amount of victuals
+ascertained by the former trials.
+
+"The first set of the first series of experiments consists of seven
+observations, of twenty-four hours' duration each, in the months of
+July and August, with three barely sufficient meals _per diem_, in
+quantities as nearly equal each day as could be managed, and only
+spring-water to drink. The second set comprises the same number of
+observations in August, September, and October, under similar
+circumstances, except that infusion of tea, drunk cold, was taken
+instead of plain water.
+
+"Each day there are carefully recorded" qualitative and quantitative
+analyses of the excretions,--estimates of "the amount of insensible
+perspiration, and of expired carbonic acid,--the quickness of
+respiration,--the beats of the pulse,--together with accurate notes of
+the duration of bodily exercise in the open air, the loss of weight of
+the whole body, the general feelings, and the circumstances,
+thermometric, barometric, and meteoric, under which the observations
+are taken.
+
+"A second series of seventeen experiments of equal duration were made,
+and at a different time of year, so as to answer the question, which
+might arise, as to whether the season made any difference."
+
+In these experiments similar observations and records are made as
+previously, "under the three following circumstances, namely: while
+taking tea as an ordinary drink, on the days immediately following the
+leaving it off, and on other days when it was not taken."
+
+"A third series, of four experiments, was also made during four fasts
+of thirty-six hours each--two with water only, and two with tea to
+drink.
+
+"In the following particulars, all the three series so entirely
+coincide, that the conclusions will be set down as general deductions
+from the whole.
+
+"Tea, in ordinary doses, has not any effect on the amount of carbonic
+acid expired, the frequency of the respirations, or of the pulse."
+
+Obviously, then, it is not with reference to the heat-producing
+function that we can look upon tea as in any sense a nutriment; and if
+it causes no saving of carbon, its effects must be sought in checking
+some other waste, or in the less consumption of nitrogen. The pulse,
+and hence the respiration, are unaltered; for the two great processes
+of circulation and aeration of the blood are interdependent functions,
+and have, in health, a definite ratio of activity one with the other.
+As a nervous stimulant, tea in excess will, as we all know, produce an
+exaltation of the action of the heart, amounting in some persons to a
+painful and irregular palpitation. No such result seems to follow its
+moderate use.
+
+"The loss by perspiration is limited by tea."  This seems, at first,
+contrary to common experience, as the sensible perspiration produced by
+several cups of warm tea is a familiar fact to all tea-drinkers. That
+this effect is wholly owing to the warmth of the mixture, it being
+drunk usually in hot infusion or decoction, was pointed out long since
+by Cullen. Tea limits perspiration, perhaps, by the astringent action
+of the tannin which it contains,--of which more hereafter. What is
+saved by limiting perspiration? Water, largely; carbonic acid, in
+considerable amount; ammonia (a nitrogenized substance;) salts of soda,
+potash and lime, and a trace of iron, all in quantities minute, to be
+sure, but to be counted in the aggregate of arrest of metamorphosis.
+
+But the great fact which establishes tea as an arrester of the change
+of tissue is, that its use diminishes remarkably the amount of nitrogen
+thrown off by the excretions, specially destined to remove that
+element, when in excess, from the system. "We have before called
+attention to the fact, that an indispensable component of plastic food,
+by which alone the tissues are repaired, is nitrogen. By a
+chemico-vital process, nitrogen builds up and is incorporated in the
+tissues. Nitrogen, again, is one of the resulting components of the
+change of tissue. This element forms a large part of the effete
+particles which are rejected on accumulation from such change or waste.
+That a less amount is excreted by the tea-drinker, when similar
+quantities are ingested, the weight and plumpness of the body remaining
+undiminished the while, is proof of the slower change of tissue which
+takes place under the modifying influence of tea. The importance of
+this effect we shall presently see.
+
+"In the first series of experiments, the daily allowance of food,
+though less copious on the tea days, was more nitrogenized, and
+nitrogen also was taken in as theine. Yet, in spite of this, the
+quantity thrown off in twenty-four hours was nearly a _gramme_ less
+than on the water days. Still more strikingly is this shown in the days
+of complete fast, when pure spring-water is seen to cause a greater
+loss of nitrogen than infusion of tea, in spite of the supply of
+nitrogen contained in the latter. The difference also is seen to exist
+in spite of an increased amount of bodily exercise."
+
+As final deductions from these experiments, there result, first, "that,
+when the diet is sufficient, the body _is_ more likely to gain weight
+when tea is taken than when not"; second, "that, when the diet is
+_insufficient_, tea _limits_ very much _the loss of weight_ thereby
+entailed."
+
+A set of experiments made by Dr. Lehmann are parallel with these. They
+exhibit the effects of coffee on the excretion of phosphorus, chloride
+of sodium, (common salt,) and nitrogen. If less full than Dr. Boecker's,
+they appear to be equally accurate, and more complete in showing the
+separate actions of the several constituents of coffee. It would be
+tedious to the general reader to follow them in detail, and we shall
+avail ourselves of the brief _resume_ of Dr. Chambers.
+
+"First,--Coffee produces on the organism two chief effects, which it is
+very difficult to connect together,--namely, the raising the activity
+of the vascular and nervous systems, and protracting remarkably the
+decomposition of the tissues. Second,--that it is the reciprocal
+modifications of the specific actions of the empyreumatic oil and
+cafeine contained in the bean which call forth the stimulant effects of
+coffee, and therefore those peculiarities of it which possess
+importance in our eyes,--such as the rousing into new life the soul
+prostrated by exertion, and especially the giving it greater
+elasticity, and attuning it to meditation, and producing a general
+feeling of comfort. Third,--that the protraction of metamorphic
+decomposition which this beverage produces in the body is chiefly
+caused by the empyreumatic oil, and that the cafeine only causes it
+when it is taken in larger quantity than usual. Fourth,--that cafeine
+(in excess) produces increased action of the heart, rigors, headache, a
+peculiar inebriation, delirium, and so on. Fifth,--that the
+empyreumatic oil (in excess) causes perspirations, augmented activity
+of the understanding, which may end in irregular trains of thought,
+restlessness, and incapacity for sleep."
+
+It follows that both the active elements of the coffee-berry are
+necessary to insure its grateful effects,--that the volatile and
+odorous principle alone protracts decomposition,--and that careful
+preparation in roasting and decocting are essential to secure the full
+benefits of it as a beverage.
+
+It would be difficult to overestimate the practical importance of these
+results. They raise coffee and tea from the rank of stimulants to that
+of food,--from idle luxuries to real agents of support and lengthening
+of life. Henceforth the economist can hear of their increasing
+consumption without a regret. The poor may indulge in them, not as
+extravagant enjoyments, but practical goods. The cup of tea, which is
+the sole luxury of their scanty meal, lessens the need for more solid
+food; it satisfies the stomach, while it gladdens the heart. It saves
+them, too, the waste of those nitrogenized articles of food which
+require so much labor and forethought to procure. The flesh meats and
+the cereals, which contain the largest amounts of this requisite of
+organic life, are always the dearest articles of consumption. Certainly
+it is not as positive nutriment that we recommend the use of coffee and
+tea; for although they contain a relatively large amount of nitrogen,
+that supply can be better taken in solid food. Their benefit is
+two-fold. While they save more than enough of the waste of tissue to
+justify their use as economical beverages, they supply a need of the
+nervous system of no small importance. They cheer, refresh, and
+console. They thus fill a place in the wants of humanity which common
+articles of food cannot, inasmuch as they satisfy the cravings of the
+spirit as well as of the flesh.
+
+We have before attempted to show that the human race is liable to a
+peculiar and constant waste from the development of the nervous system,
+and that the body has to answer for the labor of the mind. At first
+thought, we shall find it difficult to appreciate the endless vigilance
+and activity of the brain. Like the other organisms which possess a
+proper nervous system, man carries on the common organic processes of
+life with a regularity and unfailing accuracy which seem to verge on
+the mechanical forces, or to be, at least, automatic. All habitual
+voluntary acts by repetition become almost automatic, or require no
+perceptibly distinct impulse of the will. When we emerge from this
+necessary field of labor, we come to those functions peculiar to the
+proper brain. Here all is continual action. Thought, imagination, will,
+the conflicting passions, language, and even articulation, claim their
+first impulse from the nervous centre. The idlest reverie, as well as
+the most profound study, taxes the brain. That distinguishing attribute
+of man can almost never rest. In sleep, to be sure, we find a seeming
+exception. Then only its inferior portion remains necessarily at work
+to supervise the breathing function. Yet we know that we have often
+dreamed,--while we do not know how often we fail to recall our dreams.
+The duality of the cerebrum may also furnish a means of rest in all
+trivial mental acts. Still, the great demands of the mind upon the
+nervous tissues remain. And it is these losses which may be peculiarly
+supplied by the nervous stimulants. Such are coffee and tea. Common
+nutrition by common food, and particularly the adipose and phosphatic
+varieties, nourishes nerve tissue, no doubt, as gluten and fibrine do
+muscle. But the stimulants satisfy temporarily their pressing needs,
+and enable them to continue their labors without exhaustion. Reacting
+again upon the rest of the body, they invigorate the processes of
+ordinary nutrition; for whatever rests or stimulates the nerve
+proportionately refreshes and vitalizes the tissues which it supplies.
+
+It would be curious and well worth while to follow out the peculiar
+connection between the use of coffee and the excretion of phosphorus,
+which has been before hinted at. Other experiments of Dr. Boecker prove
+sugar to be a great saver of the phosphates, and hence of bone,--which
+affords, at least, a very plausible reason for the instinctive fondness
+of children for sweets, during the building portion of their lives.
+
+In exhausting labors, long-continued exposure, and to insure
+wakefulness, the uses of coffee and tea have long been practically
+recognized by all classes. The sailor, the trapper, and the explorer
+value them even above alcohol; and in high latitudes we are assured of
+their importance in bracing the system to resist the rigors of the
+Arctic winter.
+
+There is of course, as in all human history, another side of this
+picture. Abuse follows closely after use. The effects of the excessive
+employment of nervous stimulants in shaking the nerves themselves, and
+in impairing digestion, are too familiar to need description. Yet even
+here abuse is not followed by those terrible penalties which await the
+drunkard or the opium-eater. Idiosyncrasy, too, may forbid their use;
+and this is not very rare. As strengtheners and comforters of the
+average human system, however, they have no superiors, and none others
+are so largely used.
+
+It is a little singular that the active principles of coffee and tea
+are probably identical,--no more so, however, than the marvellous
+similarity of starch, gum, and sugar, or other chemical wonders. They
+have been called cafeine and theine, respectively. They are azotized,
+and contain quite a marked amount of nitrogen. Chemically, they consist
+of carbon 19, hydrogen 10, nitrogen 4, oxygen 4. Some allowance is
+therefore to be made for them as plastic food.
+
+This peculiar principle (theine) is also found in the leaves of the
+_Ilex Paraguayensis_, or Paraguay tea, used in South America, as a
+beverage.
+
+  "Good black tea contains of theine from 2.00 to 2.13 per cent.
+  Coffee-_leaves_ contain of theine from  1.15 to 1.25 per cent.
+  Paraguay tea contains of theine from    1.01 to 1.23 per cent.
+  The coffee-berry a mean of              1.00         per cent.
+
+"Besides the theine and the essential oils, which latter give the aroma
+of the plants, there is contained in both coffee and tea a certain
+amount of difficultly soluble vegetable albumen, and in the latter,
+especially, a large quantity of tannin. Roasting renders volatile the
+essential oil of the coffee-berry. The tea-leaf, infused for a short
+time, parts with its essential oil, and a small portion of alkaloid,
+(theine,) a good deal of which is thrown away with the grounds. If it
+stands too long, or is boiled, more indeed is got out of it, but an
+astringent, disagreeable drink is the result. The boiling of coffee
+extracts all its oil and alkaloid too, and, when it is drunk with the
+grounds, allows the whole nutriment to be available. Even when
+strained, it is clearly more economical than tea."
+
+Roasted coffee is a powerful deodorizer, also. This fact is familiarly
+illustrated by its use in bar-rooms; and it might be made available for
+other purposes.
+
+The cost and vast consumption of coffee and tea have made the
+inducements to adulterate them very great. The most harmless form, is
+the selling of coffee-grounds and old tea-leaves for fresh coffee and
+tea. There is no security in buying coffee ready-ground; and we always
+look at the neat little packages of it in the grocers' windows with a
+shudder. Beans and peas we have certainly tasted in ground coffee. The
+most fashionable adulteration, and one even openly vaunted as
+economical and increasing the richness of the beverage, is with the
+root of the wild endive, or chicory. Roasted and ground, it closely
+resembles coffee. It contains, however, none of the virtues of the
+latter, and has nothing to recommend it but its cheapness. The leaves
+of the ash and the sloe are used to adulterate tea. They merely dilute
+its virtues, without adding any that are worth the exchange.
+
+The coffee-tree is a native of Ethiopia or Abyssinia. Bruce tells us
+that the nomad tribes of that part of Africa carry with them, in
+crossing deserts on hostile expeditions, only balls of pulverized
+roasted coffee mixed with butter. One of these as large as a
+billiard-ball keeps them, they say, in strength and spirits during a
+whole day's fatigue, better than a loaf of bread or a meal of meat. The
+Arabs gave the first written account of coffee, and first used it in
+the liquid form. Burton, in his "Anatomy of Melancholy," mentions it as
+early as 1621. "The Turks have a drink they call coffee, (for they use
+no wine,)--so named of a berry as black as soot, and as bitter, which
+they sip up as warm as they can suffer, because they find by experience
+that that kind of drink, so used, helpeth digestion and procureth
+alacrity."
+
+The coffee-tree reaches a height of from six to twelve feet, and when
+fully grown much resembles the apple-tree. Its leaves are green all the
+year; and in almost all seasons, blossoms and green and ripe fruit may
+be seen on the same tree at the same time. When the blossom falls,
+there springs from it a small fruit, green at first, red when ripe, and
+under its flesh, instead of a stone, is the bean or berry we call
+coffee. "It has but recently become known by Europeans that the leaves
+of the coffee-plant contain the same essential principle for which the
+berries are so much valued. In Sumatra, the natives scarcely use
+anything else. The leaves are cured like tea. And the tree will produce
+leaves over a much larger _habitat_ than it will berries." Should the
+decoction of the leaves prove as agreeable as that of the berry, we
+shall have a much cheaper coffee; though it remains to be proved that
+they contain the essential oil as well as the cafeine.
+
+The coffees of Java, Ceylon, and Mocha are most esteemed. The
+quantities produced are quite limited. Manila and Arabia together give
+less than 4,500 tons. Cuba yields 5,000 tons _per annum_; St. Domingo,
+18,000; Ceylon and the British East Indies, 16,000; Java, 60,000; and
+Brazil, 142,000. Yet, in 1774, a Franciscan friar, named Villaso,
+cultivated a single coffee-tree in the garden of the convent of San
+Antonio, in Brazil. In the estimates for 1853, we find that Great
+Britain consumes 17,500 tons; France, 21,500; Germany, (Zollverein),
+58,000; and the United States, about 90,000 tons. It is worth remarking
+how small is the comparative consumption of tea in France. The
+importation of tea for 1840 was only 264,000 kilogrammes (less than
+600,000 pounds).
+
+In Asia, coffee is drunk in a thick farinaceous mixture. With us the
+cup of coffee is valued by its clearness. We generally drink it with
+sugar and milk. The French with their meals use it as we do,--but after
+dinner, invariably without milk (_cafe noir_). And we would suggest to
+the nervous and the dyspeptic, who do not want to resign the luxury of
+coffee, or to whom its effects as an arrester of metamorphosis are
+beneficial, that when drunk on a full stomach its effects upon the
+nerves are much less felt than when taken fasting or with the meals.
+
+In the consumption of tea the United States rank next to Great Britain.
+Tea is the chief import from China into this country. The tea-plant
+flourishes from the equator to the forty-fifth parallel of latitude;
+though it grows best between the twenty-third and the twenty-fifth
+parallels. Probably it can be successfully cultivated in our Southern
+States. Mr. Fortune considers that all varieties of tea are derived
+from the same plant. Other authorities say that there are two species,
+the green and the black,--_Thea viridis_ and _Thea Bohea_. This point
+is yet unsettled. Tea is grown in small, shrub-like plantations,
+resembling vineyards. As it is a national beverage, certain localities
+are as much valued for choice varieties as are the famous vintage-hills
+and slopes of Southern France. The buds and the leaves are used; and
+there are three harvestings,--in February, April, and June. The young,
+unfolded buds of February furnish the "Youi" and "Soumlo," or "Imperial
+Teas." These are the delicate "Young Hysons" which we are supposed to
+buy sometimes, but most of which are consumed by the Mandarins.
+Souchong, Congo, and Bohea mark the three stages of increasing size and
+coarseness in the leaves. Black tea is of the lowest kind, with the
+largest leaves. In gathering the choicer varieties, we are told on
+credible authority that "each leaf is plucked separately; the hands are
+gloved; the gatherer must abstain from gross food, and bathe several
+times a day." Many differences in the flavor and color of green and
+black teas are produced by art. Mr. Fortune says of green tea, that "it
+has naturally no bloom on the leaf, and a much more natural color. It
+is dyed with Prussian blue and gypsum. Probably no bad effects are
+produced. There is no foundation for the suspicion that green tea owes
+its verdure to an inflorescence acquired from plates of copper on which
+it is curled or dried. The drying-pans are said to be invariably of
+sheet-iron." We drink our tea with milk or sugar, or both, and always
+in warm infusion. In Russia, it is drunk cold,--in China, pure; in Ava,
+it is used as a pickle preserved in oil.
+
+It would be improper not to notice, finally, the moral effect of
+coffee- and tea-drinking. How much resort to stronger stimulants these
+innocent beverages prevent can be judged only by the weakness of human
+nature and the vast consumption of both.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+MEN OF THE SEA.
+
+When the little white-headed country-boy of an inland farmstead lights
+upon a book which shapes his course in life, five times out of six the
+volume of his destiny will turn out to be "Robinson Crusoe." That
+wonderful fiction is one of the servants of the sea,--a sort of
+bailiff, which enters many a man's house and singles out and seizes the
+tithe of his flock. Or rather, cunning old De Foe,--like Odusseus his
+helmet, wherewith he detected the disguised Achilles among the
+maids-of-honor,--by his magic book, summons to the service of the sea
+its predestined ones. Why is it, but from a difference in blood and
+soul, that the sea gets its own so surely? The farmer's sons grow up
+about the fireside, do chores together, together range the woods for
+squirrels, woodchucks, chestnuts, and sassafras, go to the same
+"deestrick-school," and succeed to the same ambitions and hopes.
+Reuben, the first-born, comes in due time to the care of the paternal
+acres and oxen. Simeon, Dan, Judah, Benjamin, and the rest, grow up and
+emigrate to Western clearings. Levi, it may be, pale, thoughtful Levi,
+sees other fields "white to harvest," and struggles up through a New
+England academy- and college-education, to find a seat in the
+lecture-rooms of Andover, and to hope for a pulpit hereafter. But
+Joseph, the pet and pride of the household,--what becomes of him?
+Unlucky little duck! why could he not go "peeping" at the heels of the
+maternal parent with his brother and sister biddies? Why must he be
+born with webbed toes, and run at once to the wash-tub, there to make
+nautical experiments with walnut-shells?
+
+I know why the boys of a seaport-town take kindly to the water. All the
+birds of the shore are something marine, and their table-flavor is apt
+to be fishy. We youngsters, who were rocked to sleep with the roar of
+the surf in our ears,--one wall of whose play-room was colored in blue
+edged with white, in striking contrast with the peaceful green of the
+three other sides,--who have many a night lain warm in bed and listened
+to the distant roll of a sea-chorus and the swinging tramp of a dozen
+jolly blue-jackets,--we whose greatest indulgence was a sail with Old
+Card, _the_ boatman _par excellence_,--we who knew ships, as the
+farmer's boy knows his oxen, before we had mastered the
+multiplication-table,--it is not strange that we should take kindly to
+salt water. So, too, all along the lovely "fiords" of Maine, in the
+villages which cluster about the headlands of Essex, in the brown and
+weather-mossed cottages which dot the white sands of Cape Cod, by the
+southern shore of Long Island, wherever the sea and the land meet, the
+boy grows up drawing into his lungs the salt air, which passes in
+Nature's mysterious alchemy into his blood, so that he can never wholly
+disown his birthright. But what is it that draws from the remote inland
+the predestinate children of the deep?
+
+Poor little Joseph! he tries to slip along with the others; but when
+the holiday comes, instinct takes him straight to the mill-pond, there
+to construct forbidden rafts and adventure contraband voyages. The
+best-worn page of his Malte-Brun Geography is that which treats the
+youthful student to a packet-passage to England. He can tell the names
+of all islands, capes, and bays; but ask him the boundaries of Bohemia
+or Saxony, the capitals of Western States, and down he goes to the foot
+of the class. Thus it continues awhile, till, after a fracas at school,
+or a neglected duty on the farm, or similar severance of the bonds of
+home, Master Joe may be seen trudging along the dusty seaport-highway,
+in a passion of tears, but with a resolute heart, and an ever-deepening
+conviction that he must go on, and not back.
+
+Then there is another class,--the poetical, dreamy adventurer, to whom
+the sea beckons in every white Undine that rises along the beaches of a
+moonlight night, to whom it calls in that mournful and magic undertone
+heard only by those who love and listen. These do not often run away to
+go to sea; they prefer to voyage genteelly in yachts or packet-ships,
+and, if the impulse be very strong, will get a commission in the navy.
+However, if circumstances compel a Tapleyan "coming out strong," they
+will sometimes face their work, and that right nobly; for there is
+nowhere that gentle blood so tells as at sea. The utter absence of all
+sham or room for sham brings out true and noble qualities as well as
+mean and selfish ones. For ordinary work, one man's muscle is as good
+as another's. It is only when the time of trial comes,--when the
+volunteers are called to man the boat that is to venture through the
+wild seas to pick off the crew of a foundering wreck,--"when the
+jerking, slatting sail overhead must be got in somehow," though topmast
+and yard and sail may go any minute,--when the quailing mate or
+frightened captain dares not _order_ men to all but certain death, and
+still less dares to _lead_,--then it is, when the lives of all hang on
+the heroism of one, that the good blood will assert itself.
+
+Then there is the class who are _sent_ to sea,--scapegraces all. The
+alternative is not unfrequently the one of which Dr. Johnson chose the
+other side. The Doctor being _sans question_ a landsman, _he_ never
+saw, we warrant, any resemblance to fore and main and mizzen in the
+three spires of Litchfield. But the Doctor, not being a scamp, was not
+compelled to choose. Many another is not so well off. Like little boys
+who are sent to school, they learn what they learn from pretty much the
+same motive. Sometimes they turn out good and gallant men; but not
+often does it reform a man who is unfit for the shore to dispatch him
+to sea. If there are any vices he does not carry with him, they are
+commonly to be had dog- and dirt-cheap at the first port his ship
+makes.
+
+Then, last of all, there is a large and increasing class who _get_ to
+sea. They fall into the calling, they cannot tell how; they continue in
+it, they cannot tell why. Some have friends who would rescue them, if
+they could; others have no friend, no home, no nationality even, the
+pariahs of the sea, sullen, stupid, and broken-down, burnt-out shells
+of men, which the belaying-pin of some brutal or passionate mate
+crushes into sudden collapse, or which the hospital duly consigns to
+the potter's field.
+
+There is a popular idea of the sailor, which, beginning at the lowest
+note of the gamut, with the theatrical and cheap-novelist mariner, runs
+up its do-re-mi with authors, preachers, public speakers, reformers,
+and legislators, but always in the wrong key. There is no use in making
+up an ideal of any class; but if you must have one, let it be of an
+extinct class. It does not much harm to construct horrible
+plesiosaurians from the petrified scales we dig out of a coal-mine or
+chalk-pit; but when it comes to idealizing the sea-serpent, who winters
+at the Cape Verds and summers at Nahant, it is a serious matter. For
+the love of Agassiz, give us true dimensions or none.
+
+So, too, fancy Greeks and Romans may be ever preferable to the true
+Aristophanic or Juvenalian article,--imaginary Cavaliers or Puritans
+not at all hard to swallow,--but ideal sailors, why in the world must
+we bear them, when we can get the originals so cheaply? When the
+American "Beggar's Opera" was put upon the stage, "Mose" stepped
+forward, the very impersonation of the Bowery. If it was low, it was at
+least true, a social fact. But the stage sailor is not as near
+probability as even the stage ship or the theatrical ocean. He is a
+relic of the past,--a monstrous compound out of the imperfect gleanings
+of the Wapping dramatists of the last century. Yet all those who deal
+with this character of the sailor begin upon the same false notion. In
+their eyes the seaman is a good-natured, unsophisticated, frank,
+easy-going creature, perfectly reckless of money, very fond of his
+calling, unhappy on shore, manly, noble-hearted, generous to a degree
+inconceivable to landsmen. He is a child who needs to be put in
+leading-strings the moment he comes over the side, lest he give way to
+an unconquerable propensity of his to fry gold watches and devour
+bank-notes, _a la sandwich_, with his bread and butter.
+
+With this theory in view, all sorts of nice schemes are set forward for
+the sailor, and endless are the dull and decorous substitutes for the
+merriment or sociability of his favorite boarding-house, and wonderful
+are the schemes which are to attract the nautical Hercules to choose
+the austere virtue and neglect the rollicking and easy-going vice.
+Beautiful on paper, admirable in reports, pathetic in speeches,--all
+pictorial with anchors and cables and polar stars, with the light-house
+of Duty and the shoals of Sin. But meanwhile the character of the
+merchant-marine is daily deteriorating. More is done for the sailor now
+by fifty times than was done fifty years ago; yet who will compare the
+crews of 1858 with those of 1808?
+
+There are many reasons for this change, and one is Science. That which
+always makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, and which can be made
+to restore the lost equilibrium in a higher civilization only by the
+strong pressure of an enlightened Christianity, has been at work upon
+the sea. Columbus sailed out of Palos in a very different looking craft
+from the "Great Republic." The Vikings had small knowledge of taking a
+lunar, and of chronometers set by Greenwich time. Sir Humphrey Gilbert,
+when he so gallantly and piously reminded his crew that "heaven was as
+near by sea as on land," was sitting in the stern of a craft hardly so
+large as the long-boat of a modern merchantman. Yet the modern time
+does not give us commanders such as were of old, still less such
+seamen. Science has robbed the sea of its secret,--is every day bearing
+away something of the old difficulties and dangers which made the
+wisest head and the strongest arm so dear to their fellows, which gave
+that inexpressible sense of brotherhood. Science has given us the
+steamship,--it has destroyed the sailor. The age of discovery is
+closing with this century. Up to the limits of the ice-fields, every
+shore is mapped out, every shoal sounded. Not only does Science give
+the fixed, but she is even transferring to her charts the variable
+features of the deep,--the sliding current, the restless and veering
+wind.
+
+The personal qualities which were once needed for the sea-service are
+fast passing away. The commander or the master needs no longer to lean
+upon his men, or they to trust in him. He wants drudges, not
+shipmates,--obedient, active drudges,--men who can be drilled to quick
+execution of duty, even as in a machine the several parts. The navy is
+manned after this pattern; but there is a touchstone which sharpens the
+edge dulled with routine,--the touchstone of war. When the time comes
+that the drum-tap calls to quarters, and the decks are strewn with
+sand,--when with silence as of the grave, fore and aft, the frigate
+moves stately and proud into the line of her adversaries' fire, then it
+is that the officer and the man meet face to face, and the awful truth
+of battle compels them to own their common brotherhood. The
+merchant-service has few such exigencies. The greater the size of the
+ship, the greater the number of the crew. The system of
+shipping-offices and outfitters breaks up almost all the personal
+contact between master and men. They come on board at the hour of
+sailing. A gang of riggers, stevedores, or lightermen work the vessel
+into the stream. A handful of boosy wretches are bundled into the
+forecastle, and as many more rolled, dead-drunk, into their bunks, to
+sleep off their last spree. The mates are set to the task of dragooning
+into order the unruly mass. Half the men have spent their advance, and
+mean to run as soon as the ship arrives. They intend to do as little as
+they can,--to "soger," and shirk, and work against the ship all they
+can. The captain cares only to make a quick passage and get what he can
+out of the crew. Community of interest there is none. Brutal authority
+is pitted against sullen discontent.
+
+In the old days of the little white-headed farmer's boy's dreams, there
+were discovery and trading-ships sailing into unknown seas, and finding
+fairy islands never visited before. There were savages to trade
+with,--to fight with, it might be. There were a thousand perils and
+adventures that called for all the manly and ennobling qualities both
+of generous command and loyal obedience. It was a point of honor to
+stick by ship and captain while ship and captain remained to stick by;
+for the success of a voyage depended on such mutual trust and help. But
+now where is the sea's secret? There is hardly a square league of water
+which has not been sailed over. Find an island large enough to land a
+goat upon, and you will find it laid down in the charts,--and, if it be
+only far enough south, a Stonington sealer at anchor under its lee, or
+a New Bedford whaler's crew ashore picking up drift-wood. Where are the
+old dangers of the sea? We are fast learning to calculate for the
+storms, and to run from them. Steam-frigates have ended forever the
+pirates of the Spanish Main. The long, low, black schooner, which could
+sail dead to windward through the pages of the cheap "yellow-covers,"
+and the likeness of which sported its skull and crossbones on the said
+covers, is to be met with nowhere else. Neither the Isle of Pines nor
+the numberless West India keys know her or her romantic commander any
+more.
+
+The relations of trade, too, have changed with the changes of Science.
+We were once gathered with the group of travellers who are wont to
+smoke the cigar of peace beside the pilot-house of one of our noble
+Sound steamers. As we rounded the Battery and sped swiftly up the East
+River, the noblest avenue of New York, lined with the true palaces of
+her merchant-princes,--an avenue which by its solid and truthful
+architecture half atones for the flimsiness of its land structures,--as
+we passed the ocean steamships lying at the "Hook," the sea-captains
+about me began to talk of the American triumphs of speed. "They say to
+the Englishmen now," said one, "that we're going to take the berths out
+of the 'Pacific.'" (She had just made the then crack passage.) "When
+the English fellows ask, 'What for?'--they say, 'Because Collins
+intends to run her for a day-boat.'" This extravaganza raised a laugh;
+but one of the older brethren shook his head solemnly and sadly. "It's
+all very well," said he; "but what with a steamer twice a week, and
+your telegraph to New Orleans, they know what's going on at Liverpool
+as well as if they were at Prince's Dock. It don't pay now to lay a
+week alongside the levee on the chance of five cents for cotton."
+
+It was a text that suggested a long homily. The shipmaster was degraded
+from his old position of the merchant's friend, confidential agent, and
+often brother-merchant. He was to become a mere conductor, to take the
+ship from port to port. No longer identified with the honor and success
+of a great and princely house, with the old historic kings of the
+Northwest Coast, or of Canton, or of Calcutta, he sinks into a mere
+navigator, and a smuggler of Geneva watches or Trench embroideries.
+
+We state facts. Thus much has Science done to deteriorate the men of
+the sea. It has robbed them of all the noblest parts of their calling.
+It has taken away the spirit of adventure, the love of enterprise, and
+the manly spirit which braved unknown dangers. It has destroyed their
+interest by its new-modelling of trade; it has divided labor, and is
+constantly striving to solve the problem, How to work a ship without
+requiring from the sailor any courage or head-work, or anything, in
+short, but mere muscle. It interferes with the healthful relations of
+officer and man. The docks of Liverpool are a magnificent work, but
+they necessitate the driving of the seaman from his ship into an
+atmosphere reeking with pollution. The steam-tugs of New York are a
+wonderful convenience, but they help to further many a foul scheme of
+the Cherry-Street crimps and land-sharks.
+
+For all this Science owes a remedy. It must be in a scientific way. We
+have indicated some of the leading causes of the decline of the
+seaman's character. The facts are very patent. Step into any
+shipping-office, or consult any sea-captain of your acquaintance, and
+you will have full evidence of what we say.
+
+The remedy must not be outside the difficulty. You may build "Bethels"
+into which the sailor won't come, and "Homes" where he won't stay,
+distribute ship-loads of tracts, and scatter Bibles broadcast, but you
+will still have your work to do. The Bethel, the Home, and the Bible
+are all right, but they are for the shore, and the sailor's home is on
+the sea. It points an address prettily, no doubt, to picture a group of
+pious sailors reading their Bibles aloud of a Sunday afternoon, and
+entertaining each other with profound theological remarks, couched in
+hazy nautical language. But what is the real truth of the case? It may
+be a ship close-hauled, with Cape Horn under her lee,--all hands on
+deck for twelve hours,--sleet, snow, and storm,--the slide over the
+forecastle hatchway,--no light below by which to make out a line even
+of the excellent type of the American Bible Society, and on deck a gale
+blowing that would take the leaves bodily out of any book short of a
+fifteenth-century folio,--this, with the men now reefing and now
+shaking out topsails and every other thing, as the gale rages or lulls,
+in the hope of working to windward of certain destruction.
+
+The remedy, to be effectual, must touch the seaman's calling. It is of
+no use to appeal to his better nature, if he hasn't any. If you make a
+drudge and a beast of him, you can't do him much good by preaching at
+him. The working of the present system is, that there are afloat a set
+of fellows who are a sort of no-countrymen. Like the beach-combers of
+the Pacific, they have neither country, home, nor friends, and are as
+different from the old class of American sailors as the _condottiere_
+from the loyal soldier. Let the navigation-laws be enforced first of
+all, and see that the due proportion of the crews of every ship be
+native-born. Let the custom-house protections be no longer the farce
+they are,--where a man who talks of "awlin haft the main tack" is set
+down as a native of Martha's Vineyard, and his messmate, who couldn't
+say "peas" without betraying County Cork, is permitted to hail from the
+interior of Pennsylvania. Let the ship-owners combine (it is for their
+interest) to do away with the whole body of shipping-agents, middlemen,
+and land-sharks. Jack will take his pleasure ashore,--you can't help
+that; and perhaps so would you, Sir, after six months of "old horse"
+and stony biscuit, with a leaky forecastle and a shorthanded crew. Jack
+will take his pleasure, and that in ways we may all of us object to;
+but, for Heaven's sake, break up a system of which the whole object is
+to degrade the man into the mere hack of a set of shore harpies. Do not
+leave him in the hands of those whom you are now permitting to combine
+with you to clear him out as swiftly as possible, and then dispatch him
+to sea. Let the captains ship their own crews on board the ship, and do
+away with the system of advances. But, at any rate, do learn to treat
+the sailor as if he were not altogether a fool. He has sense, plenty of
+it, shrewd, strong, common sense, and more real gentlemanly feeling
+than we on shore generally suppose, a good deal of faith, and certain
+standing principles of sea-morality. But at the same time he has
+prejudices and whims utterly unaccountable to men living on shore. He
+will forfeit one or two hundred dollars of wages to run from a ship and
+captain with which he can find no fault. He will ship the next day in a
+worse craft for smaller wages. You cannot understand his impulses and
+moods and grievances till you see them from a forecastle point of view.
+
+It may be that Science will solve the riddle by casting aside the works
+and improvements of a thousand years,--the "wave line," the spar, the
+sail, and all,--and with them the men of the sea. It may be that
+"Leviathans" will march unheedingly _through_ the mountain waves,--that
+steam and the Winans's model will obliterate old inventions and labors
+and triumphs. Blake and Raleigh and Frobisher and Dampier may be known
+no more. The poetry and the mystery of the sea may perish altogether,
+as they have in part. Out of the past looks a bronzed and manly face;
+along the deck of a phantom-ship swings a square and well-knit form. I
+hear, in memory, the ring of his cheerful voice. I see his alert and
+prompt obedience, his self-respecting carriage, and I know him for the
+man of the sea, who was with Hull in the "Constitution" and Porter in
+the "Essex." I look for him now upon the broad decks of the magnificent
+merchantmen that lie along the slips of New York, and in his place is a
+lame and stunted, bloated and diseased wretch, spiritless, hopeless,
+reckless. Has he knowledge of a seaman's duty? The dull sodden brain
+can carry the customary orders of a ship's duty, but more than that it
+cannot. Has he hopes of advancement? His horizon is bounded by the bar
+and the brothel. A dog's life, a dog's berth, and a dog's death are his
+heritage.
+
+The old illusion still prevails and has power over little towheaded
+Joseph on the Berkshire interval. It will not prevail much longer. It
+is fast yielding to the power of facts. The Joes of next year may run
+from home in obedience to the planetary destiny which casts their
+horoscope in Neptune, but they will not run to the forecastle. We shall
+have officers and men of a different class,--the Spartan on the
+quarter-deck, the Helot in the forecastle. We have it now. A story of
+brutal wrong on shipboard startles the public. A mutiny breaks out in
+the Mersey, and a mate is beaten to death, and we wonder why the
+service is so demoralized. The story could be told by a glance at the
+names upon the shipping-papers. The officers are American,--the men are
+foreigners, blacks, Irish, Germans, non-descripts, but hopelessly
+severed from the chances of the quarter-deck. The law may interpose a
+strong arm, and keep the officer from violence, the men from mutiny. We
+may enact a Draconian code which shall maintain a sullen and revengeful
+order upon the seas, but all fellowship and mutual helpfulness are
+gone. When the day of trial comes,--the wreck, the fire, the
+leak,--subordination is lost, and every man scrambles for his own
+selfish safety, leaving women and children to the flames and the waves.
+Why is it that ships, dismasted, indeed, but light and staunch, are so
+often found rolling abandoned on the seas? It is the daily incident of
+our marine columns. I have been told by an old shipmaster, how, when he
+was a young mate, his ship was dismasted on the Banks of Newfoundland,
+on a voyage to Europe. The captain had been disabled and the vessel was
+leaking. He came into command. But in those days men never dreamed of
+leaving their ship till she was ready to leave them. They rigged
+jury-masts, and, under short canvas and working at the pumps, brought
+their craft to the mouth of Plymouth Harbor. The pilot demanded
+salvage, and was refused leave to come on board. The mate had been into
+that port before, was a good seaman and a sharp observer, and he took
+his vessel safely to her anchorage himself, rather than burden his
+owners with a heavy claim. Captains and mates will not now-a-days
+follow that lead, because they cannot trust their men, because with
+every emergency the _morale_ of the forecastle is utterly gone.
+
+For all this there is of course no universal panacea. Nor do I believe
+that legislation will much help the matter. The common-law of the seas,
+well carried out by competent courts of admiralty, is better than many
+statutes. For emergencies require extraordinary powers and a wide
+discretion. There can be no divided rule in a ship. But if every man
+know his place and his duty, and none overstep it, there will come
+thereof successful and happy voyages. There must be discipline,
+subordination, and law. The republican theory stops with the shore.
+"Obey orders, though you break owners," is the Magna Charta of the
+main. This can be well and wisely carried out only with some
+homogeneity of the ship's company, with a community of feeling and a
+community of interest. Everybody who has been off soundings knows, or
+ought to know, the difference between things "done with a will" and
+"sogering." If it be important on land to adjust the relations of
+employer and employed, it is doubly important on the sea, where the
+peril and the privation are great. For it is a hard life, a life of
+unproductive toil, that oftenest shows no results while accomplishing
+great ends. It cannot be made easy. The gale and the lee-shore are the
+same as when the sea-kings of old dared them and did battle with them
+in the heroic energy of their old Norse blood. The wet, the cold, the
+exposure must be, since you cannot put a Chilson's furnace into a
+ship's forecastle, nor wear India-rubbers and carry an umbrella when
+you go aloft. But men will brave all such discomforts and the attendant
+perils with a hearty delight, if you will train up the right spirit in
+them. Better the worst night that ever darkened off Hatteras, than the
+consumption-laden atmosphere of the starving journeyman-tailor's
+garret, the slow inhalation of pulverized steel with which the
+needle-maker draws his every breath! The sea's work makes a man, and
+leaves him with his duty nobly done, a man at the last. Courage, loyal
+obedience, patient endurance, the abnegation of selfishness,--these are
+the lessons the sea teaches. Why must the shore make such diabolical
+haste and try such fiendish ingenuity to undo them? The sea is pure and
+free, the land is firm and stable,--but where they meet, the tide rises
+and falls, leaving a little belt of sodden mud, of slippery, slimy
+weeds, where the dead refuse of the sea is cast up to rot in the hot
+sun. Something such is the welcome the men of the sea get from that
+shore which they serve. Into this Serbonian bog between them and us we
+let them flounder, instead of building out into their domain great and
+noble piers and wharves, upon which they can land securely and come
+among us.
+
+Some years ago, a young scholar was led to step forth from his natural
+sphere into the forecastle of a merchantman. No quarrel with the world,
+no romantic fancy, drove him thither, but a plain common-sense purpose.
+He saw what he saw fairly, and he has told the tale in a volume which,
+for picturesque clearness, vigor, and manly truthfulness, will scarcely
+find its equal this side the age of Elizabeth. He owed it to the sea,
+for the sea gave him health, self-reliance, and fearlessness, and that
+persistent energy which saved him from becoming that which elegant
+tastes and native refinement make of too many of our young men, a mere
+literary or social _dilettante_, and raised him up to be a champion of
+right, a chivalrous defender of the oppressed, whose name has honored
+his calling. His book was an effort in the right direction. By that we
+of the land were brought nearer to those to whom this country owes so
+much, its merchant-seamen. But we want more than the work, however
+noble, of one man. We want the persistent and Christian interest in the
+elevation of the seaman of every man who is connected with his calling.
+We do not want a Miss-Nancyish nor Rosa-Matildan sentimentalism, but a
+good, earnest, practical handling of the matter. We call our merchants
+princes. If wealth and lavish expenditure make the prince, they are,
+indeed, fit peers of Esterhazy or Lichtenstein. But the true princely
+heart looks after the humblest of its subjects. When the poor of Lyons
+were driven from their homes by the flooded Rhone, Louis Napoleon urged
+his horse breast-deep into the tide to see with his own eyes that his
+people were thoroughly rescued. The merchant whose clippers have coined
+him gold should spare more than a passing thought upon the men who hung
+over the yards and stood watchful at the wheel. England's earls can
+afford to look after the toiling serfs in their collieries; the
+patricians of New York and Boston might read as startling a page as
+ever darkened a Parliamentary Blue-book, with a single glance into
+Cherry and Ann Streets.
+
+For a thousand years the Anglo-Saxon race has been sending its
+contributions to the nation of the Men of the Sea. Ever since the
+Welshman paddled his coracle across Caernarvon Bay, and Saxon Alfred
+mused over the Danish galley wrecked upon his shore, each century has
+been adding new names of fame to the Vikings' bead-roll. Is the list
+full? has Valhalla no niche more for them? and must the men of the sea
+pass away forever? If it must be so,--it must. _Che sara sara_. But if
+there is no overruling Fate in this, but only the working of casual
+causes, it is somebody's care that they be removed. In almost all
+handicrafts and callings the last thirty years have wrought a vast and
+rapid deterioration of the men who fill them. Machinery, the boasted
+civilizer, is the true barbarizer. The sea has not escaped. Its men are
+not what the men of old were. The question is, Can we let them go?--can
+they be dispensed with among the elements of national greatness?
+
+Passing fair is Venice, but she sits in lonely widowhood in the
+deserted Adriatic. Amalfi crouches under her cliffs in the shame of her
+poverty. The harbors of Tyre and Carthage are lonesome pools. They tell
+their own story. When the men of the sea no longer find a home or a
+welcome on the shore,--when they are driven to become the mere
+hirelings who fight the battles of commerce, like other hirelings they
+will serve beneath the flag where the pay and the provant are most
+abundant. The vicissitudes of traffic are passing swift in these latter
+days; and it does not lie beyond the reach of a possible future that
+the great commercial capitals of the Atlantic coast may be called to
+pause in their giddy race, even before they have rebuilded the
+Quarantine Hospital, or laid the capstone of the pharos of Minot's
+Ledge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+CHICADEE.
+
+  The song-sparrow has a joyous note,
+    The brown thrush whistles bold and free;
+  But my little singing-bird at home
+      Sings a sweeter song to me.
+
+  The cat-bird, at morn or evening, sings
+    With liquid tones like gurgling water;
+  But sweeter by far, to my fond ear,
+      Is the voice of my little daughter.
+
+  Four years and a half since she was born,
+    The blackcaps piping cheerily,--
+  And so, as she came in winter with them,
+      She is called our Chicadee.
+
+  She sings to her dolls, she sings alone,
+    And singing round the house she goes,--
+  Out-doors or within, her happy heart
+      With a childlike song o'erflows.
+
+  Her mother and I, though busy, hear,--
+    With mingled pride and pleasure listening,--
+  And thank the inspiring Giver of song,
+      While a tear in our eye is glistening.
+
+  Oh! many a bird of sweetest song
+    I hear, when in woods or meads I roam;
+  But sweeter by far than all, to me,
+      Is my Chicadee at home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE ILLUSTRIOUS OBSCURE.
+
+
+A SECOND LETTER FROM PAUL POTTER, OF NEW YORK, TO THE DON ROBERTO
+WAGONERO, COMMORANT OF WASHINGTON, IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.
+
+22,728, Five Hundred and Fifty-First St., }
+New York, June 1, 1858.                   }
+
+Dear Don Bobus,--I see that you have been Christian enough to send my
+last letter to "The Atlantic Monthly," and that the editors of that
+famous work have confirmed my opinion of their high taste by printing
+it. Your disposition of my MSS. I do not quarrel with; although it must
+be regarded in law as an illegal liberty, inasmuch as the Court of
+Chancery has decided that a man does not part with property in his own
+letters merely by sending them; but I ask permission to hint that your
+conduct will acquire a certain graceful rotundity, if you will remit to
+me in current funds the munificent sum of money which the whole-souled
+and gentlemanly proprietors--pardon the verbal habits of my humble
+calling!--have without doubt already remitted to you. _Pecunia prima
+quaerenda, virtus post nummos_. Mind you, I do not expect to be as well
+paid as Sannazarius.
+
+"Who the deuse was he?" I hear you growling.
+
+My dear Iberian friend, I really thought that you knew everything; but
+I find that you have set up for an Admirable Crichton upon an
+inadequate capital. Know, then, that a great many years ago
+Sannazarius--never mind who he was,--I do not justly know,
+myself--wrote an hexastich on the city of Venice, and sent it to the
+potent Senators of that moist settlement. It was as follows:--
+
+  "Viderat Adriacis Venetam Neptunus in undis
+    Stare urbem et toti ponere jura mari.
+  Nunc mihi Tarpeias quantumvis, Jupiter, arces,
+    Objice, et ilia tui moenia Martis, ait;
+  Sic Pelago Tibrim praefers; urbem aspice utramque,
+    Illam homines dices, hanc posuisse deos."
+
+Which may be liberally rendered thus:--
+
+  When sea-faring Neptune saw Venice well-founded
+    And stiffly coercing the Adrian main,
+  The jolly tar cried, in a rapture unbounded:
+    "Why, d--ash my eyes, Jove, but I have you again;
+  You may boast of your city, and Mars of his walling;
+    But while I'm afloat, I'll stick to it that mine
+  Beats yours into rope-yarn in spite of your bawling,
+    Just as snuffy old Tiber is flogged by the brine;
+  And he who the difference cannot discern
+  Is a lob-sided lubber from bowsprit to stern.
+
+"Very free, indeed!" you will say. It might have been worse, if I had
+staid at college a year or two longer, or if I had been elevated to a
+place in the Triennial Catalogue,--thus:
+
+  PAULUS POTTER, LL.D., S.T.D.; Barat.
+  V. Gubernator, Lit. Hum. Prof.,
+  e Cong., Praeses Rerumpub. Foed., A.B.
+  Yal., M.D. Dart., D.D. Dart., P.D.
+  V. Mon., etc., etc., etc.
+
+I have put myself down _stelliger_, because it is certain, that, after
+obtaining all the above honors, if not an inmate of the cold and silent
+tomb, I should be false to my duties as a member of society, and a
+nuisance to my fellow-creatures. The little anachronism of translating
+after being translated you will also pardon; and talking of the tomb,
+let us return to Sannazarius. I pray that your nicely noble nose may
+not be offended by the tarry flavor of my version. You will find the
+Latin in Howell's "Survey of Venice," 1651,--a book so thoroughly
+useless, and so scarce withal, that I am sure it must be in your
+library. By the way, as you have written travels in all parts of this
+and other worlds, without so much as stirring from your arm-chair, and
+have calmly and coolly published the same, I must quote to you the
+rebuke of Howell, who says, "He would not have adventured upon the
+remote, outlandish subject, had he not bin himself upon the place; had
+he not had practicall conversation with the people of whom he writes."
+This veracious person very properly dedicated his book to the saints in
+Parliament assembled, many of whom had, soon after, ample leisure for
+perusing the fat folio. Nor is it perfectly certain that you have read
+the book, although you may own it; since it is your sublime pleasure to
+collect books like Guiccardini's History, which somebody went to the
+galleys rather than read through.
+
+But let us return, my dear Bobus, to the money question. Know, then,
+that the Sannazarian performance above quoted, so different from the
+language of the malignant and turbaned Turks, filled with rapture the
+first Senator and the second Senator and all the other Senators
+mentioned in Act I., Scene 3, of "Othello," so that, in grand
+committee, and, for all I know to the contrary, with Brabantio in the
+chair, they voted to the worthy author a reward of three hundred
+zechins, or, to state it cambistically in our own beloved Columbian
+currency, $1,233.20,--this being the highest literary remuneration upon
+record, if we except the untold sums lavished by "The New York Blotter"
+upon the fascinating author of "Steel and Strychnine; or, the Dagger
+and the Bowl." But as we have had enough of Sannazarius, let us leave
+him with the gentle hope that his check was cashed in specie at the
+Rialto Bank, and that he made a good use of the money.
+
+Now, dear Don, in the great case of Virtue _vs_. Money, I appear for
+the defendant. Confound Virtue, say I, and the whole tribe of the
+Virtuous! I am as weary of both as was that sensible Athenian of
+hearing Aristides called _The Just_; and if I had been there, and a
+legal voter, I know into which box my humble oyster-shell would have
+been plumped. Such was the vile, self-complacent habit of the
+Athenians, that I suspect the best fellows then were not good fellows
+at all. And what did the son of Lysimachus make by being recalled from
+banishment? He died so poor, that he was buried at the public charge,
+and left a couple of daughters as out-door pensioners upon public
+charity. The Athenians, I aver, were a duncified race; and it would
+have pleased me hugely to have been in the neighborhood when Alcibiades
+rescinded his dog's charming tail,--a fine practical protest, although
+unpleasant to the dog. Virtue may be well enough by way of variety; but
+for a good, steady, permanent pleasure, commend me to Avarice! Yes, O
+my Bobus, I, who was once, as to money, "still in motion of raging
+waste," and, like Timon, "senseless of expense,"--I, who have many a
+time borrowed cash of you with amiable recklessness, and have never
+asked you to take it back again,--I, who have had many a race with the
+constable, and have sometimes been overtaken,--I, who have in my callow
+days spoken disrespectfully of Mammon in several charming copies of
+verses,--I am waxing sordid. I am for the King of Lydia against Solon.
+How do I know that the insolent Cyras was not blandished out of his
+bloodthirsty intention of roasting his deposed brother by a little cash
+which the son of Gyges had saved out of the wide, weltering wreck of
+his wealth, and had concealed in his boots? Royal palms were not wholly
+free from _pruritus_ even then. Why has this silly world still
+persisted in putting long ears upon Midas? I do not know whether he
+sang better or worse than Apollo; and I am sure it is much better, and
+bespeaks more sense, to play the flute ill than to play it well. Depend
+upon it, his Majesty of Phrygia has been very much abused by the
+mythologists. With that particular skill of his, during an epidemic of
+the _brevitas pecuniaria_, (_Angl._ shorts,) he would have been just
+the person to coax into one's house of accompt, at five minutes before
+two o'clock in the afternoon, to work a little involuntary
+transmutation,--to change the coal-scuttle into ingots, and the ruler
+into a great, gorged, glittering _rouleau_. So little would his
+auricular eccentricity have hindered his welcome, that I verily believe
+he would have been heartily received, if he had come with ensanguined
+chaps straight from the pillory, and had left both ears nailed to the
+post.
+
+Don't talk to me about filthy lucre! Pray, when would Sheikh Tahar,
+that eminent Koordish saint, have become convinced that he was a great
+sinner, if they had not carried about the contribution-boxes in the
+little New England churches? Do you think it has cost nothing to
+demonstrate to the widows of Scindiah the folly of _suttee_? Don't you
+know that it has been an expensive work to persuade the Khonds of
+Goomsoor to give up roasting each other in the name of Heaven? Very
+fine is Epictetus,--but wilt he be your bail? Will Diogenes bring home
+legs of mutton? Can you breakfast upon the simple fact that riches have
+wings and use them? Can you lunch upon _vanitas vanitatum_? Are loaves
+and fishes intrinsically wicked? As for Virtue, we have the opinion of
+Horace himself, that it is viler than the vilest weed, without fortune
+to support it. Poets, of all men, are supposed to live most easily upon
+air; and yet, Don Bob, is not a fat poet, like Jamie Thomson, quite
+likely, although plumper than beseems a bard, to be ten thousand times
+healthier in his singing than my Lord Byron thinning himself upon cold
+potatoes and vinegar? Do you think that Ovid cuts a very respectable
+figure, blubbering on the Euxine shore and sending penitential letters
+to Augustus and afterward to Tiberius? He was a poor puppy, and as well
+deserved to have three wives as any sinner I ever heard of. Don't you
+think, that, if the cities of Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes,
+Argos, and Athens had given over disputing about the birthplace of the
+author of the "Iliad" and other poems, and had "pooled in" a handsome
+sum to send him to a blind asylum, it would have been a sensible
+proceeding? Do you think Milton would have written less sublimely, if
+he had been more prosperous? Do you think Otway choking, or Hudibras
+Butler dying by inches of slow starvation, pleasant to look upon? Are
+we to keep any terms with the thin-visaged jade, Poverty, after she has
+broken down a great soul like John Dryden's? That is a very foolish
+notion which has so long and so universally prevailed, that a poet
+must, by the necessity of the case, be poor. David was reckoned an
+eminent bard in his day, and he was a king; and Solomon, another sweet
+singer, was a king also. Depend upon it, no man sings, or thinks, or,
+if he be a man, works, the worse for being tolerably provided for in
+basket and pocket-money.
+
+Objectively considered, I say that there is not in this world a sadder
+sight, one so touchingly suggestive of departed joys, departed never to
+return, as a pocketbook, flat, planed, exenterated, crushed by the
+elephantine foot of Fate,--nor is there one so ridiculous, inutile,
+impertinent, possibly reproachful and disagreeably didactic. Think of
+it, Don Bob,--for you in your day, as I in mine, have seen it. 'Tis so
+much leather stripped from the innocent beast, and cured and colored
+and polished and stamped to no purpose,--with a prodigious show of
+empty compartments, like banquet-halls deserted. It has a clasp to
+mount guard over nothing,--a clasp made of steel digged from the bowels
+of the earth, and smelted and hammered and burnished, only to keep
+watch and ward after the thief has made his visit leisurely. 'Tis an
+egregious chaos. 'Tis an absurd vacuum. To make it still more
+unpleasant, there are your memoranda. You are reminded that upon
+Thursday last you purchased butter flavous, or chops rosy; but where is
+hint, sign, direction, or instruction touching the purchase of either
+upon Thursday next? How much would it have helped poor Belisarius, in
+his sore estate, if he had kept a record of his household expenses, as
+my friend Minimus does? By the same token, he sometimes makes odd
+misentries, pious figurative fictions, in order to save the feelings of
+Mrs. Minimus, who is auditor-general and comptroller of the household.
+And speaking of Belisarius, just fancy the hard fate of that gallant
+and decayed soldier! Figure him left naked by the master whom he had
+served so well, crying out for a beggarly _obolus_! Now this, you must
+know, was one of the least respectable coins of ancient times, being of
+about the value of one farthing sterling. If the poor man had got his
+battered old helmet full of them, the ponderous alms would not have
+driven the wolf gaunt and grinning many paces from his squalid
+home,--always admitting that he had any home, however squalid, to crawl
+into at sunset. And how often he crouched and whined, white-headed and
+bare-headed all day, and did not get a _lepton_ (which was, in value,
+thirty-one three hundred thirty-sixths of an English farthing) for his
+pains! 'Tis such a pitiful story, that I am truly glad that the eminent
+German scholar, Nicotinus of Heidelberg, in his work upon the Greek
+Particle, has pretty clearly shown (Vol. xxviii. pp. 2850 to 5945) that
+the story may be regarded as a myth, illustrating the great, eternal,
+and universal danger of ultimate seediness, in which the most
+prosperous creatures live. And just think of Napoleon squabbling about
+wine with Sir Hudson Lowe,--the hero of Areola, without courage enough
+to hang himself. Now you will notice, my dear friend, that he did not
+lose his dignity, until, with true British instinct, they took away his
+cash, and even opened his letters to confiscate his remittances. He
+should have hidden the imperial spoons in a secret pocket. He should,
+at least, have saved a sixpence wherewithal to buy Mr. Alison.
+
+You may think, dear Don, that my views are exceedingly sordid. I
+readily admit that all the philosophy and poetry, and I suppose I must
+add the morality, of the world are against me. I know that it is
+prettier to turn up one's nose at ready cash. I have not found, indeed,
+that for the poetical pauper, in his proper person, the world, whether
+sentimental or stolid, has any deep reverence. Will old Jacob Plum, who
+lives on an unapproachably high avenue,--his house front and his heart
+of the same material,--and who made two mints of money in the patent
+_poudrette_, come to my shabby little attic in Nassau Street, and ask
+me to dinner simply because "The Samos (Ill.) Aristarchean" has spoken
+with condescending blandness of my poems? I know that Miss Plum dotes
+upon my productions. I know that she pictures me to herself as a
+Corydon in sky-blue smalls and broad-brimmed straw hat, playing elegies
+in five flats, or driving the silly sheep home through the evening
+shades. Now, whatever else I may be, I am not that. I keep my
+refinement for gala-days; I do not shave, because I would save
+sixpences; I do not wear purple and fine linen. I should be a woful
+disappointment to Mistress Plum: for I like beer with my beef, and a
+heart-easing tug at my pipe afterwards; and as for the album, we should
+never get along at all, for I have too much respect for poetry to write
+it for nothing. But if I have not wholly escaped the shiftlessness and
+improvidence of my vocation,--if I have never rightly comprehended the
+noble maxim, "A penny saved is a penny gained," (which cannot in rigid
+mathesis be true, because by saving the penny you miss the enjoyment:
+that is, half-and-half, chops, or cheese, which the penny aforesaid
+would purchase; so that the penny saved is no better than pebbles which
+you may gather by the bushel upon any shore,)--if I like to haunt Old
+Tom's, and talk of politics and poetry with the dear shabby set who
+nightly gather there, and are so fraternally blind to the holes in each
+other's coats,--why it is all a matter between myself and Mrs. Potter,
+and perhaps the clock. We have a good, stout, manly supper,--no Apician
+kickshaws, the triumphs of palate-science,--no nightingales' tongues,
+no peacocks' brains, no French follies,--but just a rasher or so, in
+its naked and elegant simplicity. Montaigne's cook, who treated of his
+art with a settled countenance and magisterial gravity, would have
+turned his nose skyward at our humble repast; and he would have cast
+like scorn upon that to which Milton with such charming grace invited
+his friend, in one of those matchless sonnets which make us weep to
+think that the author did not write a hundred of them. But Montaigne's
+cook may follow his first master, the late Cardinal Caraffa, to that
+place where there will always be fire for his saucepans! The epicures
+of Old Tom's would deal very crisply with that spit-bearing Italian, or
+his shade, should it appear to them. We are not very polished, but most
+of us could give hints to men richer than we can hope to be of a wiser
+use of money than the world is in any danger of witnessing. There is
+Old Sanders, the proof-reader,--"Illegitimate S." we call him,--who
+knows where there is an exquisite black-letter Chaucer which he pants
+to possess, and which he would possess, were it not for a fear of Mrs.
+Sanders and a tender love of the little Sanderses. There is young
+Smooch,--he who smashed the Fly-Gallery in "The Mahlstick" newspaper,
+and was not for a moment taken in by the new Titian. There is
+Crosshatch, who has the marvellous etching by Rembrandt, of which there
+are only three copies in the world, and which he will not sell,--no,
+Sir,--not to the British Museum. There is Mr. Brevier Lead, who has in
+my time successively and successfully smitten and smashed all the
+potentates, big and little, of Europe, and who has in his museum a
+wooden model of the Alsop bomb. Give them money, and Sanders will
+rebuild and refurnish the Alexandrian Library,--Smooch will bid every
+young painter in America reset his palette and try again,--and Brevier
+Lead will be fool enough to start a newspaper upon his own account,
+and, while his purse holds out to bleed, will make it a good one. But
+until all these high and mighty things happen,--until we come into our
+property,--we must make the best of matters. I know a clever Broadway
+publisher, who, if I were able to meet the expenses, would bring out my
+minor poems in all the pomp of cream-laid paper, and with all the
+circumstance of velvet binding, with illustrations by Darley, and with
+favorable notices in all the newspapers. I should cut a fine figure,
+metaphorically, if not arithmetically speaking; whereas my farthing
+rush-light is now sputtering, clinkering, and guttering to waste, and
+all because I have not a pair of silver snuffers. If you wish me to
+move the world, produce your lever! Your wealthy bard has at least
+audience; and if he cannot sing, he may thank his own hoarse throat,
+and not the Destinies.
+
+For myself, dear Don Bob, having come into my inheritance of oblivion
+while living,--having in vain called upon Fame to sound the trumpet,
+which I am sure is so obstinately plugged that it will never syllable
+my name,--having resolutely determined to be nobody,--I do not waste my
+sympathy upon myself, but generously bestow it upon a mob of fine
+fellows in all ages, who deserved, but did not grasp, a better fortune.
+All that live in human recollection are but a handful to the tribes
+that have been forgotten. You will be kind enough, my sardonic friend,
+to repress your sneers. I tell you that a great many worthy gentlemen
+and ladies have been shouldered out of the Pantheon who deserved at
+least a corner, and who would not while living have given sixpence to
+insure immortality, so certain were they of monuments harder than
+brass. The murrain among the poets is the severest. For, in the first
+place, a fine butterfly may have a pin stuck through his stomach even
+while living. There are Bavius and Maevius, who have been laughed at
+since Virgil wrote his Third Eclogue. Now why does the world laugh?
+What does the world know of either? They were stupid and malevolent,
+were they? Pray, how do you know that they were? You have Virgil's word
+for it. But how do you know that Virgil was just? It might have been
+the east wind; it might have been an indigestion; it might have been
+Virgil's vanity; it might have been all a mistake. When a man has once
+been thoroughly laughed down, people take his stupidity for granted;
+and although he may grow as wise as Solomon, living he is considered a
+fool, dying he is regarded as a fool, and dead he is remembered as a
+fool. Do you not suppose that very responsible folk were pilloried in
+the "Dunciad"? My own opinion is, that a person must have had some
+merit, or he would not have been put there at all. How many of those
+who laugh at Dennis and Shadwell know anything of either? And let me
+ask you if the Pope set had such a superabundance of heart, that you
+would have been willing, with childlike confidence, to submit your own
+verses to their criticism? For myself, I am free to say that I have no
+patience with satirists. I never knew a just one. I never heard of a
+fair one. They are a mean, malicious, murdering tribe,--they are a
+supercilious, dogmatical, envious, suspicious company,--knocking down
+their fellow-creatures in the name of Virtue for their own
+gratification,--mere Mohawks, kept by family influence out of the
+lock-up.
+
+But of all Mohawks, Time is the fiercest. If I were upon the high road
+to fame, if I had honestly determined to win immortality or perish in
+the attempt, I should look upon the gentleman with no clothing except a
+scanty forelock, and with no personal property save his scythe and
+hour-glass, as my greatest enemy,--and I should behold the perpetual
+efforts made to kill him with perfect complacency. This, I know, is not
+regarded as a strictly moral act; for this murderer of murderers is
+very much caressed by those who, in the name of Moses, would send a
+poor devil to his hempen destiny for striking an unlucky blow. How
+continually is it beaten upon the juvenile tympanum,--"Be careful of
+Time,"--"Time is money,"--"Make much of Time"! Certainly, I do not know
+what he has done to merit consideration so tender. The best that can be
+said of old Edax Rerum is that he has an unfailing appetite, and is not
+very fastidious about his provender,--and that, if he does take heavy
+toll of the wheat, he also rids the world of no small amount of chaff.
+But 'tis such a prodigious maw!
+
+You think, Don Bob, that you know the name of every man who has
+distinguished himself since the days of Deucalion and Pyrrha. Let us
+see how much you know. I believe that in your day you had something to
+do with the new edition of the Aldine Poets. I therefore ask you, in
+the name of an outraged gentleman, who is too dead to say much for
+himself, why you left out of the series my friend Mr. Robert Baston.
+You have used Baston very ill. Baston was an English poet. Baston lived
+in the fourteenth century, and wove verses in Nottingham. When proud
+Edward went to Scotland, he took Baston along with him to sing his
+victories. Unhappily, Bruce caged the bird, and compelled him to amend
+his finest poems by striking out "Edward," wherever the name of that
+revered monarch occurred, and inserting "Robert," which, as I have
+said, he was obliged to do,--and a very ridiculous mess the process
+must have made of Mr. Baston's productions. This is all I know of
+Baston; but is not this enough to melt the toughest heart? No wonder he
+prologued his piping after the following dismal fashion:--
+
+  "In dreary verse my rhymes I make,
+  Bewailing whilst such theme I take."
+
+However, Baston was a monk of the Carmelite species, and I hope he bore
+his agonies with religious bravery.
+
+And now let us make a skip down to Charles Aleyn, _temp._ Charles I.
+"of blessed memory." A Sidney collegian of Cambridge, he began life as
+an usher in the celebrated school of Thomas Farnably,--another great
+man of whom you never heard, O Don!--a famous school, in Goldsmith's
+Rents, near Red-Cross Street, in the Parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate.
+Those were stirring times; but Aleyn managed to write, before he died,
+in 1640, a rousing great poem, intituled, "The Battailes of Crescey and
+Poictiers, under the Fortunes and Valour of King Edward the Third of
+that Name, and his Sonne, Edward, Prince of Wales, surnamed The Black."
+8vo. 1633. Let me give you a taste of his quality, in the following
+elaborate catalogue of the curiosities of a battle-field:--
+
+  "Here a hand severed, there an ear was cropped;
+  Here a chap fallen, and there an eye put out;
+  Here was an arm lopped off, there a nose dropped;
+  Here half a man, and there a less piece fought;
+  Like to dismembered statues they did stand,
+  Which had been mangled by Time's iron hand."
+
+This is prosaic enough, and might have been written by a surgical
+student; but this is better:--
+
+  "The artificial wood of spears was wet
+  With yet warm blood; and trembling in the wind,
+  Did rattle like the thorns which Nature set
+  On the rough hide of an armed porcupine;
+  Or looked like the trees which dropped gore,
+  Plucked from the tomb of slaughtered Polydore."
+
+So much for Mr. Charles Aleyn.
+
+But it is at the theatre, as you may well believe, that poets live and
+die most like the blithesome grasshoppers. The poor players, marvellous
+compounds of tin, feathers, and tiffany, fret but a brief hour; but the
+playwright, less considered alive, is sooner defunct. I have not
+Dodsley's Plays by me, but, if my memory does not deceive me, not one
+of them keeps the stage; nor did dear Charles Lamb make many in love
+with that huge heap in the British Museum. Alas! all these good people,
+now grown so rusty, fusty, and forgotten, might have rolled under their
+tongues, as a sweet morsel, those lines which civil Abraham Cowley sent
+to Leviathan Hobbes:--
+
+  "To things immortal Time can do no wrong;
+  And that which never is to die forever must be young."
+
+Alas! they had great first nights and glorious third nights,--lords and
+ladies smiled and the groundlings were affable,--they lived in a
+paradise of compliment and cash,--and then were no better off than the
+garreteer who took his damnation comfortably early upon the first
+night, and ran back to his den to whimper with mortification and to
+tremble with cold. There is worthy Mr. Shakspeare, of whom an amiable
+writer kindly said, in 1723,--"There is certainly a great deal of
+entertainment in his comical Humors, and a pleasing and
+well-distinguished variety in those characters which he thought fit to
+meddle with. His images are indeed everywhere so lively, that the thing
+he would represent stands full before you, and you possess every part
+of it. His sentiments are great and natural, and his expression just,
+and raised in proportion to the subject and occasion." You may laugh at
+this as much as you please, Don Bob; but I think it quite as sensible
+as many of the criticisms of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,--as that one of
+his, for instance, upon "Measure for Measure," which I never read
+without a feeling of personal injury. I should like to know if it is
+writing criticism to write,--"Of this play, the light or comic part is
+very natural and pleasing; but the grave scenes, if a few passages be
+excepted, have more labor than elegance." Now, if old Boltcourt had
+written instead, as he might have done, if the fit had been on
+him,--"Of this play, the heavy or tragic part is very natural and
+pleasing; but the comic scenes, if a few passages be excepted, have
+more labor than elegance,"--his remark would have been quite as
+sonorous, and just a little nearer the truth. For my own part, I think
+there is nothing finer in all Shakspeare than the interview between
+Angelo and Isabella, in the Second Act, or that exquisite outburst of
+the latter, afterward, "Not with fond shekels of the tested gold,"
+which is a line the sugar of which you can sensibly taste as you read
+it. Incledon used to wish that his old music-master could come down
+from heaven to Norwich, and could take the coach up to London to hear
+that d--d Jew sing,--referring thus civilly to the respectable John
+Braham. I have sometimes wished that Shakspeare could make a similar
+descent, and face his critics. Ah! how much he could tell us over a
+single bottle of _Rosa Solis_ at some new "Mermaid" extemporized for
+the occasion! What wild work would he make with the commentators long
+before we had exhausted the ordinate cups! and how, after we had come
+to the inordinate, would he be with difficulty prevented from marching
+at once to break the windows of his latest glossator! If anything could
+make one sick of "the next age," it would be the shabby treatment which
+the Avonian has received. I do not wonder that the illustrious authors
+of "Salmagundi" said,--"We bequeathe our first volume to future
+generations,--and much good may it do them! Heaven grant they may be
+able to read it!" Seeing that contemporary fame is the most
+profitable,--that you can eat it, and drink it, and wear it upon your
+back,--I own that it is the kind for which I have the most absolute
+partiality. It is surely better to be spoken well of by your neighbors,
+who do know you, than by those who do not know you, and who, if they
+commend, may do so by sheer accident.
+
+You never heard of Mr. Horden, of Charles Knipe, of Thomas Lupon, of
+Edward Revet? Great men all, in their day! So there was Mr. John
+Smith,--_clarum et venerabile nomen_!--who in 1677 wrote a comedy
+called "Cytherea; or, the Enamoring Girdle." So there was Mr. Swinney,
+who wrote one play called "The Quacks." So there was Mr. John Tutchin,
+1685, who wrote "The Unfortunate Shepherd." So there is Mr. William
+Smith, Mr. H. Smith, author of "The Princess of Parma," and Mr. Edmund
+Smith, 1710, author of "Phedra and Hippolytus," who is buried in
+Wiltshire, under a Latin inscription as long as my arm. There is Thomas
+Yalden, D.D., 1690, who helped Dryden and Congreve in the translation
+of Ovid, who wrote a Hymn to Morning, commencing vigorously thus:--
+
+  "Parent of Day! whose beauteous beams of light
+  Sprang from the darksome womb of night!"--
+
+and who was a great friend of Addison, which is the best I know of him.
+He might have been, like Sir Philip Sidney, "scholar, soldier, lover,
+saint,"--for Doctors of Divinity have been all four,--but I declare
+that I have told you all I have learned about him.
+
+It is grievous to me, dear Bobus, a man of notorious gallantry, to find
+that the ladies, after consenting to smirch their rosy fingers with
+Erebean ink, are among the first who are discarded. If you will go into
+the College Library, Mr. Sibley will show you a charming copy of the
+works of Mrs. Behn, with a roguish, rakish, tempting little portrait of
+the writer prefixed. Poor Mrs. Behn was a notability as well as a
+notoriety in her day; and when I have great leisure for the work, I
+mean to write her life and do her justice. The task would have been
+worthy of De Foe; but, with a little help from you, I hope to do it
+passably. Poor Aphra! poet, dramatist, intriguant strumpet! Worthy of
+no better fate, take my benison of light laughter and of tears! Then
+there is Mrs. Elizabeth Singer, who was living in 1723, who selected as
+the subject of her work nothing less than the Creation, and who was a
+woman of great religion. Her poem commences patronizingly thus:--
+
+  "Hail! mighty Maker of the Universe!
+  _My_ song shall still _thy_ glorious deeds rehearse.
+  _Thy_ praise, whatever subject others choose,
+  Shall be the lofty theme of _my_ aspiring Muse."
+
+Elizabeth was a Somersetshire woman, a clothier's daughter; and if she
+had thrown away her lyre and gone back to the distaff, I do not think
+Parnassus would have broken its heart. Then there is our fair friend,
+Mrs. Molesworth. Her father was a Right Honorable Irish peer of the
+same name, who had some acquaintance, if not a friendlier connection,
+with John Locke. Her Muse was rather high-skirted, as you may believe,
+when you read this epitaph:--
+
+  "O'er this marble drop a tear!
+    Here lies fair Rosalinde;
+  All mankind was pleased with her,
+    And she with all mankind."
+
+Let me introduce you to one more lady. This is Mrs. Wiseman, dear Don!
+She was of "poor, but honest" parentage; and if she did wash the dishes
+of Mr. Recorder Wright of Oxford, she did better than my Lady Hamilton
+or my Lady Blessington of later times. Mrs. Wiseman read novels and
+plays, and, of course, during the intervals of domestic drudgery, began
+to write a drama, which she finished after she went to London. It was
+of high-sounding title, for it was called, "Antiochus the Great; or,
+the Fatal Relapse." Who relapsed so fatally--whether Antiochus with his
+confidant, or his wife with her confidante, or Ptolemy Pater with his
+confidant, or Epiphanes with his confidant--is more than I can tell.
+Indeed, I am not sure that I know which Antiochus was honored by Mrs.
+Wiseman's Muse. Whether it was Antiochus Soter, or Antiochus Theos, or
+Antiochus the Great, or Antiochus the Epiphanous or Illustrious, or
+Antiochus Eupator, or Antiochus Eutheus, or Antiochus Sidetes, or
+Antiochus Grypus, or Antiochus Cyzenicus, or Antiochus Pius,--the
+greatest rogue of the whole dynasty,--or Antiochus Asiaticus, who "used
+up" the family entirely in Syria--is more than I can tell. Indeed,
+Antiochus was such a favorite name with kings, that, without seeing the
+play,--and I have not seen it,--I cannot inform you which Antiochus we
+are talking about. Possibly it was the Antiochus who went into a fever
+for the love of Stratonice; and if so, please to notice that this was
+the wicked Antiochus Soter, the son of Selencus, and the scapegrace who
+married his mother-in-law, by the advice of the family-doctor, while
+his fond father stood tearfully by and gave away the bride. After such
+a scandalous piece of business, I shall have nothing more to do with
+the family, but shall gladly return to our talented friend, Mrs.
+Wiseman. She brought out her work at the Theatre Royal in 1706, "with
+applause"; and the play, I am glad to inform you, brought in money, so
+that an enterprising young vintner, by the name of Holt, besought her
+hand, and won it. With the profits of "Antiochus" they established a
+tavern in Westminster, and the charming Wiseman with her own hand drew
+pots of half-and-half, or mixed punch for the company. I should very
+much like to see two-thirds of our many poet-_esses_ doing the same
+thing.
+
+But enough, probably too much, of this skimble-skamble! If you will
+look into a copy of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, (Worcester's edition,)
+you will find the names of nearly a thousand English authors cited in
+alphabetical order as authorities. Of these it is safe to say that not
+more than one hundred are remembered by the general reader. Such is
+Fame! Such is the jade who leads us up hill and down, through jungles
+and morasses, into deep waters and into swamps, through thick weather
+and thin, under blue skies and brown ones, in heat and in cold, hungry
+and thirsty and ragged, and heart-sore and foot-sore, now hopeful and
+now hopeless, now striding and now stumbling, now exultant and now
+despairing, now singing, now sighing, and now swearing, up to her
+dilapidated old temple. And when we get there, we find Dr. Beattie, in
+a Scotch wig, washing the face of young Edwin! A man of your pounds
+would be a fool to undertake the journey; but if you will be such a
+fool, you must go without the company of
+
+Your terrestrial friend,
+
+PAUL POTTER.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"THE NEW LIFE" OF DANTE.
+
+
+I.
+
+"At that season," says Boccaccio, in his Life of Dante, "when the
+sweetness of heaven reclothes the earth with its adornments, and makes
+it all smiling with flowers among the green leaves, it was the custom
+in our city for the men and for the ladies to celebrate festivals in
+their own streets in separate companies. Wherefore it happened, that,
+among the rest, Folco Portinari, a man held in much honor in those
+times among the citizens, had collected his neighbors at a feast in his
+own house on the first of May. Among them was the before-named
+Alighieri,--and, as little boys are wont to follow their fathers,
+especially to festive places, Dante, whose ninth year was not yet
+finished, accompanied him. It happened, that here, with others of his
+age, of whom, both boys and girls, there were many at the house of the
+entertainer, he gave himself to merry-making, after a childish fashion.
+Among the crowd of children was a little daughter of Folco, whose name
+was Bice,--though this was derived from her original name, which was
+Beatrice. She was, perhaps, eight years old, a pretty little thing in a
+childish way, very gentle and pleasing in her actions, and much more
+sedate and modest in her manners and words than her youthful age
+required. Beside this, she had very delicate features, admirably
+proportioned, and full, in addition to their beauty, of such openness
+and charm, that she was looked upon by many as a little angel. She
+then, such as I depict her, or rather, far more beautiful, appeared at
+this feast before the eyes of our Dante, not, I believe, for the first
+time, but first with power to enamor him. And although still a child,
+he received her image into his heart with such affection, that, from
+that day forward, never, as long as he lived, did it leave him."[1]
+
+It was partly from tradition, partly from the record which Dante
+himself had left of it, that Boccaccio drew his account of this scene.
+In the _Vita Nuova_, "The New Life," Dante has written the first part
+of the history of that love which began at this festival, and which,
+growing with his growth, became, not many years after, the controlling
+passion of his life. Nothing is better or more commonly known about
+Dante than his love for Beatrice; but the course of that love, its
+relation to his external and public life, its moulding effect upon his
+character, have not been clearly traced. The love which lasted from his
+boyhood to his death, keeping his heart fresh, spite of the scorchings
+of disappointment, with springs of perpetual solace,--the love which,
+purified and spiritualized by the bitterness of separation and trial,
+led him through the hard paths of Philosophy and up the steep ascents
+of Faith, bringing him out of Hell and through Purgatory to the glories
+of Paradise and the fulfilment of Hope,--such a love is not only a
+spiritual experience, but it is also a discipline of character whose
+results are exhibited in the continually renewed struggles of life.
+
+The earthly story of this love, of its beginning, its irregular course,
+its hopes and doubts, its exaltations and despairs, its sudden
+interruption and transformation by death, is the story which the "Vita
+Nuova" tells. The narrative is quaint, embroidered with conceits,
+deficient in artistic completeness, but it has the _naivete_ and
+simplicity of youth, the charm of sincerity, the freedom of personal
+confidence; and so long as there are lovers in the world, so long as
+lovers are poets, so long will this first and tenderest love-story of
+modern literature be read with appreciation and responsive sympathy.
+
+But "The New Life" has an interest of another sort, and a claim, not
+yet sufficiently acknowledged, upon all who would read the "Divina
+Commedia" with fit appreciation, in that it contains the first hint of
+the great poem itself, and furnishes for it a special, interior,
+imaginative introduction, without the knowledge of which it is not
+thoroughly to be understood. The character of Beatrice, as she appears
+in the "Divina Commedia," the relation in which the poet stands to her,
+the motive of the dedication of the poem to her honor and memory, and
+many minor allusions, are all explained or illustrated by the aid of
+the "Vita Nuova." Dante's works and life are interwoven as are those of
+no other of the poets who have written for all time. No other has so
+written his autobiography. With Dante, external impressions and
+internal experiences--sights, actions, thoughts, emotions,
+sufferings--were all fused into poetry as they passed into his soul.
+Practical life and imaginative life were with him one and indissoluble.
+Not only was the life of imagination as real to him as the life of
+fact, but the life of fact was clothed upon by that of imagination; so
+that, on the one hand, daily events and common circumstances became a
+part of his spiritual experience in a far more intimate sense than is
+the case with other men, while, on the other, his fancies and his
+visions assumed the absoluteness and the literal existence of positive
+external facts. The remotest flights of his imagination never carry him
+where his sight becomes dim. His journey through the spiritual world
+was no less real to him than his journeys between Florence and Rome, or
+his wanderings between Verona and Ravenna. So absolute was his
+imagination, that it often so far controls his reader as to make it
+difficult not to believe that the poet beheld with his mortal eyes the
+invisible scenes which he describes. Boccaccio relates, that, after
+that part of the "Commedia" which treats of Hell had become famous it
+happened one day in Verona, that Dante "passed before a door where
+several women were sitting, and one of them, in a low voice, yet not so
+but that she was well heard by him and his companion, said to another
+woman: 'See that man who goes through Hell and comes back when he
+pleases, and brings news of those who are down there!' And then one of
+them replied simply: 'Indeed, what you say must be true; for do you not
+see how his beard is crisped and his face brown with the heat and smoke
+of it?'"[2]
+
+From this close relation between his life and his works, the "Vita
+Nuova" has a peculiar interest, as the earliest of Dante's writings,
+and the most autobiographic of them in its form and intention. In it we
+are brought into intimate personal relations with the poet. He trusts
+himself to us with full and free confidence; but there is no derogation
+from becoming manliness in his confessions. He draws the picture of a
+portion of his youth, and lays bare its tenderest emotions; but he does
+so with no morbid self-consciousness, and no affectation. Part of this
+simplicity is due, undoubtedly, to the character of the times, part to
+his own youthfulness, part to downright faith in his own genius. It was
+the fashion for poets to tell of their loves; in following the fashion,
+he not only gave expression to real feeling, but claimed his rank among
+the poets, and set a new style, from which love-poetry was to take a
+fresh date.
+
+This first essay of his poetic powers exhibits the foundation upon
+which his later life was built. The figure of Beatrice, which appears
+veiled under the allegory, and indistinct in the bright cloud of the
+mysticism of the "Divina Commedia," takes her place in life and on the
+earth through the "Vita Nuova," as definitely as Dante himself. She is
+no allegorized piece of humanity, no impersonation of attributes, but
+an actual woman,--beautiful, modest, gentle, with companions only less
+beautiful than herself,--the most delightful figure in the midst of the
+picturesque life of Florence. She is seen smiling and weeping, walking
+with stately maidenly decorum in the street, praying at the church,
+merry at festivals, mourning at funerals; and her smiles and tears, her
+gentleness, her reserve, all the sweet qualities of her life, and the
+peace of her death, are told of with such tenderness and refinement,
+such pathetic melancholy, such delicate purity, and such passionate
+vehemence, that she remains and will always remain the loveliest and
+most womanly woman of the Middle Ages,--at once absolutely real and
+truly ideal.
+
+It was in the year 1292, about two years after the death of Beatrice,
+and when he himself was about twenty-seven years old, that Dante
+collected into this _libretto d' amore_ the poems that he had written
+during Beatrice's life, adding to them others relating to her written
+after her death, and accompanying all with a narrative and commentary
+in prose. The meaning of the name which he gave to the book, "La Vita
+Nuova," has been the cause of elaborate discussion among the Italian
+commentators. Literally "The New Life," it has been questioned whether
+this phrase meant simply early life, or life made new by the first
+experience and lasting influence of love. The latter interpretation
+seems the most appropriate to Dante's turn of mind and to his condition
+of feeling at the time when the little book appeared. To him it was the
+record of that life which the presence of Beatrice had made new.[3]
+
+But whatever be the true significance of the title, this "New Life" is
+full not only of the youthfulness of its author, but of the fresh and
+youthful spirit of the time. Italy, after going through a long period
+of childhood, was now becoming conscious of the powers of maturity.
+Society, (to borrow a fine figure from Lamennais,) like a river, which,
+long lost in marshes, had at length regained its channel, after
+stagnating for centuries, was now again rapidly advancing. Throughout
+Italy there was a morning freshness, and the thrill and exhilaration of
+conscious activity. Her imagination was roused by the revival of
+ancient and now new learning, by the stories of travellers, by the
+gains of commerce, by the excitements of religion and the alarms of
+superstition. She was boastful, jealous, quarrelsome, lavish,
+magnificent, full of fickleness,--exhibiting on all sides the
+exuberance, the magnanimity, the folly of youth. After the long winter
+of the Dark Ages, spring had come, and the earth was renewing its
+beauty. And above all other cities in these days Florence was full of
+the pride of life. Civil brawls had not yet reduced her to become an
+easy prey for foreign conquerors. She was famous for wealth, and her
+spirit had risen with prosperity. Many years before, one of the
+Provencal troubadours, writing to his friend in verse, had
+said,--"Friend Gaucelm, if you go to Tuscany, seek a shelter in the
+noble city of the Florentines, which is named Florence. There all true
+valor is found; there joy and song and love are perfect and adorned."
+And if this were true in the earlier years of the thirteenth century,
+it was still truer of its close; for much of early simplicity and
+purity of manners had disappeared before the increasing luxury (_le
+morbidezze d' Egitto_, as Boccaccio terms it) and the gathered wealth
+of the city,--so that gayety and song more than ever abounded. "It is
+to be noted," says Giovanni Villani, writing of this time, "it is to be
+noted that Florence and her citizens were never in a happier
+condition." The chroniclers tell of constant festivals and
+celebrations. "In the year 1283, in the month of June, at the feast of
+St. John, the city of Florence being in a happy and good state of
+repose,--a tranquil and peaceable state, excellent for merchants and
+artificers,--there was formed a company of a thousand men or more, all
+clothed in white dresses, with a leader called the Lord of Love, who
+devoted themselves to games and sports and dancing, going through the
+city with trumpets and other instruments of joy and gladness, and
+feasting often together. And this court lasted for two months, and was
+the most noble and famous that ever was in Florence or in all Tuscany,
+and many gentlemen came to it, and many rhymers,[4] and all were
+welcomed and honorably cared for." Every year, the summer was opened
+with May and June festivals. Florence was rejoicing in abundance and
+beauty.[5] Nor was it only in passing gayeties that the cheerful and
+liberal temper of the people was displayed.
+
+The many great works of Art which were begun and carried on to
+completion at this time show with what large spirit the whole city was
+inspired, and under what strong influences of public feeling the early
+life of Dante was led. Civil liberty and strength were producing their
+legitimate results. Little republic as she was, Florence was great
+enough for great undertakings. Never was there such a noble activity
+within the narrow compass of her walls as from about 1265, when Dante
+was born, to the end of the century. In these thirty-five years, the
+stout walls and the tall tower of the Bargello were built, the grand
+foundations of the Palazzo Vecchio and of the unrivalled Duomo were
+laid, and both in one year; the Baptistery--_Il mio bel San
+Giovanni_--was adorned with a new covering of marble; the churches of
+Sta Maria Novella, of Or San Michele, (changed from its original
+object,) and Sta Croce,--the finest churches even now in
+Florence,--were all begun and carried far on to completion. Each new
+work was at once the fruit and the seed of glorious energy. The small
+city, of less than one hundred thousand inhabitants, the little
+republic, not so large as Rhode Island or Delaware, was setting an
+example which later and bigger and richer republics have not
+followed.[6] It might well, indeed, be called a "new life" for
+Florence, as well as for Dante. When it was determined to supply the
+place of the old church of Santa Reparata with a new cathedral, a
+decree was passed in words of memorable spirit: "Whereas it is the
+highest interest of a people of illustrious origin so to proceed in its
+affairs that men may perceive from its external works that its doings
+are at once wise and magnanimous, it is therefore ordered, that
+Arnolfo, architect of our commune, prepare the model or design for the
+rebuilding of Santa Reparata, with such supreme and lavish magnificence
+that neither the industry nor the capacity of man shall be able to
+devise anything more grand or more beautiful; inasmuch as the most
+judicious in this city have pronounced the opinion, in public and
+private conferences, that no work of the commune should be undertaken,
+unless the design be to make it correspondent with a heart which is of
+the greatest nature, because composed of the spirit of many citizens
+united together in one single will."[7] The records of few other cities
+contain a decree so magnificent as this.
+
+It would be strange, indeed, if the youthful book of one so sensitive
+to external influences as Dante did not give evidence of sympathy with
+such pervading emotion. And so apparent is this,--that one may say that
+only at such a period, when strength of sentiment was finding vent in
+all manner of free expression, was such a book possible. Confidence,
+frankness, directness in the rendering of personal feeling are rare,
+except in conditions of society when the emotional spirit is stronger
+than the critical. The secret of the active power of the arts at this
+time was the conscious or unconscious resort of those who practised
+them to the springs of Nature, from which the streams of all true Art
+proceed. Dante was the first of the moderns to seek Poetry at the same
+fountain, and to free her from the chains of conventionality which had
+long bound her. In this he shows his close relation to his times. It is
+his fidelity to Nature which has made him a leader for all successive
+generations. The "Vita Nuova" was the beginning of a new school of
+poetry and of prose as completely as Giotto's O was the beginning of a
+new school of painting.
+
+The Italian poets, before Dante, may be broadly divided into two
+classes. The first was that of the troubadours, writing in the
+Provencal language, hardly to be distinguished from their
+contemporaries of the South of France, giving expression in their
+verses to the ideas of love, gallantry, and valor which formed the base
+of the complex and artificial system of chivalry, repeating constantly
+the same fancies and thoughts in similar formulas of words, without
+scope or truth of imagination, with rare exhibitions of individual
+feeling, with little regard for Nature. Ingenuity is more
+characteristic of their poetry than force, subtilty more obvious in it
+than beauty. The second and later class were poets who wrote in the
+Italian tongue, but still under the influence of the poetic code which
+had governed the compositions of their Provencal predecessors. Their
+poetry is, for the most part, a faded copy of an unsubstantial
+original,--an echo of sounds originally faint. Truth and poetry were
+effectually divided. In the latter half of the thirteenth century,
+however, a few poets appeared whose verses give evidence of some native
+life, and are enlivened by a freer play of fancy and a greater
+truthfulness of feeling. Guido Guinicelli, who died in 1276, when Dante
+was eleven years old, and, a little later, Guido Cavalcanti, and some
+few others, trusting more than had been done before to their own
+inspiration, show themselves as the forerunners of a better day.[8] But
+as, in painting, Margheritone and Cimabue, standing between the old and
+the new styles, exhibit rather a vague striving than a fulfilled
+attainment, so is it with these poets. There is little that is
+distinguishingly individual in them. Love is still treated mostly as an
+abstraction, and one poet might adopt the others' love-verses with few
+changes of words for any manifest difference in them of personal
+feeling.
+
+Not so with Dante. The "Vita Nuova," although retaining many ideas,
+forms, and expressions derived from earlier poets, is his, and could be
+the work of no other. Nor was he unaware of this difference between
+himself and those that had gone before him, or ignorant of its nature.
+In describing himself to Buonagiunta da Lucca in Purgatory, he says, "I
+am one who, when Love breathes, mark, and according as he dictates
+within, I report"; to which the poet of Lucca replies, "O brother, now
+I see the knot which kept the Notary and Guittone and me back from that
+sweet new style which now I hear. I see well how your pens have
+followed close on the dictator, which truly was not the case with
+ours."[9] As Love was the common theme of the verses from which
+Buonagiunta drew his contrast, the difference between them lay plainly
+in sincerity of feeling and truth of expression. The following close
+upon the dictates of his heart was the distinguishing merit of Dante's
+love-poetry over all that had preceded it and most of what has followed
+it. There are, however, some among his earlier poems in which the
+"sweet new style" is scarcely heard,--and others, of a later period, in
+which the accustomed metaphysical and fanciful subtilties of the elder
+poets are drawn out to an unwonted fineness. These were concessions to
+a ruling mode,--concessions the more readily made, owing to their being
+in complete harmony with the strong subtilizing and allegorizing
+tendencies of Dante's own mind. Still, so far as he adopts the modes of
+his predecessors in this first book of his, Dante surpasses them all in
+their own way. He leaves them far behind him, and goes forward to open
+new paths which he is to tread alone.
+
+But there is yet another tendency of the times, to which Dante, in his
+later works, has given the fullest and most characteristic expression,
+and which exhibits itself curiously in the "Vita Nuova." Corresponding
+with the new ardor for the arts, and in sympathy with it, was a newly
+awakened and generally diffused ardor for learning, especially for the
+various branches of philosophy. Science was leaving the cloister, in
+which she had sat in dumb solitude, and coming out into the world. But
+the limits and divisions of knowledge were not firmly marked. The
+relations of learning to life were not clearly understood. The science
+of mathematics was not yet so advanced as to bind philosophy to
+exactness. The intellects of men were quickened by a new sense of
+freedom, and stimulated by ardor of imagination. New worlds of
+undiscovered knowledge loomed vaguely along the horizon. Philosophy
+invaded the sphere of poetry, while, on the other hand, poetry gave its
+form to much of the prevailing philosophy. To be a proper poet was not
+only to be a writer of verses, but to be a master of learning.
+Boccaccio describes Guido Cavalcanti as "one of the best logicians in
+the world, and as a most excellent natural philosopher,"[10] but says
+nothing of his poetry. Dante, more than any other man of his time,
+resumed in himself the general zeal for knowledge. His genius had two
+distinct, and yet often intermingling parts,--the poetic and the
+scientific. No learning came amiss to him. He was born a scholar, as he
+was born a poet,--and had he written not a single poem, he would still
+be famous as the most profound student of his times. Far as he
+surpassed his contemporaries in poetry, he was no less their superior
+in the depth and the extent of his knowledge. And this double nature of
+his genius is plainly shown in many parts of "The New Life." A youthful
+incapacity to mark clearly the line between the work of the student and
+the work of the poet is manifest in it. The display of his acquisitions
+is curiously mingled with the narrative of his emotions. This is not to
+be charged against him as pedantry. His love of learning partook of the
+nature of passion; his judgment was not yet able, if indeed it ever
+became able, to establish the division between the abstractions of the
+intellect and the affections of the heart. And above all, his early
+claim of honor as a poet was to be justified by his possession of the
+fruits of study.
+
+But there was also in Dante a quality of mind which led him to unite
+the results of knowledge with poetry in a manner almost peculiar to
+himself. He was essentially a mystic. The dark and hidden side of
+things was not less present to his imagination than the visible and
+plain. The range of human capacity in the comprehension of the
+spiritual world was not then marked by as numerous boundary-stones of
+failure as now limit the way. Impossibilities were sought for with the
+same confident hope as realities. The alchemists and the astrologers
+believed in the attainment of results as tangible and real as those
+which travellers brought back from the marvellous and still unachieved
+East. The mystical properties of numbers, the influence of the stars,
+the powers of cordials and elixirs, the virtues of precious stones,
+were received as established facts, and opened long vistas of discovery
+before the student's eyes. Curiosity and speculative inquiry were
+stimulated by wonder and fed by all the suggestions of heated fancies.
+Dante, partaking to the full in the eager spirit of the times, sharing
+all the ardor of the pursuit of knowledge, and with a spiritual insight
+which led him into regions of mystery where no others ventured,
+naturally connected the knowledge which opened the way for him with the
+poetic imagination which cast light upon it. To him science was but
+another name for poetry.
+
+Much learning has been expended in the attempt to show that even the
+doctrine of Love, which is displayed in "The New Life," is derived,
+more or less directly, from the philosophy of Plato. It has been
+supposed that this little autobiographic story, full of the most
+intimate personal revelations, and glowing with a sincere passion, was
+written on a preconceived basis of theory. A certain Platonic form of
+expression, often covering ideas very far removed from those of Plato,
+was common to the earlier, colder, and less truthful poets. Some
+strains of such Platonism, derived from the poems of his predecessors,
+are perhaps to be found in this first book of Dante's. But there is
+nothing to show that he had deliberately adopted the teachings of the
+ancient philosopher. It may well, indeed, be doubted if at the time of
+its composition he had read any of Plato's works. Such Platonism as
+exists in "The New Life" was of that unconscious kind which is shared
+by every youth of thoughtful nature and sensitive temperament, who
+makes of his beloved a type and image of divine beauty, and who by the
+loveliness of the creature is led up to the perfection of the Creator.
+
+The essential qualities of the "Vita Nuova," those which afford direct
+illustration of Dante's character, as distinguished from those which
+may be called youthful, or merely literary, or biographical, correspond
+in striking measure with those of the "Divina Commedia." The earthly
+Beatrice is exalted to the heavenly in the later poem; but the same
+perfect purity and intensity of feeling with which she is reverently
+regarded in the "Divina Commedia" is visible in scarcely less degree in
+the earlier work. The imagination which makes the unseen seen, and the
+unreal real, belongs alike to the one and to the other. The "Vita
+Nuova" is chiefly occupied with a series of visions; the "Divina
+Commedia" is one long vision. The sympathy with the spirit and impulses
+of the time, which in the first reveals the youthful impressibility of
+the poet, in the last discloses itself in maturer forms, in more
+personal expressions. In the "Vita Nuova" it is a sympathy mastering
+the natural spirit; in the "Divina Commedia" the sympathy is controlled
+by the force of established character. The change is that from him who
+follows to him who commands. It is the privilege of men of genius, not
+only to give more than others to the world, but also to receive more
+from it. Sympathy, in its full comprehensiveness, is the proof of the
+strongest individuality. By as much as Dante or Shakspeare learnt of
+and entered into the hearts of men, by so much was his own nature
+strengthened and made peculiarly his own. The "Vita Nuova" shows the
+first stages of that genius, the first proofs of that wide sympathy,
+which at length resulted in the "Divine Comedy." It is like the first
+blade of spring grass, rich with the promise of the golden harvest.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Vita di Dante_. Milan, 1823, pp. 29, 30.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Vita di Dante_, p. 69.]
+
+[Footnote 3: For _vita nova_ in the sense of _early life_, see
+_Purgatory_, xxx. 115, with the comments of Landino and Benvenuto da
+Imola; and for _eta novella_ in a similar sense, see Canzone xviii. st.
+6. Fraticelli, who supports this interpretation, gives these with other
+examples, but none more to the point. Mr. Joseph Carrow, who had a
+translation into English of the _Vita Nuova_, printed at Florence in
+1840, entitles his book "The Early Life of Dante Allighieri." But as
+giving probability to the meaning to which we incline, see Canzone x.
+st. 5.
+
+  "Lo giorno che costei nel mondo venne,
+  Secondo che si trova
+  Nel libro della mente che vien meno,
+  La mia persona parvola sostenne
+  Una passion nova."
+
+  That day when she unto the world attained,
+  As is found written true
+  Within the book of my now sinking soul,
+  Then by my childish nature was sustained
+  A passion new.
+
+In referring to Dante's Minor Poems, we shall refer to them as they
+stand in the first volume of Fraticelli's edition of the _Opere Minore
+al Dante_, Firenze, 1834. There is great need of a careful, critical
+edition of the _Canzoniere_ of Dante, in which poems falsely ascribed
+to him should no longer hold place among the genuine. But there is
+little hope for this from Italy; for the race of Italian commentators
+on Dante is, as a whole, more frivolous, more impertinent, and duller,
+than that of English commentators on Shakespeare.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The word in the original (Villani, Book vii. C. 89) is
+_Giocolari_, the Italian form of the French _jongleur_,--the
+appellation of those whose profession was to sing or recite the verses
+of the troubadours or the romances of chivalry.]
+
+[Footnote 5: See Boccaccio, _Decamerone_, Giorn. vi, Nov. 9, for an
+entertaining picture of Florentine festivities.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The feeling which moved Florence thus to build herself
+into beauty was one shared by the other Italian republican cities at
+this time. Venice, Verona, Pisa, Siena, Orvieto, were building or
+adding to churches and palaces such as have never since been
+surpassed.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Cicognara, _Storia della Scultura_, II. 147.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Guido Guinicelli will always be less known by his own
+verses than by Dante's calling him
+
+                  ------"father
+  Of me and all those better others
+  Who sweet chivalric lovelays formed."
+                                _Purg._ xxvi. 97-99.
+
+And Guido Cavalcanti, "he who took from this other Guido the praise of
+speech," (_Purg._ xi. 97,) is more famous as Dante's friend than as a
+poet.]
+
+[Footnote 9: _Purgatory_, xxiv. 53-60.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Decamerone_, Giorn. vi. Nov. 9. _Logician_ is here to be
+understood in an extended sense, as the student of letters, or _arts_,
+as they were then called, in general.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+AT SEA.
+
+  The night is made for cooling shade,
+    For silence, and for sleep;
+  And when I was a child, I laid
+  My hands upon my breast, and prayed,
+    And sank to slumbers deep:
+  Childlike as then, I lie to-night,
+  And watch my lonely cabin light.
+
+  Each movement of the swaying lamp
+    Shows how the vessel reels:
+  As o'er her deck the billows tramp,
+  And all her timbers strain and cramp
+    With every shock she feels,
+  It starts and shudders, while it burns,
+  And in its hinged socket turns.
+
+  Now swinging slow, and slanting low,
+    It almost level lies;
+  And yet I know, while to and fro
+  I watch the seeming pendule go
+    With restless fall and rise,
+  The steady shaft is still upright,
+  Poising its little globe of light.
+
+  O hand of God! O lamp of peace!
+    O promise of my soul!--
+  Though weak, and tossed, and ill at ease,
+  Amid the roar of smiting seas,
+    The ship's convulsive roll,
+  I own, with love and tender awe,
+  Yon perfect type of faith and law!
+
+  A heavenly trust my spirit calms,
+    My soul is filled with light:
+  The ocean sings his solemn psalms,
+  The wild winds chant: I cross my palms,
+    Happy as if, to-night,
+  Under the cottage-roof, again
+  I heard the soothing summer-rain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+BULLS AND BEARS.
+
+[Continued.]
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+WHICH TREATS OF THE MODESTY OF CANDIDATES FOR OFFICE.
+
+Mr. Sandford sat in his private room. Through the windows in front were
+seen the same bald and grizzly heads that had for so many years given
+respectability to the Vortex Company. The contemplation of the cheerful
+office and the thought of its increasing prosperity seemed to give him
+great satisfaction; for he rubbed his white and well-kept hands,
+settled his staid cravat, smoothed his gravely decorous coat, and
+looked the picture of placid content. He meditated, gently twirling his
+watch-seal the while.
+
+"Windham will be here presently, for my note admitted only of an answer
+in person. A very useful person to have a call from is Windham; these
+old gentlemen will put up their gold spectacles when he comes, and
+won't think any the less of me for having such a visitor. I noticed
+that Monroe was much impressed the other day. Then Bullion and Stearine
+will drop in, I think,--both solid men, useful acquaintances. If
+Plotman has only done what he promised, the thing will come round
+right. I shall not seek office,--oh, no! I could not compromise my
+position. But if the people thrust it upon me, I cannot refuse.
+Citizenship has its duties as well as its privileges, and every man
+must take his share of public responsibility. By-the-by, that's a
+well-turned phrase; 'twill bear repeating. I'll make a note of it."
+
+True enough, Mr. Windham called, and, after the trivial business-affair
+was settled, he introduced the subject he was expected to speak on.
+
+"We want men of character and business habits in public station, my
+young friend, and I was rejoiced to-day to hear that it was proposed to
+make you a Senator. We have had plenty of politicians,--men who trade
+in honors and offices."
+
+"I am sensible of the honor you mention," modestly replied Sandford,
+"and should value highly the compliment of a nomination, particularly
+coming from men like yourself, who have only the public welfare at
+heart. But if I were to accept, I don't know how I could discharge my
+duties. And besides, I am utterly without experience in political life,
+and should very poorly fulfil the expectations that would be formed of
+me."
+
+"Don't be too modest, Mr. Sandford. If you have not experience in
+politics, all the better; for the ways to office have been foul enough
+latterly. And as to business, we must arrange that. Your duties here
+you could easily discharge, and we will get some other young man to
+take your place in the charitable boards;--though we shall be
+fortunate, if we find any one to make a worthy successor."
+
+After a few words, the stately Mr. Windham bowed himself out, leaving
+Sandford rubbing his hands with increased, but still gentle hilarity.
+
+Mr. Bullion soon dropped in. He was a stout man, with a round, bald
+head, short, sturdy legs, and a deep voice,--a weighty voice on
+'Change, though, as its owner well knew,--the more, perhaps, because it
+dealt chiefly in monosyllables.
+
+"How are you, Sandford? Fine day. Anything doing? Money more in demand,
+they say. Hope all is right; though it looks like a squall."
+
+Mr. Sandford merely bowed, with an occasional "Ah!" or "Indeed!"
+
+"How about politics?" Bullion continued. "Talk of sending you to the
+Senate. Couldn't do better,--I mean the city couldn't; _you'd_ be a
+d---d fool to go. Somebody has to, though. You as well as any. Can I
+help you?"
+
+"You rather surprise me. I had not thought of the honor."
+
+Bullion turned his eye upon him,--a cool, gray eye, overhung by an
+eyebrow that seemed under perfect muscular control; for the gray wisp
+of hair grew pointed like a paint-brush, and had a queer motion of
+intelligence.
+
+"Oh, shy, I see! Just as well. Too forward is bad. We'll fix it. Good
+morning!"
+
+And Bullion, sticking his hands in his pockets, went away with a
+half-audible whistle, to look after his debtors, and draw in his
+resources before the anticipated "squall" should come. Mr. Sandford had
+lost the opportunity of making his carefully studied speech; but, as
+Bullion had said, it was just as well.
+
+Mr. Stearine came next,--a tall, thin man, with a large, bony frame,
+and a bilious temperament. A smile played perpetually around his
+loose mouth,--not a smile of frank good-humor, but of uneasy
+self-consciousness. He smiled because it was necessary to do something;
+and he had not the idea of what repose meant.
+
+"You are going to the Senate, I hear," said the visitor.
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"Oh, yes,--I've heard it from several. Mr. Windham approves it, and I
+just heard Bullion speak of it. A solid man is Bullion; a man of few
+words, but all his words tell; they drop like shot."
+
+"Mr. Windham was good enough to speak of it to me to-day; but I haven't
+made up my mind. In fact, it will be time enough when the nomination is
+offered to me. By-the-way, Mr. Stearine, you were speaking the other
+day of a little discount. If you want a thousand or two, I think I can
+get it for you. Street rates are rather high, you know; but I will do
+the best I can."
+
+Mr. Stearine smiled again, as he had done every minute before, and
+expressed his gratification.
+
+"Let me have good paper on short time; it's not my money, and I must
+consult the lender's views, you know. About one and a half per cent. a
+month, I think; he may want one and three quarters, or two per
+cent,--not more."
+
+Mr. Stearine hoped his friend would obtain as favorable terms as he
+could.
+
+"You'll have no trouble in meeting the larger note due, Bullion, on
+which I am indorser?" said Sandford.
+
+"None at all, I think," was the reply.
+
+"Two birds with one stone," thought Sandford, after his friend's
+departure. "A good investment, and the influence of a good man to boot.
+Now to see Fletcher and learn how affairs are coming on. We'll make
+that ten thousand fifteen before fall is over, if I am not mistaken."
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+WHEREIN THE INVESTMENT IS DISCUSSED.
+
+It was the evening of a long day in summer. Mrs. Monroe had rolled up
+her sewing and was waiting for her son. Tea was ready in the pleasant
+east room, and the air of the house seemed to invite tranquillity and
+repose. It was in a quiet street, away from the rattle of carriages,
+and comparatively free from the multitudinous noises of a city. The
+carts of milkmen and marketmen were the only vehicles that frequented
+it. The narrow yard in the rear, with its fringe of grass, and the
+proximity to the pavement in front, were the only things that would
+have prevented one from thinking himself a dweller in the country. As
+the clock struck six, Walter Monroe's step was heard at the
+door;--other men might be delayed; he never. No seductions of billiards
+or pleasant company ever kept him from the society of his mother. He
+had varied sources of amusement, and many friends, attracted by his
+genial temper and tried worth; but he never forgot that his mother
+denied herself all intercourse with society, and was indifferent to
+every pleasure out of the sphere of home. Nor did he meet her as a
+matter of course; mindful of his mother's absorbing love, and heartily
+returning it, he seemed always, upon entering the room, to have come
+home as from a long absence. He kissed her fondly, asked concerning her
+health and spirits, and how she had passed the day.
+
+"The day is always long till you come, Walter. Tea is ready now, my
+son. When you are rested, we will sit down."
+
+"Ah, mother, you are cheerful to-day. I have brought you, besides the
+papers, a new book, which we will commence presently."
+
+"A thoughtful boy you are; but you haven't told me all, Walter. I see
+something behind those eyes of yours."
+
+"What telltales they must be! Well, I have a pretty present for you,--a
+sweet picture I bought the other day, and which will come home
+to-morrow, I fancy."
+
+"Is that all? I shall be glad to see the picture, because you like it.
+But you have something else on your mind."
+
+"I see I never keep anything from you, mother. You seem to know my
+thoughts."
+
+"Well, what is it?"
+
+"I have been thinking, mother, that our little property was hardly so
+productive as it ought to be,--earning barely six per cent., while I
+know that many of my friends are getting eight, and even ten."
+
+"I am afraid that the extra interest is only to pay for the risk of
+losing all."
+
+"True, that is often the case; but I think we can make all safe."
+
+"Well, what do you propose doing?"
+
+"I have left it with Mr. Sandford, an acquaintance of mine, to invest
+for me. He is secretary of an insurance company, and knows all the ways
+of the money-lending world."
+
+"It's a great risk, Walter, to trust our all."
+
+"Not our all, mother. I have a salary, and, whatever may happen, we can
+always depend on that. Besides, Mr. Sandford is a man of integrity and
+credit. He has the unlimited confidence of the company, and I rely upon
+him as I would upon myself."
+
+"How has he invested it? Have you got the securities?"
+
+"Not yet, mother. I have left the money on his note for the present;
+and when he has found a good chance to loan it, he will give me the
+mortgages or stocks, as the case may be. But come, mother, let us sit
+down to tea. All is safe, I am sure; and to-morrow I will make you
+satisfied with my prudent management."
+
+When the simple meal was over, they sat in the twilight before the gas
+was lighted. The moments passed rapidly in their free and loving
+converse. Then the table was drawn out and the new book was opened.
+Mrs. Monroe suddenly recollected something.
+
+"Walter, my dear, a letter was left here to-day by the postman. As it
+was directed to the street and number, it did not go to your box. Here
+it is. I have read it; and rather sad news it brings. Cousin Augustus
+is failing, so his daughter writes, and it is doubtful whether he ever
+recovers. Poor child! I am sorry for her."
+
+Walter took the letter and hastily read it.
+
+"A modest, feeling, sensible little girl, I am sure. I have never seen
+her, you know; but this letter is simple, touching, and womanly."
+
+"A dear, good girl, I am sure. How lonely she must be!"
+
+"Mother, I believe I'll go and see them. In time of trouble we should
+forget ceremony. Cousin Augustus has never invited me, but I'll go and
+see him. Won't you go, too?"
+
+"Dear boy, I couldn't! The cars? Oh, never!"
+
+Walter smiled. "You don't get over your prejudices. The cars are
+perfectly safe, and more comfortable than coaches."
+
+"I can't go; it's no use to coax me."
+
+"I have but one thing to trouble me, mother,--and that is, that I can
+never get you away from this spot."
+
+"I'm very happy, Walter, and it's a very pleasant spot; why should I
+wish to go?"
+
+"How long since you have been down Washington Street?"
+
+"Ten years, I think."
+
+"And you have never seen the new theatre, nor the Music Hall?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Nor any of the new warehouses?"
+
+"I don't want to see them."
+
+"And you wouldn't go to church, if it were more than a stone's throw
+away?"
+
+"I am afraid not."
+
+"How long since you were in a carriage?"
+
+Her eyes filled with tears, but she made no reply.
+
+"Forgive me, mother! I remember the time,--five years! and it seems
+like yesterday when father"--
+
+There was a silence which, for a time, neither cared to break.
+
+"Well," said Walter, at length, "I shall have to go alone. To-morrow
+morning I will arrange my business,--not forgetting our
+securities,--and start in the afternoon train."
+
+"Your father often spoke of Cousin Augustus and his lovely wife; I
+wonder if the daughter has her mother's beauty?"
+
+"I can't tell. I hope so. But don't look so inquiringly. I don't love a
+woman in the world,--except you, mother. I shan't fall in love, even if
+she is an angel."
+
+"If Cousin Augustus should be worse,--should die, what will become of
+the poor motherless child?"
+
+"There are no nearer relatives than we, mother,--and we must give her a
+home, if she will come."
+
+"Certainly, Walter, we must not be hard-hearted."
+
+Mrs. Monroe was charitable, kind, and motherly towards the distressed;
+she felt the force of her son's generous sentiments. If it were her
+Cousin Augustus himself who was to be sheltered, or his son, if he had
+one,--or if the daughter were unattractive, a hoyden even, she would
+cheerfully make any sacrifice in favor of hospitality. But she could
+not repress a secret fear lest the beauty and innocence of the orphan
+should appeal too strongly to Walter's heart. She knew the natural
+destiny of agreeable young men; she acknowledged to herself that Walter
+would sometime marry; but she put the time far off as an evil day, and
+kept the subject under ban. None of her neighbors who had pretty
+daughters were encouraged to visit her on intimate terms. She almost
+frowned upon every winsome face that crossed her threshold when Walter
+was at home. So absorbing was this feeling, that she was not aware of
+its existence, but watched her son by a sort of instinct. Her conduct
+was not the result of cool calculation, and, if it could have been
+properly set before her generous, kindly heart, she would have been
+shocked at her own fond selfishness.
+
+So she sat and speculated, balancing between fear and hope. If Walter
+built air-castles, was he to blame? At twenty-four, with a heart
+untouched, with fresh susceptibilities, and a little romance withal, is
+it to be wondered that his fancy drew such pleasing pictures of his
+cousin?
+
+We will leave them to their quiet evening's enjoyment and follow
+Greenleaf to the house of Mr. Sandford.
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE MUSICAL SOIREE.
+
+A small, but judiciously-selected company had assembled; all were
+people of musical tastes, and most of them capable of sharing in the
+performances. There were but few ladies; perhaps it did not suit the
+mistress of the house to have the attentions of the gentlemen divided
+among too many. Miss Sandford was undeniably queen of the evening; her
+superb face and figure, and irreproachable toilet, never showed to
+better advantage. And her easy manners, and ready, silvery words, would
+have given a dangerous charm to a much plainer woman. She had a smile,
+a welcome, and a compliment for each,--not seemingly studied, but
+gracefully expressed, and sufficient to put the guests in the best
+humor. Mrs. Sandford, less demonstrative in manner than her
+sister-in-law, and less brilliant in conversation and personal
+attractions, was yet a most winning, lovable woman,--a companion for a
+summer ramble, or a quiet _tete-a-tete_, rather than a belle for a
+drawing-room. Mr. Sandford was calmly conscious, full of subdued
+spirits, cheerful and ready with all sorts of pleasant phrases. It is
+not often that one sees such a manly, robust figure, such a handsome,
+ingenuous face, and such an air of agreeable repose. Easelmann was
+present, retiring as usual, but with an acute eye that lost nothing
+while it seemed to be observing nothing. Greenleaf was decidedly the
+lion. It was not merely his graceful person and regular features that
+drew admiring glances upon him; the charm lay rather in an atmosphere
+of intellect that surrounded him. His conversation, though by no means
+faultless, was marked by an energy of phrase joined to an almost
+womanly delicacy and taste. His was the "hand of steel," but clothed
+with the "glove of velvet." Easelmann followed him with a look half
+stealthy, half comical, as he saw the unusual vivacity of the reigning
+beauty when in his immediate society. Her voice took instinctively a
+softer and more musical tone; she showered her glances upon him,
+dazzling and prismatic as the rays from her diamonds; she seemed
+determined to captivate him without the tedious process of a siege.
+And, in truth, he must have been an unimpressible man that could steel
+himself against the influence of a woman who satisfied every critical
+sense, who piqued all his pride, who stimulated all that was most manly
+in his nature, and without apparent effort filled his bosom with an
+exquisite intoxication.
+
+The music commenced under Marcia's direction. There were piano solos
+that were _not_ tedious,--full of melody and feeling, and with few of
+the pyrotechnical displays which are too common in modern
+virtuoso-playing; vocal duets and quartets from the Italian operas, and
+from _Orfeo_ and other German masterpieces; and solos, if not equal to
+the efforts of professional singers, highly creditable to amateurs, to
+say the least. The auditors were enthusiastic in praise. Even Charles,
+who came in late, declared the music "Vewy good, upon my
+soul,--surpwizingly good!"
+
+Greenleaf was listening to Marcia, with a pleased smile on his face,
+when Mr. Sandford approached and interrupted them.
+
+"You are proficient in more than one art, I see. You paint as well as
+though you knew nothing of music, and yet you sing like a man who has
+made it an exclusive study."
+
+Greenleaf simply bowed.
+
+"How do you come on with the picture?" Mr. Sandford continued.
+
+"Very well, I believe."
+
+"My dear Sir, make haste and finish it."
+
+"I thought you were not in a hurry."
+
+"Not in the least, my friend; but when you get that finished, you can
+paint others, which I can probably dispose of for you."
+
+"You are very kind."
+
+"I speak as a business man," said Sandford, in a lower tone, at which
+Marcia withdrew. "The arts fare badly in time of a money panic, and all
+the pictures you can sell now will be clear gain."
+
+"Are there signs of a panic?"
+
+"Decidedly; the rates of interest are advancing daily, and no one knows
+where it will end. Unless there is some relief in the market by Western
+remittances, the distress will be wide-spread and severe."
+
+"I am obliged to you for the hint. I have two or three pictures nearly
+done."
+
+"I will look at them in a day or two, and try to find you purchasers."
+
+Greenleaf expressed his thanks, warmly, and then walked towards Mrs.
+Sandford, who was sitting alone at that moment.
+
+"There is no knowing what Marcia may do," thought Sandford; "I have
+never seen her when she appeared so much in earnest,--infatuated like a
+candle-fly. I hope she won't be fool enough to marry a man without
+money. These artists are poor sheep; they have to be taken care of like
+so many children. At all events, it won't cost much to keep him at work
+for the present. Meanwhile she may change her mind."
+
+Greenleaf was soon engaged in conversation with Mrs. Sandford. She had
+too much delicacy to flatter him upon his singing, but naturally turned
+the current towards his art. Without depreciating his efforts or the
+example of deservedly eminent American painters, she spoke with more
+emphasis of the acknowledged masters; and as she dwelt with unaffected
+enthusiasm upon the delight she had received from their immortal works,
+his old desire to visit Europe came upon him with redoubled force.
+There was a calm strength in her thoughts and manner that moved him
+strangely. He saw in a new light his thoughtless devotion to pleasure,
+and especially the foolish fascination into which he had been led by a
+woman whom he could not marry and ought not to love. Mrs. Sandford did
+not exhort, nor even advise; least of all did she allude to her
+sister-in-law. Hers was only the influence of truth,--of broad ideas of
+life and its noblest ends, presented with simplicity and a womanly tact
+above all art. It seemed to Greenleaf the voice of an angel that he
+heard, so promptly did his conscience respond. He listened with
+heightening color and tense nerves; the delirious languor of amatory
+music, and the delirium he had felt while under the spell of Marcia's
+beauty, passed away. It seemed to him that he was lifted into a higher
+plane, whence he saw before him the straight path of duty, leading away
+from the tempting gardens of pleasure,--where he recognized immutable
+principles, and became conscious that his true affinities were not with
+those who came in contact only with his sensuous nature. He had never
+understood himself until now.
+
+A long meditation, the reader thinks; but, in reality, it was only an
+electric current, awakening a series of related thoughts; as a flash of
+lightning at night illumines at once a crowd of objects in a landscape,
+which the mind perceives, but cannot follow in detail.
+
+When, at length, Greenleaf looked up, he was astonished to find the
+room silent, and himself with his companion in the focus of all eyes.
+Marcia looked on with a curiosity in which there was perhaps a shade of
+apprehension. Easelmann relieved the momentary embarrassment by walking
+towards his friend, with a meaning glance, and taking a seat near Mrs.
+Sandford.
+
+"I can't allow this," said Easelmann. "You have had your share of Mrs.
+Sandford's time. It is my turn. Besides, you will forget it all when
+you cross the room."
+
+"Trust me, I shall _never_ forget," said Greenleaf, with a marked
+emphasis, and a grateful look towards the lovely widow.
+
+"What's this? What's this?" said Easelmann, rapidly. "Insatiate
+trifler, could not one suffice?"
+
+"Oh, we understand each other, perfectly," said Mrs. Sandford, in a
+placid tone.
+
+"You do, eh? I should have interrupted you sooner. It might have saved
+my peace of mind, and perhaps relieved some other anxieties I have
+witnessed. But go, now!" Greenleaf turned away with a smile.
+
+Marcia at once proposed a duet to conclude the entertainment,
+--Rossini's _Mira bianca luna_,--a piece for which she had
+reserved her force, and in which she could display the best
+qualities of her voice and style. Greenleaf had a high and pure tenor
+voice; he exerted himself to support her, and with some success; the
+duet was a fitting close to a delightful and informal concert. But he
+was thoroughly sobered; the effects he produced were from cool
+deliberation, rather than the outbursts of an enthusiastic temper.
+Earlier in the evening the tones and the glances of his companion would
+have sent fiery thrills along his nerves and lifted him above all
+self-control.
+
+In the buzz of voices that followed, Marcia commenced a lively colloquy
+with Greenleaf, as though she desired to leave him under the
+impressions with which the evening commenced. The amusements of summer
+were discussed, the merits of watering-places and other fashionable
+resorts, when Greenleaf accidentally mentioned that he and Easelmann
+were going presently to Nahant.
+
+"Delightful!" she exclaimed, "to enjoy the ocean and coast-scenery
+after the rush of company has left! While the fashionable season lasts,
+there is nothing but dress and gossip. You are wise to avoid it."
+
+"I think so," he replied. "Neither my tastes nor my pursuits incline me
+to mingle in what is termed fashionable society. It makes too large
+demands upon one's time, to say nothing of the expense or the
+unsatisfactory nature of its pleasures."
+
+"I agree with you. So you are going to sketch. Would not you and Mr.
+Easelmann like some company? You will not pore over your canvas _all_
+day, surely."
+
+"We should be delighted; _I_ should, certainly. And if you will look at
+my friend's face just now, as he is talking to your beautiful
+sister-in-law, you will see that he would not object."
+
+"Do you think Lydia is _beautiful_?"
+The tone was quiet, but the glance questioning.
+
+"Not classically beautiful,--but one of the most lovely, engaging women
+I ever met."
+
+"Yes,--she is charming, truly. I don't think her strikingly handsome,
+though; but tastes rarely agree, you know. I only asked to ascertain
+your predilections."
+
+"I understand," thought Greenleaf; but he made no further reply.
+
+"Don't be surprised, if you see us before your stay is over,--that is,
+if Lydia and I can induce Charles to go down with us. Henry is too
+busy, I suppose."
+
+Charles passed just then; he was endeavoring to form a cotillon,
+declaring that talk was slow, and, now that the music was over, a dance
+would be the thing.
+
+"Charles, you will go to Nahant for a week,--won't you?"
+
+"What! now?"
+
+"In a day or two."
+
+"Too cold, Sister Marcia; too late, altogether."
+
+"But you were unwilling to go early in the season."
+
+"Too early is as bad as too late; it is chilly there till the company
+comes. No billiards, no hops, no pwetty girls, no sailing, no wides on
+the beach, no pwomenades on the moonlight side of the piazza. No, my
+deah, Nahant is stupid till the curwent sets that way."
+
+"Southern visitors warm the coast like the Gulf Stream, I suppose,"
+said Greenleaf.
+
+"Pwecisely so,"--then, after the idea had reached his brain, adding,
+"Vewy good, Mr. Gweenleaf! Vewy good!"
+
+The soiree ended as all seasons of pleasure must, and without the dance
+on which Charles had set his heart. The friends walked home together.
+Greenleaf was rather silent, but Easelmann at last made him talk.
+
+"What do you think of the beauty, now?" the elder asked.
+
+"Still brilliant, bewitching, dangerous."
+
+"You are not afraid of her?"
+
+"Upon my soul, I believe I am."
+
+"What has frightened you? What faults or defects have you seen?"
+
+"Two. One is, she uses perfumes too freely. Stop that laugh of yours!
+It's a trifling thing, but it is an indication. I don't like it."
+
+"Fastidious man, what next? Has she more hairs on one eyebrow than the
+other? Or did you see a freckle of the size of a fly's foot?"
+
+"The second is in her manner, which, in spite of its ease and apparent
+artlessness, has too much method in it. Her suavity is no more studied
+than her raptures. She is frosted all over,--frosted like a cake, I
+mean, and not with ice. And, to follow the image, I have no idea what
+sort of a compound the tasteful confectionery covers."
+
+"Well, if that is all, I think she has come out from under your
+scrutiny pretty well. I should like to see the woman in whom you would
+not find as many faults."
+
+"If a man does not notice trifles, he will never learn much of
+character. With women especially, one should be as observing as a Huron
+on the trail of an enemy."
+
+"Ferocious hunter, who supposed there were so many wiles in your simple
+heart?"
+
+"Odd enough, there seemed to be a succession of warnings this evening.
+I was dazzled at first, I own,--almost hopelessly smitten. But Sandford
+gave me a jolt by bringing in business; he thinks there is to be a
+smash, and advises me to make hay while the sun shines. Then I talked
+with Mrs. Sandford."
+
+"Now we come to the interesting part--to me!"
+
+"But I shan't gratify you, you mouser! It is enough to say, that in a
+few simple words, uttered, I am sure, without forethought, she placed
+my frivolity before me, and then showed me what I might and ought to
+be. I was like a grasshopper before, drunk with dew, and then sobered
+by a plunge into a clear, cool spring. Besides, I have thought more
+about your advice in regard to the lady, you dissembling old rascal!
+For you know that in such matters you never mean what you say; and when
+you counsel me to fall in love with a coquette, you only wish me to be
+warned in time and make good my escape. If it were light enough, I
+should see that grizzly moustache of yours curl like a cat's, this
+minute. You can grin, you amiable Mephistopheles, but I know you! No,
+my dear Easelmann, I am cured. I shall take hold of my pencils with new
+energy. I will save money and go abroad, and----I had nearly forgotten
+her! I will take a new look at my darling's sweet face in my pocket,
+and, like Ulysses, I'll put wax into my ears when I meet the singing
+Siren again."
+
+"I hope your rustic _fiancee_ is not clairvoyant?"
+
+"I hope not."
+
+"If she is, she will cry her little eyes out to-night."
+
+"Don't speak of it, I beg of you."
+
+"You are getting lugubrious; we shall have to change the subject. Love
+affects people in as many different ways as wine. Some are
+exalted,--their feet spurn the earth, their heads are in the clouds;
+some pugnacious, walking about with a chip on the shoulder; others are
+stupidly happy,--their faces wearing a sickly smile that becomes
+painful to look at; others again, like you, melancholy as a wailing
+tenor in the last act of 'Lucia.' Like learning, a little draught of
+love is dangerous; drink largely and be sober. The charmer will not
+cast so powerful a spell upon you the next time, and you will come away
+more tranquil."
+
+There was just the least shade of sarcasm in the tone, and Greenleaf,
+as usual, was a little puzzled. For Easelmann was a study,--always
+agreeable, never untruthful, but fond of launching an idea like a
+boomerang, to sweep away, apparently, but to return upon some
+unexpected curve. His real meaning could not always be gathered from
+any isolated sentence; and to strangers he was a living riddle. But
+Greenleaf had passed the excitable period, and had lapsed into a state
+of moody repentance and grim resolution.
+
+"You need not tempt me," he said, "even if that were your object, which
+I doubt, you sly fox! And if you mean only to pique my pride in order
+to cure my inconstancy to my betrothed, I assure you it is quite
+unnecessary. I shall have too much self-respect to place myself in the
+way of temptation again."
+
+"Now you are growing disagreeable; the virtuous resolutions of a
+diner-out, on the headachy morning after, are never pleasant to hear.
+There is so much implied! One does not like to follow the idea backward
+to its naughty source. The penitent should keep his sermons and
+soda-water to himself."
+
+"Well, here we are at home. We have walked a mile, and yet it seems but
+a furlong. If I were not so disagreeable as you say, we would take
+another turn about the Common."
+
+"Sleep will do you more good, my friend; and I think I'll go home. I
+haven't smoked since dinner. Good night!"
+
+Greenleaf went to his room, but not at once to sleep; his nerves were
+still too tremulous. With the picture of Alice before him, he sat for
+hours in a dreamy reverie; and when at last he went to bed, he placed
+the miniature under his pillow.
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+A YOUNG FINANCIER AT HOME.
+
+John Fletcher lived in a small, but neat house at the South End.
+Slender and youthful as he looked, he was not a bachelor, but had a
+pretty, fragile-looking wife, to whom he was married when only nineteen
+years of age. Such a union could have been brought about only by what
+the world calls an indiscretion, or from an unreflecting, hasty
+impulse. Girl as Mrs. Fletcher seemed to be, she was not without
+prudence as a housekeeper; and as far as she could command her
+inconstant temper, she made home attractive to her husband. But neither
+of them had the weight of character to act as a counterpoise to the
+vacillation of the other. It was not a sun and a planet, the one
+wheeling about the other, nor yet were they double stars, revolving
+about a centre common to both; their movements were like nothing so
+much as the freaks of a couple of pith-balls electrically excited, at
+one time drawn furiously together, and then capriciously repelling each
+other. Their loves, caresses, spats, quarrels, poutings, and
+reconciliations were as uncertain as the vagaries of the weather, as
+little guided by sense or reason as the passions of early childhood. On
+one subject they agreed at all times, and that was to pet and spoil
+most thoroughly their infant daughter, a puny, weak-voiced,
+slender-limbed, curly-haired child, with the least possible chance of
+living to the age of womanhood.
+
+Fletcher was confidential clerk to the great banking-house of Foggarty,
+Danforth, and Dot. The senior partner rarely took any active part in
+business, but left it to the management of Danforth and Dot. Danforth
+had the active brain to plan, Dot the careful, cool faculty to execute.
+Fletcher had a good salary,--so large that he could always reserve a
+small margin for "outside operations," by which in one way or another
+he generally contrived to lose.
+
+The god he worshipped was Chance; by which I do not refer at all to any
+theory of the creation of matter, but to the course and order of human
+affairs. His drawers were full of old lottery-schemes; he did not long
+buy tickets, because he was too shrewd; but he made endless
+calculations upon the probability of drawing prizes,--provided the
+tickets were really all sold, and the wheel fairly managed. A dice-box
+was always at hand upon the mantel. He had portraits of celebrated
+racers, both quadruped and biped, and he could tell the fastest time
+ever made by either. His manipulation of cards was, as his friends
+averred, one of the fine arts; and in all the games he had wrought out
+problems of chances, and knew the probability of every contingency. A
+stock-list was always tacked above his secretary, and another
+constantly in his pocket. And this evening he had brought home a
+revolving disk, having figures of various values engraved around its
+edge, carefully poised, with a hair-spring pointer, like a hand on a
+dial-plate.
+
+"What have you got, John?" asked his wife.
+
+"Only a toy, a plaything, deary. See it spin!" and he gave the disk a
+whirl.
+
+"But what is it _for_?"
+
+"Oh, nothing in particular. I thought we could amuse ourselves in
+turning it for the largest throws."
+
+"Is that all? It is a heavy thing, and must have cost a good lot of
+money."
+
+"Not much. Now see! You know I have tried to show you how chance rules
+the world; and if you once get the chances in your favor, all is right.
+Now suppose we take this wheel, and on the number 2,000 we paste
+'Michigan Central,' 'Western' over 1,000, 'Vermont and Massachusetts'
+over 500, 'Cary Improvement' over 400, and so on. Now, after a certain
+number of revolutions, by keeping account, we get the chance of each
+stock to come up."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"I don't suppose you do; you don't give your mind to it, as I do."
+
+"But you know you had the same notion once about cards, and pasted the
+names of the stocks on the court cards; and then you shuffled and cut
+and dealt and turned up, night after night."
+
+"Little doxy! small piece of property! you'd best attend to that baby,
+and other matters that you know something about."
+
+The "little doxy" felt strongly inclined to cry, but she kept back the
+sobs and said, "You know, John, how sullen and almost hateful you were
+before, when you were bewitched after those mean stocks. I don't think
+you should meddle with such things; they are too big for you. Let the
+rich fools gamble, if they want to; if _they_ lose, they can afford it,
+and nobody cares but to laugh at them. Oh, John, you promised me you
+wouldn't gamble any more."
+
+"Well, I don't gamble. I haven't been to a faro bank for a year. I stay
+away just to please you, although I know all the chances, and could
+break the bank as easy as falling off a log."
+
+"You don't gamble, you say, but you are uneasy till you put all your
+money at risk on those paper things. I don't see the difference."
+
+"You _needn't_ see the difference; nobody asked you to see the
+difference. Gamble, indeed! there isn't a man on the street that
+doesn't keep an eye on the paper things, as you call them."
+
+"You see what I told you. You are cross. You like anything better (_a
+sob_) than your poor (_another_) neglected wife."
+
+The sobs now thickened into a cry, and, with streaming eyes, she picked
+up the puny child and declared she was going to bed. To this proposal
+the moody man emphatically assented. But as Mrs. Fletcher passed near
+her husband, the child reached out its slender arms and caught hold of
+him by his cravat, screaming, "Papa! papa! I stay, papa!"
+
+"Let go!" roughly exclaimed the amiable father. But she held the
+tighter, and shouted, "Papa! my papa!"
+
+What sudden freak overcame his anger probably not even Fletcher himself
+could tell. But, turning towards his wife, who was supporting the
+child, whose little fingers still held him fast, his face cleared
+instantly, and, with a sudden movement, he drew the surprised and
+delighted woman down upon his knee, and loaded her with every form of
+childish endearment. Her tears and sorrows vanished together, like the
+dew.
+
+"Little duck," said he, "if I were alone, I shouldn't care for any more
+money. I know I can always take care of myself. But for your sake I
+want to be independent,--rich, if you please. I want to be free. I want
+to meet that wily, smooth, plausible, damned, respectable villain face
+to face, and with as much money as he."
+
+His eyes danced with a furious light and motion, and the fringy
+moustache trembled over his thin and sensitive mouth. But in a moment
+he repented the outbreak; for his wife's face blanched then, and the
+tears leaped from her eyes.
+
+"Oh, John," she exclaimed, "what is this awful secret? I know that
+something is killing you. You mutter in sleep; you are sullen at times;
+and then you break out in this dreadful way."
+
+Fletcher meditated. "I can't tell her; 'twould kill her, and not do any
+good either. No, one good streak of luck will set me up where I can
+defy him. I'll grin and bear it."
+
+"What is it, John? Tell your poor little wife!"
+
+"Oh, nothing, my dear. I do some business for Sandford, who is apt to
+be domineering,--that's all. To-day he provoked me, and when I am mad
+it does me good to swear; it's as natural as lightning out of a black
+cloud."
+
+"It may do _you_ good to swear, John; but it makes the cold chills run
+over me. Why do you have anything to do with anybody that treats you
+so? You are _so_ changed from what you were! Oh, John, something is
+wrong, I know. Your face looks sharp and inquiring. You are thin and
+uneasy. There's a wrinkle in your cheek, that used to be as smooth as a
+girl's."
+
+She patted his face softly, as it rested on her shoulder; but he made
+no reply save by an absent, half-audible whistle.
+
+"You don't answer me, John, dear!"
+
+"I've nothing especial to say, doxy,--only that I will wind up with
+Sandford as soon as we finish the business in hand."
+
+"The business in hand? Has he anything to do with Foggarty, Danforth,
+and Dot?"
+
+Fletcher was not skilful under cross-examination. So he simply
+answered, "No," and then stopping her mouth with kisses, promised to
+explain the matter another day.
+
+"Well, John, I am tired; I think I'll take baby and go to bed. Don't
+sit up and get blue over your troubles!"
+
+As she left the room, Fletcher drew a long breath. What an accent of
+despair was borne on that sigh! His busy brain was active in laying
+plans which his vacillating will could never execute without help.
+Often before, he had determined to confront Sandford and defy him; but
+as often he had quailed before that self-possessed and imperious man.
+What hope was there, then, for this timid, crouching man, as long as
+the hand of his haughty master was outstretched in command? None!
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+STATE STREET.
+
+The stringency of the money-market began to frighten even Mr. Sandford
+who had been predicting a panic. There had been but few failures, and
+those were generally of houses that ought to fail, being insolvent from
+losses or mismanagement. Mr. Sandford studied over his sheet of bills
+payable and receivable almost hourly. The amount intrusted to him by
+Monroe had been loaned out; for which he was now very sorry, as the
+rate of interest had nearly doubled since he made the last agreement.
+This, however, was but a small item in his accounts; other transactions
+of greater magnitude occupied his attention. As he looked over the
+array of promisors and indorsers, he said to himself, "I am safe. If
+these men fail, it will be because the universal bottom has dropped out
+and chaos come again. If anybody is shaky, it is Stearine. He believes,
+though, that Bullion will help him through, and extend that note.
+Perhaps he will. Perhaps, again, he will have enough to do to keep on
+his own legs. He fancies himself strong because he owns the most of the
+Neversink Mills. But he doesn't know what I know, that Kerbstone, the
+treasurer of the Mills, is in the street every day, looking like a
+gambler when his last dollar is on the table. A few more turns of the
+screw and down goes Kerbstone. Who knows that the Mills won't tumble,
+too, and Bullion after them? _He_ may go hang; but we must look after
+Stearine, and prop him, unnecessary. That twenty thousand is more than
+we can afford to lose just now. Lucky, there he comes!"
+
+Mr. Stearine entered, not with his usual smile, but with an expression
+like that of a man trying to be jolly with the toothache. A short, but
+dexterous cross-examination showed to Sandford, that, if the
+twenty-thousand-dollar note could be extended over to better times,
+Stearine was safe. But the note was soon due, and Bullion might be
+unable or unwilling to renew; in which case, the Vortex would have to
+meet it. That was a contingency to be provided against; for Mr.
+Sandford did not intend that the public should know that the credit of
+the Company had been used for private purposes by its officers. He
+therefore called in Mr. Fayerweather, the President, and the affair was
+talked over and settled between them.
+
+"One thing more," said Sandford. "Suppose any one _should_ get wind of
+this, and grow suspicious;--Bullion himself might be foolish enough to
+let the cat out of the bag;--we might find the shares of the Vortex in
+the market, and the bears running them down to an uncomfortable
+figure."
+
+"True enough. We must stop that."
+
+"The only way is to keep a sharp lookout, and if any of the stock is
+offered, to buy it up. Half a dozen of us can take all that will be
+likely to come into market."
+
+"How many shares do you own, Sandford?" asked Mr. Fayerweather, with a
+quizzical look. "Is this a nice little scheme of yours to run them off
+at par? It's a shrewd dodge."
+
+"You do me wrong," said Sandford, with a look of wounded innocence. "I
+merely want to sustain the credit of the Company."
+
+"Oh, no doubt!" said the President.
+"Well, we will agree, then, not to let the shares fall below ninety,
+say. It would be suspicious, I think, to hold them higher than that,
+when money is two and a half per cent. a month."
+
+"Very well. You will see to this? Be careful what men you speak to."
+
+Mr. Sandford, being left alone, bethought him of Monroe. He did not
+wish to give him a statement of affairs; he had put him off once, and
+must find some way to satisfy him. How was it to be done? The financier
+meditated. "I have it," said he; "I'll send him a quarter's interest in
+advance. That's as much as I can spare in these times, when interest
+grows like those miraculous pumpkin-vines out West." He drew a check
+for two hundred dollars, and dispatched it to Monroe by letter.
+
+So Mr. Sandford had all things snug. The Vortex was going on under
+close-reefed topsails. If the notes he held were paid as they matured,
+he would have money for new operations; if not, he had arranged that
+the debtors should be piloted over the bar and anchored in safely till
+the storm should blow over. Everything was secured, as far as human
+foresight could anticipate.
+
+Mr. Sandford had now but little use for Fletcher's services, except to
+look after his debtors,--to know who was "shinning" in the street, or
+"kite-flying" with accommodation-paper. Still he did not admit the
+agent into his confidence. But this active and scheming mind was not
+long without employment. Mr. Bullion had seen him in frequent
+communication with Sandford, and thereby formed a high opinion of his
+shrewdness and tact; for he knew that Sandford was very wary in
+selecting his associates. He sought Fletcher.
+
+"Young man," said Bullion, pointing his wisp of an eyebrow at him, "do
+you want a job? Few words and keep mum. Yes or no?"
+
+"Yes," said Fletcher, decidedly.
+
+"I like your pluck," said Bullion.
+
+"It doesn't take much pluck to follow Mr. Bullion's lead."
+
+"None of your nonsense. How do you know anything about me, or what I am
+going to do? I may fail to-morrow,--God forbid!--but when the wind
+comes, it's the tall trees that are knocked over."
+
+Fletcher thought the comparison rather ludicrous for a man standing on
+such remarkably short pegs, but he said nothing.
+
+"I mean to sell a few shares of stock, and I want you to do the
+business. I am not to be known in it."
+
+Fletcher bowed, and asked what the stocks were.
+
+"No matter; any you can sell to advantage. I haven't a share, but I
+needn't tell you _that_ doesn't make any difference."
+
+"Let me understand you clearly," said Fletcher.
+
+"Sell under. For instance, take a stock that sells to-day at
+ninety-four; offer to deliver it five days hence at ninety. To-morrow
+offer it a peg lower, and so on, till the market is easier. When the
+first contract is up, we shall get the stock at eighty-eight, or less,
+perhaps,--deliver to the buyers, and pocket the difference."
+
+"But it may not fall."
+
+"It's bound to fall. People that hold stock _must_ sell to pay their
+notes. Every day brings a fresh lot of shares to the hammer."
+
+"But the bulls may corner you; they will try mightily to keep prices
+up."
+
+"But they can't corner, I tell you; there are too many of them in
+distress. Besides, we'll spread; we won't put all our eggs into one
+basket. If I stuck to 'bearing' one stock, the holders might get all
+the shares and break me by keeping them so that I couldn't comply with
+my contracts. I shan't do it. I'll pitch into the 'fancies' mainly;
+they are held by speculators, who must be short, and they'll come down
+with a run."
+
+"How deep shall I go in?"
+
+"Fifty thousand, to begin with. However, there won't be many transfers
+actually made; the bulls will merely pay the differences."
+
+"Or else waddle out of the street lame ducks."
+
+Bullion rubbed his hands, while his eyes shone with a colder glitter.
+
+"Well, you are a bear, truly," said Fletcher, with unfeigned
+admiration,--"a real Ursa Major."
+
+"To be sure, I'm a bear. What's the use in being a bull in times like
+these, to be skinned and sold for your hide and tallow?"
+
+"The market is falling, and no mistake."
+
+"Yes, and will fall lower. Stocks haven't been down since '37 so low as
+you will see them a month from now."
+
+Fletcher bowed----and waited. Bullion pointed the eyebrow again.
+
+"You don't want to begin on an uncertainty. I see. Sharp. Proper
+enough. I'll give you ten per cent. of the profits,--you to pay the
+commissions. Each day's work to be set down, and at the end of each
+week I'll give you a note for your share. That do? I thought it would.
+I offer a liberal figure, for I think you know something, youngster.
+Use your judgment, now. Consult me, of course; but mum's the word. If
+any stock is pushed in, lay hold, and don't be afraid. The holders must
+sell, and they must sacrifice. We'll skin 'em, by G--," said Bullion,
+with an excitement that was rare in a cool, hard head like his. Then
+thinking he had been too outspoken, he resumed his former concise
+manner.
+
+"All fair, you know. Bargain is a bargain. They must sell; we won't
+buy, without we buy cheap; their loss, to be sure, but our gain. All
+trade on the same plan. Seller gets the most he can; buyer pays only
+what he must."
+
+"That's it," said Fletcher. "Every man for himself in this world."
+
+"Well, good morning, young man. Sharp's the word. Call at my office
+this afternoon." And, with a queer sweep of the pointed eyebrow, he
+departed.
+
+What visions of opulence rose before Fletcher's fancy! He would now lay
+the foundations of his fortune, and, perhaps, accomplish it. He would
+become a power in State Street; and, best of all, he would escape from
+his slavery to Sandford, and perhaps even patronize the haughty man he
+had so long served. How to begin? He could not attend the sales at the
+Brokers' Board in person, as he was not a member. Should he confide in
+Danforth? No,--for, with his relations to the house, his own share in
+the profits would be whittled down. He determined to employ Tonsor, an
+old acquaintance, who would be glad to buy and sell for the regular
+commissions. The preliminaries were speedily concluded, and a list of
+stocks made out on which to operate. The excitement was almost too
+great for Fletcher to bear. As he counted the piles of bank-bills on
+his employers' counter, or stacked up heaps of coin, in his ordinary
+business, he fancied himself another Ali Baba, in a cave to which he
+had found the Open Sesame, and he could hardly contain himself till the
+time should come when he should take possession of his unimaginable
+wealth. He had built air-castles before, but never one so magnificent,
+so real. He could have hugged Bullion, bear as he was.--We leave
+Fletcher and his principal on the high road to success.
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE SIREN COMES TO THE SEA-SHORE.
+
+Greenleaf worked assiduously upon his landscapes, and, notwithstanding
+the pressure in the money-market, was fortunate enough to dispose of
+them to gentlemen whose incomes were not affected by the vicissitudes
+of business. For this he was principally indebted to Sandford, who took
+pains to bring his works to the notice of connoisseurs. But, with all
+his success, the object of his ambition was as far off as at first.
+Imperceptibly he had acquired expensive habits. He was not prodigal,
+not extravagant; but, having a keen sense of the beautiful, he
+gradually became more fastidious in dress, and in all those nameless
+elegancies which seem of right to belong to the accomplished man, as to
+the gentleman in easy circumstances. This desire for ease and luxury
+did not conflict with simplicity; he seemed born for all the enjoyment
+which the most cultivated society could bestow. He had the power to
+spend the income of a fortune worthily; unhappily, he did not have it
+to spend. He had written constantly to his betrothed, and when he told
+her of the prices he had received for his pictures, he was at a loss
+how to make her comprehend the new relations into which he had
+grown,--to explain that he was practically as poor as when he first
+came to the city. How could he assure her of his desire to end the
+engagement in marriage, if he spoke of postponement now that he had an
+income beyond his first expectations? Imperceptibly to himself, his
+letters became more like intellectual conversations, or essays,
+rather,--pleasant enough in themselves, but far different from the
+simple and fervent epistles he wrote while the memory of Alice was
+fresher. _She_ felt this, although she had not reasoned upon it, and
+her sensitive womanly heart was full of vague forebodings.
+
+Would he confess to himself, that, as he looked at her cherished
+picture, another face, with a more brilliant air and a more dazzling
+beauty, came between him and the silent image before him? Dared he to
+think, that, in his frequent visits to Miss Sandford, the ties which
+bound him to his betrothed were daily weakening?--that he found a charm
+in the very caprices and waywardness of the new love, which the
+unvarying constancy and placid affection of the old had never created?
+The one put her heart unreservedly into his keeping; she knew nothing
+of concealment, and he read her as he would an unsophisticated child;
+there was not a nook or cranny in her heart, he thought, that he had
+not explored. The other was full of surprises; she had as many phases
+as an April day; and from mere curiosity, if from no other motive,
+Greenleaf was piqued to follow on to understand her real character. The
+apprehensions he felt at first wore away; he became accustomed to her
+measured sentences and her apparently artificial manner. What seemed
+affectation now became a natural expression. The secret influence she
+exerted increased, and, at length, possessed him wholly while in her
+company. It drew him as the moon draws the tides, silently,
+unconsciously, but with a power he could not resist. It was only when
+he was away from her that he could reason himself into a belief in his
+independence.
+
+Greenleaf and Easelmann were at Nahant at the close of the season. A
+few straggling visitors only remained; the fashionable world had
+returned to the city. The friends wandered over the rocky peninsula,
+walked the long beach that leads to the main land, sketched the sea
+from the shore, and the shore from the sea, and watched and transferred
+the changing phases of Nature in sunshine and in storm. They were
+fortunate enough to see one magnificent tempest, by which the ocean was
+lashed into fury, breaking in thunder over the rugged coast-line, and
+dashing spray sheer over the huge back of Egg Rock.
+
+Miss Sandford's threat was carried into execution; the family came to
+the hotel, and, for a week, Greenleaf and his friend were most devoted
+in their attentions. Marcia was charmed with their sketches, and, with
+a tact as delicate as it is rare, gave them time for their cherished
+pursuits, and planned excursions only for their unemployed hours. They
+collected colored mosses, star-fish, and other marine curiosities; they
+sailed, fished, scampered over the rocks, drove over the beach at
+twilight, sang, danced, and bowled. And when weary of active amusement,
+they reclined on the grass and listened to the melancholy rote of the
+sea,--the steady pulsations of its mighty heart.
+
+Easelmann, with his usual raillery, congratulated his friend on his
+prospects, and declared that the pupil was surpassing the teacher in
+the beau's arts.
+
+"Finely, Greenleaf! You are just coming to the interesting part of the
+process. You are a little flushed, however,--not quite cool enough. A
+wily adversary she is; if you allow your feelings to run away with you,
+it's all up. She will hold the reins as coolly as you held your
+trotting pony yesterday. Keep the bits out of your mouth, my boy."
+
+"Don't trouble yourself. I shall keep cool. I am not going to make a
+fool of myself by proposing."
+
+"Oh, you aren't? We shall see. But she'll refuse you, and then you'll
+come to your senses."
+
+"I'm deusedly afraid she would accept me."
+
+"The vanity of mankind! Don't tell me that women are vain. Every man
+thinks himself irresistible,--that he has only to call, to have the
+women come round him like colts around a farmer with a measure of corn.
+Shake the kernels in your dish, and cry, 'Kerjock!' Perhaps she _will_
+come."
+
+"I suppose you think, with Hosea Bigelow, that
+
+  "''Ta'n't a knowin' kind o' cattle
+   That is ketched with mouldy corn.'"
+
+"I needn't tell you that Marcia Sandford is knowing,--too knowing to
+let an enthusiastic lover relapse into a humdrum husband. You amuse her
+now: for she likes to enjoy poetry and sentiment, dances, rides, and
+rambles, in company with a man of fresh susceptibilities;--a good
+phrase that, 'fresh susceptibilities.'--The instant you become serious
+and ask her to marry you, the dream is over; she will hate you."
+
+"Well, what is to become of a lady like this,--a creature you think too
+bright, if not too good, for human nature's daily food?"
+
+"An easy prophecy. The destiny of a pretty woman is to catch lovers."
+
+"'The cat doth play, and after slay,'" said Greenleaf, laughing.
+
+"Play while you can, my dear boy; if she _is_ a cat, you'll get the
+final _coup_ soon enough. To finish the fortune-telling,--she will
+continue her present delightful pursuits as long as youth and beauty
+last; and the beauty will last a long time after the youth has gone.
+She _may_ pick up some young man of fortune and marry him; but it is
+not likely; the rich always marry the rich. Just this side of the
+_blase_ period, while still in the fulness of her charms, she will open
+her battery of smiles upon some wealthy old widower and compel him to
+place her at the head of his establishment. Then, with a secure
+position and increased facilities, she will draw new throngs of
+admirers, as long as she has power to fascinate, or until there are no
+more fools left."
+
+"A pleasing picture of domestic felicity for the husband!"
+
+"Precisely what he deserves. When an old fool marries a young flirt, he
+deserves to wear whatever honors she may bestow upon him."
+
+"Do you remember how you artfully persuaded me into this intimacy? And
+now you are making game of me for following your own suggestions."
+
+"Me? I never suggest; I never persuade."
+
+"You did, you crafty old fox! You advised me to fall in love with her."
+
+"Did I? Well, I think now you have gone far enough. A sip from the cup
+of enchantment is quite sufficient; you needn't swallow the whole of
+it."
+
+"But people can't always control themselves. Can you trust yourself to
+stop this side of insensibility, when you take ether? or be sure you
+won't get drunk, if you commence the evening with a party of dissipated
+fellows?"
+
+"That will do, my friend. I know there are people who are fond of
+confessing their weakness; don't you do it. Where is the supremacy of
+mind and will, and all that nonsense, if a man can't amuse himself with
+a clever woman's artifices without tumbling into the snare he is
+watching?"
+
+"We'll see how you succeed with the charming widow,--whether the wise
+man, when his own _jecur_ is pierced with the arrow, may not show it,
+as well as other people. And by-the-by, you will have an excellent
+opportunity for your experiment. Marcia and I are going to take a sail
+this afternoon, and you can entertain Mrs. Sandford while we are gone."
+
+Easelmann softly whistled.
+
+[To be continued.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.
+
+WHAT HE SAID, WHAT HE HEARD, AND WHAT HE SAW.
+
+
+I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
+statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a
+universal formula of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table. It
+would have had a grand effect. For this purpose I fixed my eyes on a
+certain divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few
+phrases, and then forcing my picture-card, namely, _The great end of
+being_.--I will thank you for the sugar,--I said.--Man is a dependent
+creature.
+
+It is a small favor to ask,--said the divinity-student,--and passed the
+sugar to me.
+
+--Life is a great bundle of little things,--I said.
+
+The divinity-student smiled, as if that was the concluding epigram of
+the sugar question.
+
+You smile,--I said.--Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle of great
+things?
+
+The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back with
+a pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches.--Life is a great bundle
+of great things,--he said.
+
+(_Now, then_!) The great end of being, after all, is----
+
+Hold on!--said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be John,
+and nothing else,--for that is what they all call him,--hold on! the
+Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.
+
+Now the Sculpin (_Cottus Virginianus_) is a little water-beast which
+pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs
+about the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing the
+bait and hook intended for flounders. On being drawn from the water, it
+exposes an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a surface so
+full of spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the naturalists have
+not been able to count them without quarrelling about the number, and
+that the colored youth, whose sport they spoil, do not like to touch
+them, and especially to tread on them, unless they happen to have shoes
+on, to cover the thick white soles of their broad black feet.
+
+When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked round
+the table with curiosity to see what it meant. At the further end of it
+I saw a head, and a small portion of a little deformed body, mounted on
+a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a fair level enough for
+him to get at his food. His whole appearance was so grotesque, I felt
+for a minute as if there was a showman behind him who would pull him
+down presently and put up Judy, or the hangman, or the Devil, or some
+other wooden personage of the famous spectacle. I contrived to lose the
+first part of his sentence, but what I heard began so:--
+
+----by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in it, and the folks used
+to come down from the tents on 'Lection and Independence days with
+their pails to get water to make egg-pop with. Born in Boston; went to
+school in Boston as long as the boys would let me.--The little man
+groaned, turned, as if to look round, and went on.--Ran away from
+school one day to see Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a
+loggerhead. That was in flip days, when there were always two or three
+loggerheads in the fire. I'm a Boston boy, I tell you,--born at North
+End, and mean to be buried on Copps' Hill, with the good old
+underground people,--the Worthylakes, and the rest of 'em. Yes,
+Sir,--up on the old hill, where they buried Captain Daniel Malcolm in a
+stone grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe from the red-coats, in
+those old times when the world was frozen up tight and there wasn't but
+one spot open, and that was right over Faneuil Hall,--and black enough
+it looked, I tell you! There's where my bones shall lie, Sir, and
+rattle away when the big guns go off at the Navy Yard opposite! You
+can't make me ashamed of the old place! Full of crooked little
+streets;--I was born and used to run round in one of 'em----
+
+----I should think so,--said that young man whom I hear them call
+"John,"--softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but thinking
+in a half-whisper, evidently.--I should think so; and got kinked up,
+turnin' so many corners.--The little man did not hear what was said,
+but went on,--
+
+----full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened,
+and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and
+free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead
+men,--I don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their
+steeples!
+
+----How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?--said a person with black
+whiskers and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather _too_
+massive, and a diamond pin so _very_ large that the most trusting
+nature might confess an inward _suggestion_,--of course, nothing
+amounting to a suspicion. For this is a gentleman from a great city,
+and sits next to the landlady's daughter, who evidently believes in
+him, and is the object of his especial attention.
+
+How high?--said the little man.--As high as the first step of the
+stairs that lead to the New Jerusalem. Isn't that high enough?
+
+It is,--I said.--The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
+order of things; and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be
+so still. But who shall tune the pitch-pipe? _Quis cus_----(On the
+whole, as this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a foreign
+language, might not be familiar to all the boarders, I thought I would
+not finish it.)
+
+----Go to the Bible!--said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced,
+sharp-eyed, sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress,
+appearing as if it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated itself
+as a bit of economy.
+
+You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
+commentary on what you say. "He who would bring back the wealth of the
+Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies." What you bring away
+from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it--Benjamin
+Franklin! Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring me down the
+small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will find lying
+under the "Cruden's Concordance." [The boy took a large bite, which
+left a very perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-butter he held,
+and departed on his errand, with the portable fraction of his breakfast
+to sustain him on the way.]
+
+Here it is. "Go to the Bible. A Dissertation, etc., etc. By J.J.
+Flournoy. Athens, Georgia. 1858."
+
+Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have judiciously
+delivered. You may be interested, Madam, to know what are the
+conclusions at which Mr. J.J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia, has arrived.
+You shall hear, Madam. He has gone to the Bible, and he has come back
+from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing social evils, which, if
+it is the real specific, as it professes to be, is of great interest to
+humanity, and to the female part of humanity in particular. It is what
+he calls _trigamy_, Madam, or the marrying of three wives, so that
+"good old men" may be solaced at once by the companionship of the
+wisdom of maturity, and of those less perfected but hardly less
+engaging qualities which are found at an earlier period of life. He has
+followed your precept, Madam; I hope you accept his conclusions.
+
+The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact,
+"all abroad," after the delivery of this "counter" of mine, that I left
+her to recover her wits, and went on with the conversation, which I was
+beginning to get pretty well in hand.
+
+But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
+effect I had produced. First, she was a little stunned at having her
+argument knocked over. Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
+tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion. Thirdly.----
+I don't like to say what I thought. Something seemed to have pleased
+her fancy. Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into fashion,
+there would be three times as many chances to enjoy the luxury of
+saying, "No!" is more than I can tell you. I may as well mention that
+B.F. came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet for "a
+lady,"--one of the boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a secret he
+wished to be relieved of.
+
+----I continued.--If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in
+the faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the
+end of all reason. If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for truth
+with its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no presumption
+in favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of our
+inheriting it. Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair chance
+to become a convert to a better religion.
+
+The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in
+the mind by changing the word which stands for it.----I don't know
+what you mean by "depolarizing" an idea,--said the divinity-student.
+
+I will tell you,--I said.--When a given symbol which represents a
+thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it undergoes
+a change like that which rest in a certain position gives to iron. It
+becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by strange forces
+which did not belong to it. The word, and consequently the idea it
+represents, is _polarized_.
+
+The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in print,
+consists entirely of polarized words. Borrow one of these from another
+language and religion, and you will find it leaves all its magnetism
+behind it. Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo mythology. Even a
+priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy Pundit would shut
+his ears and run away from you in horror, if you should say it aloud.
+What do you care for O'm? If you wanted to get the Pundit to look at
+his religion fairly, you must first depolarize this and all similar
+words for him. The argument for and against new translations of the
+Bible really turns on this. Skepticism is afraid to trust its truths in
+depolarized words, and so cries out against a new translation. I think,
+myself, if every idea our Book contains could be shelled out of its old
+symbol and put into a new, clean, unmagnetic word, we should have some
+chance of reading it as philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read
+it,--which we do not and cannot now, any more than a Hindoo can read
+the "Gayatri" as a fair man and lover of truth should do. When society
+has once fairly dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done
+yet, it will perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of
+language.
+
+----I didn't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said
+the young fellow near me.
+
+A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening to,--I replied,
+calmly.--It gives the _parallax_ of thought and feeling as they appear
+to the observers from two very different points of view. If you wish to
+get the distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two
+observations from distant points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer
+and midwinter, for instance. To get the parallax of heavenly truths,
+you must take an observation from the position of the laity as well as
+of the clergy. Teachers and students of theology get a certain look,
+certain conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a professional
+neckcloth, and habits of mind as professional as their externals. They
+are scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well enough what the "idols
+of the tribe" are. Of course they have their false gods, as all men
+that follow one exclusive calling are prone to do.--The clergy have
+played the part of the fly-wheel in our modern civilization. They have
+never suffered it to stop. They have often carried on its movement,
+when other moving powers failed, by the momentum stored in their vast
+body. Sometimes, too, they have kept it back by their _vis inertae_,
+when its wheels were like to grind the bones of some old canonized
+error into fertilizers for the soil that yields the bread of life. But
+the mainspring of the world's onward religious movement is not in them,
+nor in any one body of men, let me tell you. It is the people that
+makes the clergy, and not the clergy that makes the people. Of course,
+the profession reacts on its source with variable energy.--But there
+never was a guild of dealers or a company of craftsmen that did not
+need sharp looking after.
+
+Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time
+since, must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in
+Harvard College yard.
+
+----Bonfire?--shrieked the little man.--The bonfire when Robert
+Calef's book was burned?
+
+The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
+burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
+President of the College and Minister of the Gospel. You remember the
+old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef,
+trader, of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what
+a set of fools and worse than fools they were--
+
+Remember it?--said the little man.--I don't think I shall forget it, as
+long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what it
+wears.--There was a ring on it.
+
+May I look at it?--I said.
+
+Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it
+falls off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.
+
+He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the table,
+and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being only a
+little above the level of the table, as he stood. With pain and labor,
+lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his sticks, he
+took a few steps from his place,--his motions and the dead beat of the
+misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and ear the malformation
+which is called in learned language _talipes varus_, or inverted
+club-foot.
+
+Stop! stop!--I said,--let me come to you.
+
+The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with
+an ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair. I
+walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his right
+hand, with the ring upon it. The ring had been put on long ago, and
+could not pass the misshapen joint. It was one of those funeral rings
+which used to be given to relatives and friends after the decease of
+persons of any note or importance. Beneath a round bit of glass was a
+death's head. Engraved on one side of this, "L.B. AEt. 22,"--on the
+other, "Ob. 1692."
+
+My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man.--Hanged for a
+witch. It doesn't seem a great while ago. I knew my grandmother, and
+loved her. Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief Justice
+Sewall hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.--That was
+Salem, though, and not Boston. No, not Boston. Robert Calef, the Boston
+merchant, it was that blew them all to----
+
+Never mind where he blew them to,--I said;--for the little man was
+getting red in the face, and I didn't know what might come next.
+
+This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
+conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.
+
+----A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
+its shirt-sleeves,--who makes bargains with deacons, instead of talking
+over texts with them,--a man who has found out that there are plenty of
+praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above all, who has
+found out, by living into the pith and core of life, that all of thy
+Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of any human book is to
+the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of the hot aortic flood of
+throbbing human life, of this infinite, instantaneous consciousness in
+which the soul's being consists,--an incandescent point in the filament
+connecting the negative pole of a past eternity with the positive pole
+of an eternity that is to come,--that all of the Deity which any human
+book can hold is to this larger Deity of the working battery of the
+universe only as the films in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad
+seams and curdled lumps of ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin
+placers,----Oh!--I was saying that a man who lives out-of-doors, among
+live people, gets some things into his head he might not find in the
+index of his "Body of Divinity."
+
+I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
+their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, which you
+could put Park-Street Church on the bottom of and look over the vane
+from its side, and try to stretch another such spire across it without
+spanning the chasm,--that idea, I say, is pretty nearly worn out. Now
+when a civilization or a civilized custom falls into senile _dementia_,
+there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it comes as plagues come,
+from a breath,--as fires come, from a spark.
+
+Here, look at medicine. Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
+prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long,
+"curing" patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling,
+selling lies at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving
+unfortunate sick people a mess of things either too odious to swallow
+or too acrid to hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.
+
+----You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
+country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,--and
+that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of
+eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxagoras was pounded! I did
+not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the old
+folios in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the
+proprietor of a "Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin
+reprints by Philadelphia Editors. Besides, many of the profession and I
+know a little something of each other, and you don't think I am such a
+simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the better heads
+among them would condemn as unfair and untrue? Now mark how the great
+plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and in what form it
+fell.
+
+A scheming drug-vendor, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy
+and incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow
+dabbler in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous
+fiction (founded the immortal system) of Homeopathy. I am very fair,
+you see,--you can help yourself to either of these sets of phrases.
+
+All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general an
+effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a
+good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was
+produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist). Not
+that the wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the
+routinists and their employers, the "general practitioners," who lived
+by selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers had
+to recognize that people could get well, unpoisoned. These dumb cattle
+would not learn it of themselves, and so the murrain of Homeopathy fell
+on them.
+
+----You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of
+theology? I will tell you, then. It is SPIRITUALISM. While some are
+crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are laughing
+at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with it as a
+mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism is
+quietly undermining the traditional ideas of the future state which
+have been and are still accepted,--not merely in those who believe in
+it, but in the general sentiment of the community, to a larger extent
+than most good people seem to be aware of. It needn't be true, to do
+this, any more than Homeopathy need, to do its work. The Spiritualists
+have some pretty strong instincts to pry over, which no doubt have been
+roughly handled by theologians at different times. And the Nemesis of
+the pulpit comes, in a shape it little thought of, beginning with the
+snap of a toe-joint, and ending with such a crack of old beliefs that
+the roar of it is heard in all the ministers' studies of Christendom!
+Sir, you cannot have people of cultivation, of pure character, sensible
+enough in common things, large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd
+business-men, men of science, professing to be in communication with
+the spiritual world and keeping up constant intercourse with it,
+without its gradually reacting on the whole conception of that other
+life. It is the folly of the world, constantly, which confounds its
+wisdom. Not only out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of
+the mouths of fools and cheats, we may often get our truest lessons.
+For the fool's judgment is a dog-vane that turns with a breath, and the
+cheat watches the clouds and sets his weathercock by them,--so that one
+shall often see by their pointing which way the winds of heaven are
+blowing, when the slow-wheeling arrows and feathers of what we call the
+Temples of Wisdom are turning to all points of the compass.
+
+----Amen!--said the young fellow called John.--Ten minutes by the
+watch. Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up
+their left foot!
+
+I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty seconds.
+His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant. I think it
+was simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a youthful
+playfulness, that led him to this outbreak. I have often noticed that
+even quiet horses, on a sharp November morning, when their coats are
+just beginning to get the winter roughness, will give little sportive
+demi-kicks, with slight sudden elevation of the subsequent region of
+the body, and a sharp short whinny,--by no means intending to put their
+heels through the dasher, or to address the driver rudely, but feeling,
+to use a familiar word, frisky. This, I think, is the physiological
+condition of the young person, John. I noticed, however, what I should
+call a _palpebral spasm_, affecting the eyelid and muscles of one side,
+which, if it were intended for the facial gesture called a wink, might
+lead me to suspect a disposition to be satirical on his part.
+
+----Resuming the conversation, I remarked,--I am, _ex officio_, as a
+Professor, a conservative. For I don't know any fruit that clings to
+its tree so faithfully, not even a "froze-'n'-thaw" winter-apple, as a
+Professor to the bough of which his chair is made. You can't shake him
+off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off. Hence, by a chain
+of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism generally.
+
+But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once
+find yourself in a current and the sea covered with weeds, and drop
+your Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher
+than in the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of
+facts and swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you
+are in it.
+
+You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight in
+a profession. Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in, through
+India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and general
+knowledge will leak in, though a profession were covered with twenty
+thicknesses of sheepskin diplomas. By Jove, Sir, till common sense is
+well mixed up with medicine, and common manhood with theology, and
+common honesty with law, _We the people_, Sir, some of us with
+nutcrackers, and some of us with trip-hammers, and some of us with
+pile-drivers, and some of us coming with a whish! like air-stones out
+of a lunar volcano, will crash down on the lumps of nonsense in all of
+them till we have made powder of them like Aaron's calf!
+
+If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up
+and keep all the soul's windows down,--to shut out the sun from the
+east and the wind from the west,--to let the rats run free in the
+cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the spiders
+weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul's typhus is bred out
+of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or rave in its
+delirium,--I, Sir, am a _bonnet-rouge_, a red-cap of the barricades, my
+friends, rather than a conservative.
+
+----Were you born in Boston, Sir?--said the little man,--looking eager
+and excited.
+
+I was not,--I replied.
+
+It's a pity,--it's a pity,--said the little man;--it's the place to be
+born in. But if you can't fix it so as to be born here, you can come
+and live here. Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science and the
+American Union, wasn't ashamed to be born here. Jim Otis, the father of
+American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod marshes awhile,
+but he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough. Joe Warren, the
+first bloody ruffled-shirt of the Revolution, was as good as born here.
+Parson Charming strolled along this way from Newport, and staid here.
+Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn't come, too;--we'd have made a man of
+him.--poor, dear, good old Christian heathen! There he lies, as
+peaceful as a young baby, in the old burying-ground! I've stood on the
+slab many a time. Meant well,--meant well. Juggernaut. Parson Charming
+put a little oil on one linchpin, and slipped it out so softly, the
+first thing they knew about it was the wheel of that side was down.
+T'other fellow's at work now; but he makes more noise about it. When
+the linchpin comes out on his side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you!
+Some think it will spoil the old cart, and they pretend to say that
+there are valuable things in it which may get hurt. Hope not,--hope
+not. But this is the great Macadamizing place,--always cracking up
+something.
+
+Cracking up Boston folks,--said the gentleman with the _diamond_-pin,
+whom, for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the _Koh-i-noor_.
+
+The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's Turk
+used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if it went
+by cogwheels.--Cracking up all sorts of things,--native and foreign
+vermin included,--said the little man.
+
+This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
+application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if
+the Koh-i-noor had been so disposed. The little man uttered it with the
+distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to exclaim,
+_E-chec_! so that it _must_ have been heard. The party supposed to be
+interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large
+knife-blade-full of something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt,
+interfered with the reply he would have made.
+
+----My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
+pleasant way, to call himself the _Autocrat_ of the table,--meaning, I
+suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders. I think our
+small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I
+undertake to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeathe me, too
+magisterially. I won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when I
+have been in company with gentlemen who _preferred_ listening, I have
+been guilty of the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly
+justified. But I maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good listener.
+If a man can tell me a fact which subtends an appreciable angle in the
+horizon of thought, I am as receptive as the contribution-box in a
+congregation of colored brethren. If, when I am exposing my
+intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good story, I will have them
+all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to the fifth "says he,"
+and listen like a three-years' child, as the author of the "Old Sailor"
+says. I had rather hear one of those grand elemental laughs from either
+of our two Georges, (fictitious names, Sir or Madam,) or listen to one
+of those old playbills of our College days, in which "Tom and Jerry"
+("Thomas and Jeremiah," as the old Greek Professor was said to call it)
+was announced to be brought on the stage with the whole force of the
+Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no such person, of course,) than say
+the best things I might by any chance find myself capable of saying. Of
+course, if I come across a real thinker, a suggestive, acute,
+illuminating, informing talker, I enjoy the luxury of sitting still for
+a while as much as another.
+
+Nobody talks much that doesn't say unwise things,--things he did not
+mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note
+sometimes. Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of
+thought. I can't answer for what will turn up. If I could, it wouldn't
+be talking, but "speaking my piece." Better, I think, the hearty
+abandonment of one's self to the suggestions of the moment, at the risk
+of an occasional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it escapes,
+but, just one syllable too late, than the royal reputation of never
+saying a foolish thing.
+
+----What shall I do with this little man?--There is only one thing to
+do,--and that is, to let him talk when he will. The day of the
+"Autocrat's" monologues is over.
+
+----My friend,--said I to the young fellow whom, as I have said, the
+boarders call "John,"--My friend,--I said, one morning, after
+breakfast,--can you give me any information respecting the deformed
+person who sits at the other end of the table?
+
+What! the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+The diminutive person, with angular curvature of the spine,--I
+said,--and double _talipes varus_,--I beg your pardon,--with two
+club-feet.
+
+Is that long word what you call it when a fellah walks so?--said the
+young man, making his fists revolve round an imaginary axis, as you may
+have seen youth of tender age and limited pugilistic knowledge, when
+they show how they would punish an adversary, themselves protected by
+this rotating guard,--the middle knuckle, meantime, thumb-supported,
+fiercely prominent, death-threatening.
+
+It is,--said I.--But would you have the kindness to tell me if you know
+anything about this deformed person?
+
+About the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+My good friend,--said I,--I am sure, by your countenance, you would not
+hurt the feelings of one who has been hardly enough treated by Nature
+to be spared by his fellows. Even in speaking of him to others, I could
+wish that you might not employ a term which implies contempt for what
+should inspire only pity.
+
+A fellah's no business to be so----crooked,--said the young man called
+John.
+
+Yes, yes,--I said, thoughtfully,--the strong hate the weak. It's all
+right. The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to the
+individual. Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down.
+Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail!--I
+understand the instinct, my friend,--it is cosmic,--it is
+planetary,--it is a conservative principle in creation.
+
+The young fellow's face gradually lost its expression as I was
+speaking, until it became as blank of vivid significance as the
+countenance of a gingerbread rabbit with two currants in the place of
+eyes. He had not taken my meaning.
+
+Presently the intelligence came back with a snap that made him wink,
+as he answered,--Jest so. All right. A 1. Put her through. That's the
+way to talk. Did you speak to me, Sir?--Here the young man struck up
+that well-known song which I think they used to sing at Masonic
+festivals, beginning, "Aldiborontiphoscophornio, Where left you
+Chrononholonthologos?"
+
+I beg your pardon.--I said;--all I meant was, that men, as temporary
+occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is improved or
+injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a natural
+dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as well as of
+the individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon the abode
+spoken of, which is to be occupied by countless future generations.
+This is the final cause of the underlying brute instinct which we have
+in common with the herds.
+
+----The gingerbread-rabbit expression was coming on so fast, that I
+thought I must try again.--It's a pity that families are kept up, where
+there are such hereditary infirmities. Still, let us treat this poor
+man fairly, and not call him names. Do you know what his name is?
+
+I know what the rest of 'em call him,--said the young fellow.--They
+call him Little Boston. There's no harm in that, is there?
+
+It is an honorable term,--I replied.--But why Little _Boston_, in a
+place where most are Bostonians?
+
+Because nobody else is quite so Boston all over as he is,--said the
+young fellow.
+
+"L.B. Ob. 1692."--Little Boston let him be, when we talk about him. The
+ring he wears labels him well enough. There is stuff in the little man,
+or he wouldn't stick so manfully by this crooked, crotchety old town.
+Give him a chance.--You will drop the Sculpin, won't you?--I said to
+the young fellow.
+
+Drop him?--he answered,--I ha'n't took him up yet.
+
+No, no,--the term,--I said,--the term. Don't call him so any more, if
+you please. Call him Little Boston, if you like.
+
+All right,--said the young fellow.--I wouldn't be hard on the poor
+little----
+
+The word he used was objectionable in point of significance and of
+grammar. It was a frequent termination of certain adjectives among the
+Romans,--as of those designating a person following the sea, or given
+to rural pursuits. It is classed by custom among the profane words;
+why, it is hard to say,--but it is largely used in the street by those
+who speak of their fellows in pity or in wrath.
+
+I never heard the young fellow apply the name of the odious pretended
+fish to the little man from that day forward.
+
+----Here we are, then, at our boarding-house. First, myself, the
+Professor, a little way from the head of the table, on the right,
+looking down, where the Autocrat used to sit. At the further end site
+the Landlady. At the head of the table, just now, the Koh-i-noor, or
+the gentleman with the _diamond_. Opposite me is a Venerable Gentleman
+with a bland countenance, who as yet has spoken little. The
+Divinity-Student is my neighbor on the right,--and further down, that
+Young Fellow of whom I have repeatedly spoken. The Landlady's Daughter
+sits near the Koh-i-noor, as I said. The Poor Relation near the
+Landlady. At the right upper corner is a fresh-looking youth of whose
+name and history I have as yet learned nothing. Next the further
+left-hand corner, looking down the table, sits the deformed person. The
+chair at his side, occupying that corner, is empty. I need not
+specially mention the other boarders, with the exception of Benjamin
+Franklin, the landlady's son, who sits near his mother. We are a
+tolerably assorted set,--difference enough and likeness enough; but
+still it seems to me there is something wanting. The Landlady's
+Daughter is the _prima donna_ in the way of feminine attractions. I am
+not quite satisfied with this young lady. She wears more "jewelry," as
+certain young ladies call their trinkets, than I care to see on a
+person in her position. Her voice is strident, her laugh too much like
+a giggle, and she has that foolish way of dancing and bobbing like a
+quill-float with a "minnum" biting the hook below it, which one sees
+and weeps over sometimes in persons of more pretensions. I can't help
+hoping we shall put something into that empty chair yet which will add
+the missing string to our social harp. I hear talk of a rare Miss who
+is expected. Something in the school-girl way, I believe. We shall see.
+
+----My friend who calls himself _The Autocrat_ has given me a caution
+which I am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit of
+all concerned.
+
+Professor,--said he, one day,--don't you think your brain will run dry
+before a year's out, if you don't get the pump to help the cow? Let me
+tell you what happened to me once. I put a little money into a bank,
+and bought a checkbook, so that I might draw it as I wanted, in sums to
+suit. Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a pen was as
+easy as rubbing Aladdin's Lamp; and my blank check-book seemed to be a
+dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all the synonymes of
+happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot. A check came back
+to me at last with these two words on it,--_No funds_. My checkbook was
+a volume of waste-paper.
+
+Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank, you
+know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's currency
+without making new deposits, the next thing will be, _No funds_,--and
+then where will you be, my boy? These little bits of paper mean your
+gold and your silver and your copper, Professor; and you will certainly
+break up and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to your metallic basis.
+
+There is something in that,--said I.--Only I rather think life can coin
+thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words. What if one
+shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that falls of a
+June evening on the leaves of his garden? Shall there be no more dew on
+those leaves thereafter? Marry, yea,--many drops, large and round and
+full of moonlight as those thou shalt have absterged!
+
+Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have
+plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not
+always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April,
+or rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against
+books as a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to
+decrepitude; with a brain as full of tingling thoughts, such as they
+are, as a limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particularly
+awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps,
+not as yet tanned or ossified, to the finger-touch of all outward
+agencies; knowing something of the filmy threads of this web of life in
+which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come
+along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his
+finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge feeding with
+the fox oftener than with the stork,--loving better the breadth of a
+fertilizing inundation than the depth of a narrow artesian well;
+finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the markings of the
+_grammatophora subtilissima_, and nothing too large in the movement of
+the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation
+Hercules;--and the question is, whether there is anything left for me,
+the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively friend has had
+his straw in the bunghole of the Universe!
+
+A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on,
+whether he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes. As
+to catching the residuum of the process, or what we call
+_thought_,--the gaseous ashes of burned-out _thinking_,--the excretion
+of mental respiration,--that will depend on many things, as, on having
+a favorable intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting
+receptacle.--I sow more thought-seeds in twenty-four hours' travel over
+the desert-sand, along which my lonely consciousness paces day and
+night, than I shall throw into soil where it will germinate, in a year.
+All sorts of bodily and mental perturbations come between us and the
+due projection of our thought. The pulse-like "fits of easy and
+difficult transmission" seem to reach even the transparent medium
+through which our souls are seen. We know our humanity by its often
+intercepted rays, as we tell a revolving light from a star or meteor by
+its constantly recurring obscuration.
+
+An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he ever
+delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if he had
+told all he knew. Braham came forward once to sing one of his most
+famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the first
+line of it;--he told his mishap to the audience, and they screamed it
+at him in a chorus of a thousand voices. Milton could not write to suit
+himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal equinox. One in the
+clothing-business, who, there is reason to suspect, may have inherited,
+by descent, the great poet's impressible temperament, let a customer
+slip through his fingers one day without fitting him with a new garment.
+"Ah!" said he to a friend of mine, who was standing by, "if it hadn't
+been for that confounded headache of mine this morning, I'd have had a
+coat on that man, in spite of himself, before he left the store." A
+passing throb, only,--but it deranged the nice mechanism required to
+persuade the accidental human being, _x_, into a given piece of
+broadcloth, _a_.
+
+We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of
+transmission of our ideas with want of ideas. I suppose that a man's
+mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the universe
+for which it has special elective affinities. In fact, I look upon a
+library as a kind of mental chemist's shop, filled with the crystals of
+all forms and hues which have come from the union of individual thought
+with local circumstances or universal principles.
+
+When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there is
+an end of his genius as a real solvent. No more effervescence and
+hissing tumult as he pours his sharp thought on the world's biting
+alkaline unbeliefs! No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets
+covered with lies! No more taking up of dull earths, and turning them,
+first into clear solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!
+
+I, the Professor, am very much like other men. I shall not find out
+when I have used up my affinities. What a blessed thing it is, that
+Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors,
+contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left! Painful as
+the task is, they never fail to warn the author, in the most impressive
+manner, of the probabilities of failure in what he has undertaken. Sad
+as the necessity is to their delicate sensibilities, they never
+hesitate to advertise him of the decline of his powers, and to press
+upon him the propriety of retiring before he sinks into imbecility.
+Trusting to their kind offices, I shall endeavor to fulfil----
+
+_Bridget enters and begins clearing the table._
+
+The following poem is my (the Professor's) only contribution to the
+great department of Ocean-Cable literature. As all the poets of this
+country will be engaged for the next six weeks in writing for the
+premium offered by the Crystal-Palace Company for the Barns Centenary,
+(so called, according to our Benjamin Franklin, because there will be
+nary a cent for any of us,) poetry will be very scarce and dear.
+Consumers may, consequently, be glad to take the present article,
+which, by the aid of a Latin tutor and a Professor of Chemistry, will
+be found intelligible to the educated classes.
+
+DE SAUTY.
+
+AN ELECTRO-CHEMICAL ECLOGUE.
+
+_Professor. Blue-Nose._
+
+PROFESSOR.
+
+  Tell me, O Provincial! speak, Ceruleo-Nasal!
+  Lives there one De Sauty extant now among you
+  Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder,
+  Holding talk with nations?
+
+  Is there a De Sauty ambulant on Tellus,
+  Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in nightcap,
+  Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature
+  Three times daily patent?
+
+  Breathes there such a being, O Ceruleo-Nasal?
+  Or is he a _mythus_,--ancient word for "humbug,"--
+  Such as Livy told about the wolf that wetnursed
+  Romulus and Remus?
+
+  Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
+  Or a living product of galvanic action,
+  Like the _acarus_ bred in Crosse's flint-solution?
+  Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!
+
+BLUE-NOSE.
+
+  Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger,
+  Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster!
+  Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me,
+  Thou shalt hear them answered.
+
+  When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
+  At the polar focus of the wire electric
+  Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us.
+  Called himself "DE SAUTY."
+
+  As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
+  Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term _mammalia_,
+  So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,
+  Sucking in the current.
+
+  When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger,--
+  Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy,--
+  And from time to time, in sharp articulation,
+  Said, "_All right!_ DE SAUTY."
+
+  From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading
+  Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples,
+  Till the land was filled with loud reverberations
+  Of "_All right_! DE SAUTY."
+
+  When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger,--
+  Faded, faded, faded, as the shocks grew weaker,--
+  Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odor
+  Of disintegration.
+
+  Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
+  Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
+  Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended,
+  There was no De Sauty.
+
+  Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,
+  C.O.H.N. Ferrum, Chor. Flu. Sil. Potassa,
+  Calc. Sod. Phosph. Mag. Sulphur, Mang.(?) Alumin.(?) Cuprum,(?)
+  Such as man is made of.
+
+  Born of stream galvanic, with it he had perished!
+  There is no De Sauty now there is no current!
+  Give us a new cable, then again we'll hear him
+  Cry, "_All right!_ DE SAUTY."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE MINISTER'S WOOING.
+
+[Continued.]
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THEOLOGICAL TEA.
+
+At the call of her mother, Mary hurried into the "best room," with a
+strange discomposure of spirit she had never felt before. From
+childhood, her love for James had been so deep, equable, and intense,
+that it had never disturbed her with thrills and yearnings; it had
+grown up in sisterly calmness, and, quietly expanding, had taken
+possession of her whole nature, without her once dreaming of its power.
+But this last interview seemed to have struck some great nerve of her
+being,--and calm as she usually was, from habit, principle, and good
+health, she shivered and trembled, as she heard his retreating
+footsteps, and saw the orchard-grass fly back from under his feet. It
+was as if each step trod on a nerve,--as if the very sound of the
+rustling grass was stirring something living and sensitive in her soul.
+And, strangest of all, a vague impression of guilt hovered over her.
+_Had_ she done anything wrong? She did not ask him there; she had not
+spoken love to him; no, she had only talked to him of his soul, and how
+she would give hers for his,--oh, so willingly!--and that was not love;
+it was only what Dr. H. said Christians must always feel.
+
+"Child, what _have_ you been doing?" said Aunt Katy, who sat in full
+flowing chintz petticoat and spotless dimity shortgown, with her
+company knitting-work in her hands; "your cheeks are as red as peonies.
+Have you been crying? What's the matter?"
+
+"There is the Deacon's wife, mother," said Mary, turning confusedly,
+and darting to the entry-door.
+
+Enter Mrs. Twitchel,--a soft, pillowy little elderly lady, whose whole
+air and dress reminded one of a sack of feathers tied in the middle
+with a string. A large, comfortable pocket, hung upon the side,
+disclosed her knitting-work ready for operation; and she zealously
+cleansed herself with a checked handkerchief from the dust which had
+accumulated during her ride in the old "one-hoss shay," answering the
+hospitable salutation of Katy Scudder in that plaintive, motherly voice
+which belongs to certain nice old ladies, who appear to live in a state
+of mild chronic compassion for the sins and sorrows of this mortal life
+generally.
+
+"Why, yes, Miss Scudder, I'm pretty tol'able. I keep goin', and goin'.
+That's my way. I's a-tellin' the Deacon, this-mornin', I didn't see how
+I _was_ to come here this afternoon; but then I _did_ want to see Miss
+Scudder and talk a little about that precious sermon, Sunday. How is
+the Doctor? blessed man! Well, his reward must be great in heaven, if
+not on earth, as I was a-tellin' the Deacon; and he says to me, says
+he, 'Polly, we mustn't be man-worshippers.' There, dear," (_to Mary_,)
+"don't trouble yourself about my bonnet; it a'n't my Sunday one, but I
+thought 'twould do. Says I to Cerinthy Ann, 'Miss Scudder won't mind,
+'cause her heart's set on better things.' I always like to drop a word
+in season to Cerinthy Ann, 'cause she's clean took up with vanity and
+dress. Oh, dear! oh, dear me! so different from your blessed daughter,
+Miss Scudder! Well, it's a great blessin' to be called in one's youth,
+like Samuel and Timothy; but then we doesn't know the Lord's ways.
+Sometimes I gets clean discouraged with my children,--but then ag'in I
+don't know; none on us does. Cerinthy Ann is one of the most master
+hands to turn off work; she takes hold and goes along like a woman, and
+nobody never knows when that gal finds the time to do all she does do;
+and I don't know nothin' what I _should_ do without her. Deacon was
+saying, if ever she was called, she'd be a Martha, and not a Mary; but
+then she's dreadful opposed to the doctrines. Oh, dear me! oh, dear me!
+Somehow they seem to rile her all up; and she was a-tellin' me
+yesterday, when she was a-hangin' out clothes, that she never should
+get reconciled to Decrees and 'Lection, 'cause she can't see, if things
+is certain, how folks is to help 'emselves. Says I, 'Cerinthy Ann,
+folks a'n't to help 'emselves; they's to submit unconditional.' And she
+jest slammed down the clothes-basket and went into the house."
+
+When Mrs. Twitchel began to talk, it flowed a steady stream, as when
+one turns a faucet, that never ceases running till some hand turns it
+back again; and the occasion that cut the flood short at present was
+the entrance of Mrs. Brown.
+
+Mr. Simeon Brown was a thriving shipowner of Newport, who lived in a
+large house, owned several negro-servants and a span of horses, and
+affected some state and style in his worldly appearance. A passion for
+metaphysical Orthodoxy had drawn Simeon to the congregation of Dr. H.,
+and his wife of course stood by right in a high place there. She was a
+tall, angular, somewhat hard-favored body, dressed in a style rather
+above the simple habits of her neighbors, and her whole air spoke the
+great woman, who in right of her thousands expected to have her say in
+all that was going on in the world, whether she understood it or not.
+
+On her entrance, mild little Mrs. Twitchel fled from the cushioned
+rocking-chair, and stood with the quivering air of one who feels she
+has no business to be anywhere in the world, until Mrs. Brown's bonnet
+was taken and she was seated, when Mrs. Twitchel subsided into a corner
+and rattled her knitting-needles to conceal her emotion.
+
+New England has been called the land of equality; but what land upon
+earth is wholly so? Even the mites in a bit of cheese, naturalists say,
+have great tumblings and strivings about position and rank; he who has
+ten pounds will always be a nobleman to him who has but one, let him
+strive as manfully as he may; and therefore let us forgive meek little
+Mrs. Twitchel for melting into nothing in her own eyes when Mrs. Brown
+came in, and let us forgive Mrs. Brown that she sat down in the
+rocking-chair with an easy grandeur, as one who thought it her duty to
+be affable and meant to be. It was, however, rather difficult for Mrs.
+Brown, with her money, house, negroes, and all, to patronize Mrs. Katy
+Scudder, who was one of those women whose natures seem to sit on
+thrones, and who dispense patronage and favor by an inborn right and
+aptitude, whatever be their social advantages. It was one of Mrs.
+Brown's trials of life, this secret, strange quality in her neighbor,
+who stood apparently so far below her in worldly goods. Even the quiet,
+positive style of Mrs. Katy's knitting made her nervous; it was an
+implication of independence of her sway; and though on the present
+occasion every customary courtesy was bestowed, she still felt, as she
+always did when Mrs. Katy's guest, a secret uneasiness. She mentally
+contrasted the neat little parlor, with its white sanded floor and
+muslin curtains, with her own grand front-room, which boasted the then
+uncommon luxuries of Turkey carpet and Persian rug, and wondered if
+Mrs. Katy did really feel as cool and easy in receiving her as she
+appeared.
+
+You must not understand that this was what Mrs. Brown _supposed_
+herself to be thinking about; oh, no! by no means! All the little, mean
+work of our nature is generally done in a small dark closet just a
+little back of the subject we are talking about, on which subject we
+suppose ourselves of course to be thinking;--of course we are thinking
+of it; how else could we talk about it?
+
+The subject in discussion, and what Mrs. Brown supposed to be in her
+own thoughts, was the last Sunday's sermon on the doctrine of entire
+Disinterested Benevolence, in which good Doctor H. had proclaimed to
+the citizens of Newport their duty of being so wholly absorbed in the
+general good of the universe as even to acquiesce in their own final
+and eternal destruction, if the greater good of the whole might thereby
+be accomplished.
+
+"Well, now, dear me!" said Mrs. Twitchel, while her knitting-needles
+trotted contentedly to the mournful tone of her voice,--"I was tellin'
+the Deacon, if we only could get there! Sometimes I think I get a
+little way,--but then ag'in I don't know; but the Deacon he's quite
+down,--he don't see no evidences in himself. Sometimes he says he don't
+feel as if he ought to keep his place in the church,--but then ag'in he
+don't know. He keeps a-turnin' and turnin' on't over in his mind, and
+a-tryin' himself this way and that way; and he says he don't see
+nothin' but what's selfish, no way.
+
+"'Member one night last winter, after the Deacon got warm in bed, there
+come a rap at the door; and who should it be but old Beulah Ward,
+wantin' to see the Deacon?--'twas her boy she sent, and he said Beulah
+was sick and hadn't no more wood nor candles. Now I know'd the Deacon
+had carried that crittur half a cord of wood, if he had one stick,
+since Thanksgivin', and I'd sent her two o' my best moulds of
+candles,--nice ones that Cerinthy Ann run when we killed a crittur; but
+nothin' would do but the Deacon must get right out his warm bed and
+dress himself, and hitch up his team to carry over some wood to Beulah.
+Says I, 'Father, you know you'll be down with the rheumatis for this;
+besides, Beulah is real aggravatin'. I know she trades off what we send
+her to the store for rum, and you never get no thanks. She 'xpects,
+'cause we has done for her, we always must; and more we do, more we may
+do.' And says he to me, says he, 'That's jest the way we sarves the
+Lord, Polly; and what if He shouldn't hear us when we call on Him in
+our troubles?' So I shet up; and the next day he was down with the
+rheumatis. And Cerinthy Ann, says she, 'Well, father, _now_ I hope
+you'll own you have got _some_ disinterested benevolence,' says she;
+and the Deacon he thought it over a spell, and then he says, 'I'm
+'fraid it's all selfish. I'm jest a-makin' a righteousness of it.' And
+Cerinthy Ann she come out, declarin' that the best folks never had no
+comfort in religion; and for her part she didn't mean to trouble her
+head about it, but have jest as good a time as she could while she's
+young, 'cause if she was 'lected to be saved she should be, and if she
+wa'n't she couldn't help it, any how."
+
+"Mr. Brown says he came onto Dr. H.'s ground years ago," said Mrs.
+Brown, giving a nervous twitch to her yarn, and speaking in a sharp,
+hard, didactic voice, which made little Mrs. Twitchel give a gentle
+quiver, and look humble and apologetic. "Mr. Brown's a master thinker;
+there's nothing pleases that man better than a hard doctrine; he says
+you can't get 'em too hard for him. He don't find any difficulty in
+bringing his mind up; he just reasons it out all plain; and he says,
+people have no need to be in the dark; and that's _my_ opinion. 'If
+folks know they ought to come up to anything, why _don't_ they?' he
+says; and I say so too."
+
+"Mr. Scudder used to say that it took great afflictions to bring his
+mind to that place," said Mrs. Katy. "He used to say that an old
+paper-maker told him once, that paper that was shaken only one way in
+the making would tear across the other, and the best paper had to be
+shaken every way; and so he said we couldn't tell, till we had been
+turned and shaken and tried every way, where we should tear."
+
+Mrs. Twitchel responded to this sentiment with a gentle series of
+groans, such as were her general expression of approbation, swaying
+herself backward and forward; while Mrs. Brown gave a sort of toss and
+snort, and said that for her part she always thought people knew what
+they did know,--but she guessed she was mistaken.
+
+The conversation was here interrupted by the civilities attendant on
+the reception of Mrs. Jones,--a broad, buxom, hearty soul, who had come
+on horseback from a farm about three miles distant.
+
+Smiling with rosy content, she presented Mrs. Katy a small pot of
+golden butter,--the result of her forenoon's churning.
+
+There are some people so evidently broadly and heartily of this world,
+that their coming into a room always materializes the conversation. We
+wish to be understood that we mean no disparaging reflection on such
+persons;--they are as necessary to make up a world as cabbages to make
+up a garden; the great healthy principles of cheerfulness and animal
+life seem to exist in them in the gross; they are wedges and ingots of
+solid, contented vitality. Certain kinds of virtues and Christian
+graces thrive in such people as the first crop of corn does in the
+bottom-lands of the Ohio. Mrs. Jones was a church-member, a regular
+church-goer, and planted her comely person plump in front of Dr. H.
+every Sunday, and listened to his searching and discriminating sermons
+with broad, honest smiles of satisfaction. Those keen distinctions as
+to motives, those awful warnings and urgent expostulations, which made
+poor Deacon Twitchel weep, she listened to with great, round, satisfied
+eyes, making to all, and after all, the same remark,--that it was good,
+and she liked it, and the Doctor was a good man; and on the present
+occasion, she announced her pot of butter as one fruit of her
+reflections after the last discourse.
+
+"You see," she said, "as I was a-settin' in the spring-house, this
+mornin', a-workin' my butter, I says to Dinah,--'I'm goin' to carry a
+pot of this down to Miss Scudder for the Doctor,--I got so much good
+out of his Sunday's sermon. And Dinah she says to me, says she,--'Laws,
+Miss Jones. I thought you was asleep, for sartin!' But I wasn't; only I
+forgot to take any caraway-seed in the mornin', and so I kinder missed
+it; you know it 'livens one up. But I never lost myself so but what I
+kinder heerd him goin' on, on, sort o' like,--and it sounded _all_ sort
+o' _good;_ and so I thought of the Doctor to-day."
+
+"Well, I'm sure," said Aunt Katy, "this will be a treat; we all know
+about your butter, Mrs. Jones. I sha'n't think of putting any of mine
+on table to-night, I'm sure."
+
+"Law, now don't!" said Mrs. Jones. "Why, you re'lly make me ashamed,
+Miss Scudder. To be sure, folks does like our butter, and it always
+fetches a pretty good price,--_he's_ very proud on't. I tell him he
+oughtn't to be,--we oughtn't to be proud of anything."
+
+And now Mrs. Katy, giving a look at the old clock, told Mary it was
+time to set the tea-table; and forthwith there was a gentle movement of
+expectancy. The little mahogany tea-table opened its brown wings, and
+from a drawer came forth the snowy damask covering. It was etiquette,
+on such occasions, to compliment every article of the establishment
+successively, as it appeared; so the Deacon's wife began at the
+table-cloth.
+
+"Well, I do declare, Miss Scudder beats us all in her table-cloths,"
+she said, taking up a corner of the damask, admiringly; and Mrs. Jones
+forthwith jumped up and seized the other corner.
+
+"Why, this 'ere must have come from the Old Country. It's 'most the
+beautiflest thing I ever did see."
+
+"It's my own spinning," replied Mrs. Katy, with conscious dignity.
+"There was an Irish weaver came to Newport the year before I was
+married, who wove beautifully,--just the Old-Country patterns,--and I'd
+been spinning some uncommonly fine flax then. I remember Mr. Scudder
+used to read to me while I was spinning,"--and Aunt Katy looked afar,
+as one whose thoughts are in the past, and dropped out the last words
+with a little sigh, unconsciously, as to herself.
+
+"Well, now, I must say," said Mrs. Jones, "this goes quite beyond me. I
+thought I could spin some; but I sha'n't never dare to show mine."
+
+"I'm sure, Mrs. Jones, your towels that you had out bleaching, this
+spring, were wonderful," said Aunt Katy. "But I don't pretend to do
+much now," she continued, straightening her trim figure. "I'm getting
+old, you know; we must let the young folks take up these things. Mary
+spins better now than I ever did. Mary, hand out those napkins."
+
+And so Mary's napkins passed from hand to hand.
+
+"Well, well," said Mrs. Twitchel to Mary, "it's easy to see that _your_
+linen-chest will be pretty full by the time _he_ comes along; won't it,
+Miss Jones?"--and Mrs. Twitchel looked pleasantly facetious, as elderly
+ladies generally do, when suggesting such possibilities to younger
+ones.
+
+Mary was vexed to feel the blood boil up in her cheeks in a most
+unexpected and provoking way at the suggestion; whereat Mrs. Twitchel
+nodded knowingly at Mrs. Jones, and whispered something in a mysterious
+aside, to which plump Mrs. Jones answered,--"Why, do tell! now I
+never!"
+
+"It's strange," said Mrs. Twitchel, taking up her parable again, in
+such a plaintive tone that all knew something pathetic was coming,
+"what mistakes some folks will make, a-fetchin' up girls. Now there's
+your Mary, Miss Scudder,--why, there a'n't nothin' she can't do; but
+law, I was down to Miss Skinner's, last week, a-watchin' with her, and
+re'lly it 'most broke my heart to see her. Her mother was a most
+amazin' smart woman; but she brought Suky up, for all the world, as if
+she'd been a wax doll, to be kept in the drawer,--and sure enough, she
+was a pretty cretur,--and now she's married, what is she? She ha'n't no
+more idee how to take hold than nothin'. The poor child means well
+enough, and she works so hard she most kills herself; but then she is
+in the suds from mornin' till night,--she's one the sort whose work's
+never done,--and poor George Skinner's clean discouraged."
+
+"There's everything in _knowing how_," said Mrs. Katy. "Nobody ought to
+be always working; it's a bad sign. I tell Mary,--'Always do up your
+work in the forenoon.'--Girls must learn that. I never work afternoons,
+after my dinner-dishes are got away; I never did and never would."
+
+"Nor I, neither," chimed in Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Twitchel,--both anxious
+to show themselves clear on this leading point of New England
+house-keeping.
+
+"There's another thing I always tell Mary," said Mrs. Katy,
+impressively. "'Never say there isn't time for a thing that ought to be
+done. If a thing is _necessary_, why, life is long enough to find a
+place for it. That's my doctrine. When anybody tells me they _can't
+find_ time for this or that, I don't think much of 'em. I think they
+don't know how to work,--that's all.'"
+
+Here Mrs. Twitchel looked up from her knitting, with an apologetic
+giggle, at Mrs. Brown.
+
+"Law, now, there's Miss Brown, she don't know nothin' about it, 'cause
+she's got her servants to every turn. I s'pose she thinks it queer to
+hear us talkin' about our work. Miss Brown must have her time all to
+herself. I was tellin' the Deacon the other day that she was a
+privileged woman."
+
+"I'm sure, those that have servants find work enough following 'em
+'round," said Mrs. Brown,--who, like all other human beings, resented
+the implication of not having as many trials in life as her neighbors.
+"As to getting the work done up in the forenoon, that's a thing I never
+can teach 'em; they'd rather not. Chloe likes to keep her work 'round,
+and do it by snacks, any time, day or night, when the notion takes
+her."
+
+"And it was just for that reason I never would have one of those
+creatures 'round," said Mrs. Katy. "Mr. Scudder was principled against
+buying negroes,--but if he had _not_ been, I should not have wanted any
+of _their_ work. I know what's to be done, and most help is no help to
+me. I want people to stand out of my way and let me get done. I've
+tried keeping a girl once or twice, and I never worked so hard in my
+life. When Mary and I do all ourselves, we can calculate everything to
+a minute; and we get our time to sew and read and spin and visit, and
+live just as we want to."
+
+Here, again, Mrs. Brown looked uneasy. To what use was it that she was
+rich and owned servants, when this Mordecai in her gate utterly
+despised her prosperity? In her secret heart she thought Mrs. Katy must
+be envious, and rather comforted herself on this view of the
+subject,--sweetly unconscious of any inconsistency in the feeling with
+her views of utter self-abnegation just announced.
+
+Meanwhile the tea-table had been silently gathering on its snowy
+plateau the delicate china, the golden butter, the loaf of faultless
+cake, a plate of crullers or wonders, as a sort of sweet fried cake was
+commonly called,--tea-rusks, light as a puff, and shining on top with a
+varnish of egg,--jellies of apple and quince quivering in amber
+clearness,--whitest and purest honey in the comb,--in short, everything
+that could go to the getting-up of a most faultless tea.
+
+"I don't see," said Mrs. Jones, resuming the gentle paeans of the
+occasion, "how Miss Scudder's loaf-cake always comes out jest so. It
+don't rise neither to one side nor t'other, but jest even all 'round;
+and it a'n't white one side and burnt the other, but jest a good brown
+all over; and it don't have no heavy streak in it."
+
+"Jest what Cerinthy Ann was sayin', the other day," said Mrs. Twitchel.
+"She says she can't never be sure how hers is a-comin' out. Do what she
+can, it will be either too much or too little; but Miss Scudder's is
+always jest so. 'Law,' says I, 'Cerinthy Ann, it's _faculty_,--that's
+it;--them that has it has it, and them that hasn't--why, they've got to
+work hard, and not do half so well, neither.'"
+
+Mrs. Katy took all these praises as matter of course. Since she was
+thirteen years old, she had never put her hand to anything that she had
+not been held to do better than other folks, and therefore she accepted
+her praises with the quiet repose and serenity of assured reputation;
+though, of course, she used the usual polite disclaimers of "Oh, it's
+nothing, nothing at all; I'm sure I don't know how I do it, and was not
+aware it was so good,"--and so on. All which things are proper for
+gentlewomen to observe in like cases, in every walk of life.
+
+"Do you think the Deacon will be along soon?" said Mrs. Katy, when
+Mary, returning from the kitchen, announced the important fact, that
+the tea-kettle was boiling.
+
+"Why, yes," said Mrs. Twitchel. "I'm a-lookin' for him every minute. He
+told me, that he and the men should be plantin' up to the eight-acre
+lot, but he'd keep the colt up there to come down on; and so I laid him
+out a clean shirt, and says, 'Now, Father, you be sure and be there by
+five, so that Miss Scudder may know when to put her tea a-drawin'.'
+--There he is, I believe," she added, as a horse's tramp was
+heard without, and, after a few moments, the desired Deacon entered.
+
+He was a gentle, soft-spoken man, low, sinewy, thin, with black hair
+showing lines and patches of silver. His keen, thoughtful, dark eye
+marked the nervous and melancholic temperament. A mild and pensive
+humility of manner seemed to brood over him, like the shadow of a
+cloud. Everything in his dress, air, and motions indicated punctilious
+exactness and accuracy, at times rising to the point of nervous
+anxiety.
+
+Immediately after the bustle of his entrance had subsided, Mr. Simeon
+Brown followed. He was a tall, lank individual, with high cheek-bones,
+thin, sharp features, small, keen, hard eyes, and large hands and feet.
+
+Simeon was, as we have before remarked, a keen theologian, and had the
+scent of a hound for a metaphysical distinction. True, he was a man of
+business, being a thriving trader to the coast of Africa, whence he
+imported negroes for the American market; and no man was held to
+understand that branch of traffic better,--he having, in his earlier
+days, commanded ships in the business, and thus learned it from the
+root. In his private life, Simeon was severe and dictatorial. He was
+one of that class of people who, of a freezing day, will plant
+themselves directly between you and the fire, and there stand and argue
+to prove that selfishness is the root of all moral evil. Simeon said he
+always had thought so; and his neighbors sometimes supposed that nobody
+could enjoy better experimental advantages for understanding the
+subject. He was one of those men who suppose themselves submissive to
+the Divine will, to the uttermost extent demanded by the extreme
+theology of that day, simply because they have no nerves to feel, no
+imagination to conceive what endless happiness or suffering is, and who
+deal therefore with the great question of the salvation or damnation of
+myriads as a problem of theological algebra, to be worked out by their
+inevitable _x, y, z_.
+
+But we must not spend too much time with our analysis of character, for
+matters at the tea-table are drawing to a crisis. Mrs. Jones has
+announced that she does not think "_he_" can come this afternoon, by
+which significant mode of expression she conveyed the dutiful idea that
+there was for her but one male person in the world. And now Mrs. Katy
+says, "Mary, dear, knock at the Doctor's door and tell him that tea is
+ready."
+
+The Doctor was sitting in his shady study, in the room on the other
+side of the little entry. The windows were dark and fragrant with the
+shade and perfume of blossoming lilacs, whose tremulous shadow, mingled
+with spots of afternoon sunlight, danced on the scattered papers of a
+great writing-table covered with pamphlets and heavily-bound volumes of
+theology, where the Doctor was sitting.
+
+A man of gigantic proportions, over six feet in height, and built every
+way with an amplitude corresponding to his height, sitting bent over
+his writing, so absorbed that he did not hear the gentle sound of
+Mary's entrance.
+
+"Doctor," said the maiden, gently, "tea is ready."
+
+No motion, no sound, except the quick racing of the pen over the paper.
+
+"Doctor! Doctor!"--a little louder, and with another step into the
+apartment,--"tea is ready."
+
+The Doctor stretched his head forward to a paper which lay before him,
+and responded in a low, murmuring voice, as reading something.
+
+"Firstly,--if underived virtue be peculiar to the Deity, can it be the
+duty of a creature to have it?"
+
+Here a little waxen hand came with a very gentle tap on his huge
+shoulder, and "Doctor, tea is ready," penetrated drowsily to the nerve
+of his ear, as a sound heard in sleep. He rose suddenly with a start,
+opened a pair of great blue eyes, which shone abstractedly under the
+dome of a capacious and lofty forehead, and fixed them on the maiden,
+who by this time was looking up rather archly, and yet with an attitude
+of the most profound respect, while her venerated friend was assembling
+together his earthly faculties.
+
+"Tea is ready, if you please. Mother wished me to call you."
+
+"Oh!--ah!--yes!--indeed!" he said, looking confusedly about, and
+starting for the door, in his study-gown.
+
+"If you please, Sir," said Mary, standing in his way, "would you not
+like to put on your coat and wig?"
+
+The Doctor gave a hurried glance at his study-gown, put his hand to his
+head, which, in place of the ample curls of his full-bottomed wig, was
+decked only with a very ordinary cap, and seemed to come at once to a
+full comprehension. He smiled a kind of conscious, benignant smile,
+which adorned his high cheek-bones and hard features as sunshine adorns
+the side of a rock, and said, kindly, "Ah, well, child, I understand
+now; I'll be out in a moment."
+
+And Mary, sure that he was now on the right track, went back to the
+tearoom with the announcement that the Doctor was coming.
+
+In a few moments he entered, majestic and proper, in all the dignity of
+full-bottomed, powdered wig, full, flowing coat, with ample cuffs,
+silver knee- and shoe-buckles, as became the gravity and majesty of the
+minister of those days.
+
+He saluted all the company with a benignity which had a touch of the
+majestic, and also of the rustic in it; for at heart the Doctor was a
+bashful man,--that is, he had somewhere in his mental camp that
+treacherous fellow whom John Bunyan anathematizes under the name of
+Shame. The company rose on his entrance; the men bowed and the women
+curtsied, and all remained standing while he addressed to each with
+punctilious decorum those inquiries in regard to health and well-being
+which preface a social interview. Then, at a dignified sign from Mrs.
+Katy, he advanced to the table, and, all following his example, stood,
+while, with one hand uplifted, he went through a devotional exercise
+which, for length, more resembled a prayer than a grace,--after which
+the company were seated.
+
+"Well, Doctor," said Mr. Brown, who, as a householder of substance,
+felt a conscious right to be first to open conversation with the
+minister, "people are beginning to make a noise about your views. I was
+talking with Deacon Timmins the other day down on the wharf, and he
+said Dr. Stiles said that it was entirely new doctrine,--entirely
+so,--and for his part he wanted the good old ways."
+
+"They say so, do they?" said the Doctor, kindling up from an
+abstraction into which he seemed to be gradually subsiding. "Well, let
+them. I had rather publish _new_ divinity than any other, and the more
+of it the better,--_if it be but true_. I should think it hardly worth
+while to write, if I had nothing _new_ to say."
+
+"Well," said Deacon Twitchel,--his meek face flushing with awe of his
+minister,--"Doctor, there's all sorts of things said about you. Now the
+other day I was at the mill with a load of corn, and while I was
+a-waitin', Amariah Wadsworth came along with his'n; and so while we
+were waitin', he says to me, 'Why, they say your minister is gettin' to
+be an Armenian'; and he went on a-tellin' how old Ma'am Badger told him
+that you interpreted some parts of Paul's Epistles clear on the
+Armenian side. You know Ma'am Badger's a master-hand at doctrines, and
+she's 'most an uncommon Calvinist."
+
+"That does not frighten me at all," said the sturdy Doctor. "Supposing
+I do interpret some texts like the Arminians. Can't Arminians have
+anything right about them? Who wouldn't rather go with the Arminians
+when they are _right_, than with the Calvinists when they are wrong?"
+
+"That's it,--you've hit it, Doctor," said Simeon Brown. "That's what I
+always say. I say, 'Don't he _prove_ it? and how are you going to
+answer him?' That gravels 'em."
+
+"Well," said Deacon Twitchel, "Brother Seth, you know Brother Seth,--he
+says you deny depravity. He's all for imputation of Adam's sin, you
+know; and I have long talks with Seth about it every time he comes to
+see me; and he says, that, if we did not sin in Adam, it's givin' up
+the whole ground altogether; and then he insists you're clean wrong
+about the unregenerate doings."
+
+"Not at all,--not in the least," said the Doctor, promptly.
+
+"I wish Seth could talk with you sometime, Doctor. Along in the spring,
+he was down helpin' me to lay stone fence,--it was when we was fencin'
+off the south pastur' lot,--and we talked pretty nigh all day; and it
+re'lly did seem to me that the longer we talked, the sotter Seth grew.
+He's a master-hand at readin'; and when he heard that your remarks on
+Dr. Mayhew had come out, Seth tackled up o' purpose and come up to
+Newport to get them, and spent all his time, last winter, studyin' on
+it and makin' his remarks; and I tell you, Sir, he's a tight fellow to
+argue with. Why, that day, what with layin' stone wall and what with
+arguin' with Seth, I come home quite beat out,--Miss Twitchel will
+remember."
+
+"That he was!" said his helpmeet. "I 'member, when he came home, says
+I, 'Father, you seem clean used up'; and I stirred 'round lively like,
+to get him his tea. But he jest went into the bedroom and laid down
+afore supper; and I says to Cerinthy Ann, 'That's a thing I ha'n't seen
+your father do since he was took with the typhus.' And Cerinthy Ann,
+she said she knew 'twa'n't anything but them old doctrines,--that it
+was always so when Uncle Seth come down. And after tea Father was
+kinder chirked up a little, and he and Seth set by the fire, and was
+a-beginnin' it ag'in, and I jest spoke out and said,--'Now, Seth, these
+'ere things doesn't hurt you; but the Deacon is weakly, and if he gets
+his mind riled after supper, he don't sleep none all night. So,' says
+I, 'you'd better jest let matters stop where they be; 'cause,' says I,
+''twon't make no difference, for to-night, which on ye's got the right
+on't;--reckon the Lord 'll go on his own way without you; and we shall
+find out, by'm-by, what that is.'"
+
+"Mr. Scudder used to think a great deal on these points," said Mrs.
+Katy, "and the last time he was home he wrote out his views. I haven't
+ever shown them to you, Doctor; but I should be pleased to know what
+you think of them."
+
+"Mr. Scudder was a good man, with a clear head," said the Doctor; "and
+I should be much pleased to see anything that he wrote."
+
+A flush of gratified feeling passed over Mrs. Katy's face;--for one
+flower laid on the shrine which we keep in our hearts for the dead is
+worth more than any gift to our living selves.
+
+We will not now pursue our party further, lest you, Reader, get more
+theological tea than you can drink. We will not recount the numerous
+nice points raised by Mr. Simeon Brown and adjusted by the Doctor,--and
+how Simeon invariably declared, that that was the way in which he
+disposed of them himself, and how he had thought it out ten years ago.
+
+We will not relate, either, too minutely, how Mary changed color and
+grew pale and red in quick succession, when Mr. Simeon Brown
+incidentally remarked, that the "Monsoon" was going to set sail that
+very afternoon, for her three-years' voyage. Nobody noticed it in the
+busy amenities,--the sudden welling and ebbing of that one poor little
+heart-fountain.
+
+So we go,--so little knowing what we touch and what touches us as we
+talk! We drop out a common piece of news,--"Mr. So-and-so is
+dead,--Miss Such-a-one is married,--such a ship has sailed,"--and lo,
+on our right hand or our left, some heart has sunk under the news
+silently,--gone down in the great ocean of Fate, without even a bubble
+rising to tell its drowning pang. And this--God help us!--is what we
+call living!
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE LETTER.
+
+Mary returned to the quietude of her room. The red of twilight had
+faded, and the silver moon, round and fair, was rising behind the thick
+boughs of the apple-trees. She sat down in the window, thoughtful and
+sad, and listened to the crickets, whose ignorant jollity often sounds
+as mournfully to us mortals as ours may to superior beings. There the
+little hoarse, black wretches were scraping and creaking, as if life
+and death were invented solely for their pleasure, and the world were
+created only to give them a good time in it. Now and then a little wind
+shivered among the boughs, and brought down a shower of white petals
+which shimmered in the slant beams of the moonlight; and now a ray
+touched some tall head of grass, and forthwith it blossomed into
+silver, and stirred itself with a quiet joy, like a new-born saint just
+awaking in paradise. And ever and anon came on the still air the soft
+eternal pulsations of the distant sea, sound mournfulest, most
+mysterious, of all the harpings of Nature. It was the sea,--the deep,
+eternal sea,--the treacherous, soft, dreadful, inexplicable sea; and
+_he_ was perhaps at this moment being borne away on it,--away,
+away,--to what sorrows, to what temptations, to what dangers, she knew
+not. She looked along the old, familiar, beaten path by which he came,
+by which he went, and thought, "What if he never should come back?"
+There was a little path through the orchard out to a small elevation in
+the pasture-lot behind, whence the sea was distinctly visible, and Mary
+had often used her low-silled window as a door when she wanted to pass
+out thither; so now she stepped out, and, gathering her skirts back
+from the dewy grass, walked thoughtfully along the path and gained the
+hill. Newport harbor lay stretched out in the distance, with the rising
+moon casting a long, wavering track of silver upon it; and vessels,
+like silver-winged moths, were turning and shifting slowly to and fro
+upon it, and one stately ship in full sail passing fairly out under her
+white canvas, graceful as some grand, snowy bird. Mary's beating heart
+told her that _there_ was passing away from her one who carried a
+portion of her existence with him. She sat down under a lonely tree
+that stood there, and, resting her elbow on her knee, followed the ship
+with silent prayers, as it passed, like a graceful, cloudy dream, out
+of her sight.
+
+Then she thoughtfully retraced her way to her chamber; and as she was
+entering, observed in the now clearer moonlight what she had not seen
+before,--something white, like a letter, lying on the floor.
+Immediately she struck a light, and there, sure enough, it was,--a
+letter in James's handsome, dashing hand; and the little puss, before
+she knew what she was about, actually kissed it, with a fervor which
+would much have astonished the writer, could he at that moment have
+been clairvoyant. But Mary felt as one who finds, in the emptiness
+after a friend's death, an unexpected message or memento; and all alone
+in the white, calm stillness of her little room her heart took sudden
+possession of her. She opened the letter with trembling hands, and read
+what of course we shall let you read. We got it out of a bundle of old,
+smoky, yellow letters, years after all the parties concerned were gone
+on the eternal journey beyond earth.
+
+"MY DEAR MARY,--
+
+"I cannot leave you so. I have about two hundred things to say to you,
+and it's a shame I could not have had longer to see you; but blessed be
+ink and paper! I am writing and seeing to fifty things besides; so you
+mustn't wonder if my letter has rather a confused appearance.
+
+"I have been thinking that perhaps I gave you a wrong impression of
+myself, this afternoon. I am going to speak to you from my heart, as if
+I were confessing on my death-bed. Well, then, I do not confess to
+being what is commonly called a bad young man. I should be willing that
+men of the world generally, even strict ones, should look my life
+through and know all about it. It is only in your presence, Mary, that
+I feel that I am bad and low and shallow and mean, because you
+represent to me a sphere higher and holier than any in which I have
+ever moved, and stir up a sort of sighing and longing in my heart to
+come towards it. In all countries, in all temptations, Mary, your image
+has stood between me and low, gross vice. When I have been with fellows
+roaring drunken, beastly songs,--suddenly I have seemed to see you as
+you used to sit beside me in the singing-school, and your voice has
+been like an angel's in my ear, and I have got up and gone out sick and
+disgusted. Your face has risen up calm and white and still, between the
+faces of poor lost creatures who know no better way of life than to
+tempt us to sin. And sometimes, Mary, when I have seen girls that, had
+they been cared for by good pious mothers, might have been like you, I
+have felt as if I could cry for them. Poor women are abused all the
+world over; and it's no wonder they turn round and revenge themselves
+on us.
+
+"No, I have not been bad, Mary, as the world calls badness. I have been
+kept by you. But do you remember you told me once, that, when the snow
+first fell and lay so dazzling and pure and soft, all about, you always
+felt as if the spreads and window-curtains that seemed white before
+were dirty? Well, it's just like that with me. Your presence makes me
+feel that I am not pure,--that I am low and unworthy,--not worthy to
+touch the hem of your garment. Your good Dr. H. spent a whole half-day,
+the other Sunday, trying to tell us about the beauty of holiness; and
+he cut, and pared, and peeled, and sliced, and told us what it wasn't,
+and what was _like_ it, and wasn't; and then he built up an exact
+definition, and fortified and bricked it up all round; and I thought to
+myself that he'd better tell 'em to look at Mary Scudder, and they'd
+understand all about it. That was what I was thinking when you talked
+to me for looking at you in church instead of looking towards the
+pulpit. It really made me laugh in myself to see what a good little
+ignorant, unconscious way you had of looking up at the Doctor, as if he
+knew more about that than you did.
+
+"And now as to your Doctor that you think so much of, I like him for
+certain things, in certain ways. He is a great, grand, large pattern of
+a man,--a man who isn't afraid to think, and to speak anything he does
+think; but then I do believe, if he would take a voyage round the world
+in the forecastle of a whaler, he would know more about what to say to
+people than he does now; it would certainly give him several new points
+to be considered. Much of his preaching about men is as like live men
+as Chinese pictures of trees and rocks and gardens,--no nearer the
+reality than that. All I can say is, 'It isn't so; and you'd know it,
+Sir, if you knew men.' He has got what they call a _system_--just so
+many bricks put together just so; but it is too narrow to take in all I
+see in my wanderings round this world of ours. Nobody that has a soul,
+and goes round the world as I do, can help feeling it at times, and
+thinking, as he sees all the races of men and their ways, who made
+them, and what they were made for. To doubt the existence of a God
+seems to me like a want of common sense. There is a Maker and a Ruler,
+doubtless; but then, Mary, all this invisible world of religion is
+unreal to me. I can see we must be good, somehow,--that if we are not,
+we shall not be happy here or hereafter. As to all the metaphysics of
+your good Doctor, you can't tell how they tire me. I'm not the sort of
+person that they can touch. I must have real things,--real people;
+abstractions are nothing to me. Then I think that he systematically
+contradicts on one Sunday what he preaches on another. One Sunday he
+tells us that God is the immediate efficient Author of every act of
+will; the next he tells us that we are entire free agents. I see no
+sense in it, and can't take the trouble to put it together. But then he
+and you have something in you that I call religion,--something that
+makes you _good_. When I see a man working away on an entirely honest,
+unworldly, disinterested pattern, as he does, and when I see you, Mary,
+as I said before, I should like at least to _be_ as you are, whether I
+could believe as you do or not.
+
+"How could you so care for me, and waste on one so unworthy of you such
+love? Oh, Mary, some better man must win you; I never shall and never
+can;--but then you must not quite forget me; you must be my friend, my
+saint. If, through your prayers, your Bible, your friendship, you can
+bring me to your state, I am willing to be brought there,--nay,
+desirous. God has put the key of my soul into your hands.
+
+"So, dear Mary, good-bye! Pray still for your naughty, loving
+
+"COUSIN JAMES."
+
+Mary read this letter, and re-read it, with more pain than pleasure. To
+feel the immortality of a beloved soul hanging upon us, to feel that
+its only communications with Heaven must be through us, is the most
+solemn and touching thought that can pervade a mind. It was without one
+particle of gratified vanity, with even a throb of pain, that she read
+such exalted praises of herself from one blind to the glories of a far
+higher loveliness.
+
+Yet was she at that moment, unknown to herself, one of the great
+company scattered through earth who are priests unto God,--ministering
+between the Divine One, who has unveiled himself unto them, and those
+who as yet stand in the outer courts of the great sanctuary of truth
+and holiness. Many a heart, wrung, pierced, bleeding with the sins and
+sorrows of earth, longing to depart, stands in this mournful and
+beautiful ministry, but stands unconscious of the glory of the work in
+which it waits and suffers. God's kings and priests are crowned with
+thorns, walking the earth with bleeding feet, and comprehending not the
+work they are performing.
+
+Mary took from a drawer a small pocket-book, from which dropped a lock
+of black hair,--a glossy curl, which seemed to have a sort of wicked,
+wilful life in every shining ring, just as she had often seen it shake
+naughtily on the owner's head. She felt a strange tenderness towards
+the little wilful thing, and, as she leaned over it, made in her heart
+a thousand fond apologies for every fault and error.
+
+She was standing thus when Mrs. Scudder entered the room to see if her
+daughter had yet retired.
+
+"What are you doing there, Mary?" she said, as her eye fell on the
+letter. "What is it you are reading?"
+
+Mary felt herself grow pale; it was the first time in her whole life
+that her mother had asked her a question that she was not from the
+heart ready to answer. Her loyalty to her only parent had gone on
+even-handed with that she gave to her God; she felt, somehow, that the
+revelations of that afternoon had opened a gulf between them, and the
+consciousness overpowered her.
+
+Mrs. Scudder was astonished at her evident embarrassment, her
+trembling, and paleness. She was a woman of prompt, imperative
+temperament, and the slightest hesitation in rendering to her a full,
+outspoken confidence had never before occurred in their intercourse.
+Her child was the core of her heart, the apple of her eye, and intense
+love is always near neighbor to anger; there was, therefore, an
+involuntary flash from her eye and a heightening of her color, as she
+said,--"Mary, are you concealing anything from your mother?"
+
+In that moment, Mary had grown calm again. The wonted serene, balanced
+nature had found its habitual poise, and she looked up innocently,
+though with tears in her large, blue eyes, and said,--"No, mother,--I
+have nothing that I do not mean to tell you fully. This letter came
+from James Marvyn; he came here to see me this afternoon."
+
+"Here?--when? I did not see him."
+
+"After dinner. I was sitting here in the window, and suddenly he came
+up behind me through the orchard-path."
+
+Mrs. Katy sat down with a flushed cheek and a discomposed air; but Mary
+seemed actually to bear her down by the candid clearness of the large,
+blue eye which she turned on her, as she stood perfectly collected,
+with her deadly pale face and a brilliant spot burning on each cheek.
+
+"James came to say good-bye. He complained that he had not had a chance
+to see me alone since he came home."
+
+"And what should he want to see you alone for?" said Mrs. Scudder, in a
+dry, disturbed tone.
+
+"Mother,--everybody has things at times which they would like to say to
+some one person alone," said Mary.
+
+"Well, tell me what he said."
+
+"I will try. In the first place, he said that he always had been free,
+all his life, to run in and out of our house, and to wait on me like a
+brother."
+
+"Hum!" said Mrs. Scudder; "but he isn't your brother, for all that."
+
+"Well, then, he wanted to know why you were so cold to him, and why you
+never let him walk with me from meetings or see me alone, as we often
+used to. And I told him why,--that we were not children now, and that
+you thought it was not best; and then I talked with him about religion,
+and tried to persuade him to attend to the concerns of his soul; and I
+never felt so much hope for him as I do now."
+
+Aunt Katy looked skeptical, and remarked,--"If he really felt a
+disposition for religious instruction, Dr. H. could guide him much
+better than you could."
+
+"Yes,--so I told him, and I tried to persuade him to talk with Dr. H.;
+but he was very unwilling. He said, I could have more influence over
+him than anybody else,--that nobody could do him any good but me."
+
+"Yes, yes,--I understand all that," said Aunt Katy,--"I have heard
+young men say _that_ before, and I know just what it amounts to."
+
+"But, mother, I do think James was moved very much, this afternoon. I
+never heard him speak so seriously; he seemed really in earnest, and he
+asked me to give him my Bible."
+
+"Couldn't he read any Bible but yours?"
+
+"Why, naturally, you know, mother, he would like my Bible better,
+because it would put him in mind of me. He promised faithfully to read
+it all through."
+
+"And then, it seems, he wrote you a letter."
+
+"Yes, mother."
+
+Mary shrank from showing this letter, from the natural sense of honor
+which makes us feel it indelicate to expose to an unsympathizing eye
+the confidential outpourings of another heart; and then she felt quite
+sure that there was no such intercessor for James in her mother's heart
+as in her own. But over all this reluctance rose the determined force
+of duty; and she handed the letter in silence to her mother.
+
+Mrs. Scudder took it, laid it deliberately in her lap, and then began
+searching in the pocket of her chintz petticoat for her spectacles.
+These being found, she wiped them, accurately adjusted them, opened the
+letter and spread it on her lap, brushing out its folds and
+straightening it, that she might read with the greater ease. After this
+she read it carefully and deliberately; and all this while there was
+such a stillness, that the sound of the tall varnished clock in the
+best room could be heard through the half-opened door.
+
+After reading it with the most tiresome, torturing slowness, she rose,
+and laying it on the table under Mary's eye, and pressing down her
+finger on two lines in the letter, said, "Mary, have you told James
+that you loved him?"
+
+"Yes, mother, always. I always loved him, and he always knew it."
+
+"But, Mary, this that he speaks of is something different. What has
+passed between"--
+
+"Why, mother, he was saying that we who were Christians drew to
+ourselves and did not care for the salvation of our friends; and then I
+told him how I had always prayed for him, and how I should be willing
+even to give up my hopes in heaven, if he might be saved."
+
+"Child,--what do you mean?"
+
+"I mean, if only one of us two could go to heaven, I had rather it
+should be him than me," said Mary.
+
+"Oh, child! child!" said Mrs. Scudder, with a sort of groan,--"has it
+gone with you so far as this? Poor child!--after all my care, you _are_
+in love with this boy,--your heart is set on him."
+
+"Mother, I am not. I never expect to see him much,--never expect to
+marry him or anybody else;--only he seems to me to have so much more
+life and soul and spirit than most people,--I think him so noble and
+grand,--that is, that he _could_ be, if he were all he ought to
+be,--that, somehow, I never think of myself in thinking of him, and his
+salvation seems worth more than mine;--men can do so much more!--they
+can live such splendid lives!--oh, a real noble man is so glorious!"
+
+"And you would like to see him well married, would you not?" said Mrs.
+Scudder, sending, with a true woman's aim, this keen arrow into the
+midst of the cloud of enthusiasm which enveloped her daughter. "I
+think," she added, "that Jane Spencer would make him an excellent
+wife."
+
+Mary was astonished at a strange, new pain that shot through her at
+these words. She drew in her breath and turned herself uneasily, as one
+who had literally felt a keen dividing blade piercing between soul and
+spirit. Till this moment, she had never been conscious of herself; but
+the shaft had torn the veil. She covered her face with her hands; the
+hot blood flushed scarlet over neck and brow; at last, with a
+beseeching look, she threw herself into her mother's arms.
+
+"Oh, mother, mother, I am selfish, after all!"
+
+Mrs. Scudder folded her silently to her heart, and said, "My daughter,
+this is not at all what I wished it to be; I see how it is;--but then
+you have been a good child; I don't blame you. We can't always help
+ourselves. We don't always really know how we do feel. I didn't know,
+for a long while, that I loved your father. I thought I was only
+curious about him, because he had a strange way of treating me,
+different from other men; but, one day, I remember, Julian Simons told
+me that it was reported that his mother was making a match for him with
+Susan Emery, and I was astonished to find how I felt. I saw him that
+evening, and the moment he looked at me I saw it wasn't true; all at
+once I knew something I never knew before,--and that was, that I should
+be very unhappy, if he loved any one else better than me. But then, my
+child, your father was a different man from James;--he was as much
+better than I was as you are than James. I was a foolish, thoughtless
+young thing then. I never should have been anything at all, but for
+him. Somehow, when I loved him, I grew more serious, and then he always
+guided and led me. Mary, your father was a wonderful man; he was one of
+the sort that the world knows not of;--sometime I must show you his
+letters. I always hoped, my daughter, that you would marry such a man."
+
+"Don't speak of marrying, mother. I never shall marry."
+
+"You certainly should not, unless you can marry in the Lord. Remember
+the words, 'Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For
+what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what
+communion hath light with darkness? and what concord hath Christ with
+Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?'"
+
+"Mother, James is not an infidel."
+
+"He certainly is an _unbeliever_, Mary, by his own confession;--but
+then God is a Sovereign and hath mercy on whom He will. You do right to
+pray for him; but if he does not come out on the Lord's side, you must
+not let your heart mislead you. He is going to be gone three years, and
+you must try to think as little of him as possible;--put your mind upon
+your duties, like a good girl, and God will bless you. Don't believe
+too much in your power over him;--young men, when they in love, will
+promise anything, and really think they mean it; but nothing is a
+saving change, except what is wrought in them by sovereign grace."
+
+"But, mother, does not God use the love we have to each other as a
+means of doing us good? Did you not say that it was by your love to
+father that you first were led to think seriously?"
+
+"That is true, my child," said Mrs. Scudder, who, like many of the rest
+of the world, was surprised to meet her own words walking out on a
+track where she had not expected them, but was yet too true of soul to
+cut their acquaintance because they were not going the way of her
+wishes. "Yes, all that is true; but yet, Mary, when one has but one
+little ewe lamb in the world, one is jealous of it. I would give all
+the world, if you had never seen James. It is dreadful enough for a
+woman to love anybody as you can, but it is more to love a man of
+unsettled character and no religion. But then the Lord appoints all our
+goings; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps;--I leave
+you, my child, in His hands." And, with one solemn and long embrace,
+the mother and daughter parted for the night.
+
+It is impossible to write a story of New England life and manners for a
+thoughtless, shallow-minded person. If we represent things as they are,
+their intensity, their depth, their unworldly gravity and earnestness,
+must inevitably repel lighter spirits, as the reverse pole of the
+magnet drives off sticks and straws.
+
+In no other country were the soul and the spiritual life ever such
+intense realities, and everything contemplated so much (to use a
+current New England phrase) "in reference to eternity." Mrs. Scudder
+was a strong, clear-headed, practical woman. No one had a clearer
+estimate of the material and outward life, or could more minutely
+manage its smallest item; but then a tremendous, eternal future had so
+weighed down and compacted the fibres of her very soul, that all
+earthly things were but as dust in comparison to it. That her child
+should be one elected to walk in white, to reign with Christ when earth
+was a forgotten dream, was her one absorbing wish; and she looked on
+all the events of life only with reference to this. The way of life was
+narrow, the chances in favor of any child of Adam infinitely small; the
+best, the most seemingly pure and fair, was by nature a child of wrath,
+and could be saved only by a sovereign decree, by which it should be
+plucked as a brand from the burning. Therefore it was, that, weighing
+all things in one balance, there was the sincerity of her whole being
+in the dread which she felt at the thought of her daughter's marriage
+with an unbeliever.
+
+Mrs. Scudder, after retiring to her room, took her Bible, in
+preparation for her habitual nightly exercise of devotion, before going
+to rest. She read and reread a chapter, scarce thinking what she was
+reading,--aroused herself,--and then sat with the book in her hand in
+deep thought. James Marvyn was her cousin's son, and she had a strong
+feeling of respect and family attachment for his father. She had, too,
+a real kindness for the young man, whom she regarded as a well-meaning,
+wilful youngster; but that _he_ should touch her saint, her Mary, that
+he should take from her the daughter who was her all, really embittered
+her heart towards him.
+
+"After all," she said to herself, "there are three years,--three years
+in which there will be no letters, or perhaps only one or two,--and a
+great deal may be done in three years, if one is wise";--and she felt
+within herself an arousing of all the shrewd womanly and motherly tact
+of her nature to meet this new emergency.
+
+[To be continued.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+WHITE'S SHAKSPEARE[1]
+
+(FIRST NOTICE.)
+
+It may be doubted whether any language be rich enough to maintain more
+than one truly great poet,--and whether there be more than one period,
+and that very short, in the life of a language, when such a phenomenon
+as a great poet is possible. It may be reckoned one of the rarest
+pieces of good-luck that ever fell to the share of a race, that (as was
+true of Shakspeare) its most rhythmic genius, its acutest intellect,
+its profoundest imagination, and its healthiest understanding should
+have been combined in one man, and that he should have arrived at the
+full development of his powers at the moment when the material in which
+he was to work--that wonderful composite called English, the best
+result of the confusion of tongues--was in its freshest perfection. The
+English-speaking nations should build a monument to the misguided
+enthusiasts of the Plain of Shinar; for, as the mixture of many bloods
+seems to have made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the
+mingling of divers speeches given them a language which is perhaps the
+noblest vehicle of poetic thought that ever existed.
+
+Had Shakspeare been born fifty years earlier, he would have been
+cramped by a book-language, not yet flexible enough for the demands of
+rhythmic emotion, not yet sufficiently popularized for the natural and
+familiar expression of supreme thought, not yet so rich in metaphysical
+phrase as to render possible that ideal representation of the great
+passions which is the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice
+and general consent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to ease
+and congruity of metrical arrangement. Had he been born fifty years
+later, his ripened manhood would have found itself in an England
+absorbed and angry with the solution of political and religious
+problems, from which his whole nature was averse, instead of in that
+Elizabethan social system, ordered and planetary in its functions and
+degrees as the angelic hierarchy of the Areopagite, where his
+contemplative eye could crowd itself with various and brilliant
+pictures, and whence his impartial brain--one lobe of which seems to
+have been Normanly refined and the other Saxonly sagacious--could draw
+its morals of courtly and worldly wisdom, its lessons of prudence and
+magnanimity. In estimating Shakspeare, it should never be forgotten,
+that, like Goethe, he was essentially observer and artist, and
+incapable of partisanship. The passions, actions, sentiments, whose
+character and results he delighted to watch and to reproduce, are those
+of man in society as it existed; and it no more occurred to him to
+question the right of that society to exist than to criticize the
+divine ordination of the seasons. His business was with men as they
+were, not with man as he ought to be,--with the human soul as it is
+shaped or twisted into character by the complex experience of life, not
+in its abstract essence, as something to be saved or lost. During the
+first half of the seventeenth century, the centre of intellectual
+interest was rather in the other world than in this, rather in the
+region of thought and principle and conscience than in actual life. It
+was a generation in which the poet was, and felt himself, out of place.
+Sir Thomas Browne, our most imaginative mind since Shakspeare, found
+breathing-room, for a time, among the "_O altitudines!_" of religious
+speculation, but soon descended to occupy himself with the exactitudes
+of science. Jeremy Taylor, who half a century earlier would have been
+Fletcher's rival, compels his clipped fancy to the conventional
+discipline of prose, (Maid Marian turned nun,) and waters his poetic
+wine with doctrinal eloquence. Milton is saved from making total
+shipwreck of his large-utteranced genius on the desolate Noman's Land
+of a religious epic only by the lucky help of Satan and his colleagues,
+with whom, as foiled rebels and republicans, he cannot conceal his
+sympathy. As purely poet, Shakspeare would have come too late, had his
+lot fallen in that generation. In mind and temperament too exoteric for
+a mystic, his imagination could not have at once illustrated the
+influence of his epoch and escaped from it, like that of Browne; the
+equilibrium of his judgment, essential to him as an artist, but equally
+removed from propagandism, whether as enthusiast or logician, would
+have unfitted him for the pulpit; and his intellectual being was too
+sensitive to the wonder and beauty of outward life and Nature to have
+found satisfaction, as Milton's could, (and perhaps only by reason of
+his blindness,) in a world peopled by purely imaginary figures. We
+might fancy his becoming a great statesman, but he lacked the social
+position which could have opened that career to him. What we mean, when
+we say Shakspeare, is something inconceivable either during the reign
+of Henry the Eighth or the Commonwealth, and which would have been
+impossible after the Restoration.
+
+All favorable stars seem to have been in conjunction at his nativity.
+The Reformation had passed the period of its vinous fermentation, and
+its clarified results remained as an element of intellectual impulse
+and exhilaration; there were signs yet of the acetous and putrefactive
+stages which were to follow in the victory and decline of Puritanism.
+Old forms of belief and worship still lingered, all the more touching
+to Fancy, perhaps, that they were homeless and attainted: the light of
+skeptic day was baffled by depths of forest where superstitious shapes
+still cowered, creatures of immemorial wonder, the raw material of
+Imagination. The invention of printing, without yet vulgarizing
+letters, had made the thought and history of the entire past
+contemporaneous; while a crowd of translators put every man who could
+read in inspiring contact with the select souls of all the centuries. A
+new world was thus opened to intellectual adventure at the very time
+when the keel of Columbus had turned the first daring furrow of
+discovery in that unmeasured ocean which still girt the known earth
+with a beckoning horizon of hope and conjecture, which was still fed by
+rivers that flowed down out of primeval silences, and which still
+washed the shores of Dreamland. Under a wise, cultivated, and
+firm-handed monarch also, the national feeling of England grew rapidly
+more homogeneous and intense, the rather as the womanhood of the
+sovereign stimulated a more chivalric loyalty,--while the new religion,
+of which she was the defender, helped to make England morally, as it
+was geographically, insular to the continent of Europe.
+
+If circumstances could ever make a great national poet, here were all
+the elements mingled at melting-heat in the alembic, and the lucky
+moment of projection was clearly come. If a great national poet could
+ever avail himself of circumstances, this was the occasion,--and,
+fortunately, Shakspeare was equal to it. Above all, we esteem it lucky
+that he found words ready to his use, original and untarnished,--types
+of thought whose sharp edges were unworn by repeated impressions. In
+reading Hakluyt's Voyages, we are almost startled now and then to find
+that even common sailors could not tell the story of their wanderings
+without rising to an almost Odyssean strain, and habitually used a
+diction that we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost.
+Those who look upon language only as anatomists of its structure, or
+who regard it as only a means of conveying abstract truth from mind to
+mind, as if it were so many algebraic formulae, are apt to overlook the
+fact that its being alive is all that gives it poetic value. We do not
+mean what is technically called a living language,--the contrivance,
+hollow as a speaking-trumpet, by which breathing and moving bipeds,
+even now, sailing o'er life's solemn main, are enabled to hail each
+other and make known their mutual shortness of mental stores,--but one
+that is still hot from the hearts and brains of a people, not hardened
+yet, but moltenly ductile to new shapes of sharp and clear relief in
+the moulds of new thought. So soon as a language has become literary,
+so soon as there is a gap between the speech of books and that of life,
+the language becomes, so far as poetry is concerned, almost as dead as
+Latin, and (as in writing Latin verses) a mind in itself essentially
+original becomes in the use of such a medium of utterance unconsciously
+reminiscential and reflective, lunar and not solar, in expression and
+even in thought. For words and thoughts have a much more intimate and
+genetic relation, one with the other, than most men have any notion of;
+and it is one thing to use our mother-tongue as if it belonged to us,
+and another to be the puppets of an overmastering vocabulary. "Ye know
+not," says Ascham, "what hurt ye do to Learning, that care not for
+Words, but for Matter, and so make a Divorce betwixt the Tongue and the
+Heart." _Lingua Toscana in bocca Romana_ is the Italian proverb; and
+that of poets should be, _The tongue of the people in the mouth of the
+scholar_. We intend here no assent to the early theory, or, at any
+rate, practice, of Wordsworth, who confounded plebeian modes of thought
+with rustic forms of phrase, and then atoned for his blunder by
+absconding into a diction more Latinized than that of any poet of his
+century.
+
+Shakspeare was doubly fortunate. Saxon by the father and Norman by the
+mother, he was a representative Englishman. A country-boy, he learned
+first the rough and ready English of his rustic mates, who knew how to
+make nice verbs and adjectives curtsy to their needs. Going up to
+London, he acquired the _lingua aulica_ precisely at the happiest
+moment, just as it was becoming, in the strictest sense of the word,
+_modern_,--just as it had recruited itself, by fresh impressments from
+the Latin and Latinized languages, with new words to express the new
+ideas of an enlarging intelligence which printing and translation were
+fast making cosmopolitan, words which, in proportion to their novelty,
+and to the fact that the mother-tongue and the foreign had not yet
+wholly mingled, must have been used with a more exact appreciation of
+their meaning.[2] It was in London, and chiefly by means of the stage,
+that a thorough amalgamation of the Saxon, Norman, and scholarly
+elements of English was brought about. Already, Puttenham, in his "Arte
+of English Poesy," declares that the practice of the capital and the
+country within sixty miles of it was the standard of correct diction,
+the _jus et norma loquendi_. Already Spenser had almost recreated
+English poetry,--and it is interesting to observe, that, scholar as he
+was, the archaic words which he was at first over-fond of introducing
+are often provincialisms of purely English original. Already Marlowe
+had brought the English unrhymed pentameter (which had hitherto
+justified but half its name, by being always blank and never verse) to
+a perfection of melody, harmony, and variety which has never been
+surpassed. Shakspeare, then, found a language already to a certain
+extent _established_, but not yet fetlocked by dictionary- and
+grammar-mongers,--a versification harmonized, but which had not yet
+exhausted all its modulations, or been set in the stocks by critics who
+deal judgment on refractory feet, that will dance to Orphean measures
+of which their judges are insensible. That the language was established
+is proved by its comparative uniformity as used by the dramatists, who
+wrote for mixed audiences, as well as by Ben Jonson's satire upon
+Marston's neologisms; that it at the same time admitted foreign words
+to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is in good
+measure equally true. What was of greater import, no arbitrary line had
+been drawn between high words and low; vulgar then meant simply what
+was common; poetry had not been aliened from the people by the
+establishment of an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move in
+the stately ceremonials of verse, and privileged from arrest while they
+forever keep the promise of meaning to the ear and break it to the
+sense. The hot conception of the poet had no time to cool while he was
+debating the comparative respectability of this phrase or that; but he
+snatched what word his instinct prompted, and saw no indiscretion in
+making a king speak as his country-nurse might have taught him.[3] It
+was Waller who first learned in France that to talk in rhyme alone
+comported with the state of royalty. In the time of Shakspeare, the
+living tongue resembled that tree which Father Hue saw in Tartary,
+whose leaves were languaged,--and every hidden root of thought, every
+subtilest fibre of feeling, was mated by new shoots and leafage of
+expression, fed from those unseen sources in the common earth of human
+nature.
+
+The Cabalists had a notion, that whoever found out the mystic word for
+anything attained to absolute mastery over that thing. The reverse of
+this is certainly true of poetic expression; for he who is thoroughly
+possessed of his thought, who imaginatively conceives an idea or image,
+becomes master of the word that shall most amply and fitly utter it.
+Heminge and Condell tell us, accordingly, that there was scarce a blot
+in the manuscripts they received from Shakspeare; and this is the
+natural corollary from the fact that such an imagination as his is as
+unparalleled as the force, variety, and beauty of the phrase in which
+it embodied itself.[4] We believe that Shakspeare, like all other great
+poets, instinctively used the dialect which he found current, and that
+his words are not more wrested from their ordinary meaning than
+followed necessarily from the unwonted weight of thought or stress of
+passion they were called on to support. He needed not to mask familiar
+thoughts in the weeds of unfamiliar phraseology; for the life that was
+in his mind could transfuse the language of every day with an
+intelligent vivacity, that makes it seem lambent with fiery purpose,
+and at each new reading a new creation. He could say with Dante, that
+"no word had ever forced him to say what he would not, though he had
+forced many a word to say what _it_ would not,"--but only in the sense,
+that the mighty magic of his imagination had conjured out of it its
+uttermost secret of power or pathos. He himself says, in one of his
+sonnets,--
+
+  "Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
+  So far from alteration and quick change?
+  Why, with the time, do I not glance aside
+  To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
+  Why write I still all one, ever the same,
+  And keep invention in a noted weed
+  That every word doth almost tell my name?"
+
+When we say that Shakspeare used the current language of his day, we
+mean only that he habitually employed such language as was universally
+comprehensible,--that he was not run away with by the hobby of any
+theory as to the fitness of this or that component of English for
+expressing certain thoughts or feelings. That the artistic value of a
+choice and noble diction was quite as well understood in his day as in
+ours is evident from the praises bestowed by his contemporaries on
+Drayton, and by the epithet "well-languaged" applied to Daniel, whose
+poetic style is as modern as that of Tennyson; but the endless
+absurdities about the comparative merits of Saxon and Norman-French,
+vented by persons incapable of distinguishing one tongue from the
+other, were as yet unheard of. The influence of the Normans in
+Romanizing our language has been vastly overrated. We find a principle
+of _caste_ established in certain cases by the relation of producer and
+consumer,--in others by the superior social standing of the conquering
+race. Thus, _ox_, _sheep_, _calf_, _swine_, indicate the thing
+produced; _beef_, _mutton_, _veal_, _pork_, the thing consumed.[5] It
+is the same with the names of the various grains, and the product of
+the cheaper kinds when ground,--as _oat-meal_, _barley-meal_,
+_rye-meal_; while the generic term for the crop becomes _grain_, and
+the meal of the variety used by the higher classes is turned into
+_flour_. To _bury_ remains Saxon, because both high and low must be
+hidden under ground at last; but as only the rich and noble could
+afford any pomp in that sad office, we get the word _funeral_ from the
+Norman. So also the serf went into a Saxon _grave_, the lord into a
+Norman _tomb_. All the parts of armor are naturally named from the
+French; the weapons of the people, as _sword_, _bow_, and the like,
+continued Saxon. So _feather_ is Saxon; but as soon as it changes into
+a _plume_ for the knight, it turns Norman,--and Latin when it is cut
+into a _pen_ for the _clerk_. _Book_ is Saxon; but a number of books
+collected together, as could be done only by the rich, makes a
+_library_. _Darling_ would be murmured over many a _cradle_ in Saxon
+_huts_; but _minion_ came into the language down the back stairs of the
+Norman _palace_. In the same way, terms of law are Norman, and of the
+Church, Latin. These are familiar examples. But hasty generalizers are
+apt to overlook the fact, that the Saxon was never, to any great
+extent, a literary language. Accordingly, it held its own very well in
+the names of common things, but failed to answer the demands of complex
+ideas derived from them. The author of "Piers Ploughman" wrote for the
+people, Chaucer for the court. We open at random and count the Latin[6]
+words in ten verses of the "Vision" and ten of Chaucer's "Romaunt of
+the Rose," (a translation from the French,) and find the proportion to
+be seven in the former and five in the latter.
+
+The organs of the Saxon have always been unwilling and stiff in
+learning languages. He acquired only about as many British words as we
+have Indian ones, and we believe that more French and Latin was
+introduced through the pen and the eye than through the tongue and the
+ear. For obvious reasons, the question is one that must be settled by
+reference to prose-writers, and not poets; and it is, we think, pretty
+well settled that more words of Latin original were brought into the
+language in the century between 1550 and 1650 than in the whole period
+before or since,--and for the simple reason, that they were absolutely
+needful to express new modes and combinations of thought.[7] The
+language has gained immensely by the infusion, in richness of synonyme
+and in the power of expressing nice shades of thought and feeling, but
+more than all in light-footed polysyllables that trip singing to the
+music of verse. There are certain cases, it is true, where the vulgar
+Saxon word is refined, and the refined Latin vulgar, in poetry,--as in
+_sweat_ and _perspiration_; but there are vastly more in which the
+Latin bears the bell. Perhaps there might be a question between the old
+English _again-rising_ and _resurrection_; but there can be no doubt
+that _conscience_ is better than _inwit_, and _remorse_ than
+_again-bite_. Should we translate the title of Wordsworth's famous ode,
+"Intimations of Immortality," into "Hints of Deathlessness," it would
+hiss like an angry gander. If, instead of Shakspeare's
+
+               "Age cannot wither her,
+  Nor custom stale her infinite variety,"
+
+we should say, "her boundless manifoldness," the sentiment would suffer
+in exact proportion with the music. What homebred English could ape the
+high Roman fashion of such togated words as
+
+   "The multitudinous sea incarnadine,"--
+
+where the huddling epithet implies the tempest-tossed soul of the
+speaker, and at the same time pictures the wallowing waste of ocean
+more vividly than the famous phrase of AEschylus does its rippling
+sunshine? Again, _sailor_ is less poetical than _mariner_, as Campbell
+felt, when he wrote,
+
+  "Ye mariners of England,"
+
+and Coleridge, when he preferred
+
+  "It was an ancient mariner"
+
+to
+
+  "It was an elderly seaman";
+
+for it is as much the charm of poetry that it suggest a certain
+remoteness and strangeness as familiarity; and it is essential not only
+that we feel at once the meaning of the words in themselves, but also
+their melodic meaning in relation to each other, and to the sympathetic
+variety of the verse. A word once vulgarized can never be
+rehabilitated. We might say now a _buxom_ lass, or that a chambermaid
+was _buxom_, but we could not use the term, as Milton did, in its
+original sense of _bowsome_,--that is, _lithe, gracefully bending_.[8]
+
+But the secret of force in writing lies not in the pedigree of nouns
+and adjectives and verbs, but in having something that you believe in
+to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it. It is
+when expression becomes an act of memory, instead of an unconscious
+necessity, that diction takes the place of warm and hearty speech. It
+is not safe to attribute special virtues (as Bosworth, for example,
+does to the Saxon) to words of whatever derivation, at least in poetry.
+Because Lear's "oak-cleaving thunderbolts," and "the all-dreaded
+thunder-stone" in "Cymbeline" are so fine, we would not give up
+Wilton's Virgilian "fulmined over Greece," where the verb in English
+conveys at once the idea of flash and reverberation, but avoids that of
+riving and shattering. In the experiments made for casting the great
+bell for the Westminster Tower, it was found that the superstition
+which attributed the remarkable sweetness and purity of tone in certain
+old bells to the larger mixture of silver in their composition had no
+foundation in fact. It was the cunning proportion in which the ordinary
+metals were balanced against each other, the perfection of form, and
+the nice gradations of thickness, that wrought the miracle. And it is
+precisely so with the language of poetry. The genius of the poet will
+tell him what word to use (else what use in his being poet at all?);
+and even then, unless the proportion and form, whether of parts or
+whole, be all that Art requires and the most sensitive taste finds
+satisfaction in, he will have failed to make what shall vibrate through
+all its parts with a silvery unison,--in other words, a poem.
+
+We think the component parts of English were in the latter years of
+Elizabeth thus exquisitely proportioned one to the other. Yet Bacon had
+no faith in his mother-tongue, translating the works on which his fame
+was to rest into what he called "the universal language," and affirming
+that "English would bankrupt all our books." He was deemed a master of
+it, nevertheless; and it is curious that Ben Jonson applies to him in
+prose the same commendation which he gave Shakspeare in verse, saying,
+that he "performed that in our tongue which may be compared or
+preferred either to _insolent Greece or haughty Rome_"; and he adds
+this pregnant sentence:--"In short, within his view and about his time
+were all the wits born that could honor a language or help study. Now
+things daily fall: wits grow downwards, eloquence grows backwards." Ben
+had good reason for what he said of the wits. Not to speak of science,
+of Galileo and Kepler, the sixteenth century was a spendthrift of
+literary genius. An attack of immortality in a family might have been
+looked for then as scarlet-fever would be now. Montaigne, Tasso, and
+Cervantes were born within the same fourteen years; and in England,
+while Spenser was still delving over the _propria que maribus_, and
+Raleigh launching paper navies, Shakspeare was stretching his baby
+hands for the moon, and the little Bacon, chewing on his coral, had
+discovered that impenetrability was one quality of matter. It almost
+takes one's breath away to think that "Hamlet" and the "Novum Organon"
+were at the risk of teething and measles at the same time. But Ben was
+right also in thinking that eloquence had grown backwards. He lived
+long enough to see the language of verse become in a measure
+traditionary and conventional. It was becoming so, partly from the
+necessary order of events, partly because the most natural and intense
+expression of feeling had been in so many ways satisfied and
+exhausted,--but chiefly because there was no man left to whom, as to
+Shakspeare, perfect conception gave perfection of phrase. Dante, among
+modern poets, his only rival in condensed force, says, "Optimis
+conceptionibus optima loquela conveniet; sed optimae conceptiones non
+possunt esse nisi ubi scientia et ingenium est;... et sic non omnibus
+versificantibus optima loquela convenit, cum plerique sine scientia et
+ingenio versificantur."[9]
+
+Shakspeare must have been quite as well aware of the provincialism of
+English as Bacon was; but he knew that great poetry, being universal in
+its appeal to human nature, can make any language classic, and that the
+men whose appreciation is immortality will mine through any dialect to
+get at an original soul. He had as much confidence in his homebred
+speech as Bacon had want of it, and exclaims,--
+
+  "Not marble nor the gilded monuments
+  Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."
+
+He must have been perfectly conscious of his genius, and of the great
+trust which he imposed upon his native tongue as embodier and
+perpetuator of it. As he has avoided obscurities in his sonnets, he
+would do so _a fortiori_ in his plays, both for the purpose of
+immediate effect on the stage and of future appreciation. Clear
+thinking makes clear writing, and he who has shown himself so eminently
+capable of it in one case is not to be supposed to abdicate
+intentionally in others. The difficult passages in the plays, then, are
+to be regarded either as corruptions, or else as phenomena in the
+natural history of Imagination, whose study will enable us to arrive at
+a clearer theory and better understanding of it.
+
+While we believe that our language had two periods of culmination in
+poetic beauty,--one of nature, simplicity, and truth, in the ballads,
+which deal only with narrative and feeling,--another of Art, (or Nature
+as it is ideally reproduced through the imagination,) of stately
+amplitude, of passionate intensity and elevation, in Spenser and the
+greater dramatists,--and that Shakspeare made use of the latter as he
+found it, we by no means intend to say that he did not enrich it, or
+that any inferior man could have dipped the same words out of the great
+poet's inkstand. But he enriched it only by the natural expansion and
+exhilaration of which it was conscious, in yielding to the mastery of a
+genius that could turn and wind it like a fiery Pegasus, making it feel
+its life in every limb. He enriched it through that exquisite sense of
+music, (never approached but by Marlowe,) to which it seemed to be
+eagerly obedient, as if every word said to him,
+
+  "_Bid me_ discourse, I will enchant thine ear,"--
+
+as if every latent harmony revealed itself to him as the gold to
+Brahma, when he walked over the earth where it was hidden, crying,
+"Here am I, Lord! do with me what thou wilt!" That he used language
+with that intimate possession of its meaning possible only to the most
+vivid thought is doubtless true; but that he wantonly strained it from
+its ordinary sense, that he found it too poor for his necessities, and
+accordingly coined new phrases, or that, from haste or carelessness, he
+violated any of its received proprieties, we do not believe. We have
+said that it was fortunate for him that he came upon an age when our
+language was at its best; but it was fortunate also for us, because our
+costliest poetic phrase is put beyond reach of decay in the gleaming
+precipitate in which it united itself with his thought.
+
+We do not, therefore, agree with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that the
+extravagance of thought and diction which characterizes much of our
+modern poetry is traceable to the influence of Shakspeare. We see in it
+only the futile effort of misguided persons to torture out of language
+the secret of that inspiration which should be in themselves. We do not
+find the extravagances in Shakspeare himself. We never saw a line in
+any modern poet that reminded us of him, and will venture to assert
+that it is only poets of the second class that find successful
+imitators. And the reason seems to us a very plain one. The genius of
+the great poet seeks repose in the expression of itself, and finds it
+at last in style, which is the establishment of a perfect mutual
+understanding between the worker and his material.[10] The secondary
+intellect, on the other hand, seeks for excitement in expression, and
+stimulates itself into mannerism, which is the wilful obtrusion of
+self, as style is its unconscious abnegation. No poet of the first
+class has ever left a school, because his imagination is
+incommunicable; while, just as surely as the thermometer tells of the
+neighborhood of an iceberg, you may detect the presence of a genius of
+the second class in any generation by the influence of his mannerism,
+for that, being an artificial thing, is capable of reproduction. Dante,
+Shakspeare, Goethe, left no heirs either to the form or mode of their
+expression; while Milton, Sterne, and Wordsworth left behind them whole
+regiments uniformed with all their external characteristics. We do not
+mean that great poetic geniuses may not have influenced thought,
+(though we think it would be difficult to show how Shakspeare had done
+so, directly and wilfully,) but that they have not infected
+contemporaries or followers with mannerism.
+
+That the propositions we have endeavored to establish have a direct
+bearing in various ways upon the qualifications of whoever undertakes
+to edit the works of Shakspeare will, we think, be apparent to those
+who consider the matter. The hold which Shakspeare has acquired and
+maintained upon minds so many and so various, in so many vital respects
+utterly unsympathetic and even incapable of sympathy with his own, is
+one of the most noteworthy phenomena in the history of literature. That
+he has had the most inadequate of editors, that, as his own Falstaff
+was the cause of the wit, so he has been the cause of the foolishness
+that was in other men, (as where Malone ventured to discourse upon his
+metres, and Dr. Johnson on his imagination,) must be apparent to every
+one,--and also that his genius and its manifestations are so various,
+that there is no commentator but has been able to illustrate him from
+his own peculiar point of view or from the results of his own favorite
+studies. But to show that he was a good common-lawyer, that he
+understood the theory of colors, that he was an accurate botanist, a
+master of the science of medicine, especially in its relation to mental
+disease, a profound metaphysician, and of great experience and insight
+in politics,--all these, while they may very well form the staple of
+separate treatises, and prove, that, whatever the extent of his
+learning, the range and accuracy of his knowledge were beyond precedent
+or later parallel, are really outside the province of an editor.
+
+That Shakspeare did not edit his own works must be attributed, we
+suspect, to his premature death. That he should not have intended it is
+inconceivable. That the "Tempest" was his latest work we have no doubt;
+and perhaps it is not considering too nicely to conjecture a profound
+personal meaning in it. Is it over-fanciful to think that in the master
+Prospero we have the type of Imagination? in Ariel, of the
+wonder-working and winged Fantasy? in Caliban, of the half-animal but
+serviceable Understanding, tormented by Fancy and the unwilling slave
+of Imagination? and that there is something of self-consciousness in
+the breaking of Prospero's wand and burying his book,--a sort of sad
+prophecy, based on self-knowledge of the nature of that man who, after
+such thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live there for years,
+only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre, lending money on
+mortgage, and leaning over his gate to chat and bandy quips with
+neighbors? His thought had entered into every phase of human life and
+thought, had embodied all of them in living creations;--had he found
+all empty, and come at last to the belief that genius and its works
+were as phantasmagoric as the rest, and that fame was as idle as the
+rumor of the pit? However this may be, his works have come down to us
+in a condition of manifest and admitted corruption in some portions,
+while in others there is an obscurity which may be attributed either to
+an idiosyncratic use of words and condensation of phrase, to a depth of
+intuition for a proper coalescence with which ordinary language is
+inadequate, to a concentration of passion in a focus that consumes the
+lighter links which bind together the clauses of a sentence or of a
+process of reasoning in common parlance, or to a sense of music which
+mingles music and meaning without essentially confounding them. We
+should demand for a perfect editor, then, first, a thorough
+glossological knowledge of the English contemporary with Shakspeare;
+second, enough logical acuteness of mind and metaphysical training to
+enable him to follow recondite processes of thought; third, such a
+conviction of the supremacy of his author as always to prefer his
+thought to any theory of his own; fourth, a feeling for music, and so
+much knowledge of the practice of other poets as to understand that
+Shakspeare's versification differs from theirs as often in kind as in
+degree; fifth, an acquaintance with the world as well as with books;
+and last, what is, perhaps, of more importance than all, so great a
+familiarity with the working of the imaginative faculty in general, and
+of its peculiar operation in the mind of Shakspeare, as will prevent
+his thinking a passage dark with excess of light, and enable him to
+understand folly that the Gothic Shakspeare often superimposed upon the
+slender column of a single word, that seems to twist under it, but does
+not,--like the quaint shafts in cloisters,--a weight of meaning which
+the modern architects of sentences would consider wholly unjustifiable
+by correct principle.
+
+It would be unreasonable to expect a union of all these qualifications
+in a single man, but we think that Mr. White combines them in larger
+proportion than any editor with whose labors we are acquainted. He has
+an acuteness in tracing the finer fibres of thought worthy of the
+keenest lawyer on the scent of a devious trail of circumstantial
+evidence; he has a sincere desire to illustrate his author rather than
+himself; he is a man of the world, as well as a scholar; he comprehends
+the mastery of imagination, and that it is the essential element as
+well of poetry as of profound thinking; a critic of music, he
+appreciates the importance of rhythm as the higher mystery of
+versification. The sum of his qualifications is large, and his work is
+honorable to American letters.
+
+Though our own studies have led us to somewhat intimate acquaintance
+with Elizabethan literature, it is with some diffidence that we bring
+the criticism of _dilettanti_ to bear upon the labors of five years of
+serious investigation. We fortify ourselves, however, with Dr.
+Johnson's dictum on the subject of Criticism:--"Why, no, Sir; this is
+not just reasoning. You _may_ abuse a tragedy, though you cannot make
+one. You may scold a carpenter who has made a bad table, though _you_
+cannot make a table; it is not your trade to make tables." Not that we
+intend to abuse Mr. White's edition of Shakspeare, but we shall speak
+of what seem to us its merits and defects with the frankness which
+alone justifies criticism.
+
+We have spoken of Mr. White's remarkable qualifications. We shall now
+state shortly what seem to us his faults. We think his very acumen
+sometimes misleads him into fancying a meaning where none exists, or at
+least none answerable to the clarity and precision of Shakspeare's
+intellect; that he is too hasty in his conclusions as to the
+pronunciation of words and the accuracy of rhymes in Shakspeare's day,
+and that he has been seduced into them by what we cannot help thinking
+a mistaken theory as to certain words, as _moth_ and _nothing_, for
+example; that he shows, here and there, a glimpse of Americanism,
+especially misplaced in an edition of the poet whose works do more than
+anything else, perhaps, to maintain the sympathy of the English race;
+and that his prejudice against the famous corrected folio of 1632 leads
+him to speak slightingly of Mr. Colier, to whom all lovers of our early
+literature are indebted, and who alone, in the controversy excited in
+England by the publication of his anonymous corrector's emendations,
+showed, under the most shameful provocation, the temper of a gentleman
+and the self-respect of a scholar. But after all these deductions, we
+remain of the opinion that Mr. White has given us the best edition
+hitherto published, and we do not like him the less for an occasional
+crotchet. For though Shakspeare himself seemed to think with regret
+that the dirge of the hobby-horse had been sung, yet, as we ourselves
+have given evidence, it is impossible for any one to write on this
+subject without taking an occasional airing on one or more of those
+imaginary steeds that stand at livery with no risk of eating off their
+own heads. We shall take up the subject again in our next number, and
+by extracts justify both our commendation and our criticisms of Mr.
+White.
+
+[Footnote 1: _The Works of William Shakspeare_. Edited, etc., by
+RICHARD GRANT WHITE. Vols. II., III., IV, and V. Boston: Little, Brown,
+& Co. 1858.]
+
+[Footnote 2: As where Ben Jonson is able to say,--"Men may securely
+sin, but safely never."]
+
+[Footnote 3: "Vulgarem locutionem appellamus eam qua infantes
+adsuefiunt ab adsistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt:
+vel, quod brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus _quam sine
+omni regula, nutricem imitantes, accepimus_." Dante, _de Vulg.
+Eloquio_, Lib. I. cap. i.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Gray, himself a painful corrector, told Nicholls that
+"nothing was done so well as at the first concoction,"--adding, as a
+reason, "We think in words." Ben Jonson said, it was a pity Shakspeare
+had not blotted more, for that he sometimes wrote nonsense,--and cited
+in proof of it the verse
+
+  "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."
+
+The last four words do not appear in the passage as it now stands, and
+Professor Craik suggests that they were stricken out in consequence of
+Jonson's criticism. This is very probable; but we suspect that the pen
+that blotted them was in the hand of Master Heminge or his colleague.
+The moral confusion in the idea was surely admirably characteristic of
+the general who had just accomplished a successful _coup d'etat_, the
+condemnation of which he would fancy that he read in the face of every
+honest man he met, and which he would therefore be forever indirectly
+palliating.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Scott, in _Ivanhoe_.]
+
+[Footnote 6: We use the word _Latin_ here to express words derived
+either mediately or immediately from that language.]
+
+[Footnote 7: The prose of Chaucer (1390) and of Sir Thomas Malory
+(translating from the French, 1470) is less Latinized than that of
+Bacon, Browne, Taylor, or Milton. The glossary to Spenser's _Shepherd's
+Calendar_ (1579) explains words of Teutonic and Romanic root in about
+equal proportions. The parallel but independent development of Scotch
+is not to be forgotten.]
+
+[Footnote 8: We believe that for the last two centuries the Latin
+radicals of English have been more familiar and homelike to those who
+use them than the Teutonic. Even so accomplished a person as Professor
+Craik, in his _English of Shakspeare_, derives _head_, through the
+German _haupt_, from the Latin _caput_! We trust that its genealogy is
+nobler, and that it is of kin with _coelum tueri_, rather than with the
+Greek [Greek: kephalae], if Suidas be right in tracing the origin of
+that to a word meaning _vacuity_. Mr. Craik suggests, also, that
+_quick_ and _wicked_ may be etymologically identical, _because_ he
+fancies a relationship between _busy_ and the German _boese_, though
+_wicked_ is evidently the participial form of A.S. _wacan_, (German
+_weichen_,) _to bend, to yield_, meaning _one who has given way to
+temptation_, while _quick_ seems as clearly related to _wegan_, meaning
+_to move_, a different word, even if radically the same. In the _London
+Literary Gazette_ for Nov. 13, 1858, we find an extract from Miss
+Millington's _Heraldry in History, Poetry, and Romance_, in which,
+speaking of the motto of the Prince of Wales,--_De par Houmout ich
+diene_,--she says, "The precise meaning of the former word [_Houmout_]
+has not, I think, been ascertained." The word is plainly the German
+_Hochmuth_, and the whole would read, _De par (Aus) Hochmuth ich
+diene_,--"Out of magnanimity I serve." So entirely lost is the Saxon
+meaning of the word _knave_, (A.S. _cnava_, German _knabe_,) that the
+name _nauvie_, assumed by railway-laborers, has been transmogrified
+into _navigator_. We believe that more people could tell why the month
+of July was so called than could explain the origin of the names for
+our days of the week, and that it is oftener the Saxon than the French
+words in Chaucer that puzzle the modern reader.]
+
+[Footnote 9: _De Vulgari Eloquio_, Lib. II. cap. i. _ad finem_. We
+quote this treatise as Dante's, because the thoughts seem manifestly
+his; though we believe that in its present form it is an abridgment by
+some transcriber, who sometimes copies textually, and sometimes
+substitutes his own language for that of the original.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Pheidias said of one of his pupils that he had an
+inspired thumb, because the modelling-clay yielded to its careless
+sweep a grace of curve which it refused to the utmost pains of others.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
+
+_A History of Philip the Second, King of Spain_. By WILLIAM H.
+PRESCOTT. Vol. III. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1858.
+
+A cordial welcome from many quarters will greet this third instalment
+of a work which promises, when completed, to be the most valuable
+contribution to European history ever made by an American scholar. This
+will in part be owing to the importance of the subject, which, though
+professing to be the history of a single country and a single reign, is
+in fact the great program of the politics of Christendom, and of more
+than Christendom, during a period when the struggles of rival powers
+and of hostile principles and creeds kept the world in agitation and
+prolonged suspense,--when Romanism and Reform, the Crescent and the
+Cross, despotic power and constitutional freedom, were contending for
+mastery, and no government or nation could stand wholly aloof from a
+contest in which the fate, not of empires alone, but of civilization,
+was involved. Spain, during that period, was the bulwark of the Church
+against the attacks of the Reformers, and the bulwark of Christendom
+against the attacks of the Moslem. The power of Spain towered high
+above that of every other monarchy; and this power was wielded with
+absolute authority by the king. The Spanish nation was united and
+animated by an intense, unwavering devotion to the ancient faith, which
+was entwined with all the roots of the national life,--which was
+Spanish, in fact, far more than it was Italian; and of this spirit
+Philip the Second was the fitting representative, not merely from his
+position, but from his education, his intellect, and his character.
+Therefore it is that the historian of this single country and this
+single reign, standing upon a central eminence, must survey and depict
+the whole vast field of which we have spoken.
+
+The materials for such a survey are abundant. But down to a very recent
+period, the most valuable and authentic portion of them--letters of the
+actors, records, written not from hearsay, but from personal knowledge,
+documents of various kinds, private and official, that fill up the
+hiatuses, correct the conjectures, establish the credibility, and give
+a fresh meaning to the relations of the earlier writers--were neglected
+or concealed, inaccessible, unexplored, all but unknown. Now these
+hidden sources have been revealed. A flood of light streams back upon
+that bygone age, filling every obscure nook, making legible and plain
+what before could neither be read nor understood. Or rather, the effect
+is such as when distant objects, seen dimly and confusedly with the
+naked eye, are brought within the range of a powerful telescope, which
+dissolves the seeming masses, and enables us to scrutinize each
+separate form.
+
+Glance for a moment through this instrument, so adjusted as to bear
+upon a figure not undeserving of a closer study. Night has fallen on
+the bleak and sombre scenery of the Sierra Guadarrama. The gray
+outlines of the Escorial are scarcely distinguishable from those of the
+dusky hills amid which it stands. No light is thrown forth from its
+eleven thousand windows, save in this retreating angle formed by the
+junction of the palace with the convent, or--to speak according to the
+architect's symbolical design--of the "handle" with the "gridiron." The
+apartment from which this feeble ray emerges is of small size,--not
+more than sixteen feet square,--but having on two sides arched recesses
+that somewhat increase its capacity. One of these alcoves contains a
+bed, and a door opening into an adjoining oratory, which has immediate
+communication with the chancel of the great church, so that an occupant
+of the bed might, if supported in a sitting posture, have a view of the
+high altar and witness the elevation of the host. This alcove is decked
+with many little images of saints, which, with a few small pictures, of
+rare beauty,--the subjects all of a religious character,--and two
+cabinets of a curious, agate-colored marble, a product of the New
+World,--are the only ornaments that relieve the extreme simplicity of
+the apartment, with its plain white walls and floor of brick. The other
+alcove is occupied by a writing-table, where sits, intent on the
+employment that consumes by far the greater portion of his time, the
+potent monarch of Spain, the "most pious and most prudent" Philip the
+Second. A drowsy secretary, who waits for the completion of the
+document which he is to copy, is his only attendant.
+
+Does it not seem strange that ambassadors and nuncios should become
+confused and lose all recollection of the addresses they had committed
+to memory, in the presence of a prince whose exterior so ill accords
+with the grandeur of his titles and the vastness of his power? His form
+is below the middle height and very slender, the limbs having even an
+attenuated look. The whole appearance is that of a man of delicate and
+even feeble organization. The blonde complexion, the pale blue eyes,
+and the light sandy hue--save where they are prematurely touched with
+gray--of the hair, moustache, and short, pointed beard, all indicate
+the Flemish origin of one who would fain be regarded as "wholly a
+Spaniard." The protruding under-jaw is another proof of his descent
+from the Burgundian rulers of the Netherlands. The expression of the
+countenance, as we find on a closer inspection, is not so easy to
+define. There is no variable play of light and shade upon the features,
+no settled look of joy or sorrow, no trace of anger or of weariness. Is
+it because the subject with which his pen is busied is too unimportant
+to call forth any emotion in the writer? It may be a mere matter of
+routine, connected with the regular business of his household or the
+ordinary affairs of state. But if it be an answer to the dispatch from
+Flanders giving information of the outburst of iconoclasm and
+rebellion, or a subtly-conceived plan for the secret execution of
+Montigny or the assassination of Escovedo, or an order for the
+imprisonment--or the death--of the heir-apparent to the throne, you
+shall perceive nothing in that face, unruffled as a mask, by which to
+conjecture the sentiment or purpose of the mind. As little will he in
+the presence of others exhibit any signs of agitation on the reception
+of extraordinary news, or the occurrence of some great event. The fleet
+which he sent out under his brother, John of Austria, in conjunction
+with the Papal and Venetian armaments, to decide by a single blow the
+long struggle with the Infidel,--all Europe awaiting the issue with
+trembling anxiety and suspense,--has won a memorable and unexpected
+victory, and destroyed forever the _prestige_ of the Moslem power. An
+official, bursting with the intelligence, carries it to the king, who
+is hearing a service in his private chapel. Without the slightest
+change of countenance, Philip desires the priest, whose ear the
+thrilling whisper has reached, and who stands open-mouthed, prepared to
+burst forth at once into the _Te Deum_, to proceed with the service;
+that ended, he orders appropriate thanks to be offered up.
+
+As in triumph, so in disaster. The _armada_, which had been baptized
+"Invincible," is destroyed. The great navy collected from many states,
+equipped at the cost of an enormous treasure, manned with the choicest
+troops of Spain and her subject dominions, lies scattered and wrecked
+along the English shores, which it was sent forth to conquer. Again the
+sympathies of Europe are excited to the highest pitch. Protestantism
+triumphs; Catholicism despairs. He who had most at stake alone
+preserves his calmness, on hearing that all is lost. He neither frowns
+upon his unfortunate generals nor murmurs against Providence. Again he
+orders thanks to be offered up, for those who have been rescued from
+the general ruin,--for those, also, who in this holy enterprise have
+lost their lives and joined eternal glory.
+
+Neither does any private grief--the death of children, of a parent, or
+of a wife--move him either to real or simulated agitation.[1] Nor will
+intense physical suffering overpower this habitual stoicism. He has
+seen unmoved the agony of many victims. He will himself endure the like
+without any outward manifestation of pain. In yonder bed he will one
+day suffer tortures surpassing those to which he has so often consigned
+the heretic and the apostate Morisco; there he will expire amid horrors
+that scarce ever before encompassed a death-bed;--but no groan will
+reveal the weakness of the flesh; the soul, triumphant over nature,
+will bear aloft her colors to the last, and plant them on the breach
+through which she passes into the unknown eternity.
+
+But while we have been thus discoursing, the king has finished his long
+dispatch, and now hands it to the secretary. The latter, having vainly
+struggled with his sleepiness, has at length begun to nod. Hearing his
+name pronounced, he starts to his feet, takes the document, which is
+not yet dry, to sand it, and, desirous to show by his alertness that he
+has been all the time wide awake, empties over it--the contents of the
+inkstand! Awkward individual!--there he stands, dumfounded and aghast.
+His master quietly resumes his seat, procures fresh materials, and,
+though it is long past midnight, begins his task anew with that
+incomparable patience which is "his virtue."
+
+The perfect equanimity on all occasions, which was the trait in
+Philip's character that most impressed such of his contemporaries as
+were neither his adherents nor his enemies,--for example, the Venetian
+envoys at his court,--was not produced by a single stroke of Nature's
+pencil, but had a three-fold origin. In the education which, from his
+earliest years, had prepared him for the business of reigning, the
+_alpha_, and the _omega_ of every lesson had been the word
+"dissimulation." _Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare_. By this
+maxim it was not intended--at least, openly or cynically--to impress on
+youthful royalty the duty and propriety of lying. All it professed to
+inculcate was the necessity of wearing an habitual veil before the
+mind, through which no thought or feeling should ever be discernible.
+Every politician, in the sixteenth century, had learned that lesson.
+William of Orange, the best and purest statesman of the age, was the
+greatest of all masters in the art of dissimulation. In vain might
+Granvelle strive to pry into that bosom, to learn whether its designs
+were friendly or hostile to the plans of tyranny. Not till it was
+extorted by events could the secret be discovered.
+
+In the second place, Philip, as a Spaniard, and one whose manners were
+to furnish a model for the Spanish court, had, of course, been trained
+to that demeanor which was regarded in Spain as the distinctive mark of
+high breeding. "All the nobles of this court," writes an Italian
+contemporary, "though amazingly ignorant and unlettered, maintain a
+certain haughty tranquillity of manner which they term _sosiego_."
+Foreigners found it difficult to define a quality which differed as
+much from the composure and self-possession everywhere characteristic
+of the gentleman as Spartan endurance or Stoical apathy from ordinary
+fortitude or self-control. It was a glacier-like repose, incrusting a
+mountain of pride. The beams, that gilded, might not thaw it; the storm
+did but harden and extend it. It yielded only to the inner fires of
+arrogance and passion, bursting through, at times, with irrepressible
+fury.
+
+These occasional outbreaks were never witnessed in Philip.[2] He was
+exempted from them by the third element which we proposed to notice,
+and which, as nature takes precedence of habit, ought perhaps to have
+been the first. A Spaniard by birth and education, a Spaniard in his
+sympathies and in his tastes, he had inherited, nevertheless, some of
+the peculiarities, intellectual as well as moral, of the other race to
+which by his origin, and, as we have already said, by his physical
+characteristics, he belonged. He had none of the more pleasing
+qualities of the Netherlander; but he had the sluggish temper, the slow
+but laborious mind. "He is phlegmatic as well from natural disposition
+as from will," remarks an Italian contemporary. "This king," says
+another Venetian minister, "is absolutely free from every kind of
+passion." The word "passion" is here used in a strict, if not the most
+correct sense. Philip could, perhaps, love; that he could hate is what
+no one has ever ventured to dispute; but never did either feeling,
+strong, persistent, indestructible, though it might be, rise in
+turbulent waves around his soul. In religion he was a bigot,--not a
+fanatic. "The tranquillity of my dominions and the security of my
+crown," he said, "rest on an unqualified submission in all essential
+points to the authority of the Holy See." In the same deliberate and
+impressive style, not in that of a wild and reckless frenzy, is his
+famous saying, "Better not to reign at all than to reign over
+heretics." His course in all matters of government was in conformity
+with the only chart by which he had been taught to steer. He boasted
+that he was no innovator,--that he did but tread in the footsteps of
+his father. Nor, though he ever kept his object steadily in view, did
+he press towards it with undue haste. He was content that time should
+smooth away the difficulties in his path. "Time and myself against any
+other two" was not the maxim of a man who looked to effect great
+changes or who felt himself in danger of being driven from his course
+by the gusts of passion.
+
+To a person of this character it mattered little, as far as the
+essentials of existence were concerned, whether his life were passed
+upon a throne or at an attorney's desk. In the latter situation, his
+fondness for using the pen would well have qualified him for the
+drudgery, his admirable patience would have been sufficiently
+exercised, and the mischief he was able to do would have been on a more
+contracted scale. On the throne, his labors, as his admirers tell us,
+were those of "a poor clerk earning his bread," while his recreations
+were those of a Jeronymite monk. His intercourse with mankind was
+limited to the narrowest range of which his position would allow. Even
+with his ministers he preferred to communicate in writing. When he went
+abroad, it was in a carriage so constructed as to screen him entirely
+from view, and to shut out the world from his observation. He always
+entered Madrid after nightfall, and reached his palace by streets that
+were the least frequented. He had an equally strong aversion to bodily
+exercise. Such was his love of quiet and seclusion, that it was
+commonly believed he waited only for a favorable opportunity to follow
+the example of his father, resign his power and withdraw to a
+convent.[3]
+
+In the volume before us are two chapters devoted to the character and
+personal habits of Philip, a picture of his court, his method of
+transacting business, his chief advisers, the machinery of his
+government, and his relations with his subjects. As usually happens, it
+is in details of a personal and biographical kind that the author's
+investigations have been the most productive of new discoveries. It is
+a question with some minds, whether such details are properly admitted
+into history. The new luminary of moral and political science, the
+Verulam of the nineteenth century, Mr. Henry Buckle, tells us that
+biography forms no part of history, that individual character has
+little or no effect in determining the course of the world's affairs,
+and that the historian's proper business is to exhibit those general
+laws, discoverable, by a strictly scientific process of investigation,
+which act with controlling power upon human conduct and govern the
+destinies of our race. We readily admit that the discovery of such laws
+would exceed in importance every other having relation to man's present
+sphere of existence; and we heartily wish that Mr. Buckle had made as
+near an approach to the discovery as he confidently believes himself to
+have done. But even had he, instead of crude theories, unwarranted
+assumptions, and a most lively but fallacious train of reasoning,
+presented us with a grand and solid philosophical work, a true _Novum
+Organon_, he would still have left the department of literature which
+he has so violently assailed in full possession of its present field.
+Our curiosity in regard to the character and habits of the men who have
+played conspicuous parts on the stage of history would have been not a
+whit diminished. The interest which men feel in the study of human
+character is, perhaps, the most common feeling that induces them to
+read at all. It is to gratify that feeling that the great majority of
+books are written. The mutual influences of mind upon mind--not the
+influences of climate, food, the "aspects of Nature," thunder-storms,
+earthquakes, and statistics--form, and will ever form, the great staple
+of literature. Mr. Buckle's own book would not have been half so
+entertaining as it is, if he had not, with the most natural
+inconsistency, plentifully besprinkled his pages with biographical
+details, some of which are not incorrect. Lord Macaulay, whom Mr.
+Buckle is unable to eulogize with sufficient vehemence without a
+ludicrous as well as irreverent application of Scriptural language, is
+of all writers the most profuse in the description of individual
+peculiarities, neatly doing up each separate man in a separate parcel
+with an appropriate label, and dismissing half his personages, like
+"ticket-of-leave men," with a "character," and nothing more.
+
+In truth, while the office of the speculative philosopher is to explore
+the principles that have the widest operation in the revolutions of
+society, the office of the historian is to represent society as it
+actually exists at any given period in all its various phenomena. The
+_science_ of history has been first invented--at least, he tells us
+so--by Mr. Buckle. The _art_ of history is older than Herodotus, older
+than Moses, older than printed language. It is based, like every other
+art, on certain truths, general and special, principles and facts; its
+process, like that of every other art, is the Imagination, the creative
+principle of genius, using these truths as its rules and its materials,
+working by them and upon them, applying and idealizing them. That there
+is such a thing as historical art has also, we know, been disputed. It
+is one of the exceedingly strong convictions--he will not allow us to
+call them opinions--entertained by the distinguished author of "Modern
+Painters," and expressed by him in a lecture delivered at Edinburgh,
+that past ages are to be studied only in the records which they have
+themselves left,--letters, contemporary memoirs, and the like sources.
+Works built upon these he calls "restorations," weak and servile
+copies, from which the spirit of the original has fled. He accordingly
+advises every one who would make himself really acquainted with the
+manners and events of a former period to go at once to the
+fountain-head and learn what that period said for itself in its own
+dialect and style. It might be sufficient mildly to warn any person who
+thinks of adopting this advice, that, unless the field of his intended
+researches be very limited, or the amount of time which he proposes to
+devote to the study very great, the result can scarcely be of a
+satisfactory nature. But there is another answer to Mr. Ruskin, which
+has more force when addressed to one so renowned as a critic and
+exponent of Art. The eye of Genius seizes what escapes ordinary
+observation. The province of Art is to _reveal_ Nature, to elucidate
+her obscurities, to present her, not otherwise than as she _is_, but
+more truthfully and more completely than she _appears_ to the common
+eye. Of what use were landscape-painting, if it did not teach us how to
+look for beauty in the real landscape? Who has not seen in a good
+portrait an expression which he then for the first time recognized as
+that which best represented the character of the original? When we
+applaud the personations of a great actor, we exclaim, as the highest
+praise, "How true to Nature!" We must, therefore, have seen before the
+look and gesture, and heard the tone, which we thus acknowledge as
+appropriate to the passion and the scene. And yet they had never
+stamped themselves upon our minds, when witnessed in actual life, from
+which the actor himself had copied them, with half that force and
+vividness which they receive from his delineation. In like manner, the
+historian--one to whom history is a genuine vocation--applies to the
+facts with which he has to deal, to the evidence which he has to sift,
+to the relations which he has to peruse, a faculty which shall detect a
+meaning where the common reader would find none,--which shall conceive
+a whole picture, a complete view, where another would see but
+fragments,--which shall combine and reproduce in one distinct and
+living image the relics of a past age, which lie broken, scattered, and
+buried beneath the mounds of time. Such a work has Niebuhr performed
+for early Roman history, and Michelet for the confused epochs of
+mediaeval France. The spirit, instead of escaping in the process, was
+for the first time made visible. The historian did not merely anatomize
+the body of the Past, but with magic power summoned up its ghost.
+
+It cannot be said that the claims of history have ever been disallowed
+by the reading public. There is, indeed, no class of literature so
+secure of receiving the attention which it demands. While the novelist
+modestly confines himself to a brace of spare duodecimos, and, if his
+story be somewhat extended, endeavors to conceal its length in the
+smallness of the print, the historian unblushingly presents himself
+with three, six, a dozen, nay, if he be a Frenchman or a German, with
+forty huge tomes, and is more often taken to task for his omissions
+than censured for the fulness of his narrative. It is respectable to
+buy his volumes, and respectable to read them. We don't put them away
+in corners, but give them the most conspicuous places on our shelves.
+Strange to say, that kind of reading to which we were once driven as to
+a task, which our fathers thought must be useful because it was so
+dull, has of late outstripped every other branch in its attractiveness
+to the mass. Nobody yawns over Carlyle; people set upon Macaulay as if
+quite unconscious that they were about to be led into the labyrinths of
+Whig and Tory politics; and gentlemen whirled along in railway-cars
+bend over the pages of Prescott, and pronounce them as fascinating as
+any romance. Stranger still, these modern historians excel their
+predecessors as much in learning and depth of research as in dramatic
+power, artistic arrangement and construction, and beauty and
+picturesqueness of style. Compare the meagre array of references in the
+foot-notes of Watson's "History of Philip the Second" with the
+multitude of authorities cited by Mr. Prescott. It may be doubted,
+whether any printed book, however rare or little known, which could
+throw the least glimmer of light upon his subject, has been overlooked
+or neglected by the last-mentioned author; while thousands of
+manuscript pages, gathered from libraries and collections in almost
+every part of Europe, have furnished him with some of his most curious
+particulars and enabled him to clear up the mystery that shrouded many
+portions of the subject.
+
+We shall not attempt to determine the exact place that ought to be
+assigned in an illustrious brotherhood to our American historian. The
+country is justly proud of him, as one whose name is a household word
+in many lands,--who has done more, perhaps, than any other of her
+living writers, with the exception of Washington Irving, to obtain for
+a still youthful literature the regard and attention of the world,--who
+has helped to accomplish the prediction of Horace Walpole, that there
+would one day be "a Thucydides at Boston and a Xenophon at New York"; a
+prediction which seemed so fanciful, at the time it was made, (less
+than two years before the declaration of Independence,) that the
+prophet was fain to link its fulfilment with the contemporaneous visit
+of a South American traveller to the deserted ruins of London.[4] His
+writings have won favor with hosts of readers, and they have received
+the homage of learned and profound inquirers, like Humboldt and Guizot.
+They have merits that are recognizable at a glance, and they have also
+merits that will bear the closest examination. They occupy a field in
+which they have no compeers. They are the products of a fertile soil
+and of laborious cultivation. The mere literary critic, accustomed to
+dwell with even more attention on the form than on the substance of a
+work, commends above all the admirable skill shown in the selection and
+grouping of the incidents, the facile hand with which an obscure and
+entangled theme is divested of its embarrassments, the frequent
+brilliancy and picturesqueness of the narrative, the judicious mixture
+of anecdote and reflection, and the harmony and clearness of the style.
+These are the qualities which make Mr. Prescott's histories, with all
+their solid learning and minute research, as pleasant reading as the
+airiest of novels. And yet not these alone. A charm is felt in many a
+sentence that has a deeper origin than in the intellect. No egotism
+obtrudes itself upon our notice; but the subtile outflow of a generous
+and candid spirit, of a genial and singularly healthy nature, wins for
+the author a secure place in the affections of his readers.
+
+The third volume of the "History of Philip the Second" is, we think,
+superior to its predecessors. It contains, perhaps, no single scene
+equal in elaborate and careful painting to the death of Count Egmont.
+It has no chapter devoted to the elucidation of the darker passages in
+Philip's personal history, like that which in a former volume traced to
+a still doubtful end the unhappy career of Don Carlos, or such as will
+doubtless, in a future volume, shed new light on that of Antonio Perez.
+But there is a more continuous interest, arising from a greater unity
+of subject. With the exception of the two chapters already referred to,
+the narrative is taken up with the contest waged by the Spaniards
+against those Moslem foes whom they hated with the hereditary hate of
+centuries, the mingled hate that had grown out of diversity of
+religion, an alien blood, and long arrears of vengeance. When that
+contest was waged upon the sea or on a foreign soil, it was at least
+mitigated by the ordinary rules of warfare. But on Spanish soil it knew
+no restraint, no limitation but the complete effacement of the Moorish
+population. The story of the Morisco Rebellion, which we remember to
+have first read with absorbed attention in Dunham's meagre sketch, is
+here related with a fulness of detail that exhausts the subject, and
+leaves the mind informed both of causes and results. Yet the march of
+the narrative is rapid and unchecked, from the first outbreak of the
+revolt, when Aben-Farax, with a handful of followers, facing the
+darkness of night and the blinding snow, penetrated into the streets of
+Granada, shouting the cry so long unheard in air that had once been so
+familiar with its sound, "There is no God but Allah, and Mahomet is the
+prophet of God!"--through all the strange and terrible vicissitudes of
+the deadly struggle that ensued, the frightful massacres, the wild
+_guerrilla_ battles, the fiery onslaughts of the Spanish chivalry, the
+stealthy surprises of the Moorish mountaineers,--down to the complete
+suppression of the insurrection, the removal of the defeated race, the
+overthrow and death of Aben-Aboo, "the little king of the Alpujarras,"
+and the ghastly triumph in which his dead body, clothed in the robes of
+royalty and supported upright on a horse, was led into the capital
+where his ancestors had once reigned in peaceful splendor, after which
+the head was cut off and set up in a cage above the wall, "the face
+turned towards his native hills, which he had loved so well."
+
+On such a theme, and in such localities, Mr. Prescott is more at home
+than any other writer, American or European. His imagination, kindled
+by long familiar associations, burns with a steady flame. The
+characters are portrayed with a free and vigorous pencil, the contrast
+between the Orientalism of the Spanish Arab and the sterner features of
+the Spanish Goth being always strongly marked. The scenery, painted
+with as much fidelity as truth, is sometimes brought before the eye by
+minute description, and sometimes, with still happier effect, by
+incidental touches,--an epithet or a simile, as appropriate as it is
+suggestive. As we follow the route of Mundejar's army, the "frosty
+peaks" of the Sierra Nevada are seen "glistening in the sun like
+palisades of silver"; while terraces, scooped out along the rocky
+mountain-side, are covered with "bright patches of variegated culture,
+that hang like a garland round the gaunt Sierra." At their removal from
+Granada, the remnant of what had once been a race of conquerors bid a
+last farewell to their ancient homes just as "the morning light has
+broken on the _red_ towers of the Alhambra"; and scattered over the
+country in small and isolated masses, the presence of the exiles is
+"sure to be revealed by the minute and elaborate culture of the
+soil,--as the secret course of the mountain-stream is betrayed by the
+brighter green of the meadow."
+
+We had marked for quotation an admirable passage, in which our author
+passes judgment on the policy of the Spanish government, its cruelty
+and its mistakes. But want of space compels us here to take leave of a
+book which we have not pretended to analyze, but to which we have
+rendered sincere, though inadequate, praise.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Sempre apparisce d'un volto e d'una temperatura medesima;
+la qual cosa a chi, considerato gli accidenti che gli sono occorsi
+delle morti dei figliuoli e delle mogli, ha fatto credere che fusse
+crudele." _Relaz. Anon._ (1588.)]
+
+[Footnote 2: None of the anecdotes in which Philip is represented as
+giving way to violent bursts of anger will bear examination. Take, for
+example, the story of his pent-up wrath having exploded against the
+Prince of Orange, when he was quitting the Netherlands in 1559. The
+Prince, it is said, who had accompanied him to the ship, endeavored to
+convince him that the opposition to his measures, of which he
+complained, had sprung from the Estates; on which the king, seizing
+William's sleeve, and shaking it vehemently, exclaimed, "No, not the
+Estates, but you,--you,--you!"--_No los Estados, ma vos,--vos,
+--vos!_--using, say the original relator and the repeaters of
+the story, a form of address, the second person plural, which in the
+Spanish language is expressive of contempt. Now it is true that _vos_,
+applied to an equal, would have been a solecism; but it is also true
+that it was the _invariable_ form employed by the sovereign, even when
+addressing a grandee or a prince of the Church. (See the _Papiers
+d'Etat de Granvelle, passim_.) Moreover, the correspondence of the time
+shows clearly that neither Philip nor Granvelle had as yet conceived
+any deep suspicion of the Prince of Orange, much less had any of the
+parties been so imprudent as to throw off the usual mask. The story is
+first told by Auberi, a writer of the seventeenth century, who had it
+from his father, to whom it had been told by an anonymous eye-witness!]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Relazione di Pigafetta._]
+
+[Footnote 4: Walpole to Mason, Nov. 24, 1774.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Courtship of Miles Standish_. By HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.
+Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1858.
+
+The introduction and acclimatization of the _hexameter_ upon English
+soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was
+first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre
+remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel
+Harvey,--a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,--whose chief claim to
+remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was
+the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his "Foure
+Letters," (1592,) he says, "If I never deserve anye better
+remembraunce, let mee rather be Epitaphed, the Inventour of the English
+Hexameter, whome learned M. Stanihurst imitated in his Virgill, and
+excellent Sir Phillip Sidney disdained not to follow in his Arcadia and
+elsewhere." This claim of invention, however, seems to have been an
+afterthought with Harvey, for, in the letters which passed between him
+and Spenser in 1579, he speaks of himself more modestly as only a
+collaborator with Sidney and others in the good work. The Earl of
+Surrey is said to have been the first who wrote thus in English. The
+most successful person, however, was William Webb, who translated two
+of Virgil's Eclogues with a good deal of spirit and harmony. Ascham, in
+his "Schoolmaster," (1570,) had already suggested the adoption of the
+ancient hexameter by English poets; but Ascham (as afterwards Puttenham
+in his "Art of Poesie") thought the number of monosyllabic words in
+English an insuperable objection to verses in which there was a large
+proportion of dactyles, and recommended, therefore, that a trial should
+be made with iambics. Spenser, at Harvey's instance, seems to have
+tried his hand at the new kind of verse. He says,--"I like your late
+Englishe Hexameters so exceedingly well, that I also enure my penne
+sometimes in that kinde.... For the onely or chiefest hardnesse, whych
+seemeth, is in the Accente, which sometime gapeth, and, as it were,
+yawneth ilfauouredly, coming shorte of that it should, and sometime
+exceeding the measure of the Number, as in _Carpenter_; the middle
+sillable being vsed shorte in Speache, when it shall be read long in
+Verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling that draweth one legge after hir:
+and _Heaven_, being used shorte as one sillable, when it is in Verse
+stretched out with a _Diastole_, is like a lame dogge that holdes up
+one legge. But it is to be wonne with Custome, and rough words must be
+subdued with Vse. For why a God's name may not we, as else the Greekes,
+have the kingdome of our owne Language, and measure our Accentes by the
+Sounde, reserving the Quantitie to the Verse?" The amiable Edmonde
+seems to be smiling in his sleeve as he writes this sentence. He
+instinctively saw the absurdity of attempting to subdue English to
+misunderstood laws of Latin quantities, which would, for example, make
+the vowel in _debt_ long, in the teeth of use and wont.
+
+We give a specimen of the hexameters which satisfied so entirely the
+ear of Master Gabriel Harvey,--an ear that must have been long by
+position, in virtue of its place on his head.
+
+  "Not the like _Discourser_, for Tongue and head: to be found out;
+  Not the like _resolute Man_, for great and serious affayres;
+  Not the like _Lynx_, to spie out secretes and priuities of States;
+  _Eyed_ like to _Argus, Earde_ like to _Midas, Nosd_ like to _Naso_,
+  Wingd like to _Mercury_, fitist of a Thousand for to be employed."
+
+And here are a few from "worthy M. Stanyhurst's" translation of the
+"AEneid."
+
+  "Laocoon storming from Princelis Castel is hastning,
+  And a far of beloing: What fond phantastical harebraine
+  Madnesse hath enchaunted your wits, you townsmen unhappie?
+  Weene you (blind hodipecks) the Greekish nauie returned,
+  Or that their presents want craft? is subtil Vlissis
+  So soone forgotten? My life for an haulf-pennie (Trojans)," etc.
+
+Mr. Abraham Fraunce translates two verses of Heliodorus thus:--
+
+  "Now had fyery Phlegon his dayes reuolution ended,
+  And his snoring snowt with salt waues all to bee washed."
+
+Witty Tom Nash was right enough when he called this kind of stuff,
+"that drunken, staggering kinde of verse which is all vp hill and downe
+hill, like the waye betwixt Stamford and Becchfeeld, and goes like a
+horse plunging through the myre in the deep of winter, now soust up to
+the saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes." It will be noticed that
+his prose falls into a kind of tipsy hexameter. The attempt in England
+at that time failed, but the controversy to which it gave rise was so
+far useful that it called forth Samuel Daniel's "Defence of Ryme,"
+(1603,) one of the noblest pieces of prose in the language. Hall also,
+in his "Satires," condemned the heresy in some verses remarkable for
+their grave beauty and strength.
+
+The revival of the hexameter in modern poetry is due to Johann Heinrich
+Voss, a man of genius, an admirable metrist, and, Schlegel's sneer to
+the contrary notwithstanding, hitherto the best translator of Homer.
+His "Odyssey," (1783,) his "Iliad," (1791,) and his "Luise," (1795,)
+were confessedly Goethe's teachers in this kind of verse. The "Hermann
+and Dorothea" of the latter (1798) was the first true poem written in
+modern hexameters. From Germany, Southey imported that and other
+classic metres into England, and we should be grateful to him, at
+least, for having given the model for Canning's "Knifegrinder." The
+exotic, however, again refused to take root, and for many years after
+we have no example of English hexameters. It was universally conceded
+that the temper of our language was unfriendly to them.
+
+It remained for a man of true poetic genius to make them not only
+tolerated, but popular. Longfellow's translation of "The Children of
+the Lord's Supper" may have softened prejudice somewhat, but
+"Evangeline," (1847,) though incumbered with too many descriptive
+irrelevancies, was so full of beauty, pathos, and melody, that it made
+converts by thousands to the hitherto ridiculed measure. More than
+this, it made Longfellow at once the most popular of contemporary
+English poets, Clough's "Bothie"--a poem whose singular merit has
+hitherto failed of the wide appreciation it deserves--followed not long
+after; and Kingsley's "Andromeda" is yet damp from the press.
+
+While we acknowledge that the victory thus won by "Evangeline" is a
+striking proof of the genius of the author, we confess that we have
+never been able to overcome the feeling that the new metre is a
+dangerous and deceitful one. It is too easy to write, and too uniform
+for true pleasure in reading. Its ease sometimes leads Mr. Longfellow
+into prose,--as in the verse
+
+  "Combed and wattled gules and all the rest of the blazon,"--
+
+and into a prosaic phraseology which has now and then infected his
+style in other metres, as where he says
+
+  "Spectral gleam their snow-white _dresses_,"--
+
+using a word as essentially unpoetic as _surtout_ or _pea-jacket_. We
+think one great danger of the hexameter is, that it gradually accustoms
+the poet to be content with a certain regular recurrence of accented
+sounds, to the neglect of the poetic value of language and intensity of
+phrase.
+
+But while we frankly avow our infidelity as regards the metre, we as
+frankly confess our admiration of the high qualities of "Miles
+Standish." In construction we think it superior to "Evangeline"; the
+narrative is more straightforward, and the characters are defined with
+a firmer touch. It is a poem of wonderful picturesqueness, tenderness,
+and simplicity, and the situations are all conceived with the truest
+artistic feeling. Nothing can be better, to our thinking, than the
+picture of Standish and Alden in the opening scene, tinged as it is
+with a delicate humor, which the contrast between the thoughts and
+characters of the two heightens almost to pathos. The pictures of
+Priscilla spinning, and the bridal procession, are also masterly. We
+feel charmed to see such exquisite imaginations conjured out of the
+little old familiar anecdote of John Alden's vicarious wooing. We are
+astonished, like the fisherman in the Arabian tale, that so much genius
+could be contained in so small and leaden a casket. Those who cannot
+associate sentiment with the fair Priscilla's maiden name of Mullins
+may be consoled by hearing that it is only a corruption of the Huguenot
+Desmoulins,--as Barnum is of the Norman Vernon.
+
+Indifferent poets comfort themselves with the notion that contemporary
+popularity is no test of merit, and that true poetry must always wait
+for a new generation to do it justice. The theory is not true in any
+general sense. With hardly an exception, the poetry that was ever to
+receive a wide appreciation has received it at once. Popularity in
+itself is no test of permanent literary fame, but the kind of it is and
+always has been a very decided one. Mr. Longfellow has been greatly
+popular because he so greatly deserved it. He has the secret of all the
+great poets,--the power of expressing universal sentiments simply and
+naturally. A false standard of criticism has obtained of late, which
+brings a brick as a sample of the house, a line or two of condensed
+expression as a gauge of the poem. But it is only the whole poem that
+is a proof of the poem, and there are twenty fragmentary poets, for one
+who is capable of simple and sustained beauty. Of this quality Mr.
+Longfellow has given repeated and striking examples, and those critics
+are strangely mistaken who think that what he does is easy to be done,
+because he has the power to make it seem so. We think his chief fault
+is a too great tendency to moralize, or rather, a distrust of his
+readers, which leads him to point out the moral which he wishes to be
+drawn from any special poem. We wish, for example, that the last two
+stanzas could be cut off from "The Two Angels," a poem which, without
+them, is as perfect as anything in the language.
+
+Many of the pieces in this volume having already shone as captain
+jewels in Mana's carcanet, need no comment from us; and we should,
+perhaps, have avoided the delicate responsibility of criticizing one of
+our most precious contributors, had it not been that we have seen some
+very unfair attempts to depreciate Mr. Longfellow, and that, as it
+seemed to us, for qualities which stamp him as a true and original
+poet. The writer who appeals to more peculiar moods of mind, to more
+complex or more esoteric motives of emotion, may be a greater favorite
+with the few; but he whose verse is in sympathy with moods that are
+human and not personal, with emotions that do not belong to periods in
+the development of individual minds, but to all men in all years, wins
+the gratitude and love of whoever can read the language which he makes
+musical with solace and aspiration. The present volume, while it will
+confirm Mr. Longfellow's claim to the high rank he has won among lyric
+poets, deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty
+of epic narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth
+century. In our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which
+craves the red pepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present
+generation are apt to overlook this almost obsolete and unobtrusive
+quality; but we doubt if, since Chaucer, we have had an example of more
+purely objective narrative than in "The Courtship of Miles Standish."
+Apart from its intrinsic beauty, this gives the poem a claim to higher
+and more thoughtful consideration; and we feel sure that posterity will
+confirm the verdict of the present in regard to a poet whose reputation
+is due to no fleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the
+public of that which charms now and charms always,--true power and
+originality, without grimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo,
+is the artistic type of strength.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Thoughts on the Life and Character of Jesus of Nazareth_. By W.H.
+FURNESS, Minister of the First Congregational Unitarian Church in
+Philadelphia. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1859.
+
+Here is a book, written, not for "orthodox believers," but for those
+whom the orthodox creeds have wholly repelled from its subject. It is
+quite distinct from three other books on the same general theme, by the
+same author. It has, indeed, some objects in view, at which neither of
+those books directly aimed.
+
+It will overwhelm with horror such readers as may stumble upon it, who
+do not know, till they meet it, that there is any view of Jesus Christ
+but that which is presented in the widely circulated issues of the
+Tract Society and similar institutions. Our attention has already been
+called to one very absurd and unjust attack upon it, in a Philadelphia
+paper, intended to catch the prejudices of such persons. But the views
+by which we found this attack accompanied, in the same journal, led us
+to suspect that some political prejudice against the author's
+anti-slavery had more to do with the onslaught than any deeply seated
+love of Orthodox Christianity. To another class of readers, who have
+been wholly repelled from any interest in Jesus Christ, by whatever
+misfortune of temperament or training, the careful study of these
+"Thoughts" would be of incalculable value. We suppose this class of
+readers, through the whole extent of our country, to be quite as large
+as the first class we have named. To a third class, which is probably
+as large as both the others put together, who are neither repelled nor
+attracted by the received ecclesiastical statements regarding the
+Saviour, but are willing to pass, without any real inquiry or any firm
+opinion, his presence in the world, and his influence at this moment on
+every event in modern life, the book might also have an immense value,
+if it could be conceived that any thunder-clap could wake them from
+that selfish and comfortable indifference as to the central point of
+all the history, philosophy, life, and religion, in which they live.
+
+We have no intention of entering into a discussion of the remarkable
+and very clear views presented in this volume. We have only to say that
+the author does not do himself justice when he asserts that there is no
+system in its arrangement. It is a systematic work, leading carefully
+along from point to point in the demonstration attempted. One may read
+it through in an afternoon, and he will then have a very clear idea of
+what the author thinks, which does not always happen when one has read
+a book through. If he be one of the class of readers for whom it was
+written, he will have, at the very least, a deeper interest in the
+study of the life of Jesus of Nazareth than he had when he began. He
+will have read a reply to Dr. Strauss, Mr. Parker, Dr. Feuerbach, and
+Mr. Hittel, which, he will confess, is written in an appreciative and
+candid spirit, quite different from that of some of the _ex-cathedra_
+works of controversy, which have failed to annihilate these writers,
+although they have taken so arrogant a tone. As we have said, we do not
+attempt to analyze the argument or the statement of which we thus
+speak. We have only to say that it is positive, and not
+negative,--constructive, and not destructive,--reverent, and not
+flippant,--courteous to opponents, and never denunciatory. These are
+characteristics of a work of theology of which those can judge who do
+not affect to be technical theologians. Had we to give our own views of
+the matters presented in so interesting a form, we should not, of
+course, attempt to condense our assent or our dissent with the author
+into these columns; but where we differed or where we agreed, we should
+gladly recognize his eagerness to be understood, his earnest hope to
+find the truth, and his sympathy with all persons seeking
+it,--qualities which we have not always found in our study of
+theologians by profession.
+
+In making the suggestion, however, that these "Thoughts" would be of
+special value to those who have fallen into the habit of disbelieving
+the Gospels, they hardly know why, we know that there is no more
+probability that they will read a book with this title than there is
+that young men should read "Letters to Young Men," or young women
+should read "Letters to Young Women." We suppose that the unconverted
+seldom read "Hints to the Unconverted," and that undecided fools never
+read "Foster on Decision of Character." Recurring, then, to Mr.
+Everett's story of the Guava jelly, which was recommended to invalids,
+but would "not materially injure those who are well," we may add to
+what we have said, that all readers of this volume will find valuable
+suggestions in it for the enlightenment of the gospel narratives.
+Theologians who differed fundamentally from Dr. Furness have been eager
+to express their sense of the value of his "Jesus and his Biographers,"
+as affording some of the most vivid and scenic representations in all
+literature of that life which he has devoted all his studies to
+illustrating. It does not fall in the way of this book to attempt many
+such illustrations; but it is full of hints which all readers will
+value as lightening up and making fresh their notion of Scripture.
+
+Critically speaking, the most prominent fault in the book is the
+occasional interpolation of matter not connected directly with its
+argument. That argument is simply laid out. In the first part is the
+direct plea of the author for the gospel narrative as a whole,
+earnestly and effectively sustained. The second part examines Mr.
+Theodore Parker's arguments against the truth of parts of it. The third
+book discusses other objections. So far as this is done from the
+author's leading point of view, the book is coherent and effective. But
+occasionally there comes in a little piece of fanciful criticism on the
+text, or a comment on some side-view or transaction, or the suggestion
+of a probability or a possibility, which remind one of the thin
+puerilities of the commentators whom Dr. Furness despises more than of
+the general drift of his own discussion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Vernon Grove; or Hearts as they are_. A Novel. New York: Rudd &
+Carleton.
+
+This volume makes a pleasant addition to the light reading of the day.
+It is the more welcome as coming from a new field; for we believe that
+the veil of secrecy with regard to its authorship has been so far blown
+aside, that we shall be permitted to say, that, although it is written
+by a lady of New England birth, it may be most properly claimed as a
+part of the literature of South Carolina. It is a regular novel,
+although a short one. It is an interesting story, of marked, but not
+improbable incidents, involving a very few well-distinguished
+characters, who fall into situations to display which requires nice
+analysis of the mind and heart,--developed in graceful and flowing
+narrative, enlivened by natural and spirited conversations. The
+atmosphere of the book is one of refined taste and high culture. The
+people in it, with scarce an exception, are people who mean to be good,
+and who are handsome, polite, accomplished, and rich, or at least
+surrounded by the conveniences and even luxuries of life. It is a
+story, too, for the most part, of cultivated enjoyment. There are
+sufferings and sorrows depicted in it, it is true; without them, it
+would be no representation of real life, which it does not fail to be.
+Some tears will undoubtedly be shed over it, but the sufferings and
+sorrows are such that we feel they are, after all, leading to
+happiness; and we are not made to dwell upon pictures of unnecessary
+misery or unavailing misfortune. Let it not be supposed, however, that
+we are speaking of a namby-pamby tale of the luxuries and successes of
+what is called "high life," for this book has nothing of that
+character. We mean only to point out, as far as we may, without
+entering upon the story itself, that it tells of pleasant people, in
+pleasant circumstances, among whom it is a pleasure to the reader for a
+time to he. Many a novel "ends well" that keeps us in a shudder or a
+"worry" from the beginning to the end. Here we see the enjoyment as we
+go along. Indeed, a leading characteristic of "Vernon Grove" is the
+extremely good taste with which it is conceived and written; and so we
+no more meet with offensive descriptions of vulgar show and luxury than
+we do with those of squalor or moral turpitude. It is a book marked by
+a high tone of moral and religious as well as artistic and esthetic
+culture. Without being made the vehicle of any set theories in
+philosophy or Art, without (so far as we know) "inculcating" any
+special moral axiom, it embodies much good teaching and suggestion with
+regard to music and painting, and many worthy lessons for the mind and
+heart. This is done, as it should be, by the apparently natural
+development of the story itself. For, as we have said, the book is
+really a novel, and will be read as a novel should be, for the story,
+and not, in the first instance and with deliberation, with the critical
+desire to find out what lessons it teaches or what sentiments it
+inspires.
+
+The narrative covers a space of several years, but is so told that we
+are furnished with details rather than generalities; and particular
+scenes, events, and conversations are set forth vividly and minutely.
+The descriptions of natural scenery, and of works of Art, many of which
+come naturally into the story, show a cultivated and observant eye and
+a command of judicious language. The characters are well developed,
+and, with an unimportant exception, there is nothing introduced into
+the book that is not necessary to the completion of the story. "Vernon
+Grove" will commend itself to all readers who like works of fiction
+that are lively and healthy too; and will give its author a high rank
+among the lady-novelists of our day and country.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Arabian Days' Entertainments_. Translated from the German, by HERBERT
+PELHAM CORTIS. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1858.
+
+In this famous nineteenth century of ours, which prides itself on being
+practical, and feeds voraciously on facts, and considers itself almost
+above being amused, we for our part rejoice to greet such a book as
+this. Our great-great-grandfathers, when they were boys, were happy in
+having wise and good grandfathers who told them pleasant stories of
+what never happened,--and who loved well to tell them, because they
+were truly wise men, and knew what the child's mind relished and
+fattened upon,--nay, and because, like all truly good men, they
+themselves indulged a fond, secret, half-belief that these child's
+stories of theirs were, if the truth could be got at, more than half
+true. We should be sorry to believe that this good old life of
+story-telling and story-hearing had utterly gone out. It belonged to an
+age that only very foolish men and very vulgar men laugh at without
+blushing.
+
+"We of the nineteenth century" have a certain way of our own, however,
+of enjoying that most rarely fascinating class of literary productions
+known as _stories_,--a critical, perhaps over-intellectual, way,--but
+still sufficing, it is comfortable to know, to keep the story at very
+near its ancient dignity in the realm of letters. Perhaps it is a true
+sign of the perfect story, that it ministers at once to these two
+unsympathizing mental appetites, and pleases completely, not only the
+man, but his--by this aide--ever-so-great-grandfather, the child.
+
+Everybody thinks first of the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments," when we
+fall into such remarks as these,--that marvellous treasure, from which
+the dreams of little boys have been furnished forth, and the pages of
+great scholars gemmed with elegant illustration, ever since it was
+first opened to Western eyes. With this book the title which Mr. Curtis
+has so happily selected for his translation invites us to compare it;
+and it is not too much praise to say that it can well stand the
+comparison,--we mean as a selection of stories fascinating to old and
+young. As to the matter of translation itself, the versions we have of
+the "Arabian Nights" are notoriously bad. These stories, which Mr.
+Curtis has laid all good children and all right-minded grown people
+under perpetual obligation by thus collecting and presenting to them,
+are the productions of a single German writer, and, with the exception
+of three or four separately published in magazines, have, we believe,
+never before been translated into English. They present some very
+interesting points of contrast with the ever-famous book of Eastern
+stories,--such as open some very tempting cross-views of the German and
+the Eastern mind, which, for want of opportunity, we must pass by now.
+
+The scenes of most of them are laid in the East,--of a few in Germany;
+but the robust _method_ of the German story-writer is apparent in each.
+We wish we could quote from one or two which have particularly charmed
+us; but though this is impossible within any decent limits, we can at
+least provoke the appetite of readers of all ages by the mere
+displaying of such titles as these:--"The History of Caliph Stork";
+"The Story of the Severed Hand"; "The Story of Little Muck"; "Nosey the
+Dwarf"; "The Young Englishman"; "The Prophecy of the Silver Florin";
+"The Cold Heart," etc. What prospects for winter evenings are here! And
+while we can assure the adult reader that the promise which these
+titles give of burlesque or humorous description, and bold, romantic
+narrative, shall be more than kept, it may be well also to say, for the
+comfort of those whom we hope to see buy the book for their children's
+sake, that the stories in it are entirely free from certain objections
+which may be fairly urged against the "Arabian Nights" as reading for
+young people. The "Arabian Days" have nothing to be ashamed of in the
+nature of their entertainments.
+
+The translation itself is a performance in a high degree creditable,
+not only to the German, but to the English, scholarship of Mr. Curtis.
+We perceive scarcely any of that peculiar stiffness of style which
+makes so many otherwise excellent translations painful to read,--the
+stiffness as of one walking in new boots,--the result of dressing the
+words of one language in the grammatical construction of another. Mr.
+Curtis gives us the sentiment and wit and fancy and humor and oddity of
+the German's stories, but in an English way. Indeed, his is manly and
+graceful English, such as we hope we are not now by any means seeing
+the last of.
+
+To the right sort of reader, as _we_ consider him, of the "Arabian
+Days," a word about the pictures (for observe, that the proper name for
+the illustrations of a story-book is _pictures_) may be fitly spoken.
+
+There are no less than sixteen very nice pictures to this
+story-book,--well done, even for Mr. Hoppin, artistically, and well
+conceived for the refreshing of the inner eye of him, her, or _it_ that
+reads. And we must be permitted, also, who have read this book by
+candle-light, as only such a book should be read, to congratulate the
+readers who come after us upon the good type and good paper in which
+the publishers have very properly produced it.
+
+We hope and believe this publication will before long be given as a
+boon to the rising generation, our second-cousins, across the water.
+They, however, cannot have it (as we fully intend that certain small
+bodies, but huge feeders on fiction, among our acquaintance, shall have
+it) on Christmas morning,--the dear old festival, that, as we write, is
+already near enough to warm our hearts with anticipation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Stratford Gallery: or the Shakspeare Sisterhood_. Comprising
+Forty-five Ideal Portraits, described by HENRIETTA LEE PALMER.
+Illustrated. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
+
+This book is what it purports to be,--not a collection of elaborate
+essays devoted to metaphysical analysis or to conjectural emendations
+of doubtful lines,--but a series of ideal portraits of the women of
+Shakspeare's plays. The reader may fancy himself led by an intelligent
+cicerone who pauses before each picture and with well-chosen words
+tells enough of the story to present the heroine, and then gives her
+own conception of the character, with such hints concerning manners and
+personal peculiarities as a careful study of the play may furnish. The
+narrations are models of neatness and brevity, yet full enough to give
+a clear understanding of the situation to any one unacquainted with it.
+The creations of Shakspeare have a wonderful completeness and vitality;
+and yet the elements of character are often mingled so subtilely that
+the sharpest critics differ widely in their estimates. Nothing can be
+more fascinating than to follow closely the great dramatist, picking
+out from the dialogue a trait of form here, a whim of color there, and
+at last combining them into an harmonious whole, with the truth of
+outline, hue, and bearing preserved. Often as this has been done, there
+is room still for new observers, provided they bring their own eyes to
+the task, and do not depend upon the dim and warped lenses of the
+commentators.
+
+It is very rarely that we meet with so fresh, so acute, and so
+entertaining a student of Shakspeare as the author of this volume. Her
+observations, whether invariably just or not, are generally taken from
+a new stand-point. She is led to her conclusions rather by instinct
+than by reason. She makes no apology for her judgments.
+
+  "I have no reason but a woman's reason;
+  I think her so because I think her so."
+
+And it would not be strange, if womanly instinct were to prove
+oftentimes a truer guide in following the waywardness or the apparent
+contradictions of a woman's nature than the cold logical processes of
+merely intellectual men.
+
+To the heroines who are most truly _women_ the author's loyalty is pure
+and intense. Imogen, the "chaste, ardent, devoted, beautiful"
+wife,--Juliet, whose "ingenuousness and almost infantile simplicity"
+endear her to all hearts,--Miranda, that most ethereal creation, type
+of virgin innocence,--Cordelia, with her pure, filial devotion,--are
+painted with loving, sympathetic tenderness.
+
+Altogether, this is a book which any admirer of the poet may read with
+pleasure; and especially to those who have not ventured to think wholly
+for themselves it will prove a most useful and agreeable companion.
+
+It is a matter of regret that the characters of the greatest of
+dramatists should not have been embodied by the greatest of painters.
+But no Michel Angelo, or Raphael, or Correggio, has illustrated these
+wonderful creations; and the man who is capable of appreciating
+Miranda, or Ophelia, or Desdemona, finds the ideal heads of the
+painters, of our day at least, tame, vapid, and unsatisfactory. The
+heroine, as imaged in his mind, is arrayed in a loveliness which limner
+never compassed. We cannot promise our readers that the engravings in
+this beautifully printed and richly bound volume will prove to be
+exceptions to the usual rule. They are from designs by English
+artists,--"Eminent Hands," in the popular phrase; the faces are often
+quite striking and expressive, and, up to a certain point,
+characteristic; moreover, they are smoothly finished, and will compare
+favorably with those in fashionable gift-books. Without being in the
+least degree examples of a high style of Art in its absolute sense,
+they answer well the purpose for which they were designed. Indeed, if
+they were more truly ideal, and, at the same time, more truly human,
+they would doubtless be far less popular.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Ernest Carroll, or Artist-Life in Italy_. A Novel, in Three Parts.
+Boston; Ticknor & Fields. 1858.
+
+This book is not strictly of the kind which the Germans call the
+Art-Novel, and yet we know not how else to class it. The author has
+spun a somewhat improbable story as the thread for his reflections on
+Art and his reminiscences of artists and travel. We confess that we
+should have liked it better, had he made his book simply a record of
+experience and reflection. But there are many admirable things in this
+little volume, which is evidently the work of a person of refined
+artistic culture and clear intelligence. Of especial value we reckon
+the reminiscences of Allston and his methods; and it seems a little
+singular, since the scene is laid chiefly in Florence and in 1847, that
+we get nothing more satisfactory than a single anecdote about the elder
+Greenough, whose life and works and thoroughly emancipated style of
+thought have done more to honor American Art than those of any other
+man, except Allston.
+
+We rather regret that the author had not made his book more of a
+journal, and recorded directly his own impressions, because he shows a
+decided ability in bringing scenes before the eye of the reader. The
+sketches of Doney's _Caffe_ and the Venetian _improvvisatore_ are
+especially vivid; so is that of the old picture-dealer; though in all
+we think some of the phrases might have been softened with advantage.
+We enter our earnest protest also against the Ruskin chapter. The
+scenes at Graefenberg are fresh, lively, and interesting. The book is
+also enlivened by many entertaining anecdotes of living American
+artists and _savans_, which are told with the skill of a practised
+_raconteur_. We hope to hear from the author again, and in a form which
+shall enable his knowledge and experience in matters of Art to have
+freer play than the exigencies of a novel allow them, and in which his
+abilities in the discussion of aesthetics shall have more scope given
+them than that of the _obiter dicta_ in a story.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Hymns of the Ages_. Being Selections from the Lyra Catholica,
+Apostolica, Germanica, and other Sources, with an Introduction by PROF.
+F.D. HUNTINGTON. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1859. Square 8vo. pp.
+300.
+
+In this exquisitely-printed volume the editors have collected specimens
+of the devotional poetry of the Christian Church, including
+translations from the Roman Breviary, as well as from German hymns,
+with a few from English sources. There has been no attempt, evidently,
+to conform to the requirements of any creed; the devout Catholic, as
+well as the Episcopalian Churchman, will find here the favorite
+aspirations, penitential strains, and ascriptions of praise, which have
+been consecrated by generations of worshippers. To American readers the
+collection will be substantially new, since hardly a dozen of the hymns
+are to be found in the volumes in use in our churches. If it had been
+the purpose of the editors to gather all the classic religious poetry,
+to form a sacred anthology, it would have been necessary to print a
+great number of the hymns in modern collections; and the volume would
+in that case have lost in novelty what it gained in completeness.
+
+Those who like to go back to the ancient forms of worship for
+inspiration, who feel the force of association in the lyrics which have
+come down from almost apostolic times, will find in this book an aid to
+devotion and religious contemplation. With a little more care in
+excluding strongly-marked doctrinal stanzas, the "Hymns of the Ages,"
+if less characteristic, would have been more truly _catholic_, and
+therefore acceptable to a larger portion of the Church Universal.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOLUME 3, ISSUE
+15, JANUARY, 1859***
+
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