Chapter 2

"Have I not in my time heard lions roar? Have I not heard the sea, puft up with wind, Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat? Have I not heard great ordnance in the field, And Heaven's artillery thunder in the skies? Have I not in the pitched battle heard Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?"

SHAKSPEARE.

Europe had never seen so complete or so powerful an army as that which was now assembled within sight of Valenciennes. The city was already regarded as in our possession; and crowds of military strangers, from every part of the Continent, came day by day pouring into the allied camp. Nothing could equal the admiration excited by the British troops. The admirable strength, stature, and discipline of the men, and the successes which they had already obtained, made them the first object of universal interest; and the parades of our regiments formed a daily levee of princes and nobles. It was impossible that soldiership could be on a more stately scale. Other times have followed, which have shown the still statelier sight of nations marching to battle; but the hundred thousand men who marched under Cobourg to take up their positions in the lines of Valenciennes, filled the eye of Europe; and never was there a more brilliant spectacle. At length orders were sent to prepare for action, and the staff of the army were busily employed in examining the ground. The Guards were ordered to cover the operations of the pioneers; and all was soon in readiness for the night on which the first trench was to be opened. A siege is always the most difficult labour of an army, and there is none which more perplexes a general. To the troops, it is incessant toil--to the general, continual anxiety. The men always have the sense of that disgust which grows upon the soldier where he contemplates a six weeks' delay in the sight of stone walls; and the commander, alive to every sound of hazard, feels that he yet must stand still, and wait for the attack of every force which can be gathered round the horizon. He may be the lion, but he is the lion in a chain--formidable, perhaps, to those who may venture within its length, but wholly helpless against all beyond. Yet those feelings, inevitable as they are, were but slightly felt in our encampment round the frowning ramparts of the city. We had already swept all before us; we had learned the language of victory; we were in the midst of a country abounding with all the good things of life, and which, though far from exhibiting the luxuriant beauty of the British plains, was yet rich and various enough to please the eye. Our camp was one vast scene of gaiety. War had, if ever, laid aside its darker draperies, and "grim-visaged" as it is, had smoothed its "wrinkled front." The presence of so many visitors of the highest rank gave every thing the air of royalty. High manners, splendid entertainments, and all the habits and indulgences of the life of courts, had fled from France only to be revived in Flanders. Our army was a court on the march; and the commander of the British--the honest, kind-hearted, and brave Duke of York--bore his rank like a prince, and gathered involuntarily round him as showy a circle as ever figured in St James's, or even in the glittering saloons of the Tuileries. Hunting parties, balls, suppers, and amateur theatrical performances, not merely varied the time, but made it fly. Hope had its share too, as well as possession. Paris was before us; and on the road to the capital lay but the one fortress which was about to be destroyed with our fire, and of which our engineers talked with contempt as the decayed work of "old" Vauban.

But the course of victory is like the course of love, which, the poet says, "never does run smooth." The successes of the Allies had been too rapid for their cabinets; and we had found ourselves on the frontiers of France before the guardian genii of Europe, in the shape of the stiff-skirted and full-wigged privy councillors of Vienna and Berlin, had made up their minds as to our disposal of the prize. Startling words suddenly began to make their appearance in the despatches, and "indemnity for the past and security for the future"--those luckless phrases which were yet destined to form so large a portion of senatorial eloquence, and give birth to so prolific an offspring of European ridicule--figured in diplomacy for the first time; while our pioneers stood, pickaxe in hand, waiting the order to break ground. We thus lost day after day. Couriers were busy, while soldiers were yawning themselves to death; and the only war carried on was in the discontents of the military councils. Who was to have Valenciennes? whose flag was to be hoisted on Lille? what army was to garrison Conde? became national questions. Who was to cut the favourite slices of France, employed all the gossips of the camp, in imitation of the graver gossips of the cabinet; and, in the mean time, we were saved the trouble of the division, by a furious decree from the Convention ordering every man in France to take up arms--converting all the churches into arsenals, anathematizing the German princes as so many brute beasts, and recommending to their German subjects the grand republican remedy of the guillotine for all the disorders of the government, past, present, and to come.

Circumstances seldom give an infantry officer more than a view of the movements in front of his regiment; but my intimacy with Guiscard allowed me better opportunities. Among his variety of attainments he was a first-rate engineer, and he was thus constantly employed where any thing connected with the higher departments of the staff required his science. He was now attached to the Prussian mission, which moved with the headquarters of the British force, and our intercourse was continued. I thus joined the reconnoitring parties under his command, and received the most important lessons in my new art. But one of my first questions to him, had been the mode of his escape on the night of our volunteer reconnoisance.

"Escape? Why, I committed the very blunder against which I had cautioned you, and fell into the hands of the first hussar patrole I could possibly have met. But my story is of the briefest kind. I had not rode forward above an hour, when my horse stumbled over something in that most barbaric of highways, and lamed himself. I then ought to have returned; but curiosity urged me on, and leading my unfortunate charger by the bridle, I threaded my way through the most intricate mesh of hedge and ditch within my travelling experience. The trampling of horses, and the murmur of men in march, at last caught my ear; and I began to be convinced that the movement which I expected from Dampier's activity was taking place. I then somewhat questioned my own _insouciance_ in having thrust you into hazard; and attempted to make my way across the country in your direction. To accomplish this object I turned my horse loose, taking it for granted that, lame as he was, he was too good a Prussian to go any where but to his own camp. This accounts for his being found at morn. I had, however, scarcely thus taken the chance of losing a charger which had cost me a hundred and fifty gold ducats, when I received a shot from behind a thicket which disabled my left arm, and I was instantly surrounded by a dozen French hussars. I was foolish enough to be angry, and angry enough to fight. But as I was neither Samson, nor they Philistines, my sabre was soon beaten down, and I had only to surrender. I was next mounted on the croup of one of their horses, and after a gallop of half an hour reached the French advanced guard. It was already hurrying on, and I must confess that, from the silence of the march and the rapid pace of their battalions, I began to be nervous about the consequences, and dreaded the effects of a surprise on some of our camps. My first apprehension, however, was for you. I thought that you must have been entangled in the route of some of the advancing battalions, and I enquired of the colonel of the first to whom I was brought, whether he had taken any prisoners.

"'Plenty,' was the answer of the rough Republican--'chiefly peasants and spies; but we have shot none of them yet. That would make too much noise; so we have sent them to the rear, where I shall send you. You will not be shot till we return to-morrow morning, after having cut up those _chiens Anglais_.'"

I could not avoid showing my perturbation at the extreme peril in which this distinguished man had involved himself on my account; and expressed something of my regret and gratitude.

"Remember, Marston," was his good-humoured reply, "that, in the first place, the Frenchman was not under circumstances to put his promise in practice--he having found the English _chien_ more than a match for the French wolf; and, in the next, that twelve hours form a very important respite in the life of the campaigner. I was sent to the rear with a couple of hussars to watch me until the arrival of the general, who was coming up with the main body. On foot and disarmed, I had only to follow them to the next house, which was luckily one of the little Flemish inns. My hussars found a jar of brandy, and got drunk in a moment; one dropped on the floor--the other fell asleep on his horse. I had now a chance of escape; but I was weary, wounded, and overcome with vexation. It happened, as I took my last view of my keeper outside, nodding on his horse's neck, that I glanced on a huge haystack in the stable-yard. The thought struck me, that helpless as I was, I might contrive to give an alarm to some of the British videttes or patroles, if your gallant countrymen should condescend to employ such things. I stole down into the yard, lantern in hand; thrust it into the stack, and had the satisfaction of seeing it burst into a blaze. I made my next step into the stable, to find a horse for my escape; but the French patroles had been before me, and those clever fellows seldom leave any thing to be gleaned after them. What became of my escort I did not return to enquire; but I heard a prodigious galloping through the village, and found the advantage of the flame in guiding me through as perplexing a maze of thicket and morass as I ever attempted at midnight. The sound of the engagement which followed directed me to the camp; and I remain, a living example to my friend, of the advantage of twelve hours between sentence and execution."

I had another wonder for him; and nothing could exceed his gratification when he heard, that his act had enabled me to give the alarm of the French advance. But for that blaze I should certainly have never been aware of their movement; the light alone had led me into the track of the enemy, and given me time to make the intelligence useful.

"The worst of all this," said he, with his grave smile, "is that the officer in command of your camp on that night will get a red riband and a regiment; and that you will get only the advantage of recollecting, that in war, and perhaps in every situation of life, nothing is to be despaired of, and nothing is to be left untried. A candle in a lantern, properly used, probably saved both our lives, the lives of some thousands of your brave troops, the fate of the campaign, and, with it, half the thrones of Europe, trembling on the chance of a first campaign. I shall yet have some of my mystical countrymen writing an epic on my Flemish lantern."

During this little narrative, we had been riding over the bleak downs which render the environs of Valenciennes such a barren contrast to the general luxuriance of northern France; and were examining the approaches to the city, when Guiscard called to his attendant for his telescope. We were now in the great coal-field of France; but the miners had fled, and left the plain doubly desolate. "Can those," said he, "be the miners returning to their homes? for if not, I am afraid that we shall have speedy evidence of the hazards of inactivity." But the twilight was now deepening, and neither of us could discern any thing beyond an immense mass of men, in grey cloaks, hurrying towards the city. I proposed that we should ride forward, and ascertain the facts. He checked my rein. "No! Amadis de Gaul, or Rolando, or by whatever name more heroic your chivalry prefers being called, we must volunteer no further. My valet shall return to the camp and bring us any intelligence which is to be found there, while we proceed on our survey of the ground for our batteries."

We had gone but a few hundred yards, and I was busily employed in sketching the profile of the citadel, when we heard the advance of a large party of British cavalry, with several of the staff, and the Duke of York, then a remarkably handsome young man, at their head. I had seen the Duke frequently on our parades in England; but even the brief campaign had bronzed his cheek, and given him the air which it requires a foreign campaign to give. He communicated the sufficiently interesting intelligence, that since the victory over Dampier, the enemy had collected a strong force from their garrisons, and after throwing ten thousand men into Valenciennes, had formed an intrenched camp, which was hourly receiving reinforcements. "But we must put a stop to that," said the Duke, with a smile; "and, to save them trouble and ourselves time, we shall attack them to-morrow." He then addressed himself to Guiscard, with the attention due to his name and rank, and conversed for a few minutes on the point of attack for the next day--examined my sketch--said some flattering words on its correctness, and galloped off.

"Well," said Guiscard, as he followed with his glance the flying troop, "war is a showy spectacle, and I can scarcely wonder that it should be the game of princes; but a little more common sense in our camps would have saved us to-morrow's battle. The delays of diplomacy are like the delays of law--the estate perishes before the process is at an end. But now to our work." We rode to the various points from which a view of the newly arrived multitude could be obtained. Their fires began to blaze; and we were thus enabled to ascertain at once their position, and, in some degree, their numbers. There could not be less than thirty thousand men, the arrival of the last few hours. "For this _contretemps_," said Guiscard, as he examined their bivouac with his telescope, "we have to thank only ourselves. Valenciennes ought to have been stormed within the first five minutes after we could have cut down those poplars for scaling ladders," and he pointed to the tapering tops of the large plantations lining the banks of the Scheldt; "but we have been quarreling over our portfolios, while the French have been gathering every rambling soldier within a hundred miles; and now we shall have a desperate struggle to take possession of those lines, and probably a long siege as finale to the operation. There, take my glass, and judge for yourselves." I looked, and if the novelty and singularity could have made me forget the serious business of the scene, I might have been amply amused. The whole French force were employed in preparing for the bivouac, and fortifying the ground, which they had evidently taken up with the intent of covering the city. All was in motion. At the distance from which we surveyed it, the whole position seemed one huge ant-hill. Torches, thickets burning, and the fires of the bivouac, threw an uncertain and gloomy glare over portions of the view, which, leaving the rest in utter darkness, gave an ominous and ghostly look to the entire. I remarked this impression to Guiscard, and observed that it was strange to see a "scene of the most stirring life so sepulchral."

"Why not?" was his reply. "The business is probably much the same."

"Yet sepulchral," I observed, "is not exactly the word which I would have used. There is too much motion, too much hurried and eager restlessness, too much of the wild and fierce activity of beings who have not a moment to lose, and who are busied in preparations for destruction."

"Have you ever been in the Sistine Chapel?" asked my companion.

"No; Italy has been hitherto beyond my flight; but the longing to see it haunts me."

"Well, then, when your good fortune leads you to Rome, let your first look be given to the noblest work of the pencil, and of Michael Angelo: glance at the bottom of his immortal picture, and you will see precisely the same wild activity, and the same strange and startling animation. The difference only is, that the actors here are men--there, fiends; here the scene is the field of future battle--there, the region of final torment. I am not sure that the difference is great, after all."

At daybreak, the British line was under arms. I feel all words fail, under the effort to convey the truth of that most magnificent display; not that a simple detail may not be adequate to describe the movements of a gallant army; but what can give the impression of the time, the form and pressure of collisions on which depended the broadest and deepest interests of the earth. Our war was then, what no war was since the old invasions under the Edwards and Henrys--national; it was as romantic as the crusades. England was fighting for none of the objects which, during the last three hundred years, had sent armies into the field--not for territory, not for glory, not for European supremacy, not even for self-defence. She was fighting for a Cause; but that was the cause of society, of human freedom, of European advance, of every faculty, feeling, and possession by which man is sustained in his rank above the beasts that perish. The very language of the great dramatist came to my recollection, at the moment when I heard the first signal-gun for our being put in motion.

"Now all the youth of England are on fire, And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies. Now thrive the armourers; and honour's thought Reigns solely in the breast of every man. They sell the pasture now to buy the horse, Following the mirror of all Christian kings With winged heels, as English Mercuries."

Our troops, too, had all the ardour which is added even to the boldest by the assurance of victory. They had never come into contact with the enemy but to defeat them, and the conviction of their invincibility was so powerful, that it required the utmost efforts of their officers to prevent their rushing into profitless peril. The past and the present were triumphant; while, to many a mind of the higher cast, the future was, perhaps, more glittering than either. In the same imperishable eloquence of poetry--

"For now sits expectation in the air, And hides a sword, from hilt unto the point, With crowns imperial, crowns and coronets, Promised to Harry and his followers."

The ambition of the English soldier may be of a more modified order than that of the foreigner; but the dream of poetry was soon realized in the crush of the Republicans, who had trampled alike the crown and the coronet in the blood of their owners. Twenty-seven thousand men were appointed for the attack of the French lines; and on the first tap of the drum, a general shout of exultation was given from all the columns. The cavalry galloped through the intervals to the front, and parks of the light guns were sent forward to take up positions on the few eminences which commanded the plain; but the day had scarcely broke, when one of those dense fogs, the customary evil of the country, fell suddenly upon the whole horizon, and rendered action almost impossible. Nothing could exceed the vexation of the army at this impediment; and if our soldiers had ever heard of Homer, there would have been many a repetition of his warrior's prayer, that "live or die, it might be in the light of day."

But in the interval, important changes were made in the formation of the columns. The French lines had been found of unexpected strength, and the Guards were pushed forward to head a grand division placed under command of General Ferrari. The British were, of course, under the immediate orders of an officer of their own, and a more gallant one never led troops under fire. I now, for the first time, saw the general who was afterwards destined to sweep the French out of Egypt, and inflict the first real blow on the military supremacy of France under Napoleon. General Abercromby was then in the full vigour of life; a strongly formed, manly figure, a quiet but keen eye, and a countenance of remarkable steadiness and thought, all gave the indications of a mind firm in all the contingencies of war. Exactly at noon, the fog drew up as suddenly as it had descended, and we had a full view of the enemy's army. No foreign force ever exhibits so showy and soldierly an appearance as the British. The blue of the French and Prussians looks black, and the white of the Austrian looks faded and feeble, compared with the scarlet. As I cast my glance along our lines, they looked like trails of flame. The French were drawn up in columns in front of their camp, which, by the most extraordinary exertion, they had covered during the night with numerous batteries, and fortified with a circle of powerful redoubts; the guns of the fortress defended their flank and rear, and their position was evidently of the most formidable kind. But all view was lost, from the moment when the head of our brigade advanced. Every gun that could be brought to bear upon us opened at once, and all was enveloped in smoke. For a full hour we could see nothing but the effect of the grape-shot on our own ranks as we poured on, and hear nothing but the roar of the batteries. But at length shouts began to arise in distant parts of the field, and we felt that the division which had been appointed to assault the rear of the camp was making progress. Walmoden, commanding a brigade under Ferrari, now galloped up, to ascertain whether our men were ready to assault the intrenchments. "The British troops are _always_ ready," was Abercromby's expressive, and somewhat indignant, answer. In the instant of our rushing forward, an aide-de-camp rode up, to acquaint the general that the column under the Duke of York had already stormed three redoubts. "Gentlemen," said Abercromby, turning to the colonels round him, "we must try to save our friends further trouble--forward!" Within a quarter of an hour we were within the enemy's lines, every battery was stormed or turned, and the French were in confusion. Some hurried towards the fortress, which now began to fire; a large body fled into the open country, and fell into the hands of his royal highness; and some, seizing the boats on the river, dropped down with the stream. All was victory: yet this was to be my day of ill luck. In pursuing the enemy towards the fortress, a battalion, which had attempted to cover the retreat, broke at the moment when my company were on the point of charging them. This was too tempting a chance to be resisted; we rushed on, taking prisoners at every step, until we actually came within sight of the gate by which the fugitives were making their escape into the town. But we were in a trap, and soon felt that we were discovered, by a heavy discharge of musketry from the rampart. We had now only to return on our steps, and I had just given the word, when the firing was renewed on a bastion, round which we were hurrying in the twilight. I felt a sudden shock, like that of electricity, which struck me down; I made a struggle to rise on my feet, but my strength wholly failed me, and I lost all recollection.

On my restoration to my senses, in a few hours after, I found that I had been carried into the town, and placed in the military hospital. My first impulse was, to examine whether any of my brave fellows had shared my misfortune; but all round me were French, wounded in the engagement of the day. My next source of congratulation was, that I had no limb broken. The shot had struck me in the temple, and glanced off without entering; but I had lost much blood, had been trampled, and felt a degree of exhaustion, which gave me the nearest conception to actual death.

Of the transactions of the field I knew nothing beyond my own share of the day; but I had seen the enemy in full flight, and that was sufficient. Within a day or two, the roaring of cannon, the increased bustle of the attendants, and the tidings that a black flag had been erected on the hospital, told me that the siege had begun. I shall pass over its horrors. Yet, what is all war but a succession of horrors? The sights which I saw, the sounds which I heard from hour to hour, were enough to sicken me of human nature. In the gloom and pain of my sleepless nights, I literally began to think it possible that a fiendish nature might supplant the human condition, and that the work before my eyes was merely an anticipation of those terrors, which to name startles the imagination and wrings the heart. Surrounded with agonies, the involuntary remark always came to my mind with renewed freshness, in the common occurrences of the hospital day. But, besides the sufferings of the wounded, a new species of suffering, scarcely less painful, and still more humiliating, began to be prominent. The provisions of the people, insufficiently laid in at the approach of the besiegers, rapidly failed, and the hospital itself was soon surrounded by supplicants for food. The distress, at last, became so excessive, that it amounted to agony. Emaciated figures of both sexes stole or forced their way into the building, to beg our rations, or snatch them from our feeble hands; and I often divided my scanty meal with individuals who had once been in opulent trade, or been ranked among the _semi-noblesse_ of the surrounding country. Sometimes I missed faces to which I had been accustomed among those unfortunate beings, and I heard a still more unhappy tale--shall I call it more unhappy? They had perished by the cannon-shot, which now poured into the city day and night, or had been buried in the ruins of some of the buildings, which were now constantly falling under the heaviest bombardment in the annals of war. Of those scenes I say no more. If the siege of a great fortress is the most trying of all hazards to the soldier without, what must it be to the wretches within? Valenciennes was once the centre of the lace manufactories of France. The war had destroyed them at once. The proprietors had fled, the thousands of young and old employed in those delicate and beautiful productions, had fled too, or remained only to perish of famine. A city of twenty thousand of the most ingenious artists was turning day by day into a vast cemetery. As I tossed on my mattress hour after hour, and heard the roar of the successive batteries, shuddered at the fall of the shells, and was tortured by the cries of the crowd flying from the explosions all night long--I gave the deepest curses of my spirit to the passion for glory. It is true, that nations must defend themselves; the soldier is a protector to the industry, the wealth, and the happiness of the country. I am no disciple of the theory, which, disclaiming the first instinct of nature, self-preservation, invites injury by weakness, and creates war by impunity; but the human race ought to outlaw the man who dares to dream of conquest, and builds his name in the blood of man.

On my capture, one of my first wishes had been to acquaint my regiment with the circumstances of my misfortune, and to relieve my friends of their anxiety for the fate of a brother officer. But this object, which, in the older days of continental campaigning, would have been acceded to with a bow and a compliment by Monsiegneur le Comte, or Son Altesse Royale, the governor, was sturdily refused by the colonel in charge of the hospital--a firm Republican, and the son of a cobbler, who, swearing by the Goddess of Reason, threatened to hang over the gate the first man who dared to bring him another such proposal. I next sent my application to the commandant, a brave old soldier, who had served in the royal armies, and had the feelings of better times; but it was probably intercepted, for no answer came. This added deeply to my chagrin. My absence must give rise to conjecture; my fall had been unseen even by my men; and while I believed that my character was above the scandal of either pusillanimity or desertion, it still remained at the mercy of all.

But chance came to my relief. It happened that I had unconsciously won the particular regard of one of the Beguines who attended the hospital; and my _tristesse_, which she termed 'effrayante,' one evening attracted her peculiar notice. Let not my vanity be called in question; for my fair admirer was at least fifty years old, and was about the figure and form of one of her country churns, although her name was Juliet! Pretty as the name was, the Beguine had not an atom of the poetic about her. Romance troubled her not. Yet with a face like the full moon, and a pile of petticoats which would have made a dowdy of the "Belvedere Diana," she was a capital creature. Juliet, fat as she was, had the natural frolic of a squirrel; she was everywhere, and knew every thing, and did every thing for every body; her tongue and her feet were constantly busy; and I scarcely knew which was the better emblem of the perpetual motion. My paleness was peculiarly distressing to her; "it hurt her feelings;" it also hurt her honour; for she had been famous for her nursing, and as she told me, with her plump hands upon her still plumper hips, and her head thrown back with an air of conscious merit, "she had saved more than the doctors had killed." I had some reluctance to tell her the cause of my _tristesse_; for I knew her zeal, and I dreaded her plunging into some hazard with the authorities. But who has ever been able to keep a secret, where it was the will of the sex to extort it? Juliet obtained mine before she left the ward for the night; and desired me to give her a letter, which she pledged herself to transmit to my regiment. But this I determined to refuse, and I kept my determination. I had no desire to see my "fat friend" suspended from the pillars of the portico; or to hear of her, at least, being given over to the mercies of the provost-marshal. We parted, half in anger on her side, and with stern resolution on mine.

During the day Juliet was not forthcoming, and her absence produced, what the French call, a "lively sensation"--which, in nine instances out of ten, means an intolerable sense of ennui--in the whole establishment. I shared the general uneasiness, and at length began to cast glances towards the gate, where, though I was not exactly prepared to see the corpulent virtues of my friend in suspension, I had some tremblings for the state, "_sain et sauf_;" of my Beguine. At last her face appeared at the opening of the great door, flushed with heat and good-nature, and, as it came moving through the crowd which gathered round her with all kinds of enquiries, giving no bad resemblance to the moon seen through a fog; whether distinct or dim, full and florid to the last. Her good-humoured visage revived me, as if I had met a friend of as many years standing as she numbered on her cradle. But all my enquiries for the news of earth outside the hospital, were answered only by an "order" to keep myself tranquil--prevent the discomposure of my pulse, and duly drink my ptisan. All this, however, was for the general ear. The feebleness which kept me confined to my bed during the day, had made my nights wakeful. On this night, whether on the anxiety of the day, or the heavier roar of the siege, for the bombardment was now at its height, I exhibited signs of returning fever, and the Beguine remained in attendance. But when the crowd had gone to such rest as they could find, amid the thunder of batteries and the bursting of shells, Juliet approached my pillow with a broad smile, which distended her good-natured mouth from ear to ear, and thrust under my pillow a small packet--the whole operation being followed by a finger pressed to her lips, and a significant glance to every corner of the huge melancholy hall, to see that all was secure. She then left me to my meditations!

The mysterious packet contained three letters; and, eager as I was for their perusal, I almost shuddered at their touch; for they must have been obtained with infinite personal peril, and if found upon the Beguine they might have brought her under the severest vengeance of the garrison. They were from Guiscard, Mariamne, and Mordecai. Thus to three individuals, all comparatively strangers, was my world reduced. But they were no common strangers; and I felt, while holding their letters in my hand, and almost pressing them to my heart, how much more strongly friendship may bind us than the ties of cold and negligent relationship. I opened the soldier's letter first. It was like every thing that Guiscard ever did; manly, yet kind. "Your disappearance in that unfortunate rencontre has created much sorrow and surprise; but the sorrow was all for your loss to _the_ 'corps of corps,' and the surprise was, that no tidings could be heard of you, whether fallen or surviving. The flag and trumpet sent in next morning to recover the remains of such as had suffered in that mad rush to the gates of the town, came back without being permitted to pass beyond the outworks, bringing a brutal message from the officer on duty, 'that the next flag should be fired on,' and that the 'brave soldiers of the Republic allowed of no compromise with the slaves of tyranny!' The bravado might be laughed at, but it left me in the dark relative to your fate; and if you are to be flattered by the feelings of men who cannot get at you but by cannon-shot, you may congratulate yourself on having had as many fine things said of you as would make an epitaph for a duke--and, I believe, with a sincerity at least equal to the best of them. I write all this laughingly now, but suspense makes heaviness of heart, and you cost me some uneasy hours, of course. I send you none of _our_ news; as you will hear all in good time, and communications on public matters might bring your messenger or yourself into difficulties. You are alive, and in good hands; that is the grand point. Your character is now in _my_ hands, and I shall take care of it; I shall see you a general officer yet, if you have not the greater luck to retire and live an honest farmer, sitting under your own fig-tree and your own vine, with an unromantic spouse, and some half-dozen of red-cheeked children. Farewell, we shall _soon_ see each other."

The last line evidently meant more than met the eye, and I was now just in the mind to indulge in the fantasies of my fair correspondent. They were like herself--a curious mixture of mirth and melancholy.

"Why I wished to write to you, or why I write at all--which, however, I do decorously at the side of my father--are questions which I have not taken the trouble of asking until this moment. But I am in Switzerland, where no one has time for any thing but worshipping mountain-tops, and falling down at the feet of cataracts. Whether it would add to Mr Marston's satisfaction I cannot presume to say, but I feel better, much better, than when I first came into this land of fresh breezes and beauty of all kinds--the population, of every rank, always excepted. If I were, like you, a philosopher, I should probably say that nature gets tired of her work, and after having struck off some part of it with all the spirit of an Italian painter, disdains the trouble of finishing; or, like a French 'fashionable,' coquettes with her own charms, and is determined to make the world adore her, in spite of her slippers and her shawl. Thus, nature, which gave the peacock a diadem on its head, and a throne in its tail, has given it a pair of frightful legs. And on the same charming principle, she has given Switzerland the finest of all possible landscapes, and filled them with the most startling of all possible physiognomies.

"But no more of theory. It has always made my head ache, and headachs are, I know, contagious; so I spare you. Yet, have you a moment, among your thousand and one avocations, to remember my father--or me? I beg that I may not impede the march of armies, or shock the balance of Europe, while I solicit you to give me a single line--no more; a mere 'annonce' of any thing that can tell me of your 'introuvable' friend Lafontaine. This is _not_ for myself. The intelligence is required for a sister of his whom I have lately met in this country--a showy "citizeness" of Zurich, _embonpoint_ and matronly, married to one of the portly burghers of the city, and exemplary in all the arts of sheep-shearing, wool-spinning, and cheese-making; a mother, surrounded _a la Francaise_ with a host of Orlandos, Hyacintes, Aristomenes, and Apollos--pretty children, with the Frenchman developing in all its gaudiness; the Switzer remaining behind, until it shall come forth in cloudy brows, and a face stamped with money-making. Madame Spiegler is still not beyond a waltz, and in the very whirl of one last night, she turned to me and _implored_ that I should 'move heaven and earth,' as she termed it--with her blue eyes thrown up to the chandelier, and her remarkably pretty and well-_chausse'd_ feet still beating time to the dance--to bring her disconsolate bosom tidings of her '_frere, si bien aime, si malheureux_.' I promised, and she flew off instantly into the very _core_ of a dance, consisting of at least a hundred couples.

"I have just returned from a drive along the shore of the Leman. The recollection of Madame Spiegler, rolling and rushing through the waltz like a dolphin through the waves; or like any thing caught in an enormous whirlpool, sweeping round perpetually until it was swept out of sight, had fevered me. The air here is certainly delicious. It has a sense of life--a vivid, yet soft, freshness, that makes the mere act of breathing it delightful. But I have mercy on you--not one word of Clarens, not one word of Meillerie. Take it for granted that Ferney is burnt down, as it well might be without any harm to the picturesque; and that Jean Jacques never wrote, played the knave, or existed. If I were a Swiss Caliph Omar, I should make a general seizure, to be followed by a general conflagration, of every volume that has ever touched on the wit and wickedness of the one, or the intolerable sensibility of the other. I should next extend the flame to all tours, meditations, and musings on hills, valleys, and lakes; prohibit all sunset 'sublimities' as an offence against the state; and lay all raptures at the 'distant view of Mont Blanc,' or the 'ascent of the Rhighi,' if not under penalty of prison, at least under a bond never to be seen in the territory again. But I must make my _adieux_. _Apropos_, if you _should_ accidentally hear any thing of your _pelerin-a-pied_ friend Lafontaine--for I conjecture that he has gone to discover the fountains of the Nile, or is at this moment a candidate for the office of court-chamberlain at Timbuctoo--let me hear it. Madame Spiegler is really uneasy on the subject, though it has not diminished either her weight or her velocity, nor will prevent her waltzing till the end of the world, or of herself. _One_ sentence--nay, one syllable--will be enough.

"This light _is_ delicious, and it is only common gratitude to nature to acknowledge, that she has done something in the scene before my casement at this sweet and quiet hour, which places her immeasurably above the _decorateurs_ of a French _salon_. The sun has gone, and the moon has not yet come. There is scarcely a star; and yet a light lingers, and floats, and descends over everything--hill, forest, and water--like the light that one sometimes sees in dreams. All dream-like--the work of a spell laid over a horizon of a hundred miles. I should scarcely be surprised to see visionary forms rising from these woods and waters, and ascending in bright procession into the clouds. I hear, at this moment, some touches of music, which I could almost believe to come from invisible instruments as they pass along with the breeze. Still, may I beg of you, Mr Marston, not to suppose that I mean to extend this letter to the size of a government despatch, nor that the mark which I find I have left on my paper, is a tear? _I_ have no sorrow to make its excuse. But here, one weeps for pleasure, and I can forgive even Rousseau his--'Je m'attendrissais, je soupirais, et je pleurais comme un enfant. Combien de fois, m'arretant pour pleurer plus a mon aise, assis sur une grosse pierre, je me suis amuse a voir tomber mes larmes dans l'eau.' Rousseau was lunatic, but he was _not_ lunatic when he wrote this, or _I_ am growing so too. For fear of that possible romance, I say, farewell.

"P.S.--Remember Madame Spiegler. _Toujours a vous_--MARIAMNE."

My third letter was Mordecai to the life--a bold, hurried, yet clear view of the political bearings of the time. It more than ever struck me, in the course of his daring paragraphs, what a capital leader he would have made for a Jewish revolution; if one could imagine the man of a thousand years of slavery grasping the sword and unfurling the banner. Yet bold minds _may_ start up among a fallen people; and when the great change, which will assuredly come, is approaching, it is not improbable that it will be begun by some new and daring spirit throwing off the robes of humiliation, and teaching Israel to strike for freedom by some gallant example--a new Moses smiting the Egyptian, and marching from the house of bondage, the fallen host of the oppressor left weltering in the surge of blood behind.

After some personal details, and expressions of joy at the recovering health of his idolized but wayward daughter, he plunged into politics. "I have just returned," said he, "from a visit to some of our German kindred. You may rely upon it, that a great game is on foot. _Your_ invasion is a jest. Your troops will fight, I allow, but your cabinets will betray. I have seen enough to satisfy me, that, if you do not take Paris within the next three months, you will not take it within ten times the number of years. Of course, I make no attempt at prediction. I leave infallibility to the grave fools of conclaves and councils; but the French mob will beat them all. What army can stand before a pestilence? When I was last in Sicily, I went to the summit of Etna during the time of an eruption. On my way, I slept at one of the convents on the slope of the mountain. I was roused from my sleep by a midnight clamour in the court of the convent--the monks were fluttering in all corners, like frightened chickens. I came down from my chamber, and was told the cause of the alarm in the sudden turn of a stream of the eruption towards the convent. I laughed at the idea of hazard from such a source, when the building was one mass of stone, and, of course, as I conceived, incombustible. '_Santissima Madre!_' exclaimed the frightened superior, who stood wringing his hands and calling on all the saints in his breviary; 'you do not know of what stone it is built. All is lava; and at the first touch of the red-hot rocks now rolling down upon us, every stone in the walls will melt like wax in the furnace.' The old monk was right. We lost no time in making our escape to a neighbouring pinnacle, and from it saw the stream of molten stone roll round the walls, inflame them, scorch, swell, and finally melt them down. Before daylight, the site of the convent was a gulf of flame. This comes of sympathy in stones--what will it be in men? Wait a twelvemonth; and you will see the flash and flame of French republicanism melting down every barrier of the Continent. The mob has the mob on its side for ever. The offer of liberty to men who have spent a thousand years under despotism, is irresistible. Light may blind, but who loves utter darkness? The soldier may melt down like the rest; he is a man, and may be a madman like the rest; he, too, is one of the multitude.

"Their language may be folly or wisdom, it may be stolen from the ramblings of romance writers, or be the simple utterance of irrepressible instincts within; but it is the language which I hear every where around me. Men eat and drink to it, work and play to it, awake and sleep to it. It is in the rocks and the streams, in the cradle, and almost on the deathbed. It rings in the very atmosphere; and what must be the consequence? If the French ever cross the Rhine, they will sweep every thing before them, as easily as a cloud sweeps across the sky, and with as little power in man to prevent them. A cluster of church steeples or palace spires could do no more to stop the rush of a hurricane.

"You will call me a panegyrist of Republicanism, or of France. I have no love for either. But I may admire the spring of the tiger, or even give him credit for the strength of his tusks, and the grasp of his talons, without desiring to see him take the place of my spaniel on the hearth-rug, or choosing him as the companion of my travels. _I_ dread the power of the multitude, _I_ despair of its discipline, and _I_ shrink from the fury of its passions. A republic in France can be nothing but a funeral pile, in which the whole fabric is made, not for use, but for destruction; which man cannot inhabit, but which the first torch will set in a blaze from the base to the summit; and upon which, after all, corpses alone crown the whole hasty and tottering erection. But this I _shall_ say, that Germany is at this moment on the verge of insurrection; and that the first French flag which waves on the right bank of the Rhine will be the signal of explosion. I say more; that if the effect is to be permanent, pure, or beneficial, it will _not_ be the result of the tricolor. The French conquests have always been brilliant, but it was the brilliancy of a soap-bubble. A puff of the weakest lips that ever breathed from a throne, has always been enough to make the nation conquerors; but the hues of glory no sooner began to colour the thin fabric, than it burst before the eye, and the nation had only to try another bubble. It is my impression, that the favouritism of Revolution at this moment will even receive its death-blow from France itself. All is well while nothing is seen of it but the blaze ascending, hour by hour, from the fragments of her throne, or nothing heard but the theatrical songs of the pageants which perform the new idolatry of 'reason.' But when the Frenchman shall come among nations with the bayonet in his right hand and with the proclamation in his left--when he turns his charger loose into the corn-field, and robs the peasant whom he harangues on the rights of the people--this republican baptism will give no new power to the conversion. The German phlegm will kick, the French _vivacite_ will scourge, and then alone will the true war begin. Yet all this may be but the prelude. When the war of weapons has been buried in its own ashes, another war may begin, the war of minds--the struggle of mighty nations, the battle of an ambition of which our purblind age has not even a glimpse--a terrible strife, yet worthy of the immortal principle of man, and to be rewarded only by a victory which shall throw all the exploits of soldiership into the shade."

While I was meditating on the hidden meanings of this letter, in which my Jewish friend seemed to have imbibed something of the dreamy spirit of Germany itself, I was startled by a tremendous uproar outside the hospital--the drums beat to arms, the garrison hastily mustered, the population poured into the streets, and a strong and startling light in all the casements, showed that some great conflagration had just begun. The intelligence was soon spread that the Hotel de Ville, the noblest building in the city, a fine specimen of Italian architecture of the seventeenth century, and containing some incomparable pictures by the Italian masters, and a _chef-d'oeuvre_ of Rubens, had been set on fire by a bomb, and was now in a blaze from battlement to ground. The next intelligence was still more painful. The principal convent of the city, which was close in its rear, had taken fire, and the unfortunate nuns were seen at the windows in the most imminent danger of perishing. Feeble as I was, I immediately rose. The Beguine rushed in at the moment, wringing her hands and uttering the wildest cries of terror at the probable destruction of those unhappy women. I volunteered my services, which were accepted, and I hurried out to assist in saving them if possible. The spectacle was overwhelming.

The Hotel de Ville was a large and nearly insulated building, with a kind of garden-walk round three of its sides, which was now filled with the populace. The garrison exhibited all the activity of the national character in their efforts to extinguish the flames. Scaling-ladders were applied to the windows, men mounted them thick as bees; fire-buckets were passed from hand to hand, for the fire-engines had been long since destroyed by the cannonade; and there seemed to be some hope of saving the structure, when a succession of agonizing screams fixed every eye on the convent, where the fire had found its way to the stores of wood and oil, and shot up like the explosion of gunpowder. The efforts of the troops were now turned to save the convent; but the intense fury of the flame defeated every attempt. The scaling-ladders no sooner touched the casements than they took fire; the very walls were so hot that none could approach them; and every new gust swept down a sheet of flame, which put the multitude to flight in all directions. Artillery was now brought out to breach the walls; but while there remained a hundred and fifty human beings within, it was impossible to make use of the guns. All efforts at length ceased; and the horror was deepened, if such could be, by seeing now and then a distracted figure rush to a casement, toss up her arms to heaven, and then rush back again with a howl of despair.

I proposed to the French officers that they should dig under the foundations, and thus open a way of escape through the vaults. The attempt was made, but it had the ill success of all the rest. The walls were too massive for our strength, and the pickaxe and spade were thrown aside in despair. From the silence which now seemed to reign within, and the volumes of smoke which poured from the casements, it began to be the general impression that the fate of the nuns was already decided; and the officers were about to limber up their guns and retire, when I begged their chief to make one trial more, and fire at a huge iron door which closed a lofty archway leading to the Hotel de Ville. He complied; a six-pound ball was sent against the door, and it flew off its hinges. To the boundless exultation and astonishment of all, we saw the effect of this fortunate shot, in the emergence of the whole body of the nuns from the smoking and shattered building. They had been driven, step by step, from the interior to the long stone-built passage which in old times had formed a communication with the town, and which had probably not been used for a century. The troops and populace now rushed into the Hotel de Ville to meet and convey them to places of safety. I followed with the same object, yet with some unaccountable feeling that I had a personal interest in the rescue. The halls and apartments were on the huge and heavy scale of ancient times, and I was more than once bewildered in ranges of corridors filled with the grim reliques of civic magnificence, fierce portraits of forgotten men of city fame, portentous burghers, and mailed captains of train bands. The unhappy women were at length gathered from the different galleries to which they had scattered in their fright, and were mustered at the head of the principal entrance, or _grand escalier_, at whose foot the escort was drawn up for their protection.

But the terrors of that fearful night were not yet at an end. The light of the conflagration had caught the eye of the besiegers, and a whole flight of shells were sent in its direction. Some burst in the street, putting the populace to flight on every side; and, while the women were on the point of rushing down the stair, a crash was heard above, and an enormous shell burst through the roof, carrying down shattered rafters, stones, and a cloud of dust. The batteries had found our range, and a succession of shells burst above our heads, or tore their way downwards. All was now confusion and shrieking. At length one fell on the centre of the _escalier_, rolled down a few steps, and, bursting, tore up the whole stair, leaving only a deep gulf between us and the portal. The women fled back through the apartment. I now regarded all as lost; and expecting the roof to come down every moment on my head, and hearing nothing round me but the bursting and hissing of those horrible instruments of havoc, I hurried through the chambers, in the hope of finding some casement from which I might reach the ground. They were all lofty and difficult of access, but I at length climbed up to one, from which, though twenty or thirty feet from the path below, I determined to take the plunge. I was about to leap, when, to my infinite surprise, I heard my name pronounced. I stopped. I heard the words--"_Adieu, pour toujours!_" All was dark within the room, but I returned to discover the speaker. It was a female on her knees near the casement, and evidently preparing to die in prayer. I took her hand, and led her passively towards the window; she wore the dress of a nun, and her veil was on her face. As she seemed fainting, I gently removed it to give her air. A sheet of flame suddenly threw a broad light across the garden, and in that face I saw--Clotilde! She gave a feeble cry, and fell into my arms.

Our escape was accomplished soon after, by one of the scaling-ladders which was brought at my call; and before I slept, I had seen the being in whom my very existence was concentrated, safely lodged with the principal family of the town. Slept, did I say? I never rested for an instant. Thoughts, reveries, a thousand wild speculations, rose, fell, chased each other through my brain, and all left me feverish, half-frantic, and delighted.

At the earliest moment which could be permitted by the formalities of France, even in a besieged town, I flew to Clotilde. She received me with the candour of her noble nature. Her countenance brightened with sudden joy as she approached me. In the _salle de reception_ she sat surrounded by the ladies of the family, still full of enquiries on the perils of the night, congratulations on her marvellous escape, and no slight approval of the effect of the convent costume on the contour of her fine form and expressive features. My entrance produced a diversion in her favour; and I was showered with showy speeches from the seniors of the circle; the younger portion suddenly relapsing into that frigid propriety which the Mademoiselle retains until she becomes the Madame, and then flings off for ever like her girlish wardrobe. But their eyes took their full share, and if glances at the "Englishman" could have been transfered into words, I should have enjoyed a very animated conversation on the part of the _Jeunes Innocenes_. But I shrank from the panegyric of my "heroism," as it was pronounced in all the tones of courtesy; and longed for the voice of Clotilde alone. The circle at last withdrew, and I was left to the most exquisite enjoyment of which the mind of man is capable--the full, fond, and faithful outpouring of the heart of the woman he loves. Strange to say, I had never exchanged a syllable with Clotilde before; and yet we now as deeply understood each other--were as much in each other's confidence, and had as little of the repulsive ceremonial of a first interview, as if we had conversed for years.

"You saved my life," said she; "and you are entitled to my truest gratitude to my last hour. I had made up my mind to die. I was exhausted in the attempt to escape from that horrible convent. When at last I reached the Hotel de Ville, and found that all the sisterhood had been driven back from the great stair by the flames, I gave up all hope: and may I acknowledge, unblamed, to you--but from _you_ what right have I now to conceal any secret of my feelings?--I was not unwilling to lay down a life which seemed to grow darker from day to day."

"You were wearied of your convent life?" said I, fixing my eyes on hers with eager enquiry. "But you must not tell me that you are a nun. The new laws of France forbid that sacrifice. My sweet Clotilde, while I live, I shall never recognise your vows."

"You need not," she answered, with a smile that glowed.

'Celestial rosy red, love's proper hue.'

"I have never taken them. The superior of the convent was my near relative, and I fled to her protection from the pursuit of one whom I never could have respected, and whom later thoughts have made me all but abhor."

"Montrecour! I shall pursue him through the world."

"No," said Clotilde; "he is as unworthy of your resentment as of my recollection. He is a traitor to his king and a disgrace to his nobility. He is now a general in the Republican service, Citizen Montrecour. But we must talk of him no more."

She blushed deeply, and after some hesitation, said, "I am perfectly aware that the marriages customary among our noblesse were too often contracted in the mere spirit of exclusiveness; and I own that the proposal of my alliance with the Marquis de Montrecour was a family arrangement, perfectly in the spirit of other days. But my residence in England changed my opinions on the custom of my country, and I determined never to marry." She stopped short, and with a faint smile, said, "But let us talk of something else." Her cheek was crimson, and her eyes were fixed on the ground.

"No, Clotilde, talk of nothing else. Talk of your feelings, your sentiments, of yourself, and all that concerns yourself. No subject on earth can ever be so delightful to your friend. But, talk of what you will, and I shall listen with a pleasure which no human being has ever given me before, or ever shall give me again."

She raised her magnificent eyes, and fixed them full upon me with an involuntary look of surprise, then grew suddenly pale, and closed them as if she were fainting. "I must listen," said she, "to this language no longer. I know you to be above deception. I know you to be above playing with the vanity of one unused to praise, and to such praise. But I have a spirit as high as your own. Let us be friends. It will give an additional honour to my name; shall I say"--and she faltered--"an additional interest to my existence. Now we must part for a while."

"Never!" was my exclamation. "The world does not contain two Clotildes. And you shall never leave me. You have just told me that I preserved your life. Why shall I not be its protector still? Why not be suffered to devote mine to making yours happy?" But the bitter thought struck me as I uttered the words--how far I was from the power of giving this incomparable creature the station in society which was hers by right! How feeble was my hope even of competence! How painfully I should look upon her beauty, her fine understanding, and her generous heart, humbled to the narrow circumstances of one whose life depended upon the chances of the most precarious of all professions, and whose success in that profession depended wholly on the caprice of fortune. But one glance more drove all doubts away, and I took her hand.

She looked at me with speechless embarrassment, sighed deeply, and a tear stole down her cheek. At length, withdrawing her hand, she said, in almost a whisper, and with an evident effort, "This must not be. I feel infinite honour in your good opinion--deeply grateful for your kindness. But this must not be. No. I should rather wear this habit for my life, than make so ungenerous a return to the noble spirit that can thus offer its friendship to a stranger."

"No, Clotilde, no. Again, in my turn, I say, this must not be; you are _no_ stranger. I know you at this hour as well as if I had known you from the first hour of my being. I gave my heart to you from the moment when I first saw you among your countrywomen in England. It required no time to make me feel that you were my fate. It was an instinct, a spell, a voice of nature, a voice of heaven within me!"

She listened and trembled. I again took the hand, which was withheld no more. "From that day, Clotilde, you were my thought by day and my dream by night. All my desires of distinction were, that it might be seen by your eye; all my hopes of fortune, that I might be enabled to lay it at your feet. If a throne were offered to me on condition of renouncing you, I should have rejected it. If it were my lot to labour in the humblest rank of life, with _you_ by my side I should have cheerfully laboured; and, with your hand in mine, I should have said, I have found what is worth the world--happiness!"

Tears flowed down her cheeks, which were now like marble. She feebly attempted to smile, while, with eyelids drooping, and her whole frame quivering with emotion, she murmured in broken accents, "It is impossible--utterly impossible! leave me. I must not bring you a portionless, a helpless, a nameless being--a mere dependent on your kindness, a burden on your fortune, an obstacle to your whole advance in the world!" A rich flush suddenly lighted up her lovely countenance, and a new splendour flashed from her eyes. She threw back her head loftily, and looking upwards, as if to draw thoughts from above--"Sir," said she, "I am as proud as you. I have had noble ancestors; I have borne a noble name. If that name has fallen, it is in the common wreck of my country. Our fortunes have sunk, only where the monarchy has gone down along with them; and I shall never degrade the memory of those ancestors, nor humiliate still more the fallen name of our house, by imposing my obscurity, my poverty, on one who has honoured me as you have done. Now--farewell! My resolution is fixed. Farewell, my friend! I shall never forget this day." She turned away her face, and wept abundantly; then, fixing a deep look on me, she added--"I own that it would be a consolation to Clotilde de Tourville to believe that she may be sometimes remembered; but, until times change, we meet no more--if they change not, we part for ever."

I was so completely startled, so thunderstruck, by this declaration, that I could not utter a word. I stood gazing at her with open lips. I felt a mist gathering over my eyes; a strange sensation about my heart chilled my whole frame. I tottered to the sofa and pressed my hand in pain upon my eyes; when I withdrew it, I was alone--Clotilde was gone, she had vanished with the silence of a vision.

I left the house immediately, in a state of mind which seemed like a dissolution of all my faculties. I could not speak--I could scarcely see--I could only gasp for air, and retain sufficient power over my limbs to guide my steps to my melancholy dwelling. There I threw myself on my rough bed, and lingered throughout the day in an exhaustion of mind and body, which I sometimes thought to be the approach of death. How little could Clotilde have intended that I should suffer thus for her high-toned delicacy! Still, in all my misery of soul, I did her justice. I remembered the countenance of melancholy beauty with which she announced her final determination. The accents of her impassioned voice continually rose in my recollection, giving the deepest testimony of a heart struggling at once with affection and a sense of duty. In my wildest reveries during that day and night of wretchedness, I felt that, if she could have spared me a single pang, she would have rejoiced to cheer, to console, to tranquillize me. Those were strange feelings for a rejected lover, but they were entirely mine. There was so lofty a spirit in her glance, so true a sincerity in her language, so pure and transparent a truth in her sighs, and smiles, and involuntary tears, that I acquitted her, from my soul, of all attempts to try, or triumph over, my devotion to her. More than once, during that night of anguish, I almost imagined the scene of the day actually passing again before my eyes. I saw her sorrows, and vainly endeavoured to subdue them; I heard her convulsive tones, and attempted to calm them; I reasoned with her, talked of our common helplessness, acknowledged the dignity and the delicacy of her conduct, and even gave her lip the kiss of peace and sorrow as I bade her farewell. Deep but exquisite illusion! which I cherished, and strove to renew; until, suddenly aroused by some changing of the sentinels, or passing of the attendants, I looked round, and saw nothing but the gloomy roof, the old flickering of the huge lantern hanging from the centre of the hall, and the beds where so many had slept their last, and which so many of the sleepers were never to leave with life. I then had the true experience of human passion. Love, in the light and gay, may be as sportive as themselves; in the calm and grave, it may be strong and deep; but in some, it is strong as tempest and consuming as flame.

I should probably have closed my days in that place of all afflicting sights and sounds, but for my good old Beguine. On her first visit at dawn, she lectured me prodigiously on the folly of exposing myself to the hazards of the night air, of which she evidently thought much more than of the Austrian cannon-balls. "They might shower upon the buildings as they pleased, but," said the Beguine, "if they kill, their business is done. It is your cold, your damp, your night air, that carries off, without letting any one know how," the perplexity of science on the subject plainly forming the chief evil in poor Juliet's mind.

"See my own condition," said she, striving to bring her recollections in aid of her advice. "At fifteen I was a barmaid at the Swartz Adler; there I ran in and out, danced at all the family fetes, and was as gay as a bird on the tree. But that life was too good to last. At twenty, a corporal of Prussian dragoons fell in love with me, or I with him--it is all the same. His regiment was ordered to Silesia, and away we all marched. But if ever there was a country of fogs, that was the one. There are, now and then, a few even in our delightful France; but, in Silesia, they have a patent for them, they have them _par privilege_; if men could eat them, there would never be a chance of starving in Silesia. So we all got sore throats. Cannon and musketry were nothing to them. Our dragoons dropped off like flies at the end of summer; and, unless we had been ordered away to keep the Turks from marching to Berlin, or the saints know where, the regiment would have had its last quarters in this world within a league of the marshes of Breslau. So I say ever since--take care of damp."

Having thus relieved her good-natured spirit of its burden, she proceeded to give me sketches of her history. The corporal had fallen a victim--though whether to Silesian fog, brandy, or bullet, she left doubtful--and she had married his successor in the rank. Love and matrimony in the army are of a different order from either in civil life; for the love is perpetual, the matrimony precarious. Juliet acknowledged that she never left above a month's interval between her afflictions as a widow and her consolations as a wife. In the course of time she changed her service. A handsome Austrian sergeant won her heart and hand, and she followed him to Hungary. There, between marsh fever and Turkish skirmishing, various casualties occurred in the matrimonial list; and Juliet, who evidently had been a handsome brunette, and whose French vivacity distanced all the heavy charms of the Austrian peasantry, was never without a husband. At length, like other veterans, having served her country to the full extent of her patriotism, she was discharged with her tenth husband, and of course induced the honest Austrian to come to the only country on which, in a Frenchwoman's creed, the sun shines. There the Austrian died.

"I loved him," said the Beguine, wiping her eyes. "He was an excellent fellow, though dull; and I believe, next to smoking and schnaps, he loved me better than any thing else in the world. But on his emperor's birth-day, which he always kept with a bottle of brandy additional, he rambled out into the fog, and came back with a cold. _Peste!_ I knew it was all over with him; but I nursed him like a babe, and he died, like a true Austrian, with his meerschaum in his mouth, bequeathing me his snuff-box, the certificate of his pension, and his blessing. I buried him, got pensioned, and was broken-hearted. What, then, was to be done? I was born for society. I once or twice thought of an eleventh husband; but I was rich. I had above a thousand francs, and a pension of a hundred; this perplexed me. I was determined to be married for myself alone. Yet, how could I know whether the hypocrites who clustered round me were not thinking of my money all the while? So I determined to marry no more--and became a Beguine."

In all my vexation, I could not help turning my eye upon the sentimentalist. She interpreted it in the happy way of her country. "You wonder at my self-denial," said she; "I perceive it in your astonishment. I was _but_ fifty then. Yes," said she, clasping her hands and looking pathetic; "I acknowledge that it _was_ cruel. What right had I to break so many hearts? I have much to answer for--and I _but_ fifty! I am even now but fifty-six. Yet, observe, I have taken no vows; remark _that_, Monsieur le Capitaine. At this moment I am only a _Soeur de Charite_. No, nothing shall ever induce me to make or keep the vows. _I_ am free to marry to-morrow; and I only beg, Monsieur le Capitaine, that when you are well enough to go abroad again, whether in the town or in the country, or in whatever part of Europe you may travel, you will have the kindness to state positively, most positively, that Juliet Donnertronk, _nee_ Ventrebleu, has not taken, and never will take, any vows whatever!"

"Not even those of marriage, Juliet?" asked I.

She laughed, and patted my burning head, with "_Ah, vous etes bien bon! Ah, moqueur Anglais!_" finishing with all the pantomine of blushing confusion, and starting away like a fluttered pigeon.

As soon as I felt able to move, which was not till some days after, my first effort was to reach the mansion in which Clotilde resided. But there I received the intelligence, that on the evening of the day of my first and last visit, she had left the town with the superior of the convent. She had made such urgent entreaties to the governor to be permitted to leave Valenciennes, that he had obtained a passport for her from the general commanding the trenches; and not only for her, but also for the nuns--the burning of whose convent had left them houseless.

Painful as it was thus to lose her, it was in some degree a relief to find that she was under the protection of her relative; and when I saw, from day to day, the ravage that was committed by the tremendous weight of fire, I almost rejoiced that she was no longer exposed to its perils.

But it was my fate, or perhaps my good fortune, never to be suffered to brood long over my own calamities. My life was spent in the midst of tumults, which, if they did not extinguish--and what could extinguish?--the sense of such mental trials, at least prevented the echo of my complaints from returning to my ears. Before the midnight of that very day in which I had flung myself on my couch with almost total indifference as to my ever resting on another, the whole city was alarmed by the intelligence that the besiegers were evidently preparing for an assault. I listened undisturbed. Even this could scarcely add to the horrors in which the inhabitants lived from hour to hour; and to me it was the hope of a rescue, unless I should be struck by some of the shells, which now were perpetually bursting in the streets, or should even fall a victim to the wrath of the incensed garrison. But an order came suddenly to the officer in charge of the hospital, to send all the patients into the vaults, and throw all the beds on the roof, to deaden the weight of the fire. He was a man of gentlemanlike manners, and had been attentive to me, in the shape of many of those minor civilities which a man of severe authority might have refused, but which mark kindliness of disposition. On this night he told me, that he had orders to put all the prisoners in arrest; but that he regarded me more as a friend than a prisoner--and that I was at liberty to take any precaution for my security which I thought proper. My answer was, "that I hoped, at all events, not to be shut into the vaults, but to take my chance above ground." In the end, I proposed to assist in carrying the mattresses to the roof, and remain there until the night was over. "But you will be hit," said my friend. "So be it," was my answer. "It is the natural fate of my profession; but, at least, I shall not be buried alive."

"All will be soon over with us all, and with Valenciennes," said the officer; "though whether to-night or not, is a question. We have seen new batteries raised within the last twenty-four hours. The enemy have now nearly three hundred heavy guns in full play; and, to judge from the quantity of shells, they must have a hundred mortars besides. No fortress can stand this; and, if it continues, we shall soon be ground into dust." He took his leave; and, with my mattress on my shoulder, I mounted the numberless and creaking staircases, until the door of the roof and the landscape opened on me together.

The night was excessively dark, but perfectly calm; and, except where the fire from the batteries marked their position, all objects beyond the ramparts were invisible. The town around me lay silent, and looking more like a vast grave than a place of human existence. Now and then the light of a lantern gliding along the ruined streets, showed me a group of wretched beings hurrying a corpse to the next churchyard, or a priest seeking his way over the broken heaps to attend some dying soldier or citizen. All was utter desolation.

But a new scene--a terrible and yet a superb one--suddenly broke upon me. A discharge of rockets from various points of the allied lines, showed that a general movement was begun. The batteries opened along the whole extent of the trenches, and by their blaze I was able to discern, advancing and formed in their rear, two immense columns, which, however, in the distance and the fitfulness of the glare, looked more like huge clouds than living beings. The guns of the ramparts soon replied, and the roar was deafening; while the plunging of shot along the ramparts and roofs made our situation perilous in no slight degree. But, in the midst of this hurricane of fire, I saw a single rocket shoot up from the camp, and the whole range of the batteries ceased at the instant. The completeness of the cessation was scarcely less appalling than the roar. While every telescope was turned intently to the spot, where the columns and batteries seemed to have sunk together into the earth, a pyramid of blasting flame burst up to the very clouds, carrying with it fragments of beams and masonry. The explosion rent the air, and shook the building on which I stood as if it had been a house of sand. A crowd of engineer and staff-officers now rushed on the roof, and their alarm at the results of the concussion was undisguised. "This is what we suspected," said the chief to me; "but it was impossible to discover where the gallery of their mine was run. Our counter mine has clearly failed." He had scarcely spoken the words, before a second and still broader explosion tore up the ground to a great extent, and threw the counterscarp for several hundred yards into the ditch. The drums of the columns were now distinctly heard beating the advance; but darkness had again fallen, and all was invisible. A third explosion followed, still closer to the ramparts, which blew up the face of the grand bastion. The stormers now gave a general shout, and I saw them gallantly dashing across the ditch and covered way, tearing down the palisades, fighting hand to hand, clearing the outworks with the bayonet, and finally making a lodgement on the bastion itself. The red-coats, which now swarmed through the works, and the colours planted on the rampart, showed me that my countrymen had led the assault, and my heart throbbed with envy and admiration. "Why am I not there?" was my involuntary cry; as I almost wished that some of the shots, which were not flying about the roofs, would relieve me from the shame of being a helpless spectator. "_Mon ami_," said the voice of the brave and good-natured Frenchman, who had overheard me--"if you wish to rejoin your regiment, you will not have long to wait. This affair will not be decided to-night, as I thought that it would be half an hour ago. I see that they have done as much as they intended for the time, and mean to leave the rest to fright and famine. To-morrow will tell us something. Pack up your valise. _Bon soir!_"

SONNET TO CLARKSON.

Patriot for England's conscience! Champion keen Of man's one holy birthright! dear grey head, Laurell'd with blessings!--Hath my country bred Lips, to her shame, in unregenerate spleen Profaning heaven's own air with words unclean Against thy sacred name?--Th' august pure Dead In calm of glory sleep:--like them serene, In virtue firmlier mail'd than they with dust, Wait, Clarkson, on our sorrow-trodden sphere, Until her climes waft promise to thine ear, How each thy proud renown will have in trust: Then call'd, at the life-judging Throne appear On the right hand, avouched Loving and Just.

A. B.

LETTER FROM THE RIGHT HON. CHARLES HOPE, LATE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COURT OF SESSION.

EDINBURGH, _25th October 1844_.

TO THE EDITOR OF BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.

SIR,

I did not read Mr Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott," and therefore it was only lately, and by mere accident, I heard that he has inserted an anecdote of Lord Braxfield, which, if it had been true, must for ever load his memory with indelible infamy. The story, in substance, I understand to be this--That Lord Braxfield once tried a man for forgery at the Circuit at _Dumfries_, who was not merely an acquaintance, but an intimate friend of his Lordship, with whom he used to play at chess: That he did this as coolly as if he had been a perfect stranger: That the man was found guilty: That he pronounced sentence of death upon him; and then added, "Now, John, I think I have _checkmated_ you now." A more unfeeling and brutal conduct it is hardly possible to imagine. The moment I heard the story I contradicted it; as, from my personal knowledge of Lord Braxfield, I was certain that it could not be true. Lord Braxfield certainly was not a polished man in his manners; and now-a-days especially would be thought a coarse man. But he was a kind-hearted man, and a warm and steady friend--intimately acquainted with all my family, and much esteemed by them all. I was under great obligations to him for the countenance he showed me when I came to the bar, just sixty years ago, and therefore I was resolved to probe the matter to the bottom. For that purpose, I directed the record of the South Circuit to be carefully searched, and the result is, that Lord Braxfield _never tried any man for forgery at Dumfries_. But I was not satisfied with this, as it might have been said that Sir Walter had only mistaken the town, and that the thing might have happened at some of the other Circuit towns. Therefore I then directed a search to be made of the records of all the other Circuits in Scotland, during the whole time that Lord Braxfield sat on the Justiciary Bench; and the result is, that his Lordship never tried any man for forgery at any of the Circuits, _except once at Stirling_; and then the culprit, instead of being a friend, or even a common acquaintance of Lord Braxfield's, _was a miserable shopkeeper in the town of Falkirk_, whose very name it is hardly possible he could have heard till he read it in the indictment. Therefore I think I have effectually cleared his character from the ineffable infamy of such brutality.

I understand that Mr Lockhart became completely satisfied that this story did not apply to Lord Braxfield; and therefore has set it down, in his second edition, to the credit, or rather to the discredit, not of Lord Braxfield, but of a "_certain judge_." But this does not sufficiently clear Lord Braxfield of it. Because thousands may never see his second edition, or if they did, might think that the story still related to Lord Braxfield, but that Mr Lockhart had suppressed his name out of delicacy to his family; and therefore, as your excellent Magazine has a more extensive circulation in Scotland than the _Quarterly_, I beg of you to give this letter an early place. I understand one circumstance which satisfied Mr Lockhart that the story did not apply to Lord Braxfield is, that the family had assured him that he never played at chess--a fact of which I could also have assured Mr Lockhart. But the search of the records of Justiciary, which I directed to be made, is the most satisfactory refutation of the infamous calumny; and I cannot imagine how Sir Walter could have believed it for a moment. Certainly he would not, if he had known Lord Braxfield as intimately as I did. I owe a debt of gratitude to his memory, and am happy to have an opportunity of repaying it.

I am, Sir, Your most obedient servant, C. HOPE.

POEMS BY ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.[31]

These volumes, from the pen of Miss Barrett, would be a remarkable publication at any time; but, in the present dearth of poetical genius, their appearance is doubly welcome; their claims on our consideration are doubly strong; and we cannot allow ourselves to pass them over without some detailed notice of their contents. In spite of many blemishes in point of execution, this lady's poems have left a very favourable impression on our mind. If the poetess does not always command our unqualified approbation, we are at all times disposed to bend in reverence before the deep-hearted and highly accomplished woman--a woman, whose powers appear to us to extend over a wider and profounder range of thought and feeling, than ever before fell within the intellectual compass of any of the softer sex.

If we might venture to divine this lady's moral and intellectual character from the general tone of her writings, we should say, that never did woman's mind dwell more habitually among the thoughts of a solemn experience--never was woman's genius impressed more profoundly with the earnestness of life, or sanctified more purely by the overshadowing awfulness of death. She aspires to write as she has lived; and certainly her poetry opens up many glimpses into the history of a pure and profound heart which has felt and suffered much. At the same time, a reflective cast of intellect lifts her feelings into a higher and calmer region than that of ordinary sorrow. There are certain delicate and felicitous peculiarities in the constitution of her sensibilities, which frequently impart a rare and subtle originality to emotions which are as old, and as widely diffused, as the primeval curse. The spirit of her poetry appears to us to be eminently religious; not because we think her very successful when she deals directly with the mysteries of divine truth, but because she makes us feel, even when handling the least sacred subjects, that we are in the presence of a heart which, in its purity, sees God. In the writings of such a woman, there must be much which is calculated to be a blessing and a benefit to mankind. If her genius always found a suitable exponent in her style, she would stand unrivaled, we think, among the poetesses of England.

But whether it be that Miss Barrett is afraid of degrading poetry to the low rank of an _accomplishment_--whether it be that she has some peculiar theory of her own on the subject of language, and on the mode in which poetical emotions may be most felicitously expressed--whether it be that nature has denied her the possession of a sound critical judgment, or that she refuses to exercise it in the moment of inspiration--whether it be that she considers the habit of pure and polished composition an attainment of very secondary importance--or whether it be that she has allowed herself to be infected by the prevailing mannerisms of the day--certain it is, that there is a large proportion of her poetry in which she has failed to add the graces of good style and of careful versification to her other excellent acquirements. That she can write pure English, and that she frequently does so, is undeniable. In some of the extracts which we shall give, we believe that the language could scarcely be improved. But we are constrained to say, that her compositions are very often disfigured by strained or slovenly modes of phraseology, which greatly detract from their impressiveness, and which must materially injure the reputation of their authoress, by turning away many hearts from the homage which they otherwise would most willingly have rendered to her exalted genius.

Miss Barrett is a classical scholar. She surely knows that the great works in which she delights have earned the epithet of _classical_, and come recommended to the reverence of all mankind, solely in virtue of the scrupulous propriety of their language; and because they are fitted to serve as models of style to all succeeding generations. The purity of their diction, and nothing else, has been their passport to immortality. We cannot but lament that Miss Barrett has not provided more surely for her future fame, by turning to their best account the lessons which the masterpieces of antiquity are especially commissioned to teach.

Let it not be thought that we would counsel Miss Barrett, or any one else, to propose these works to themselves as direct objects of imitation. Far from it. Such directions would be very vague and unmeaning, and might lead to the commission of the very errors which they aimed at preventing. The words "purity and propriety of diction" are themselves very vague words. Let us say, then, that a style which goes at once to the point, which is felt to _get through business_, and which carries with it no affectation, either real or apparent, is always a good style; and that no other style is good. This is the quality which may be generalized from the works of the great authors of all ages, as the prime characteristic of all good writing. Their style is always pregnant with a working activity--it impresses us with the feeling that real work is done here. We fear not to say that Milton himself owes much of his reputation to the peremptory and business-like vigour of his style. He never beats about the bush--he never employs language which a plain man would not have employed--if he could. The sublimity of "Paradise Lost" is supported throughout by the direct force of its language--language the most elaborate, but also the most to the point, and the least fantastical, that ever fell from human lips. There are difficulties to encounter in the abstract conception of the poem. The naked argument does not at first recommend itself to our understanding. It is not till we have vanquished those difficulties,--in which step we are mainly assisted by the unparalleled execution of the work,--that all our sympathies gravitate towards the mysterious theme.

Now if it be true that it requires all the force of a thoroughly practical style to reconcile our affections to such remote and obscure conceptions as the fall of man, the war of the rebellious angels, &c., it is peculiarly unfortunate that Miss Barrett, in her opening poem, entitled a "Drama of Exile," should have ventured to tread on Miltonic ground. For, while our feelings are naturally disposed to fly off at a tangent from the vague and impalpable conceptions which form the staple of her poem, the dreamy and unpractical character of her style makes them fly still further from the subject. The force of her language is not sufficient to bind down and rivet our sympathies to the theme; and the lyrical portions of the drama, in particular, are so inarticulate, that we are compelled to pronounce this composition--partial to it as its authoress is--the least successful of her works.

But it is our wish to do full justice to Miss Barrett's extraordinary merits, and to convey to our readers a favourable impression of her powers; and therefore we shall say no more at present about the "Drama of Exile," but shall turn our attention to some of the fairer and less questionable manifestations of her genius. We shall commence with her sonnets; for these appear to us to be by far the most finished of her compositions in point of style; and in depth and purity of sentiment, we think that they surpass any thing she has ever written, with the exception of the poem entitled "Bertha in the Lane," which we shall quote hereafter. As our first specimen, we select one which she entitles

DISCONTENT.

"Light human nature is too lightly tost And ruffled without cause; complaining on-- Restless with rest--until, being overthrown, It learneth to lie quiet. Let a frost Or a small wasp have crept to the innermost Of our ripe peach; or let the wilful sun Shine westward of our window,--straight we run A furlong's sigh, as if the world were lost. But what time through the heart and through the brain God hath transfix'd us--we, so moved before, Attain to a calm! Ay, shouldering weights of pain, We anchor in deep waters, safe from shore; And hear, submissive, o'er the stormy main, God's charter'd judgments walk for evermore."

Yes; we fear it is too true that the voice of God never speaks so articulately to man, as when it speaks in the desperate calm of a soul to which life or death has done its worst. The same solemn thought with which the sonnet concludes, forms the moral of her ballad entitled the "Lay of the Brown Rosary." It is thus that the heroine of that poem speaks--

"Then breaking into tears--'Dear God,' she cried, 'and must we see All blissful things depart from _us_, or ere we go to THEE? We cannot guess thee in the wood, or hear thee in the wind? Our cedars must fall round us, ere we see the light behind? Ay sooth, we feel too strong in weal, to need thee on that road; But woe being come, the soul is dumb that crieth not on 'God.'"

Then it is that the despair which blackens the earth strikes clear the face of the sky. Listen again to Miss Barrett, when her soul is cheered by the promises of "Futurity:"--

FUTURITY.

"And, O beloved voices! upon which Ours passionately call, because erelong Ye brake off in the middle of that song We sang together softly, to enrich The poor world with the sense of love, and witch The heart out of things evil--I am strong,-- Knowing ye are not lost for aye among The hills, with last year's thrush. God keeps a niche In Heaven to hold our idols! and albeit He brake them to our faces, and denied That our close kisses should impair their white,-- I know we shall behold them raised, complete,-- The dust shook from their beauty,--glorified New Memnons singing in the great God-light."

And again, listen to her hallowed and womanly strain when she speaks of "Comfort:"--

COMFORT.

"Speak low to me, my Saviour--low and sweet From out the hallelujahs, sweet and low, Lest I should fear and fall, and miss thee so Who art not miss'd by any that entreat. Speak to me as to Mary at thy feet-- And if no precious gums my hands bestow, Let my tears drop like amber, while I go In reach of thy divinest voice complete In humanest affection--thus, in sooth To lose the sense of losing! As a child, Whose song-bird seeks the wood for evermore, Is sung to in its stead by mother's mouth; Till, sinking on her breast, love-reconciled, He sleeps the faster that he wept before."

How profound and yet how feminine is the sentiment! No _man_ could have written that sonnet. It rises spontaneously from the heart of a Christian woman, which overflows with feelings more gracious and more graceful than ever man's can be. It teaches us what religious poetry truly is; for it makes affections inspired by the simplest things of earth, to illustrate, with the most artless beauty, the solemn consolations of the Cross.

The pointedness of the following religious sonnet is very striking and sublime. The text is, "And the Lord turned and _looked_ upon Peter."

THE MEANING OF THE LOOK.

"I think that look of Christ might seem to say-- 'Thou Peter! art thou then a common stone Which I at last must break my heart upon, For all God's charge, to his high angels, may Guard my foot better? Did I yesterday Wash _thy_ feet, my beloved, that they should run Quick to deny me 'neath the morning sun,-- And do thy kisses, like the rest, betray?-- The cock crows coldly.--Go, and manifest A late contrition, but no bootless fear! For when thy deathly need is bitterest, Thou shalt not be denied, as I am here-- My voice, to God and angels, shall attest,-- _Because I_ KNOW _this man, let him be clear_.'"

One more sonnet, and we bid adieu to these very favourable specimens of Miss Barrett's genius:--

PATIENCE TAUGHT BY NATURE.

"'O dreary life!' we cry, 'O dreary life!' And still the generations of the birds Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds Serenely live while we are keeping strife With heaven's true purpose in us, as a knife Against which we may struggle. Ocean girds Unslacken'd the dry land: savannah-swards Unweary sweep: hills watch, unworn; and rife Meek leaves drop yearly from the forest-trees, To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass In their old glory. O thou God of old! Grant me some smaller grace than comes to _these_;-- But so much patience, as a blade of grass Grows by contented through the heat and cold."

There is a poem in these volumes entitled the "Cry of _the Human_"--some stanzas of which are inspired by profound feeling, and written with a rare force and simplicity of style; but as other parts of it are obscure, and as it appears to us to be of very unequal merit, we shall not quote the whole of it. In addition to the faults which are to be found in the poem itself, its title is objectionable, as embodying one of Miss Barrett's worst mannerisms, and one for which we think that no allowance ought to be made. She is in the habit of employing certain adjectives in a substantive sense. She does so here. In other places she writes "Heaven assist _the Human_." "Leaning from _my human_," that is, stooping from my rank as a human being. In one passage she says,

"Till the heavenly Infinite Falling off from our _Created_--"

_nature_ being understood after the word "created." The word "divine" is one which she frequently employs in this substantive fashion. She also writes "Chanting down the _Golden_"--the golden what?

"Then the full sense of your _mortal_ Rush'd upon you deep and loud."

For "mortal," read "mortality." It is true that this practice may be defended to a certain extent by the example and authority of Milton. But Miss Barrett is mistaken if she supposes that her frequent and prominent use of such a form of speech, can be justified by the rare and unobtrusive instances of it which are to be found in the _Paradise Lost_. To use an anomalous expression two or three times in a poem consisting of many thousand lines, is a very different thing from bringing the same anomaly conspicuously forward, and employing it as a common and favourite mode of speech in a number of small poems. In the former case, it will be found that the expression is vindicated by the context, and by the circumstances under which it is employed; in the latter case it becomes a nuisance which cannot be too rigorously put down. One step further and we shall find ourselves talking, in the dialect of Yankeeland, of "us poor Humans!" However, as the point appears to us to be one which does not admit of controversy, we shall say no more on the subject, but shall proceed to the more agreeable duty of quoting the greater portion of Miss Barrett's poem, which may be regarded as a commentary on the prayer--"The Lord be merciful to us sinners."

THE CRY OF THE HUMAN.

"'There is no God,' the foolish saith,-- But none, 'There is no sorrow;' And nature oft, the cry of faith, In bitter need will borrow: Eyes, which the preacher could not school, By wayside graves are raised; And lips say, 'God be pitiful,' Which ne'er said, 'God be praised.' Be pitiful, O God!

"The curse of gold upon the land, The lack of bread enforces-- The rail-cars snort from strand to strand, Like more of Death's White horses! The rich preach 'rights' and future days, And hear no angel scoffing: The poor die mute--with starving gaze On corn-ships in the offing. Be pitiful, O God!

"We meet together at the feast-- To private mirth betake us-- We stare down in the winecup, lest Some vacant chair should shake us! We name delight and pledge it round-- 'It shall be ours to-morrow!' God's seraphs! do your voices sound As sad in naming sorrow? Be pitiful, O God!

"We sit together with the skies, The steadfast skies above us: We look into each other's eyes,-- 'And how long will you love us?'-- The eyes grow dim with prophecy, The voices, low and breathless-- 'Till death us part!'--O words, to be Our _best_ for love the deathless! Be pitiful, dear God!

"We tremble by the harmless bed Of one loved and departed-- Our tears drop on the lips that said Last night, 'Be stronger-hearted!' O God--to clasp those fingers close, And yet to feel so lonely!-- To see a light on dearest brows, Which is the daylight only! Be pitiful, O God!

"The happy children come to us, And look up in our faces: They ask us--Was it thus, and thus, When we were in their places?-- We cannot speak:--we see anew The hills we used to live in; And feel our mother's smile press through The kisses she is giving. Be pitiful, O God!

"We pray together at the kirk, For mercy, mercy, solely-- Hands weary with the evil work, We lift them to the Holy! The corpse is calm below our knee-- Its spirit, bright before Thee-- Between them, worse than either, we-- Without the rest or glory! Be pitiful, O God!

"We sit on hills our childhood wist, Woods, hamlets, streams, beholding! The sun strikes, through the furthest mist, The city's spire to golden. The city's golden spire it was, When hope and health were strongest, But now it is the churchyard grass We look upon the longest. Be pitiful, O God!

"And soon all vision waxeth dull-- Men whisper, 'He is dying:' We cry no more, 'Be pitiful!'-- We have no strength for crying!-- No strength, no need! Then, Soul of mine, Look up and triumph rather-- Lo! in the depth of God's Divine, The Son adjures the Father-- Be pitiful, O God!"

"The Romance of the Swan's Nest" is written in a different vein. It is characterized by graceful playfulness of manner and sentiment, which shows how heartily the amiable authoress can enter into the sympathies and enjoyments of child, and how much she is at home when she engages in lighter dalliance with the muse. We have taken the liberty to print in italics two or three _Barrettisms_, which however, we believe, are not very reprehensible. On the whole, it is very pleasing and elegant performance:--

ROMANCE OF THE SWAN'S NEST.

"Little Ellie sits alone Mid the beeches of a meadow, By a stream-side, on the grass: And the trees are showering down _Doubles of their leaves in shadow_, On her shining hair and face.

"She has thrown her bonnet by; And her feet she has been dipping In the shallow water's flow-- Now she holds them nakedly In her hands, all sleek and dripping, While she rocketh to and fro.

"Little Ellie sits alone,-- And the smile, she softly useth, Fills the silence like a speech; While she thinks what shall be done,-- And the sweetest pleasure, chooseth, For her future within reach!

"Little Ellie in her smile Chooseth ... 'I will have a lover, Riding on a steed of steeds! He shall love me without guile; And to _him_ I will discover That swan's nest among the reeds.

"'And the steed shall be red-roan, And the lover shall be noble, With an eye _that takes the breath_,-- And the lute he plays upon Shall strike ladies into trouble, As his sword strikes men to death.

"'And the steed, it shall be shod All in silver, housed in azure, And the mane shall swim the wind! And the hoofs, along the sod, Shall flash onward _in a pleasure_, Till the shepherds look behind.

"'But my lover will not prize All the glory that he rides in, When he gazes in my face! He will say, 'O Love, thine eyes Build the shrine my soul abides in; And I kneel here for thy grace.'

"'Then, ay, then--he shall kneel low-- With the red-roan steed _anear_ him Which shall seem to understand-- Till I answer, "Rise, and go! For the world must love and fear him Whom I gift with heart and hand."

"'Then he will arise so pale, I shall feel my own lips tremble With a _yes_ I must not say-- Nathless, maiden-brave, "Farewell," I will utter and dissemble-- "Light to-morrow, with to-day."

"'Then he will ride through the hills, To the wide world past the river, There to put away all wrong! To make straight distorted wills,-- And to empty the broad quiver Which the wicked bear along.

"'Three times shall a young foot-page Swim the stream, and climb the mountain, And kneel down beside my feet-- "Lo! my master sends this gage, Lady, _for thy pity's counting_! What wilt thou exchange for it?"

"'And the first time, I will send A white rosebud for a guerdon,-- And the second time, a glove! But the third time--I may bend From my pride, and answer--"Pardon, If he comes to take my love."

"'Then the young foot-page will run, Then my lover will ride faster, Till he kneeleth at my knee! "I am a duke's eldest son! Thousand serfs do call me master,-- But, O Love, I love but thee!"

"'He will kiss me on the mouth Then, and lead me as a lover, Through the crowds that praise his deeds! And when soul-tied by one troth, Unto _him_ I will discover That swan's nest among the reeds.'

"Little Ellie, with her smile Not yet ended, rose up gaily,-- Tied the bonnet, donn'd the shoe-- And went homeward, round a mile, Just to see, as she did daily, What more eggs were with the _two_.

"Pushing through the elm-tree copse Winding by the stream, light-hearted, Where the osier pathway leads-- Past the boughs she stoops--and stops! Lo! the wild swan had deserted-- And a rat had gnaw'd the reeds.

"Ellie went home sad and slow! If she found the lover ever, With his red-roan steed of steeds, Sooth I know not! but I know She could show him never--never, That swan's nest among the reeds!"

But the gem of the collection is unquestionably the poem entitled "Bertha in the Lane." This is the purest picture of a broken heart that ever drew tears from the eyes of woman or of man. Although our extracts are likely to exceed the proportion which they ought to bear to our critical commentary, we must be permitted to quote this poem entire. A grain of such poetry is worth a cart-load of criticism:--

BERTHA IN THE LANE.

"Put the broidery-frame away, For my sewing is all done! The last thread is used to-day, And I need not join it on. Though the clock stands at the noon, I am weary! I have sewn Sweet, for thee, a wedding-gown.

"Sister, help me to the bed, And stand near me, dearest-sweet, Do not shrink nor be afraid, Blushing with a sudden heat! No one standeth in the street?-- By God's love I go to meet, Love I thee with love complete.

"Lean thy face down! drop it in These two hands, that I may hold 'Twixt their palms thy cheek and chin, Stroking back the curls of gold. 'Tis a fair, fair face, in sooth-- Larger eyes and redder mouth Than mine were in my first youth!

"Thou art younger by seven years-- Ah!--so bashful at my gaze, That the lashes, hung with tears, Grow too heavy to upraise? I would wound thee by no touch Which thy shyness feels as such-- Dost thou mind me, dear, so much?

"Have I not been nigh a mother To thy sweetness--tell me, dear? Have we not loved one another Tenderly, from year to year; Since our dying mother mild Said _with accents undefiled_,[32] 'Child, be mother to this child!'

"Mother, mother, up in heaven, Stand up on the jasper sea, And be witness I have given All the gifts required of me;-- Hope that bless'd me, bliss that crown'd, Love, that left me with a wound, Life itself, that turneth round!

"Mother, mother, thou art kind, Thou art standing in the room,-- In a molten glory shrined, That rays off into the gloom! But thy smile is bright and bleak Like cold waves--I cannot speak; I sob in it, and grow weak.

"Ghostly mother, keep aloof One hour longer from my soul-- For I still am thinking of Earth's warm-beating joy and dole! On my finger is a ring Which I still see glittering, When the night hides every thing.

"Little sister, thou art pale! Ah! I have a wandering brain-- But I lose that fever-bale, And my thoughts grow calm again. Lean down closer--closer still! I have words thine ear to fill,-- And would kiss thee at my will.

"Dear, I heard thee in the spring, Thee and Robert--through the trees, When we all went gathering Boughs of May-bloom for the bees. Do not start so! think instead How the sunshine overhead Seem'd to trickle through the shade.

"What a day it was, that day! Hills and vales did openly Seem to heave and throb away, At the sight of the great sky: And the silence, as it stood In the glory's golden flood, Audibly did bud--and bud!

"Through the winding hedgerows green, How we wander'd, I and you,-- With the bowery tops shut in, And the gates that show'd the view-- How we talk'd there! thrushes soft Sang our pauses out,--or oft Bleatings took them, from the croft.

"Till the pleasure, grown too strong, Left me muter evermore; And, the winding road being long, I walked out of sight, before; And so, wrapt in musings fond, Issued (past the wayside pond) On the meadow-lands beyond.

"I sate down beneath the beech Which leans over to the lane, And the far sound of your speech Did not promise any pain: And I bless'd you full and free, With a smile stoop'd tenderly O'er the May-flowers on my knee.

"But the sound grew into word As the speakers drew more near-- Sweet, forgive me that I heard What you wish'd me not to hear. Do not weep so--do not shake-- Oh,--I heard thee, Bertha, make Good true answers for my sake.

"Yes, and HE too! let him stand In thy thoughts, untouch'd by blame. Could he help it, if my hand He had claim'd with hasty claim? That was wrong perhaps--but then Such things be--and will, again! Women cannot judge for men.

"Had he seen thee, when he swore He would love but me alone? Thou wert absent,--sent before To our kin in Sidmouth town. When he saw thee who art best Past compare, and loveliest, He but judged thee as the rest.

"Could we blame him with grave words, Thou and I, Dear, if we might? Thy brown eyes have looks like birds, Flying straightway to the light: Mine are older.--Hush!--Look out-- Up the street! Is none without? How the poplar swings about!

"And that hour--beneath the beech,-- When I listen'd in a dream, And he said, in his deep speech, That he owed me all _esteem_,-- Each word swam in on my brain With a dim, dilating pain, Till it burst with that last strain--

"I fell flooded with a Dark, In the silence of a swoon-- When I rose, still cold and stark, There was night,--I saw the moon: And the stars, each in its place, And the May-blooms on the grass, Seem'd to wonder what I was.

"And I walk'd as if apart From myself, when I could stand-- And I pitied my own heart, As if I held it in my hand,-- Somewhat coldly,--with a sense Of fulfill'd benevolence, And a 'poor thing' negligence.

"And I answer'd coldly too, When you met me at the door; And I only _heard_ the dew Dripping from me to the floor: And the flowers I bade you see, Were too wither'd for the bee,-- As my life, henceforth, for me.

"Do not weep so--dear--heart-warm! It was best as it befell! If I say he did me harm, I speak wild,--I am not well. All his words were kind and good-- _He esteem'd me!_ Only blood Runs so faint in womanhood.

"Then I always was too grave,-- Liked the saddest ballads sung,-- With that look, besides, we have In our faces, who die young. I had died, Dear, all the same-- Life's long, joyous, jostling game Is too loud for my meek shame.

"We are so unlike each other, Thou and _I_; that none could guess We were children of one mother, But for mutual tenderness. Thou art rose-lined from the cold, And meant, verily, to hold Life's pure pleasures manifold.

"I am pale as crocus grows Close beside a rose-tree's root! Whosoe'er would reach the rose, Treads the crocus underfoot-- _I_, like May-bloom on thorn tree-- _Thou_, like merry summer-bee! Fit, that _I_ be pluck'd for _thee_.

"Yet who plucks me?--no one mourns-- I have lived my season out,-- And now die of my own thorns Which I could not live without. Sweet, be merry! How the light Comes and goes! If it be night, Keep the candles in my sight.

"Are there footsteps at the door? Look out quickly. Yea, or nay? Some one might be waiting for Some last word that I might say. Nay? So best!--So angels would Stand off clear from deathly road-- Not to cross the sight of God.

"Colder grow my hands and feet-- When I wear the shroud I made, Let the folds lie straight and neat, And the rosemary be spread-- That if any friend should come, (To see _thee_, sweet!) all the room May be lifted out of gloom.

"And, dear Bertha, let me keep On my hand this little ring, Which at nights, when others sleep, I can still see glittering. Let me wear it out of sight, In the grave--where it will light All the Dark up, day and night.

"On that grave, drop not a tear! Else, though fathom-deep the place, Through the woollen shroud I wear, I shall feel it on my face. Rather smile there, blessed one, Thinking of me in the sun-- Or forget me--smiling on!

"Art thou near me? nearer? so! Kiss me close upon the eyes-- That the earthly light may go Sweetly as it used to rise-- When I watch'd the morning-gray Strike, betwixt the hills, the way He was sure to come that day.

"So--no more vain words be said! The hosannas nearer roll-- Mother, smile now on thy Dead-- I am death-strong in my soul! Mystic Dove alit on cross, Guide the poor bird of the snows Through the snow-wind above loss!

"Jesus, Victim, comprehending Love's divine self-abnegation-- Cleanse my love in its self-spending, And absorb the poor libation! Wind my thread of life up higher, Up through angels' hands of fire!-- I aspire while I expire!"

The following extract from a little poem entitled "Sleeping and Watching," is very touching in its simplicity. Miss Barrett is watching over a slumbering child. How softly does the spirit of the watcher overshadow the cradle with the purest influences of its own sanctified sorrows, while she thus speaks!--

"_I_, who cannot sleep as well, Shall I sigh to view you? Or sigh further to foretell All that may undo you? Nay, keep smiling, little child, Ere the sorrow neareth,-- _I_ will smile too! Patience mild Pleasure's token weareth. Nay, keep sleeping, before loss; I shall sleep though losing! As by cradle, so by cross, Sure is the reposing.

"And God knows, who sees us twain, Child at childish leisure, I am near as tired of pain As you seem of pleasure;-- Very soon too, by his grace Gently wrapt around me, Shall I show as calm a face, Shall I sleep as soundly! Differing in this, that _you_ Clasp your playthings sleeping, While my hand shall drop the few Given to my keeping;

"Differing in this, that _I_ Sleeping, shall be colder, And in waking presently, Brighter to beholder! Differing in this beside (Sleeper, have you heard me? Do you move, and open wide Eyes of wonder toward me?)-- That while I draw you withal From your slumber, solely,-- Me, from mine, an angel shall, With reveillie holy!"

After having perused these extracts, it must be impossible for any one to deny that Miss Barrett is a person gifted with very extraordinary powers of mind, and very rare sensibilities of heart. She must surely be allowed to take her place among the female writers of England as a poetess of no ordinary rank; and if she does not already overtop them all, may she one day stand forth as the queen of that select and immortal sisterhood! It is in her power to do so if she pleases.

It is now our duty to revert to the principal poem in the collection, respecting which we have already ventured to pronounce rather an unfavourable opinion. The "Drama of Exile" is the most ambitious of Miss Barrett's compositions. It is intended to commemorate the sayings and doings of our First Parents, immediately subsequent to their expulsion from the garden of Eden. Its authoress, with sincere modesty, disclaims all intention of entering into competition with Milton; but the comparison must, of course, force itself upon the reader; and although it was not to be expected that she should rise so soaringly as Milton does above the level of her theme, it was at any rate to be expected that her _dramatis personae_ should not stand in absolute contrast to his. Yet Milton's Satan and Miss Barrett's Lucifer are the very antipodes of each other. Milton's Satan is a thoroughly practical character, and, if he had been human, he would have made a first-rate man of business in any department of life. Miss Barrett's Lucifer, on the contrary, is the poorest prater that ever made a point of saying nothing to the purpose, and we feel assured that he could have put his hand to nothing in heaven, on earth, or in hell. He has nothing to do, he does nothing, and he could do nothing. He seems incapable of excogitating a single plot of treachery, or of carrying into execution a single deed of violence. His thoughts are a great deal too much taken up about his own personal appearance. Gabriel is an equally irresolute character. The following is a portion of a dialogue which takes place between the two; and it is perhaps as fair a sample of the drama as any that we could select. Near the beginning of the poem Gabriel concludes a short address to Lucifer with these words--

"Go from us straightway.

_Lucifer._ Wherefore?

_Gabriel._ Lucifer, Thy last step in this place, trod sorrow up. Recoil before that sorrow, if not this sword.

_Lucifer._ Angels are in the world--wherefore not I? Exiles are in the world--wherefore not I? The cursed are in the world--wherefore not I?

_Gabriel._ Depart.

_Lucifer._ And where's the logic of 'depart?' Our lady Eve had half been satisfied To obey her Maker, if I had not learnt To fix my postulate better. Dost thou dream Of guarding some monopoly in heaven Instead of earth? _Why I can dream with thee To the length of thy wings._

_Gabriel._ I do not dream. This is not heaven, even in a dream; nor earth, As earth was once,--first breathed among the stars,-- Articulate glory from the mouth divine,-- To which the myriad spheres thrill'd audibly, Touch'd like a lute-string,--and the sons of God Said AMEN, singing it. I know that this Is earth, not new created, but new cursed-- This, Eden's gate, not open'd, but built up With a final cloud of sunset. Do I dream? Alas, not so! this is the Eden lost By Lucifer the serpent! this the sword (This sword, alive with justice and with fire,) That smote upon the forehead, Lucifer The angel! Wherefore, angel, go ... depart-- Enough is sinn'd and suffer'd.

_Lucifer._ By no means."

It will be observed, that in this passage Gabriel thrice desires Lucifer to "move on;" it will also be observed that Gabriel has a sword--or perhaps it may be the revolving sword which guards Paradise that he speaks of; but be it so or not, he threatens Lucifer with the edge of the sword unless he decamps; and yet, although the warning is repeated, as we have said, three distinct times, and although Lucifer pertinaciously refuses to stir a step, still the weapon remains innocuous, and the arch-fiend remains intact. This is not the way in which Milton manages matters. Towards the conclusion of the fourth book of Paradise Lost, this same Gabriel orders Satan to leave his presence--

"Avant! Fly thither whence thou fledd'st."

The rebel angel refuses to retire:--upon which, without more ado, both sides prepare themselves for battle. On the side of Gabriel

"Th'angelic squadron bright _Turned fiery red_, sharpening in mooned horns Their phalanx."

What an intense picture of ardour preparatory to action (it is night, remember) is presented to our imaginations by the words "turned fiery red!"

"On t'other side, Satan alarm'd, Collecting all his might, dilated stood, Like Teneriff, or Atlas, unremov'd: His stature reach'd the sky."

Then would have come the tug of war--then

"Dreadful deeds Might have ensued;"

and would have ensued--

"Had not soon The Eternal, to prevent such horrid fray, Hung forth in heaven his golden scales."-- "The fiend look'd up and knew His mounted scale aloft; nor more, but fled Murmuring, and with him fled the shades of night."

But in the interview which Miss Barrett describes between Gabriel and Lucifer, no such headlong propensity to act is manifested by either party--no such crisis ensues to interrupt the fray. Gabriel is satisfied with giving utterance to a feeble threat, which, when he finds that Lucifer pays no attention to it, he never attempts to carry into execution. For no apparent cause, he suddenly changes his tone, and condescends to hold parley with his foe on a variety of not very interesting particulars, informing him, among other things, that he "does not dream!"

The following is Lucifer's description of our First Mother. It is impregnated with Miss Barrett's mannerisms, and strongly characterized by that fantastical and untrue mode of picturing sensible objects, which the example of Shelley and Keates tended especially to foster, if they were not the first to introduce it:--

"_Lucifer._ Curse freely! curses thicken. Why, this Eve Who thought me once part worthy of her ear, And somewhat wiser than the other beasts,-- Drawing together _her large globes of eyes, The light of which is throbbing in and out Around their continuity of gaze_,-- Knots her fair eyebrows in so hard a knot, And, down from _her white heights of womanhood_, Looks on me so amazed,--I scarce should fear To wager such an apple as she pluck'd, Against one riper from the tree of life, That she could curse too--as a woman may-- _Smooth in the vowels_."

We do not very well understand why Eve's curses should have been smoother in the vowels than in the consonants. But as we are no great elocutionists, or at all well conversant with the mysteries of "labials," "dentals," and "gutterals," we shall not contest the point with Lucifer, lest we should only expose our own ignorance.

Respecting the leading conception of her drama, Miss Barrett writes thus:--"My subject was the new and strange experience of the fallen humanity as it went forth from Paradise into the wilderness; with a peculiar reference to Eve's allotted grief, which, considering that self-sacrifice belonging to her womanhood, and the consciousness of originating the Fall to her offence--appeared to me imperfectly apprehended hitherto, and more expressible by a woman than a man." No wonder that Miss Barrett failed in her undertaking. In the conception of Eve's grief as distinguished from Adam's, and as coloured by the circumstances of her situation--namely, by the consciousness that she had been the _first_ to fall, and the proximate cause of Adam's transgression--there is certainly no sufficient foundation to sustain the weight of a dramatic poem. At the most, it might have furnished materials for a sonnet. It therefore detracts nothing from the genius of Miss Barrett to say, that her attempt has been unsuccessful. She has tried to make bricks not only without straw, but almost without clay; and that being the case, the marvel is that she should have succeeded so well.

"There was room at least," continues Miss Barrett, "for lyrical emotion in those first steps into the wilderness, in that first sense of desolation after wrath, in that first audible gathering of the recriminating 'groan of the whole creation,' in that first darkening of the hills from the recoiling feet of angels, and in that first silence of the voice of God." There certainly _was_ room for lyrical emotion in these first steps into wilderness. All nature might most appropriately be supposed to break forth in melodious regrets around the footsteps of the wanderers: but we cannot think that Miss Barrett has done justice to nature's strains. Unless lyrical emotion be expressed in language as clear as a mountain rill, and as well defined as the rocks over which it runs, it is much better left unsung. The merit of all lyrical poetry consists in the clearness and cleanness with which it is cut; no tags or loose ends can any where be permitted. But Miss Barrett's lyrical compositions are frequently so inarticulate, so slovenly, and so defective, both in rhythm and rhyme, that we are really surprised how a person of her powers could have written them, and how a person of any judgment could have published them. Take a specimen, not by any means the worst, from the "Song of the morning star to Lucifer:"--

"Mine orbed image sinks Back from thee, back from thee, As thou art fallen, methinks, Back from me, back from me. O my light-bearer, Could another fairer Lack to thee, lack to thee? Ai, ai, Heosphoros! I loved thee, with the fiery love of stars. Who love by burning, and by loving move, Too near the throned Jehovah, not to love. Ai, ai, Heosphoros! Their brows flash fast on me from gliding cars, Pale-passion'd for my loss. Ai, ai, Heosphoros!

"Mine orbed heats drop cold Down from thee, down from thee, As fell thy grace of old Down from me, down from me. O my light-bearer, Is another fairer Won to thee, won to thee? Ai, ai, Heosphoros, Great love preceded loss, Known to thee, known to thee. Ai, ai! Thou, breathing they communicable grace Of life into my light Mine astral faces, from thine angel face, Hast inly fed, And flooded me with radiance overmuch From thy pure height. Ai, ai! Thou, with calm, floating pinions both ways spread, Erect, irradiated, Didst sting my wheel of glory On, on before thee, Along the Godlight, by a quickening touch! Ha, ha! Around, around the firmamental ocean, I swam expanding with delirious fire! Around, around, around, in blind desire To be drawn upward to the Infinite-- Ha, ha!"

But enough of _Ai ai Heosphoros_. It may be very right for ladies to learn Greek--not, however, if it is to lead them to introduce such expressions as this into the language of English poetry.

Nor do we think that Miss Barrett's lyrical style improves when she descends to themes of more human and proximate interest, and makes the "earth-spirits" and the "flower-spirits" pour their lamentations into the ears of the exiled pair. The following is the conclusion of the _layment_ (as Miss Barrett pronounces the word _lament_) of the "flower-spirits:"--

"We pluck at your raiment, We stroke down your hair, We faint in our _lament_, And pine into air. Fare-ye-well--farewell! The Eden scents, no longer sensible, Expire at Eden's door! Each footstep of your treading Treads out some fragrance which ye knew before: Farewell! the flowers of Eden Ye shall smell never more."

Would not Miss Barrett's hair have stood on end if Virgil had written "Arma virumque _canto_?" Yet surely that false quantity would have been not more repugnant to the genius of Latin verse than her transposition of accent in the word _lament_ is at variance with the plainest proprieties of the English tongue.

The "earth-spirits" deliver themselves thus:--

_Earth Spirits._ "And we scorn you! there's no pardon Which can lean to you aright! When your bodies take the guerdon Of the death-curse in our sight, Then the bee that hummeth lowest shall transcend you. Then ye shall not move an eyelid Though the stars look down your eyes; And the earth, which ye defiled, She shall show you to the skies,-- Lo! these kings of ours--who sought to comprehend you.'

_First Spirit._ And the elements shall boldly All your dust to dust constrain; Unresistedly and coldly, I will smite you with my rain! From the slowest of my frosts is no receding.

_Second Spirit._ And my little worm, appointed To assume a royal part, He shall reign, crown'd and anointed, O'er the noble human heart! Give him counsel against losing of that Eden!"

In one of the lyrical effusions, man is informed that when he goes to heaven--

"Then a _sough of glory_ Shall your entrance greet, Ruffling round the doorway The smooth radiance it shall meet."

We wonder what meaning Miss Barrett attaches to the word _sough_! It is a term expressive of the dreary sighing of autumnal winds, or any sound still more disconsolate and dreary; and therefore, to talk of a "sough of glory," is to talk neither more nor less than absolute nonsense.

What can be more unlyrical than this verse?

"Live, work on, oh, Earthy! By the Actual's tension Sped the arrow worthy Of a pure ascension."

We have said that the lyrical effusions interspersed throughout the "Drama of Exile," are very slovenly and defective in point of rhyme. What can be worse than "Godhead" and "wooded," "treading" and "Eden," "glories" and "floorwise," "calmly" and "palm-tree," "atoms" and "fathoms," "accompted" and "trumpet," and a hundred others? What can be worse, do we ask? We answer that there is one species of rhyme which Miss Barrett is sometimes, though, we are happy to say, very rarely, guilty of, which is infinitely more reprehensible than any of these inaccuracies. We allude to the practice of affixing an _r_ to the end of certain words, in order to make them rhyme with other words which terminate in that letter. Writers who are guilty of this atrocity are not merely to be condemned as bad rhymesters: they are to be blamed on the far more serious ground that they give the sanction and authority of print to one of the vilest vulgarisms which pollutes the oral language of certain provincial societies. What makes the practice so offensive in literary composition is the fact, that the barbarism is one which may sometimes be actually heard falling from living lips. But for this, it would be pardonable. We verily believe that Miss Barrett herself does not talk of "Laura_r_" and "Matilda_r_;" we verily believe that she would consider any one who does so no fit associate for herself in point of manners or education:--yet she scruples not to make "Aceldama"(r) rhyme to "tamer," and "Onora"(r) rhyme to "o'er her." When we think of these things, we turn to the following "stage-direction" with which her "Drama of Exile" concludes--"There is a sound through the silence _as of the falling tears of an angel_." That angel must have been a distressed critic like ourselves.

Next to the "Drama of Exile," the longest poem in the collection is the composition entitled "A Vision of Poets." This poem is designed, says our authoress, "to indicate the necessary relations of genius to suffering and self-sacrifice." It is stamped throughout with the thoughtful earnestness of Miss Barrett's character, and is, on the whole, a very impressive performance. But it would have been more impressive still if it had been composed after less vicious models, or if Miss Barrett had trusted more to a style prompted by her own native powers, and less to the fantastical modes of phraseology which have been introduced into literature by certain inferior artists of this and the preceding generation. We cannot read it, however, without appreciating the fervour which stirs the soul of the authoress through all its depths, when she declares and upholds the sacred mission of the poet, and teaches him that he must embrace his destiny with gratitude and pride, even though the crown which encircles his living brows be one in which the thorns far out-number the laurel leaves. We shall grace our pages with a series of portraits, in which Miss Barrett sketches off first the true poets and then the pretenders. They certainly contain some good points, although many of her touches must be pronounced unsuccessful. Let Homer lead the van:--

"Here, Homer, with the broad suspense Of thunderous brows, and lips intense Of garrulous god-innocence.

"There, Shakspeare! on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world! Oh, eyes sublime-- With tears and laughters for all time!

"Here, AEschylus--the women swoon'd _To see so awful_ when he frown'd As the gods did--he standeth crown'd.

"Euripides, with close and mild Scholastic lips--that could be wild, And laugh or sob out like a child

"_Right in the classes._ Sophocles, With that king's look which down the trees, Follow'd the dark effigies

"Of the lost Theban! Hesiod old, Who somewhat blind, and deaf, and cold, Cared most for gods and bulls! and bold

"Electric Pindar, quick as fear, With race-dust on his checks, and clear, Slant startled eyes that seem to hear

"The chariot rounding the last goal, To hurtle past it in his soul! And Sappho crown'd with aureole

"Of ebon curls on calmed brows-- O poet-woman! none forgoes The leap, attaining the repose!

"Theocritus, with glittering locks, Dropt sideway, as betwixt the rocks He watch'd the visionary flocks!

"And Aristophanes! who took The world with mirth, and laughter-struck The hollow caves of Thought, and woke

"The infinite echoes hid in each. And Virgil! shade of Mantuan beech Did help the shade of bay to reach

"And knit around his forehead high!-- For his gods wore less majesty Than his brown bees humm'd deathlessly.

"Lucretius--nobler than his mood! Who dropp'd his plummet down the broad Deep universe, and said 'No God,'

"Finding no bottom. He denied Divinely the divine, and died Chief poet on the Tiber-side,

"By grace of God. His face is stern, As one compell'd, in spite of scorn, To teach a truth he could not learn.

"And Ossian, dimly seen or guess'd! Once counted greater than the rest, When mountain-winds blew out his vest.

"And Spenser droop'd his dreaming head (With languid sleep-smile you had said From his own verse engendered)

"On Ariosto's, till they ran Their locks in one!--The Italian Shot nimbler heat of bolder man

"From his fine lids. And Dante stern And sweet, whose spirit was an urn For wine and milk pour'd out in turn.

"And Goethe--with that reaching eye His soul reach'd out from far and high, _And fell from inner entity_.

"And Schiller, with heroic front Worthy of Plutarch's kiss upon't-- Too large for wreath of modern wont.

"Here Milton's eyes strike piercing-dim! The shapes of suns and stars did swim Like clouds on them, and granted him

"God for sole vision! Cowley, there, Whose active fancy debonaire Drew straws like amber--foul to fair.

"And Burns, with pungent passionings Set in his eyes. Deep lyric springs Are of the fire-mount's issuings.

"And poor, proud Byron--sad as grave And salt as life! forlornly brave, And quivering with the dart he drave.

"And visionary Coleridge, who Did sweep his thoughts as angels do Their wings, with cadence up the Blue."

"Homer" we are not sure about; we can only hope that there may be people whom the picture will please. "Shakspeare" is good. "AEschylus" (Miss Barrett's favourite, too,) is treated very scurvily and very ungrammatically. What on earth are we to make of the words "the women swooned to see so awful" &c.? It is well known that no pregnant woman could look AEschylus in the face when the fit of inspiration was on him, without having cause to regret her indiscretion. But though delicacy might have dictated that this fact should be only barely hinted at, surely grammar need not have miscarried in the statement. The syntax of the passage will puzzle future commentators as much as some of his own corrupt choruses. "Euripides" promises well; but the expression, "Right in the classes," throws our intellect completely on its beam-ends; and as we cannot right it again, in order to take a second glance at the poet of Medea, we must pass on to the next. "Sophocles" will be acceptable to scholars. "Hesiod" is excellent. "Cared most for _gods and bulls_" is worth any money. "Pindar" and "Sappho" are but so so. The picture of "Theocritus" is very beautiful. There is nothing particularly felicitous in the sketch of "Aristophanes." How much more graphic is what Milton, in one of his prose works, says with respect to the "holy Chrysostom's" study of the same. Chrysostom, it seems, was a great student of Aristophanes. Some people might have been, and no doubt were, scandalized to think that so pious a father of the church should have made a bosom companion of so profane and virulent a wit: but says Milton, the holy father was quite right in poring over Aristophanes, for "_he had the art to cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into the style of a rousing sermon_." Put that into verse and it would ring well. We thank Miss Barrett for the graphic touch of Virgil's "brown bees," which certainly _are_ better than his gods. "Lucretius" is very finely painted. "Ossian" looms large through the mist, but walk up to him, and the pyramid is but a cairn. "Spenser" and "Ariosto," with their locks blended in one, compose a very sweet picture. "Dante" we will not answer for. "Goethe" is a perfect enigma. What does the word "fell" mean? [Greek: deinos], we suppose--that is, "not to be trifled with." But surely it sounds very strange, although it may be true enough, to say that this "fellness" is occasioned by "inner entity." But perhaps the line has some deeper meaning, which we are unable to fathom. We have seen a better picture than that of Goethe in the hour of inspiration, when his forehead was like a precipice dim with drifting sleet. "Schiller" is well drawn; evidently from Thorwaldsen's gigantic statue of the poet. Miss Barrett paints "Milton" in his blindness as seeing all things in God. But Mallebranche had already taught that God is the "sole vision" of all of us; and therefore, if that theory be correct, she has failed to assign to the poet of the Fall any distinctive attribute which distinguishes him from other men. "Cowley" is well characterized. "Burns" ought to have been better. "Byron" pleases us. "Coleridge" has very considerable merit.

As a contrast to the preceding sketches of the true poets, (many of which, however, we have omitted, and we may also remark, in parenthesis, that none of our living poets are meddled with,) we now pass before the eyes of the reader a panorama of _pretenders_. We shall make no remarks on the expression of their features, leaving Miss Barrett to brand them as they deserve with her just scorn and indignation--

"One dull'd his eyeballs as they ached, With Homer's forehead--though he lack'd An inch of any! And one rack'd

"His lower lip with restless tooth-- As Pindar's rushing words forsooth Were pent behind it. One, his smooth

"Pink cheeks, did rumple passionate, Like AEschylus--and tried to prate On trolling tongue, of fate and fate!

"One set her eyes like Sappho's--or Any light woman's! one forbore Like Dante, or any man as poor

"In mirth, to let a smile undo His hard shut lips. And one, that drew Sour humours from his mother, blew

"His sunken cheeks out to the size Of most unnatural jollities, Because Anacreon looked jest-wise.

"So with the rest.--It was a sight For great world-laughter, as it might For great world-wrath, with equal right.

"Out came a speaker from that crowd, To speak for all--in sleek and proud Exordial periods, while he bow'd

"His knee before the angel.--'Thus, O angel! who hast call'd for us, We bring thee service emulous,--

"'Fit service from sufficient soul-- Hand-service, to receive world's dole-- Lip-service, in world's ear to roll

"'Adjusted concords--soft enow To hear the winecups passing through, And not too grave to spoil the show.

"'Thou, certes, when thou askest more, O sapient angel! leanest o'er The window-sill of metaphor.

"'To give our hearts up! fie!--That rage Barbaric, antedates the age! It is not done on any stage.

"'Because your scald or gleeman went With seven or nine-string'd instrument Upon his back--must ours be bent?

"'We are not pilgrims, by your leave, No, nor yet martyrs! if we grieve, It is to rhyme to ... summer eve.

"'And if we labour, it shall be As suiteth best with our degree, In after-dinner reverie.'

"More yet that speaker would have said-- Poising between his smiles fair-fed, Each separate phrase till finished:

"But all the foreheads of those born And dead true poets flash'd with scorn Betwixt the bay leaves round them worn--

"Ay, jetted such brave fire, that they, The new-come, shrank and paled away, Like leaden ashes when the day

"Strikes on the hearth! A spirit-blast, A presence known by power, at last Took them up mutely--they had pass'd!"

"Lady Geraldine's Courtship" is a poem of the Tennysonian school. Some pith is put forth in the passionate parts of the poem; but it is deficient throughout in that finished elegance of style which distinguishes the works of the great artist from whom it is imitated. Bertram, a peasant-born poet falls in love with the Lady Geraldine, a woman of high rank and very extensive possessions. He happens to overhear the lady address the following words to a suitor of the same rank with herself, and whose overtures she is declining--

"Yes, your lordship judges rightly. Whom I marry, shall be noble, Ay, and wealthy. I shall never blush to think how he was born."

Upon which, imagining that these words have some special and cutting reference to himself, he passes into the presence of the lady, and rates her in a strain of very fierce invective, which shows that his blood is really up, whatever may be thought of the taste which dictated his language, or of the title he had to take to task so severely a lady who had never given him any sort of encouragement. In a letter to a friend, he thus describes the way in which he went to work--the fourth line is a powerful one--

"Oh, she flutter'd like a tame bird, in among its forest-brothers, Far too strong for it! then drooping, bow'd her face upon her hands-- And I spake out wildly, fiercely, brutal truths of her and others! _I, she planted the desert, swathed her, windlike, with my sands._

"I pluck'd up her social fictions, bloody-rooted, though leaf verdant,-- Trod them down with words of shaming,--all the purples and the gold, And the 'landed stakes' and Lordships--all that spirits pure and ardent Are cast out of love and reverence, because chancing not to hold.

"'For myself I do not argue,' said I, 'though I love you, Madam, But for better souls, that nearer to the height of yours have trod-- And this age shows, to my thinking, still more infidels to Adam, Than directly, by profession, simple infidels to God.

"'Yet, O God' (I said,) 'O grave' (I said,) 'O mother's heart and bosom! With whom first and last are equal, saint and corpse and little child! We are fools to your deductions, in these figments of heart-closing! We are traitors to your causes, in these sympathies defiled!

"'Learn more reverence, madam, not for rank or wealth--_that_ needs no learning; _That_ comes quickly--quick as sin does! ay, and often works to sin; But for Adam's seed, MAN! Trust me, 'tis a clay above your scorning, With God's image stamp'd upon it, and God's kindling breath within.

"'What right have you, Madam, gazing in your shining mirror daily, Getting, so, by heart, your beauty, which all others must adore,-- While you draw the golden ringlets down your fingers, to vow gaily,... You will wed no man that's only good to God,--and nothing more.'"

In the second stanza, we cannot make out the construction of the words, "all that spirits pure and ardent are cast out of love and reverence." This vigorous tirade is continued throughout several stanzas. The poor lady merely utters the word "Bertram," and the lover is carried to bed in a fainting fit when his passion is expended. When he recovers he indites the aforesaid letter. After he has dispatched it, the lady enters his apartment: oh, blessed and gracious apparition! We quote the _denouement_, omitting one or two stanzas--

Soh! how still the lady standeth! 'tis a dream--a dream of mercies! 'Twixt the purple lattice-curtains, how she standeth still and pale! 'Tis a vision, sure, of mercies, sent to soften his self-curses-- Sent to _sweep_ a patient quiet, o'er the tossing of his wail.

'Eyes,' he said, 'now throbbing through me! are ye eyes that did undo me? _Shining eyes, like antique jewels set in Parian statue-stone!_ Underneath that calm white forehead, are ye ever burning torrid, O'er the desolate sand-desert of my heart and life undone?'

"Ever, evermore the while in a slow silence she kept smiling,-- And approach'd him slowly, slowly, in a gliding measured pace; With her two white hands extended, as if praying one offended, And a look of supplication, gazing earnest in his face.

"Said he--'Wake me by no gesture,--sound of breath, or stir of vesture; Let the blessed apparition melt not yet _to its divine_! No approaching--hush! no breathing! or my heart must swoon to death in The too utter life thou bringest--O thou dream of Geraldine!'

"Ever, evermore the while in a slow silence she kept smiling-- But the tears ran over lightly from her eyes, and tenderly; 'Dost thou, Bertram, truly love me? Is no woman far above me, Found more worthy of thy poet-heart, than such a one as _I_?'

"Said he--'I would dream so ever, like the flowing of that river, Flowing ever in a shadow, greenly onward to the sea; So, thou vision of all sweetness--princely to a full completeness,-- Would my heart and life flow onward--deathward--through this dream of THEE!'

"Ever, evermore the while in a slow silence she kept smiling,-- While the shining tears ran faster down the blushing of her cheeks; Then with both her hands enfolding both of his, she softly told him, 'Bertram, if I say I love thee,... 'tis the vision only speaks.'

"Soften'd, quicken'd to adore her, on his knee he fell before her-- And she whisper'd low in triumph--'It shall be as I have sworn! Very rich he is in virtues,--very noble--noble certes; And I shall not blush in knowing, that men call him lowly born!"

With the exception of the line, and the other expressions which we have printed in italics, we think that the whole tone of this _finale_ is "beautiful exceedingly;" although, if we may express our private opinion, we should say that the lover, after his outrageous demeanour, was very unworthy of the good fortune that befell him. But, in spite of the propitious issue of the poem, we must be permitted (to quote one of Miss Barrett's lines in this very lay) to make our "critical deductions for the modern writers' fault." Will she, or any one else tell us the meaning of the second line in this stanza? Or, will she maintain that it has any meaning at all? Lady Geraldine's possessions are described--

"She has halls and she has castles, and the resonant steam-eagles _Follow far on the directing of her floating dove-like hand_-- With a thund'rous vapour trailing, underneath the starry vigils, So to mark upon the blasted heaven, the measure of her land."

We thought that steam-coaches generally followed the directing of no hand except the "stoker's;" but _it_ certainly is always much liker a raven than a dove. "Eagles and vigils" is not admissible as a rhyme; neither is "branch and grange." Miss Barrett says of the Lady Geraldine that she had "such a gracious coldness" that her lovers "could not _press their futures_ on the present of her courtesy." Is that human speech? One other objection and our carpings shall be dumb. Miss Barrett, in our opinion, has selected a very bad, dislocated, and unmelodious metre for the story of Lady Geraldine's courtship. The poem reads very awkwardly in consequence of the rhymes falling together in the alternate lines and not in couplets. Will Miss Barrett have the goodness to favour the public with the sequel of this poem? We should like to know how the match between the peasant's son and the peer's daughter was found to answer.

Those among our readers who may have attended principally to the selections which we made from these volumes before we animadverted on the "Drama of Exile," may perhaps be of opinion that we have treated Miss Barrett with undue severity, and have not done justice to the vigour and rare originality of her powers; while others, who may have attended chiefly to the blemishes of style and execution which we have thought it our duty to point out in our later quotations, may possibly think that we have ranked her higher than she deserves. We trust that those who have carefully perused both the favourable and unfavourable extracts, will give us credit for having steered a middle course, without either running ourselves aground on the shoals of detraction, or oversetting the ship by carrying too much sail in favour of our authoress. And although they may have seen that our hand was sometimes unsteady at the helm, we trust that it has always been when we felt apprehensive that the current of criticism was bearing us too strongly towards the former of these perils. If any of our remarks have been over harsh, we most gladly qualify them by saying, that, in our humble opinion, Miss Barrett's poetical merits infinitely outweigh her defects. Her genius is profound, unsullied, and without a flaw. The imperfections of her manner are mere superficial blot which a little labour might remove. Were the blemishes of her style tenfold more numerous than they are, we should still revere this poetess as one of the noblest of her sex; for her works have impressed us with the conviction, that powers such as she possesses are not merely the gifts or accomplishments of a highly intellectual woman; but that they are closely intertwined with all that is purest and loveliest in goodness and in truth.

It is plain that Miss Barrett would always write well if she wrote simply from her own heart, and without thinking of the compositions of any other author--at least let her think of them only in so far as she is sure that they embody great thoughts in pure and appropriate language, and in forms of construction which will endure the most rigid scrutiny of common sense and unperverted taste. If she will but wash her hands completely of AEschylus and Milton, and all other poets, either great, or whom she takes for such, and come before the public in the graces of her own feminine sensibilities, and in the strength of her own profound perceptions, her sway over human hearts will be more irresistible than ever, and she will have nothing to fear from a comparison with the most gifted and illustrious of her sex.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] London. Moxon. 1844.

[32] "_With accents undefiled_;" this is surely a very strange and unaccountable interpolation. How was it possible, or conceivable, that any accents could be _defiled_, which conveyed the holiest and most pathetic injunction that ever came from the lips of a dying mother?

UP STREAM; OR, STEAM-BOAT REMINISCENCES.

I had come to New Orleans to be married, and the knot once tied, there was little inducement for my wife, myself, or any of our party, to remain in that city. Indeed, had we been disposed to linger, an account that was given us of the most unwelcome of all visitors, the yellow fever, having knocked at the doors of several houses in the Marigny suburb, would have been sufficient to drive us away. For my part, I was anxious to find myself in my now comfortable home, and to show my new acquisition--namely, my wife--to my friends above Baton Rouge, well assured that the opinion of all would be in favour of the choice I had made. By some eccentric working of that curious machinery called the mind, I was more thoughtful than a man is usually supposed to be upon his wedding-day; and I received the congratulations of the guests, went through the _obligato_ breakfast, and the preparations for departure, in a very automatical manner. I took scarcely more note of the nine shots that were fired as we went on board the steamer, of the hurrahs shouted after us from the quay by a few dozen sailors, or the waving of the star-spangled banners that fluttered over the poop and forecastle--of all the honour and glory, in short, attending our departure. I was busy drawing a comparison between my first and this, my last, voyage to the Red River.

It was just nine years and two months since I had first come into possession of my "freehold of these United States," as the papers specified it. Five thousand dollars had procured me the honour of becoming a Louisianian planter; upon the occurrence of which event, I was greeted by my friends and acquaintances as the luckiest of men. There were two thousand acres, "with due allowance for fences and roads," according to the usual formula; and the wood alone, if I might believe what was told me, was well worth twenty thousand dollars. For the preceding six months, the whole of the western press had been praising the Red River territory to the very skies; it was an incomparable sugar and cotton ground, full sixteen feet deep of river slime--Egypt was a sandy desert compared to it--and as to the climate, the zephyrs that disported themselves there were only to be paralleled in Eldorado and Arcadia. I, like a ninny as I was, although fully aware of the puffing propensities of our newspaper editors, especially when their tongues, or rather pens, have been oiled by a few handfuls of dollars, fell into the trap, and purchased land in the fever-hole in question, where I was assured that a habitable house and two negro huts were already built and awaiting me. The improvements alone, the land-speculator was ready to take his oath, were worth every cent of two thousand dollars. In short, I concluded my blind bargain, and in the month of June, prepared to start to visit my estate. I was at New Orleans, which city was just then held fast in the gripe of its annual scourge and visitor, the yellow fever. I was in a manner left alone; all my friends had gone up or down stream, or across the Pont Chartrain. There was nothing to be seen in the whole place but meagre hollow-eyed negresses, shirtless and masterless, running about the streets, howling like jackals, or crawling in and out of the open doors of the houses. In the upper suburb things were at the worst; there, whole streets were deserted, the houses empty, the doors and windows knocked in; while the foul fever-laden breeze came sighing over from Vera Cruz, and nothing was to be heard but the melancholy rattle of the corpse-carts as they proceeded slowly through the streets with their load of coffins. It was high time to be off, when the yellow fever, the deadly _vomito_, had thus made its triumphant entry, and was ruling and ravaging like some mighty man of war in a stormed fortress.

I had four negroes with me, including old Sybille, who was at that time full sixty-five years of age; Caesar, Tiberius, and Vitellius, were the three others. We are fond of giving our horses and negroes these high sounding appellations, as a sort of warning, I am inclined to think, to those amongst us who sit in high places; for even in our young republic there is no lack of would-be Caesars.

The steamers had left off running below Baton Rouge, so I resolved to leave my gig at New Orleans, procuring in its stead a sort of dearborn or railed cart, in which I packed the whole of my traps, consisting of a medley of blankets and axes, barrows and ploughshares, cotton shirts and cooking utensils. Upon the top of all this I perched myself; and those who had known me only three or four months previously as the gay and fashionable Mr Howard, one of the leaders of the _ton_, the deviser and proposer of fetes, balls, and gaieties of all kinds, might well have laughed, could they have seen me half buried amongst pots and pans, bottles and bundles, spades and mattocks, and suchlike useful but homely instruments. There was nobody there to laugh, however, or to cry either. Tears were then scarce articles in New Orleans; for people had got accustomed to death, and their feelings were more or less blunted. But even had the yellow fever not been there, I doubt if any one would have laughed at me; there is too much sound sense amongst us. Our town beauties--ay, the most fashionable and elegant of them--think nothing of installing themselves, with their newly wedded husbands, in the aforesaid dearborns, and moving off to the far west, leaving behind them all the comforts and luxuries among which they have been brought up. Whoever travels in our backwoods, will often come across scenes and interiors such as the boldest romance writer would never dare to invent. Newly married couples, whose childhood and early youth have been spent in the enjoyment of all the superfluities of civilization, will buy a piece of good land far in the depths of forests and prairies, and found a new existence for themselves and their children. One meets with their dwellings in abundance--log-houses, consisting for the most part of one room and a small kitchen: on the walls of the former the horses' saddles and harness, and the husband's working clothes, manufactured often by the delicate hands of his lady; in one corner, a harp or a piano; on the table, perhaps, a few numbers of the North American or Southern reviews, and some Washington or New York papers. A strange mixture of wild and civilized life. It is thus that our Johnsons, our Livingstons, and Ranselaers, and hundreds, ay, thousands of families, our Jeffersons and Washingtons, commenced; and truly it is to be hoped, that the rising generation will not despise the custom of their forefathers, or reject this healthy means of renovating the blood and vigour of the community.

To return to my own proceedings. I got upon my dearborn, in order to leave as soon as possible the pestilential atmosphere of New Orleans; and I had just established myself amongst my goods and chattels, when Caesar came running up in great exultation, with a new cloak which he had been so lucky as to find lying before the door of a deserted house in the suburb. I took hold of the infected garment with a pair of tongs, and pitched it as far as I was able from the cart, to the great dismay of Caesar, who could not understand why I should throw away a thing which he assured me was well worth twenty dollars. We set off, and soon got out of the town. Not a living creature was to be seen as far as the eye could reach along the straight road. On the right hand side, the suburb of the Annunciation was enclosed in wooden palisades, upon which enormous bills were posted, containing proclamations by the mayor of the town, and headed with the word "Infected," in letters that could be read half a mile off. These proclamations, however, were unnecessary. New Orleans looked more like a churchyard than a city; and we did not meet five persons during the whole of our drive along the new canal road.

At the first plantation at which we halted, in order to give the horses a feed, gates and doors were all shut in our faces, and the hospitable owner of the house warned us to be off. As this warning was conveyed in the shape of a couple of rifle-barrels protruded through the jalousies, we did not think it advisable to neglect it. The reception was cheerless enough; but we came from New Orleans, and could expect no better one. Caesar, however, dauntless as his celebrated namesake, jumped over a paling, and plucked an armful of Indian corn ears, which he gave to the horses; an earthen pan served to fetch them water from the Mississippi, and after a short pause we resumed our journey. Five times, I remember, we halted, and were received in the same humane and hospitable manner, until at last we reached the plantation of my friend Bankes. We had come fifty miles under a burning sun, and had passed more than fifty plantations, each with its commodious and elegant villa built upon it; but we had not yet seen a human face. Here, however, I hoped to find shelter and refreshment; but in that hope I was doomed to be disappointed.

"From New Orleans?" enquired the voice of my friend through the jalousies of his verandah.

"To be sure," answered I.

"Then begone, friend, and be d----d to you!" was the affectionate reply of the worthy Mr Bankes, who was, nevertheless, kind enough to cause a huge ham and accessories, together with half a dozen well-filled bottles, to be placed outside the door--a sort of mute intimation that he was happy to see us, so long as we did not cross his threshold. I had a hearty laugh at this half-and-half hospitality, eat and drank, wrapped myself in a blanket, and slept, with the blue vault for a covering, as well or better than the president.

In the morning, before starting, I shouted out a "Thank ye! and be d----d to you!" by way of _remerciment_; and then we resumed our march.

At last, upon the third evening, we managed to get our heads under a roof at the town of Baton Rouge, in the house of an old French soldier, who laughed at the yellow fever as he had formerly done at the Cossacks and Mamelukes; and the following morning we started for the Red River, in the steamboat Clayborne. By nightfall we reached my domain.

_Santa Virgen!_ exclaims the Spaniard in his extremity of grief and perplexity: what I exclaimed, I am sure I do not remember; but I know that my hair stood on end, when I beheld, for the first time, the so-called improvements on my new property. The habitable and comfortable house was a species of pigsty, built out of the rough branches of trees, without doors, windows, or roof. There was I to dwell, and that in a season when the thermometer was ranging between ninety-five and a hundred degrees. The very badness of things, however, stimulated us to exertion; we set to work, and in two days had built a couple of very decent huts, the only inconvenience of which was, that when it rained hard, we were obliged to take refuge under a neighbouring cotton-tree. Fortunately, out of the two thousand acres, there really were fifty in a state of cultivation, and that helped us. I planted and kept house as well as I could: in the daytime I ploughed and sowed; and in the evening I mended the harness and the holes in my inexpressibles. With society I was little troubled, seeing that my nearest neighbour lived five-and-twenty miles off. The first summer passed in this manner; the second was a little better; and the third better still--until at last the way of life became endurable. There is nothing in the world impracticable; and Napoleon never spoke a truer word than when he said, "_Impossible!--C'est le mot d'un fou!_"

And then a hunting-party in the savannahs of Louisiana or Arkansas!

There is a something in those endless and gigantic wildernesses which seems to elevate the soul, and to give to it, as well as to the body, an increase of strength and energy. There reign, in countless multitudes, the wild horse and the bison; the wolf, the bear, and the snake; and, above all, the trapper, surpassing the very beasts of the desert in wildness--not the old trapper described by Cooper, who never saw a trapper in his life, but the real trapper, whose adventures and mode of existence would furnish the richest materials for scores of romances.

Our American civilization has engendered certain corrupt off-shoots, of which the civilization of other countries knows nothing, and which could only spring up in a land where liberty is found in its greatest development. These trappers are for the most part outcasts, criminals who have fled from the chastisement of the law, or else unruly spirits to whom even the rational degree of freedom enjoyed in the United States has appeared cramping and insufficient. It is perhaps fortunate for the States, that they possess the sort of fag-end to their territory comprised between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains; for much mischief might be caused by these violent and restless men, were they compelled to remain in the bosom of social life. If, for example, _la belle France_ had had such a fag-end or outlet during the various crises that she has passed through in the course of the last fifty years, how many of her great warriors and equally great tyrants might have lived and died trappers! And truly, neither Europe nor mankind in general would have been much the worse off, if those instruments of the greatest despotism that ever disguised itself under the mask of freedom--the Massenas, and Murats, and Davousts, and scores more of suchlike laced and decorated gentry--had never been heard of.

One finds these trappers or hunters in all the districts extending from the sources of the Columbia and Missouri, to those of the Arkansas and Red Rivers, and on the tributary streams of the Mississippi which run eastward from the Rocky Mountains. Their whole time is passed in the pursuit and destruction of the innumerable wild animals, which for hundreds and thousands of years have bred and multiplied in those remote steppes and plains. They slay the buffalo for the sake of his hump, and of the hide, out of which they make their clothing; the bear to have his skin for a bed; the wolf for their amusement; and the beaver for his fur. In exchange for the spoils of these animals they get lead and powder, flannel shirts and jackets, string for their nets, and whisky to keep out the cold. They traverse those endless wastes in bodies several hundreds strong, and have often desperate and bloody fights with the Indians. For the most part, however, they form themselves into parties of eight or ten men, a sort of wild guerillas. These must rather be called hunters than trappers; the genuine trapper limiting himself to the society of one sworn friend, with whom he remains out for at least a year, frequently longer; for it takes a considerable time to become acquainted with the haunts of the beaver. If one of the two comrades dies, the other remains in possession of the whole of their booty. The mode of life that is at first adopted from necessity, or through fear of the laws, is after a time adhered to from choice; and few of these men would exchange their wild, lawless, unlimited freedom, for the most advantageous position that could be offered them in a civilized country. They live the whole year through in the steppes, savannahs, prairies, and forests of the Arkansas, Missouri, and Oregon territories--districts which comprise enormous deserts of sand and rock, and, at the same time, the most luxuriant and beautiful plains, teeming with verdure and vegetation. Snow and frost, heat and cold, rain and storm, and hardships of all kinds, render the limbs of the trapper as hard, and his skin as thick, as those of the buffalo that he hunts; the constant necessity in which he finds himself of trusting entirely to his bodily strength and energy, creates a self-confidence that no peril can shake--a quickness of sight, thought, and action, of which man in a civilized state can form no conceptions. His hardships are often terrible; and I have seen trappers who had endured sufferings, compared to which the fabled adventures of Robinson Crusoe are mere child's play, and whose skin had converted itself into a sort of leather, impervious to every thing except lead and steel. In a moral point of view, these men may be considered a psychological curiosity: in the wild state of nature in which they live, their mental faculties frequently develop themselves in a most extraordinary manner; and in the conversation of some of them may be found proofs of a sagacity and largeness of views, of which the greatest philosophers of ancient or modern times would have no cause to be ashamed.

The daily and hourly dangers incurred by these trappers must, one would think, occasionally cause them to turn their thoughts to a Supreme Being; but such is not the case. Their rifle is their god--their knife their patron saint--their strong right hand their only trust. The trapper shuns his fellow-men; and the glance with which he measures the stranger whom he encounters on his path, is oftener that of a murderer than a friend: the love of gain is as strong with him as it is found to be in a civilized state of society, and the meeting of two trappers is generally the signal for the death of one of them. He hates his white competitor for the much-prized beaver skins far more than he does his Indian one: the latter he shoots down as coolly as if he were a wolf or a bear; but when he drives his knife into the breast of the former, it is with as much devilish joy as if he felt he were ridding mankind of as great an evil-doer as himself. The nourishment of the trapper, consisting for years together of buffalo's flesh--the strongest food that a man can eat--and taken without bread or any other accompaniment, doubtless contributes to render him wild and inhuman, and to assimilate him in a certain degree to the savage animals by which he is surrounded.

During an excursion that I made with some companions towards the upper part of the Red River, we met with several of these trappers; amongst others, with one weather-beaten old fellow, whose face and bare neck were tanned by sun and exposure to the colour of tortoise-shell. We hunted two days in his company, without noticing any thing remarkable about the man; he cooked our meals, which consisted usually of a haunch of venison or a buffalo's hump, instructed us where to find game, and was aware of the approach of the latter even sooner than his huge wolf-dog, which never left his side. It was only on the morning of the third day, that we discovered something calculated to diminish our confidence in our new comrade. This was a number of lines and crosses upon the butt of his rifle, which gave us a new and not very favourable insight into the man's character. These lines and crosses came after certain words rudely scratched with a knife-point, and formed a sort of list, of which the following is a copy:--

Buffaloes--no number given, they being probably too numerous.

Bears, nineteen--the number being indicated by nineteen strait strokes.

Wolves, thirteen--marked by oblique strokes.

Red underloppers, four--marked by four crosses.

White underloppers, two--noted by two stars.

Whilst we were examining this curious calendar, and puzzling ourselves to make out the meaning of the word "underloppers," I observed a grim smile stealing over the features of the old trapper. He said nothing, however; drew the buffalo's hump he was cooking from under the hot embers, took it out of the piece of hide in which it was wrapped, and placed it before us. It was a meal that a king might have envied, and the mere smell of it made us forget the rifle butt. We had scarcely fallen to, when the old man laid hold of his gun.

"Look ye," said he, with a strange grin. "It's my pocket-book. D'ye think it a sin to kill one of them red or white underloppers?"

"Whom do you mean?" asked we.

The man smiled again and rose to depart; his look, however, was alone enough to enlighten us as to who the two-legged interlopers were whom he had first shot, and then noted on his rifle-butt with as much cool indifference as if they had been wild turkeys instead of human beings. In a region to which the vengeful arm of the law does not reach, we did not feel ourselves called upon or entitled to set ourselves up as judges, and we let the man go.

These trappers occasionally, and at long intervals, return for a few days or weeks to the haunts of civilization; and this occurs when they have collected a sufficient quantity of beaver skins. They then fell a hollow tree that stands on the shore of some navigable stream, make it water-tight, launch it, load it with their merchandise and their few necessaries, and float and row for thousands of miles down the Missouri, Arkansas, or Red River, to St Louis, Natchitoches, or Alexandria. They may be seen roaming and staring about the streets of these towns, clad in their coats of skins, and astonishing strangers by their wild and primitive appearance.

* * * * *

I was sitting on a sofa in a corner of the ladies' cabin, with Louise by my side, and talking over with her these and other recollections of more or less interest. The tea hour was long past, and the cabins were lighted up. Suddenly we were interrupted in our conversation by a loud noise overhead.

"A nigger killed!" sang out somebody upon deck.

"A nigger killed!" repeated two, ten, twenty, and at length a hundred voices; and thereupon there was a running and trampling, and hurrying and scurrying, an agitation in our big floating inn as if the boilers were on the brink of bursting, and giving us a passage into eternity in the midst of their scalding contents. Louise started up, and dragging me with her, hurried breathless through the two saloons, to the stairs leading upon deck.

"Who is killed? Where is the poor negro?"

The answer I got was a horse-laugh from a score of backwoodsmen.

"Much noise about nothing, dear Louise."

And we were on the point of descending the stairs again, when we were detained, and our attention riveted, by the picturesque appearance of the deck--I should rather say of the persons grouped upon it--seen in the red, flickering, and uncertain light of sundry lamps, lanterns, and torches. Truly, the night-piece was not bad. In the centre of the steamer's deck, at an equal distance from stem and stern, stood a knot of fellows of such varied and characteristic appearance as might be sought for in vain in any other country than ours. It seemed as if all the western states and territories had sent their representatives to our steamer. Suckers from Illinois, and Badgers from the lead-mines of Missouri--Wolverines from Michigan, and Buckeyes from Ohio--Redhorses from old Kentuck, and Hunters from Oregon, stood mingled before us, clad in all sorts of fantastical and outlandish attire. One had a hunting-shirt of blue and white striped calico, which made its wearer's broad back and huge shoulders resemble a walking feather-bed; another was remarkable for a brilliant straw-hat--a New Orleans purchase, that looked about as well on his bronzed physiognomy as a Chinese roof would do on a pigsty. Winebago wampum belts and Cherokee mocassins, jerkins of tanned and untanned deer-hide, New York frock-coats, and red and blue jackets, composed some of the numerous costumes, of which the mixture and contrast were in the highest degree picturesque.

In the middle of this group stood a personage of a very different stamp--a most interesting specimen of the genus Yankee, contrasting in a striking manner with the rough-hewn sons of Anuk who surrounded him. He was a man of some thirty years of age, as dry and tough as leather, of grave and pedantic mien, the skin of his forehead twisted into innumerable small wrinkles, his lips pressed firmly together, his bright reddish-grey eyes apparently fixed, but, in reality, perpetually shifting their restless glances from the men by whom he was surrounded, to some chests that lay upon the deck before him, and again from the chests to the men; his whole lean, bony, angular figure in a position that made it difficult to conjecture whether he was going to pray, or to sing, or to preach a sermon. In one hand he held a roll of pigtail tobacco, in the other some bright-coloured ribands, which he had taken from an open chest containing the manifold articles constituting the usual stock in trade of a pedlar. Beside this chest were two others, and beside those lay a negro, howling frightfully, and rubbing alternately his right shoulder and his left foot; but nevertheless, according to all appearance, by no means in danger of taking his departure for the other world. As the Yankee pedlar raised his hand and signed to the vociferous blackamoor to be silent, the face of the former gradually assumed that droll, cunning, and yet earnest expression which betrays those double distilled Hebrews, when they are planning to get possession, in a quasi-legal manner, of the dollars of their fellow-citizens; in a word, when they are manoeuvering to exchange their worthless northern wares for the sterling coin of the south. Presently his arms began to swing about like those of a telegraph; he threw a long and loving glance at the two unopened chests, which had apparently slipped down from the top of a quantity of merchandise piled upon deck, and fallen on the foot and shoulder of the negro; then measuring the latter with a look of reproach, he suddenly opened his compressed lips, from which a sharp, high-toned, schoolmasterlike voice issued.

"Sambo, Sambo! What have you done? Sambo, Sambo!" he repeated, while his voice became more solemn, and he raised his hands and eyes as if appealing to heaven for justice. "Sambo, you onlucky nigger, what have you been a doin'?"

"A 'sarve,' a wonderful 'sarve!'" screamed the man, pointing to the chests with an appearance of the profoundest grief.

"Heaven forgive you, Sambo! but you have endangered, perhaps sp'iled, a 'sarve,' compared to which all the 'intments and balms of Mecca, Medina, and Balsora--of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, or whatever other places they may come from, air actilly no better than cart-grease. Ah, Sambo! if you were twenty times a nigger, and could be brought twenty times on the auction table, you wouldn't fetch enough money to pay for the harm you have done!"

"Boe! Boe!" howled the negro by way of parenthesis.

"Ah, Boe! Boe!" screamed the Yankee, "you may well say Boe, Boe! And you ain't the only one as may say it, that's sartain. There be ladies and gentlemen here, as respectable ladies and gentlemen as can be found any where--ay, even to Boston, the cradle of our independence--and they might say Boe! Boe! if they knew all. In them two chests are a hundred tin boxes and glass phials; and if only twenty of them are damaged, there is more injury done than your hide could pay for, if it were twenty times as thick and twenty times as vallyable as it is. Your whole carcass ain't worth one of the boxes of that precious 'intment. Ah, Sambo!"

"Boe! Boe!" howled Sambo in reply.

"What's the palaver about?" growled some of the Badgers and Buckeyes; "open the chests, and you'll see what harm's done."

"D'ye ye hear, Sambo?" cried the Yankee with the same immovable countenance; "you're to hold yer tongue, the gentlemen say; they're tired of yer noise, and no wonder. What's the use of boohooin' away at that rate? Helps you nothin'; you desarve what you've got. I'll thank you for your long knife, Mister. That'll do. That opens it, cuts in like rael steel; better it should be into hard word than soft flesh. There they are, then, and not broken; onhurt, without a spot or a crack. Sing praises to the Lord! psalms and hymns of rejoicin'--not a phial broke, nor a box smashed! Praised be the Lord! I say ag'in. Since they are safe, it don't matter if twenty shoulder-blades and ankle-bones are put out. Verily the mercy of Heaven shall be made manifest, and that by the means of a feeble vessel, Jared Bundle by name. Down with ye, Sambo--down with ye, I say!--Your shoulder and your dingy hide shall be made whole, and your black bones shall be comforted!"

Not a muscle of the Yankee's face moved; he preserved the grave and solemn appearance of a man to whom a sacred trust has been confided, and who is fully penetrated with the importance of his mission. Once or twice, however, I observed him give a keen but almost imperceptible glance around him, as if to observe the effect of his eloquence upon his auditors.

"Down with you, Sambo!" he repeated to the negro, who had got himself into a sort of sitting posture upon the deck.

"Down, down!" cried the men of Kentucky.

"Down!" those of Missouri and Ohio.

"Be quick about it!" shouted an Illinois sucker.

"Let's see the Yankee's wonderful cure!" exclaimed a hunter from Oregon.

And amidst shouts and exclamations and laughter, poor Sambo was seized by half a dozen of their bear's fists, and stretched out upon a heap of coffee-bags like a pig that's going to be killed.

"Boe! Boe!" clamoured the negro at the top of his voice.

"Boohoo as much as you like," cried the Yankee in a shrill tone, that was heard above all the howlings of the unlucky Sambo. "You'll sing to another tune when you see and understand and feel what a Conne'ticut man _can_ do. You say Boe, Boe! like a poor benighted crittur as you are, but what do you say to that?" cried the pedlar in a triumphant voice, as he held close to the negro's nose a piece of linen rag on which he had smeared a green greasy substance bearing a strong resemblance to paste-blacking in a state of decomposition. Then, taking up the box which contained this precious compound, he put it in close proximity to the obtuse snout of the blackamoor, who made a grimace as if his olfactories were but moderately regaled by the odour emanating from the miraculous ointment.

"What d'ye think of that, Sambo? Is that the stuff or not? Will that do, think ye? Well, you shall soon see. Gentlemen!" he continued, with all the gravity of a legitimate M.D. "Gentlemen! the arms and legs of this poor Sambo must be stretched as much as possible, in order that the sarve may take its full effect. Will you be good enough to assist me?"

Upon the word, the backwoodsmen caught hold of the negro's limbs, and began pulling and tugging at them till the poor devil roared as if they had been impaling him.

"Boohoo away!" cried the Yankee. "It's all for your good. If your shoulder is put out, the stretchin' will put it in ag'in."

The negro continued his lamentations, as well he might, when every one of his joints was cracking under the force applied.

"All no use your callin' out!" screamed the pedlar, as he stuck the salved rag upon the ebony hide of the patient. "Better hold yer tongue. Ain't you lucky to have met with me at a time when all the doctors in the world--the Browns, and Hossacks, and Sillimans--could not have done you a cent's worth of good? All their drugs would have had no more effect than a ladleful of pea-soup. You ought to be rejoicin' in yer luck, instead of screamin' like a wounded catamount. Keep still, will you? There, that'll do. Many thanks, gentlemen; I thank you in the name of this senseless crittur. That's enough. No cause for complaint, man!" continued he, as he stuck a second plaster on the negro's foot. "All safe enough when Jared Bundle is there with his Palmyra sarve. You be the first as was ever know'd to scream after havin' one smell of that precious 'intment. And I tell you what it is, my man, if both your black legs had been broken clean off, and were swimmin' down the Mississippi half rotten--ay, or if they had just come out of the jaws of an alligator, and you were to stick 'em on, and plaster them up with this 'intment, you may take my word, Jared Bundle's word, that they'd grow to your body again--the flesh would become your flesh, and the bone your bone, as sure as I am now here." And he looked round at his auditors with a world of confidence and veracity depicted upon his countenance.

"There was Aby Sparks to Penobscot--you know, ladies and gentlemen, Aby Sparks, the son of Enoch Sparks, who married Peggy Heath. Good family the Sparkses--very good family, as you know, ladies and gentlemen. Respectable people in a respectable way of business, the general line--drugs and cutlery, and hats patent waterproof, bird-seed and jewellery, tea and coffee pots, and shoes of the newest fashion. Ladies and gentlemen, do you want a good tea or coffee pot? Partiklar jam, _they_ are, I reckon. Well, Aby Sparks said to me, 'Jared Bundle,' says he, 'leave me a dozen boxes or phials, whichever you like, of your Palmyra sarve. Wonderful stuff that!' says he. 'What!' says I, 'leave you some of my Palmyra sarve! You're jist right to say it ain't common apothecaries' stuff; that it certainly ain't. But what would the ladies and gentlemen on the lower Mississippi say, if I left any of it here? It's all meant for them,' says I; 'they're my best customers.'"

"Soft sawder! Jared Bundle," grunted a Kentuckian.

"Cart grease and cobbler's wax," said a man of Illinois.

"He's from the north," laughed a third, "where there's more wooden clocks than cows and calves."

"Where the grasshoppers break their legs in jumpin' from one potato heap to another," interposed a fourth.

"Where the robins starve in harvest time, and the mockin'-bird is too hungry to mock," cried a fifth.

"Nothin' in the world like Jared Bundle's 'intment," continued the imperturbable Yankee. "Finest thing possible for corns. Ain't genteel to talk of such things, ladies and gentlemen; but if any of you have got corns, rub 'em just two or three times with the Palmyra sarve, and they'll disappear like snow in sunshine. Worth any money against tan and freckles. You, miss," cried he to Louise, "you ain't got any freckles, but you may very likely git 'em. A plaster on each cheek afore you go to bed--git up in the mornin', not a freckle left--all lilies and roses!"

"Hold your impudent tongue!" said I, "or I will plaster you."

"We're in a free country," was the answer; "free to sell and free to buy. Gentlemen," continued Mr Bundle, "famous stuff for razor-strops. Rub a little on, draw the razor a couple of times over it--shave. Razor runs over the face like a steam-carriage along a railroad, you don't know how; beard disappears like grass before the sickle, or a regiment of Britishers before Yankee rifles. Great vartue in the sarve--uncommon vartue! Ma'am!" cried he to a lady who, like ourselves, was looking on from a short distance at this farcical scene, "Ma'am!"

I looked round at the lady. "Bless my soul! Mrs Dobleton and the Misses Dobleton from Concordia, my neighbours on the Mississippi. Delighted to see you, Mrs Dobleton; allow me the honour of introducing my wife to you."

Our greetings and compliments were drowned by the piercing voice of the indefatigable Yankee.

"Ma'am!" cried he, with a box of ointment in each hand, "Ma'am! the finest cure in the world for toothach. If teeth are good, it keeps 'em so; if bad, it makes 'em sound and white as ivory. A small bit on the point of a knife between the teeth and the gum--acts like a charm. Young ladies! a capital remedy for narrow chests."

The skinny Miss Dobletons turned green with vexation.

"Incomparable remedy!" continued Jared; "rub it well in on the part affected, and in a short time the most contracted chest becomes as wide as that of Mrs Broadbosom to Charleston. Fine thing for lockjaw, ma'am!" cried he to a Mrs Bodwell who was standing by, and amongst whose good qualities that of silence was not considered to hold a conspicuous place; "a famous cure for lockjaw, from whatever cause it may come on. There was Miss Trowlop--she had a very handsum' mouth and a considerable gift of the gab--was goin' to be married to Mr Shaver, run a hickory splinter through her prunella shoe into her foot--jaw locked as fast as old Ebenezer Gripeall's iron safe. If she'd a-had my Palmyra sarve she'd be still alive, Mrs Shaver, now; 'stead of that, the land-crabs have eaten her. Another example, ladies: Sally Brags, Miss Sally Brags to Portsmouth. You know Portsmouth, Providence, where the pretty gals grow; some folk _do_ say they're prettier to Baltimore--won't say they ain't--matter of taste, pure matter of taste; but Miss Sally Brags, ladies, had the lockjaw--couldn't say a word; took a box of my Palmyra sarve--ladies, two dollars a box by retail--her tongue now goes clap-clap-clap like any steam-mill. Famous cure for lockjaw!"

During this unceasing flow of words, the Yankee had found the time to drive a capital trade; his merchandise of all kinds was rapidly disappearing, and the more the backwoodsmen laughed, the faster flowed the dollars into the pedlar's pouch. It was most diverting to observe the looks of the purchasers of the Palmyra ointment, as they first smelled at it and then shook their heads, as if in doubt whether they were not duped.

"Wonderful stuff!" cried the Yankee with imperturbable gravity, and as if to reassure them. "And capital coffee-pots," continued he to a leather-jerkined Missouri man, who had taken up one of the latter and was examining it. "I'll warrant 'em of the best description, and no mistake. Wonderful stuff this Palmyra sarve, came direct from Moscow, where the Archbishop of Abyssinia had brought it, but, havin' got into debt, he was obliged to sell off; and from Moscow, which, as you all know, is a great seaport, it passed into the hands of the Grand Duke of Teheran or Tombuctoo, who lives somewhere about the Cape of Good Hope. From there it came to Boston in the brig Sarah, Captain Larks. I was one of the first to go on board, and as soon as I smelled to it, I knew directly what time o' day it was--where the wind blew from, as I may say. Ladies, here you have the means of preservin' your health and your beauty for the longest day you live, and all for two dollars--only two dollars a box. In short, ladies and gentlemen," concluded the persevering fellow sententiously, "you have my warranty that this sarve heals all curable diseases; and if it be true, as the famous Doctor Flathead says, that there be only two sorts of maladies--them of which people die, and them of which they get well--you must see how important it is to have a box of the Palmyra 'intment. Best of all sarves, ladies! two dollars a box, ladies!

"Ladies and gentlemen," resumed Mr Bundle after a brief pause, "d'ye want any other articles--silks, linen, calicoes, fine spices, nutmegs? None of your walnut-wood nutmegs, but ginu_ine_ Boston goods, out of the most respectable stores. Ah! ladies and gentlemen, Jared Bundle's tea and coffee pots--let me recommend 'em to you. The metal is of a particular sort, corrects the oily matter contained in the tea, which the doctors say is no better than so much p'ison. Should be sorry for you to suppose I was instigated by love of gain--filthy lucre, ladies; but think of your vallyable health--your precious health--and buy my teapots; two dollars twenty-five cents a-piece. Yes, ma'am," continued he, turning to one of the negresses who were crawling, and grinning, and gaping around his wares, "beautiful Lyons ribands, and Bengal neck-handkerchiefs _di_rect from Calcutta; lovely things them handkerchiefs, and the ribands too, partic'lerly the broad ones--quarter of a dollar a yard. Four yards did you say, ma'am? Better go the _en_tire figur'--take eight, and you'll have twice as much. Now, ladies and gentlemen, to return to the teapots"----

"The teapots!" cried several voices a short distance off. "Hurra! Jared Bundle's teapots! Look here at the Yankee teapots!"

At the same moment the steward of the steamer made his appearance upon the field of Mr Bundle's operations, escorted by half a dozen of the backwoodsmen, and stepping into the torchlight, held up the very coffee-pot which the shameless Yankee had sold to the leather-jacketed man of Missouri. The pot had been filled with boiling water, which was now oozing out comfortably and deliberately at every side and corner of the vessel. For one moment the spectators stared in mute astonishment; but then the discovery of the Yankee's cheatery drew from them a peal of laughter which seemed likely to be inextinguishable.

"Jared Bundle! What do you say to that? Jared Bundle's teapots! A hurra for Jared Bundle and the Yankee teapots!"

The immovable pedlar was by no means put out of countenance by this discovery. While the backwoodsmen were having their laugh out, he took hold of the teapot, examined it deliberately on all sides, at front and back, inside and out, and then shook his head gravely. When the laughers had exhausted their uproariousness, he cleared his throat, and resumed.

"Ah, gentlemen! or rather ladies and gentlemen! in our happy land of freedom and enlightenment, the most enlightened country in the world, no one, I am sure, will refuse to hear the poor pedlar's explanation of this singular circumstance. I know you are all most desirous of havin' it explained, and explain it I can and will. I am sorry to say there are gentlemen who sell teapots for the southern states which are only meant for the northern ones, and others who sell for the north what is meant for the south. That's how I've been deceived in these teapots, which come from the store of the highly respectable Messrs Knockdown. They are for northern consumption, gentlemen, without the smallest doubt, and you know that many teapots will support the cold of the north, but are worth nothin' when they git into a southern climate. It's oncommon hot, you see, down hereaway on the Mississippi, and I reckon that's the reason that you southern gentlemen _are_ sich an almighty b'ilin' up people, who take a gougin' to your breakfast as we should a mackerel. I'm a'most inclined to think, too, that you bile your water a deal too hot, which our northern tea and coffee pots ain't used to, and can't stand nohow."

"Humbug!" growled a score of backwoodsmen, some of whom began to close round the Yankee, as if to make sure of him and his worthless wares.

"Boe! Boe!" howled Sambo, who had been quite forgotten during this scene.

"You still here, you black devil!" cried the pedlar, turning fiercely round upon the negro. "Am I to be deafened by your cussed croakin'? Don't mind him, ladies and gentlemen--pay no attention to him. Who cares about a nigger? He only cries out for his amusement. It's all his tricks and cunnin'; he'd like to git some more of my sarve on his black hide! He won't have any, tho'! Be off with ye, you stinkin' nigger!"

"Stinkin' nigga! Massa Yankee say stinkin' nigga!" yelled Sambo, showing all his white teeth in an ecstasy of anger. "Matto stinkin' nigga now," screamed he as he sprang suddenly to his feet, to the infinite delight of the backwoodsmen, and began capering and hopping about, and grinning like a mad ape. "Matto stinkin' nigga now; one hour 'go him dearie Matto, and good Matto, and Massa Yankee promise four picaillee[33] if Matto let dam heavy chest wid stinkin' serve fall on him foot and shoulder. Boe! Boe! Massa Yankee no good man; bad Massa, Massa Yankee!"

And so it was and turned out to be. The rogue of a Yankee had made a sort of bargain with Sambo, and arranged a scheme by which to draw the attention of the passengers in a natural manner to the famous Palmyra salve. Seldom or never had the risible nerves of the burly backwoodsmen on board the Ploughboy steamer, been so enormously tickled as by the discovery of this Yankee trick. The laughter was deafening, really earsplitting; and was only brought to something like an end by the appearance of the captain, who came with a petition from the lady passengers, to the effect that the Yankee should not be too hardly dealt with for his ingenious attempt to transfer his fellow-citizens' dollars into his own pocket. Thereupon Badgers and Buckeyes, Wolverines and Redhorses, abated their hilarity; and it was comical to see how these rough tenants of the western forests proceeded, with all the gravity of backwoods etiquette, to respond to the humanity of the ladies. In the first place a deputation was chosen, consisting of two individuals, who were charged to assure the ladies of the universal willingness to treat the Yankee as tenderly as might be consistent with the nature of his transgression; secondly, a commission was appointed for the examination of the spurious wares. The articles that had been bought were produced one after the other, their quality and value investigated, and then they were either condemned and thrown overboard, or their sale was confirmed. The tea and coffee pots were almost, without exception, pronounced worthless; for although well enough calculated for a long voyage on the Mississippi, they could never have been meant to hold boiling Mississippi water. The wonderful Palmyra salve proved to be neither more nor less than a compound of hog's lard and gunpowder, with the juice of tobacco and walnut leaves--a mixture that might perhaps have been useful for the destruction of vermin, but the efficacy of which as an antidote to freckles and lockjaw was at least problematical. The teapots, the ointment, and some spices, amongst which wooden nutmegs cut an important figure, were duly consigned to the keeping of the Mississippi kelpies; while the dollars that had been paid for them were retransferred from the pockets of the Yankee to those of the credulous purchasers. Finally, Mr Bundle himself, in consideration of the truly republican stoicism with which he witnessed the execution of the judgment pronounced on his wares, was invited with much ceremony to regale himself with a "go-the-whole-hog-cocktail," an honour which he accepted and replied to in a set speech, at the conclusion of which he enquired whether the honourable society by whose sentence he had been deprived of the larger portion of his merchandise, could not recommend him to a schoolmaster's place in one of their respectable settlements. I almost wondered that he did not treat us to a Methodist sermon as a preparation for our slumbers. He seemed the right man to do it. He exactly answered to the description given of the Yankees by Halleck, in his Connecticut:--

----"Apostates, who are meddling With merchandise, pounds, shillings, pence, and peddling, Or wandering through southern climates teaching The A, B, C, from Webster's spelling-book; Gallant and godly, making love and preaching, And gaining by what they call hook and crook, And what the moralists call overreaching, A decent living. The Virginians look Upon them with as favourable eyes As Gabriel on the devil in Paradise."

There was a deafening "Hurrah for the honourable Mistress Howard!" as the party of backwoodsmen walked off towards the gentlemen's cabin; and then things became quieter. I had invited the bears to drink a glass to Mrs Howard's health, and had told the steward to put down to my account the slings and cocktails they might consume. Mrs Dobleton, whose husband is secretary to a temperance society, pulled a wry face or two at what she doubtless thought an encouragement to vice; but for my part I have no such scruples. It always gives me pleasure to find myself thrown by chance among these rough and wild, but upright and energetic sons of the wilderness--these pioneers of the west, who pass their lives in converting tangled thickets and endless forests into fields and pastures, for the benefit of generations yet unborn. Truly, dear Louise, a few dollars spent amongst these worthy fellows are not thrown away, if they serve to form one, the smallest, link of the chain of good-will and good fellowship that does and ought to bind us to our fellow-citizens.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] The Louisianian name for 6-1/4 cent pieces.

WESTMINSTER-HALL AND THE WORKS OF ART,

(_On a Free Admission Day._)

BY B. SIMMONS.

I.

By slow degrees, like rain-fraught breeze rising in time of dearth, Whispers of Wisdom, far and wide, are muttering o'er the earth; And lo! rough Reason's breath, that wafts strong human health to all, Has blown aside the gates where Pride dozed in her feudal hall.

II.

Stout Carter, drop that loutish look, nor hesitate before-- Eyeing thy frock and clouted shoes--yon dark enormous door; 'Tis ten to one thy trampled sires their ravaged granges gave To spread the Wood from whence was hew'd that oaken architrave.[34]

III.

Take now _thy_ turn. We'll on and in, nor need the pealing tromp (Once wont the lordlings thronging here to usher to the pomp) To kindle our dull phantasies for yon triumphal show That lights the roof so high aloof with the whiteness of its glow.

IV.

RED WILLIAM, couldst thou heave aside the marble of the tomb, And look abroad from Winchester's song-consecrated gloom,[35] A keener smart than Tyrrel's dart would pierce thy soul to see In thy vast courts the Vileinage and peasants treading free.

V.

Oh, righteous retribution! Ye Shades of those who here Stood up in bonds before the slaves of sceptred fraud and fear! Unswerving SOMERS!--MORE!--even thou, dark SOMERSET,[36] who fell In pride of place condignly, yet who loved the Commons well--

VI.

And Ye who with undaunted hearts, immortal mitred Few! For Truth's dear sake, the Tyrant foil'd to whom ye still were true--[37] Rejoice! Who knows what scatter'd thoughts of yours were buried seeds, Slow-springing for th' oppress'd and poor, and ripen'd now to deeds?

VII.

Ha, ha! 'twould make a death's-head laugh to see how the cross-bones-- The black judicial formula devised by bloody thrones-- The Axe's edge _this_ way, now _that_, borne before murder'd men, Who died for aiding their true Liege on mountain and in glen,[38]

VIII.

Are swept like pois'nous spiders' webs for ever from the scene, Where in their place come crowding now the mighty and the mean; The Peer walks by the Peasant's side,[39] to see if grace and art Can touch a bosom clad in frieze, can brighten Labour's heart.

IX.

O! ye who doubt presumptuously that feeling, taste, are given To all for culture, free as flowers, by an impartial heaven, Look through this quiet rabble here--doth it not shame to-day More polish'd mobs to whom we owe our annual squeeze in May?

X.

Mark that poor Maiden, to her Sire interpreting the tale There pictured of the Loved and Left,[40] until her cheek grows pale:-- Yon crippled Dwarf that sculptured Youth[41] eyeing with glances dim, Wondering will he, in higher worlds, be tall and straight like him;--

XI.

How well they group with yonder pale but fire-eyed Artisan, Who just has stopp'd to bid his boys those noble features scan That sadden us for WILKIE! See! he tells them now the story Of that once humble lad, and how he won his marble glory.

XII.

Not all alone thou weep'st in stone, poor Lady, o'er thy Chief,[42] That huge-limb'd Porter, spell-struck there, stands sharer in thy grief. Pert Cynic, scorn not his amaze; all savage as he seems, What graceful shapes henceforward may whiten his heart in dreams!

XIII. A long adieu, dark Years! to you, of war on field and flood, Battle afar, and mimic war at hone to train our blood-- The ruffian Ring--the goaded Bull--the Lottery's gates of sin-- The _all_ to nurse the outward brute, and starve the soul within!

XIV.

Here lives and breathes around us proof that those all-evil times Are fled with their decrepit thoughts, their slaughter, and their crimes; Long stood THIS HALL the type of all could MAN'S grim bonds increase-- Henceforth be it his Vestibule to hope, and light, and peace!

_August_, 1844.

FOOTNOTES:

[34] Westminster-Hall, first reared by Rufus, was entirely rebuilt by Richard II.

[35] Winchester, many years the residence of Joseph Warton, is so much associated with the recollections and noble poetry of his younger brother, as to warrant the expression in the text.

[36] The Protector-Duke, beheaded on Tower-Hill in the reign of his nephew, Edward VI.--"His attention to the poor during his Protectorship, and his opposition to the system of enclosures, had created him many friends among the lower classes, who hastened to witness his end, and yet flattered themselves with the hope of his reprieve."--LINGARD.

[37] The trial of the seven bishops took place in the hall. Five out of their number--worthy of note upon every occasion--(the Archbishop, the Bishops of Ely, Bath and Wells, Chichester, and Petersborough,) refused the oaths to King William, and were deprived accordingly.

[38] The unfortunate Scottish lords were tried here 1745-6, as Horace Walpole abundantly testifies.

[39] More than one noble family, very creditably, have visited the works of art on free-admission days.

[40] Maclise's fresco of _The Knight_.

[41] _Youth at a stream_, by J. H. Foley.

[42] Lough's _Mourners_, a group in marble.

LINES ON THE LANDING OF HIS MAJESTY KING LOUIS PHILIPPE, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1844.

BY B. SIMMONS.

I.

Ho! Wardens of the Coast look forth Upon your Channel seas-- The night is melting in the north, There's tumult on the breeze; Now sinking far, now rolling out In proud triumphal swell, That mingled burst of shot and shout Your fathers knew so well, What time to England's inmost plain The beacon-fires proclaim'd That, like descending hurricane, Grim Blake, that Mastiff of the Main, Beside your shores had once again The Flemish lion tamed![43]

War wakes not now that tumult loud, Ye Wardens of the Coast, Though looming large, through dawn's dim cloud, Like an invading host The Barks of France are bearing down, One crowd of sails, while high Above the misty morning's frown Their streamers light the sky. Up!--greet for once the Tricolor, For once the lilied flag! Forth with gay barge and gilded oar, While fast the volley'd salvoes roar From batteried line, and echoing shore, And gun-engirdled crag!

Forth--greet with ardent hearts and eyes, The GUEST those galleys bring; In Wisdom's walks the more than Wise-- 'Mid Kings the more than King! No nobler visitant e'er sought The Mighty's white-cliff'd isle, Where ALFRED ruled, where BACON thought, Where AVON'S waters smile: Hail to the tempest-vexed Man! Hail to the Sovereign-Sage! A wearier pilgrimage who ran Than the immortal Ithacan, Since first his great career began, Ulysses of our age!

A more than regal welcome give, Ye thousands crowding round; Shout for the once lorn Fugitive, Whose soul no solace found Save in that SELF-RELIANCE--match For adverse worlds, alone-- Which cheer'd the Tutor's humble thatch, Nor left him on the throne. The WANDERER MULLER'S sails they furl-- The Wave-encounterer, who, When Freedom leagued with Crime to hurl Up earth's foundations, from the whirl Where vortex'd Empires raged, the pearl Of matchless Prudence drew.

V.

Shout for the Husband and the Sire, Whose children, train'd to truth, Repaid in feeling, grace, and fire, The lessons taught their youth. Recall his grief when bent above His rose-zoned daughter's clay, Beside whose marble, lifeless, Love, And Art, and Genius lay.[44] And his be homage still more dread, From our mute spirits won, For tears of heart-wrung anguish shed, When with that gray "discrowned head," On foot he follow'd to the dead His gallant, princely son.

VI.

Shout for the Hero and the King In soul serene--alike, If suppliant States the sceptre bring, Or banded traitors strike! Oh, if at times a thrall too strong Round Freedom's form be laid, Where Faction works by wrath and wrong His pardon be display'd. Be his this praise--unspoil'd by power His course benignly ran, A MONARCH, mindful of the hour He felt misfortune's wintry shower, A MAN, from hall to peasant's bower, The common friend of Man.

VII.

Again the ramparts' loosen'd load Of thunder rends the air! Peal on--such pomp is fitly show'd-- He lands no stranger there. Hear from his lips your language grave In earnest accents fall-- The memories of the home ye gave He hastens to recall-- 'Mid flash of spears and fiery thrill Of trumpets speed him forth, The Master-Mind your Shakspeare still Had loved to draw--that to its will Shapes Fate and Chance with potent skill-- The Numa of the North.

VIII.

Windsor! henceforth a loftier spell Invests thy storied walls-- The Bards of future years shall tell That first within thy halls Imperial TRUTH and MERCY met, And in that hallow'd hour Gave earth the hope that Peace shall yet Be dear to Kings as Power. When France clasp'd England's hand of old There memory marks the wane Of iron times, the bad and bold;[45] Oh, may our SECOND FIELD of GOLD A portent still more fair unfold Of Wisdom's widening reign!

FOOTNOTES:

[43] Almost all Blake's great battles were fought in the Channel. One of the most memorable was that off Portsmouth, February 1652.

[44] The Princess Marie of Wurtemberg, the most accomplished child of this most accomplished family, and whose beautiful efforts in sculpture and painting are well known, died a year after her marriage, January 2, 1839.

[45] The meeting between Francis and Henry took place June 1520, the first great period of civilized progression in Europe--the era of Printing--of Columbus--and of the Reformation.

LAMARTINE.

It is remarkable, that although England is the country in the world which has sent forth the greatest number of ardent and intrepid travellers to explore the distant parts of the earth, yet it can by no means furnish an array of writers of travels which will bear a comparison with those whom France can boast. In skilful navigation, daring adventure, and heroic perseverance, indeed, the country of Cook and Davis, of Bruce and Park, of Mackenzie and Buckingham, of Burckhardt and Byron, of Parry and Franklin, may well claim the pre-eminence of all others in the world. An Englishman first circumnavigated the globe; an Englishman alone has seen the fountains of the Nile; and, five years after the ardent spirit of Columbus had led his fearful crews across the Atlantic, Sebastian Cabot discovered the shores of Newfoundland, and planted the British standard in the regions destined to be peopled with the overflowing multitudes of the Anglo-Saxon race.

But if we come to the literary works which have followed these ardent and energetic efforts, and which are destined to perpetuate their memory to future times--the interesting discoveries which have so much extended our knowledge and enlarged our resources--the contemplation is by no means to an inhabitant of these islands equally satisfactory. The British traveller is essentially a man of energy and action, but rarely of contemplation or eloquence. He is seldom possessed of the scientific acquirements requisite to turn to the best account the vast stores of new and original information which are placed within his reach. He often observes and collects facts; but it is as a practical man, or for professional purposes, rather than as a philosopher. The genius of the Anglo-Saxon race--bold, sagacious, and enterprising, rather than contemplative and scientific--nowhere appears more strongly than in the accounts of the numerous and intrepid travellers whom they are continually sending forth into every part of the earth. We admire their vigour, we are moved by their hardships, we are enriched by their discoveries; but if we turn to our libraries for works to convey to future ages an adequate and interesting account of these fascinating adventures, we shall, in general, experience nothing but disappointment. Few of them are written with the practised hand, the graphic eye, necessary to convey vivid pictures to future times; and though numerous and valuable books of travels, as works of reference, load the shelves of our libraries, there are surprisingly few which are fitted, from the interest and vivacity of the style in which they are written, to possess permanent attractions for mankind.

One great cause of this remarkable peculiarity is without doubt to be found in the widely different education of the students in our universities, and our practical men. In the former, classical attainments are in literature the chief, if not exclusive, objects of ambition; and in consequence, the young aspirants for fame who issue from these learned retreats, have their minds filled with the charms and associations of antiquity, to the almost entire exclusion of objects of present interest and importance. The vigorous practical men, again, who are propelled by the enterprise and exertions of our commercial towns, are sagacious and valuable observers; but they have seldom the cultivated minds, pictorial eye, or powers of description, requisite to convey vivid or interesting impressions to others. Thus our scholars give us little more than treatises on inscriptions, and disquisitions on the sites of ancient towns; while the accounts of our practical men are chiefly occupied with commercial enquiries, or subjects connected with trade and navigation. The cultivated and enlightened traveller, whose mind is alike open to the charm of ancient story and the interest of modern achievement--who is classical without being pedantic, graphic and yet faithful, enthusiastic and yet accurate, discursive and at the same time imaginative, is almost unknown amongst us. It will continue to be so as long as education in our universities is exclusively devoted to Greek and Latin verses or the higher mathematics; and in academies to book-keeping and the rule of three; while so broad and sullen a line as heretofore is drawn between the studies of our scholars and the pursuits of our practical citizens. To travel to good purpose, requires a mind stored with much and varied information, in science, statistics, geography, literature, history, and poetry. To describe what the traveller has seen, requires, in addition to this, the eye of a painter, the soul of a poet, and the hand of a practised composer. Probably it will be deemed no easy matter to find such a combination in any country or in any age; and most certainly the system of education, neither at our learned universities nor our commercial academies, is fitted to produce it.

It is from inattention to the vast store of _previous_ information requisite to make an accomplished traveller, and still more a writer of interesting travels, that failures in this branch of literature are so glaring and so frequent. In other departments of knowledge, a certain degree of information is felt to be requisite before a man can presume to write a book. He cannot produce a treatise on mathematics without knowing at least Euclid, nor a work on history without having read Hume, nor on political economy without having acquired a smattering of Adam Smith. But in regard to travels, no previous information is thought to be requisite. If the person who sets out on a tour has only money in his pocket, and health to get to his journey's end, he is deemed sufficiently qualified to come out with his two or three post octavos. If he is an Honourable, or known at Almack's, so much the better; that will ensure the sale of the first edition. If he can do nothing else, he can at least tell the dishes which he got to dinner at the inns, and the hotels where comfortable beds are to be found. This valuable information, interspersed with a few descriptions of scenes, copied from guide-books, and anecdotes picked up at _tables-d'hote_ or on board steamboats, constitute the stock in trade of many an adventurer who embarks in the speculation of paying by publication the expenses of his travels. We have no individuals in view in these remarks; we speak of things in general, as they are, or rather have been; for we believe these ephemeral travels, like other ephemerals, have had their day, and are fast dying out. The market has become so glutted with them that they are, in a great many instances, unsaleable.

The classical travellers of England, from Addison to Eustace and Clarke, constitute an important and valuable body of writers in this branch of literature, infinitely superior to the fashionable tours which rise up and disappear like bubbles on the surface of society. It is impossible to read these elegant productions without feeling the mind overspread with the charm which arises from the exquisite remains and heart-stirring associations with which they are filled. But their interest is almost exclusively classical; they are invaluable to the accomplished scholar, but they speak in an unknown tongue to the great mass of men. They see nature only through the medium of antiquity: beautiful in their allusion to Greek or Roman remains, eloquent in the descriptions of scenes alluded to in the classical writers, they have dwelt little on the simple scenes of the unhistoric world. To the great moral and social questions which now agitate society, and so strongly move the hearts of the great body of men, they are entire strangers. Their works are the elegant companions of the scholar or the antiquary, not the heart-stirring friends of the cottage or the fireside.

Inferior to Britain in the energy and achievements of the travellers whom she has sent forth, and beyond measure beneath her in the amount of the addition she has made to geographical science, France is yet greatly superior, at least of late years, in the literary and scientific attainments of the wanderers whose works have been given to the world. Four among these stand pre-eminent, whose works, in very different styles, are at the head of European literature in this interesting department--Humboldt, Chateaubriand, Michaud, and Lamartine. Their styles are so various, and the impression produced by reading them so distinct, that it is difficult to believe that they have arisen in the same nation and age of the world.

Humboldt is, in many respects, and perhaps upon the whole, at the head of the list; and to his profound and varied works we hope to be able to devote a future paper. He unites, in a degree that perhaps has never before been witnessed, the most various qualities, and which, from the opposite characters of mind which they require, are rarely found in unison. A profound philosopher, an accurate observer of nature, an unwearied statist, he is at the same time an eloquent writer, an incomparable describer, and an ardent friend of social improvement. Science owes to his indefatigable industry many of her most valuable acquisitions; geography, to his intrepid perseverance, many of its most important discoveries; the arts, to his poetic eye and fervid eloquence, many of their brightest pictures. He unites the austere grandeur of the exact sciences to the bewitching charm of the fine arts. It is this very combination which prevents his works from being generally popular. The riches of his knowledge, the magnitude of his contributions to scientific discovery, the fervour of his descriptions of nature, alternately awaken our admiration and excite our surprise; but they oppress the mind. To be rightly apprehended, they require a reader in some degree familiar with all these subjects; and how many of these are to be met with? The man who takes an interest in his scientific observations will seldom be transported by his pictures of scenery; the social observer, who extracts the rich collection of facts which he has accumulated regarding the people whom he visited, will be indifferent to his geographical discoveries. There are few Humboldts either in the reading or thinking world.

Chateaubriand is a traveller of a wholly different character--he lived entirely in antiquity. But it is not the antiquity of Greece and Rome which has alone fixed his regards, as it has done those of Clarke and Eustace--it is the recollections of chivalry, the devout spirit of the pilgrim, which chiefly warmed his ardent imagination. He is universally allowed by Frenchmen of all parties to be their first writer; and it may be conceived what brilliant works an author of such powers, and eminently gifted both with the soul of a poet and the eye of a painter, must have produced in describing the historic scenes to which his pilgrimages extended. He went to Greece and the Holy Land with a mind devout rather than enlightened, credulous rather than inquisitive. Thirsting for strong emotions, he would be satisfied; teeming with the recollections and visions of the past, he traversed the places hallowed by his early affections with the fondness of a lover who returns to the home of his bliss, of a mature man who revisits the scenes of his infancy. He cared not to enquire what was true or what was legendary in these time-hallowed traditions; he gladly accepted them as they stood, and studiously averted all enquiry into the foundation on which they rested. He wandered over the Peloponnesus or Judea with the fond ardour of an English scholar who seeks in the Palatine Mount the traces of Virgil's enchanting description of the hut of Evander, and rejects as sacrilege every attempt to shake his faith.

"When Science from Creation's face Enchantment's visions draws, What lovely visions yield their place To cold material laws!"

Even in the woods of America, the same ruling passion was evinced. In those pathless solitudes, where no human foot had ever trod but that of the wandering savage, and the majesty of nature appeared in undisturbed repose, his thoughts were still of the Old World. It was on the historic lands that his heart was set. A man himself, he dwelt on the scenes which had been signalized by the deeds, the sufferings, the glories of man.

Michaud's mind is akin to that of Chateaubriand, and yet different in many important particulars. The learned and indefatigable historian of the Crusades, he has traversed the shores of the Mediterranean--the scene, as Dr Johnson observed, of all that can ever interest man--his religion, his knowledge, his arts--with the ardent desire to imprint on his mind the scenes and images which met the eyes of the holy warriors. He seeks to transport us to the days of Godfrey of Bouillon and Raymond of Toulouse; he thirsts with the Christian host at Dorislaus, he shares in its anxieties at the siege of Antioch, he participates in its exultation at the storming of Jerusalem. The scenes visited by the vast multitude of warriors who, during two hundred years, were precipitated from Europe on Asia, have almost all been visited by him, and described with the accuracy of an antiquary and the enthusiasm of a poet. With the old chronicles in his hand, he treads with veneration the scenes of former generous sacrifice and heroic achievements, and the vast and massy structures erected on either side during those terrible wars--when, for centuries, Europe strove hand to hand with Asia--most of which have undergone very little alteration, enable him to describe them almost exactly as they appeared to the holy warriors. The interest of his pilgrimage in the East, accordingly, is peculiar, but very great; it is not so much a book of travels as a moving chronicle; but, like Sir W. Scott's _Minstrelsy of the Borders_, it is a chronicle clothed in a very different garb from the homely dress of the olden time. It transports us back, not only in time but in idea, six hundred years; but it does so with the grace of modern times--it clothes the profound feelings, the generous sacrifices, the forgetfulness of self of the twelfth century, with the poetic mind, the cultivated taste, the refined imagery of the nineteenth.

Lamartine has traversed the same scenes with Chateaubriand and Michaud, and yet he has done so in a different spirit; and the character of his work is essentially different from either. He has not the devout credulity of the first, nor the antiquarian zeal and knowledge of the last; but he is superior to either in the description of nature, and the painting vivid and interesting scenes on the mind of the reader. His work is a moving panorama, in which the historic scenes and azure skies, and placid seas and glowing sunsets, of the East, are portrayed in all their native brilliancy, and in richer even than their native colours. His mind is stored with the associations and the ideas of antiquity, and he has thrown over his descriptions of the scenes of Greece or Holy Writ, all the charms of such recollections; but he has done so in a more general and catholic spirit than either of his predecessors. He embarked for the Holy Land shortly before the Revolution of 1830; and his thoughts, amidst all the associations of antiquity, constantly reverted to the land of his fathers--its distractions, its woes, its ceaseless turmoil, its gloomy social prospects. Thus, with all his vivid imagination and unrivaled powers of description, the turn of his mind is essentially contemplative. He looks on the past as an emblem of the present; he sees, in the fall of Tyre and Athens and Jerusalem, the fate which one day awaits his own country; and mourns less the decay of human things, than the popular passions and national sins which have brought that instability in close proximity to his own times. This sensitive and foreboding disposition was much increased by the death of his daughter--a charming child of fourteen, the companion of his wanderings, the depositary of his thoughts, the darling of his affections--who was snatched away in the spring of life, when in health and joy, by one of the malignant fevers incident to the pestilential plains of the East.

Though Lamartine's travels are continuous, he does not, like most other wanderers, furnish us with a journal of every day's proceedings. He was too well aware that many, perhaps most, days on a journey are monotonous or uninteresting; and that many of the details of a traveller's progress are wholly unworthy of being recorded, because they are neither amusing, elevating, nor instructive. He paints, now and then, with all the force of his magical pencil, the more brilliant or characteristic scenes which he visited, and intersperses them with reflections, moral and social; such as would naturally be aroused in a sensitive mind by the sight of the rains of ancient, and the contemplation of the decay of modern times.

He embarked at Marseilles, with Madame Lamartine and his little daughter Julia, on the 10th July 1830. The following is the picture of the yearnings of his mind on leaving his native land; and they convey a faithful image of his intellectual temperament:--

"I feel it deeply: I am one only of those men, without a distinctive character, of a transitory and fading epoch, whose sighs have found an echo--only because the echo was more poetical than the poet. I belong to another age by my desires: I feel in myself another man: the immense and boundless horizon of philosophy, at once profound, religious, and poetical, has opened to my view, but the punishment of a wasted youth overtook me; it soon faded from my sight. Adieu, then, to the dreams of genius, to the aspirations of intellectual enjoyment! It is too late: I have not physical strength to accomplish any thing great. I will sketch some scenes--I will murmur some strains, and that is all. Yet if God would grant my prayers, here is the object for which I would petition--a poem, such as my heart desires, and his greatness deserves!--a faithful, breathing image of his creation: of the boundless world, visible and invisible! That would indeed be a worthy inheritance to leave to an era of darkness, of doubt, and of sadness!--an inheritance which would nourish the present age, and cause the next to spring with renovated youth."--(_Voyages en Orient_, I. 49-60.[46])

One of his first nocturnal reveries at sea, portrays the tender and profoundly religious impressions of his mind:--

"I walked for an hour on the deck of the vessel alone, and immersed alternately in sad or consoling reflections. I repeated in my heart all the prayers which I learned in infancy from my mother: the verses, the fragments of the Psalms, which I had so often heard her repeat to herself, when walking in the evening in the garden of Melly. I experienced a melancholy pleasure in thus scattering them, in my turn, to the waves, to the winds, to that Ear which is ever open to every real movement of the heart, though not yet uttered by the lips. The prayer which we have heard repeated by one we have loved, and who is no more, is doubly sacred. Who among us would not prefer a few words of prayer taught us by our mother, to the most eloquent supplication composed by ourselves? Thence it is that whatever religious creed we may adopt at the age of reason, the Christian prayer will be ever the prayer of the human race. I prayed, in the prayer of the church for the evening at sea; also for that dear being, who never thought of danger to accompany her husband, and that lovely child, who played at the moment on the poop with the goat which was to give it milk on board, and with the little kids which licked her snow-white hands, and sported with her long and fair ringlets."--(I. 57.)

A night-scene on the coast of Provence gives a specimen of his descriptive powers.

"It was night--that is, what they call night in those climates; but how many days have I seen less brilliant on the banks of the Thames, the Seine, the Saone, or the Lake of Geneva! A full noon shone in the firmament, and cast into the shade our vessel, which lay motionless on the water at a little distance from the quay. The moon, in her progress through the heavens, had left a path marked as if with red sand, with which she had besprinkled the half of the sky: the remainder was clear deep blue, which melted into white as she advanced. On the horizon, at the distance of two miles, between two little isles, of which the one had headlands pointed and coloured like the Coliseum at Rome, while the other was violet like the flower of the lilac, the image of a vast city appeared on the sea. It was an illusion, doubtless; but it had all the appearance of reality. You saw clearly the domes glancing--dazzling lines of palaces--quays flooded by a soft and serene light; on the right and the left the waves were seen to sparkle and enclose it on either side: it was Venice or Malta reposing in the midst of the waters. The illusion was produced by the reflection of the moon, when her rays fell perpendicularly on the waters; nearer the eye, the radiance spread and expanded in a stream of gold and silver between two shores of azure. On the left, the gulf extended to the summit of a long and obscure range of serrated mountains; on the right opened a narrow and deep valley, where a fountain gushed forth beneath the shade of aged trees; behind, rose a hill, clothed to the top with olives, which in the night appeared dark, from its summit to its base--a line of Gothic towers and white houses broke the obscurity of the wood, and drew the thoughts to the abodes, the joys, and the sufferings of man. Further off, in the extremity of the gulf, three enormous rocks rose, like pillars without base, from the surface of the waters--their forms were fantastic, their surface polished like flints by the action of the waves; but those flints were mountains--the remains, doubtless, of that primeval ocean which once overspread the earth, and of which our seas are but a feeble image."--(II. 66.)

A rocky bay on the same romantic coast, now rendered accessible to travellers by the magnificent road of the Corniche, projected, and in part executed by Napoleon, furnishes another subject for this exquisite pencil:--

"A mile to the eastward on the coast, the mountains, which there dip into the sea, are broken as if by the strokes of enormous clubs--huge fragments have fallen, and are strewed in wild confusion at the foot of the cliffs, or amidst the blue and green waves of the sea, which incessantly laves them. The waves break on these huge masses without intermission, with a hollow and alternating roar, or rise up in sheets of foam, which besprinkle their hoary fronts. These masses of mountains--for they are too large to be called rocks--are piled and heaped together in such numbers, that they form an innumerable number of narrow havens, of profound caverns, of sounding grottoes, of gloomy fissures--of which the children of some of the neighbouring fishermen alone know the windings and the issues. One of these caverns, into which you enter by a natural arch, the summit of which is formed by an enormous block of granite, lets in the sea, through which it flows into a dark and narrow valley, which the waters fill entirely, with a surface as limpid and smooth as the firmament which they reflect. The sea preserves in this sequestered nook that beautiful tint of bright green, of which marine painters so strongly feel the value, but which they can never transfer exactly to their canvass; for the eye sees much which the hand strives in vain to imitate.

"On the two sides of that marine valley rise two prodigious walls of perpendicular rock, of an uniform and sombre hue, similar to that of iron ore, after it has issued and cooled from the furnace. Not a plant, not a moss can find a slope or a crevice wherein to insert its roots, or cover the rocks with those waving garlands which so often in Savoy clothe the cliffs, where they flower to God alone. Black, naked, perpendicular, repelling the eye by their awful aspect--they seem to have been placed there for no other purpose but to protect from the sea-breezes the hills of olives and vines, which bloom under their shelter; an image of those ruling men in a stormy epoch, who seem placed by Providence to bear the fury of all the tempests of passion and of time, to screen the weaker but happier race of mortals. At the bottom of the bay the sea expands a little, assumes a bluer tint as it comes to reflect more of the cloudless heavens, and at length its tiny waves die away on a bed of violets, as closely netted together as the sand upon the shore. If you disembark from the boat, you find in the cleft of a neighbouring ravine a fountain of living water, which gushes beneath a narrow path formed by the goats, which leads up from this sequestered solitude, amidst overshadowing fig-trees and oleanders, to the cultivated abodes of man. Few scenes struck me so much in my long wanderings. Its charm consists in that exquisite union of force and grace, which forms the perfection of natural beauty as of the highest class of intellectual beings; it is that mysterious hymen of the land and the sea, surprised, as it were, in their most secret and hidden union. It is the image of perfect calm and inaccessible solitude, close to the theatre of tumultuous tempests, where their near roar is heard with such terror, where their foaming but lessened waves yet break upon the shore. It is one of those numerous _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of creation which God has scattered over the earth, as if to sport with contrasts, but which he conceals so frequently on the summit of naked rocks, in the depth of inaccessible ravines, on the unapproachable shores of the ocean, like jewels which he unveils rarely, and that only to simple beings, to children, to shepherds or fishermen, or the devout worshippers of nature."--(I. 73--74.)

This style of description of scenery is peculiar to this age, and in it Lamartine may safely be pronounced without a rival in the whole range of literature. It was with Scott and Chateaubriand that the _graphic_ style of description arose in England and France; but he has pushed the art further than either of his great predecessors. Milton and Thompson had long ago indeed, in poetry, painted nature in the most enchanting, as well as the truest colours; but in prose little was to be found except a general and vague description of a class of objects, as lakes, mountains, and rivers, without any specification of features and details, so as to convey a definite and distinct impression to the mind of the reader. Even the classical mind and refined taste of Addison could not attain this graphic style; his descriptions of scenery, like that of all prose writers down to the close of the eighteenth century, are lost in vague generalities. Like almost all descriptions of battles in modern times, they are so like each other that you cannot distinguish one from the other. Scott and Chateaubriand, when they did apply their great powers to the delineation of nature, were incomparably faithful, as well as powerfully imaginative; but such descriptions were, for the most part, but a secondary object with them. The human heart was their great study; the vicissitudes of life the inexhaustible theme of their genius. With Lamartine, again, the description of nature is the primary object. It is to convey a vivid impression of the scenes he has visited that he has written; to kindle in his reader's mind the train of emotion and association which their contemplation awakened in his own, that he has exerted all his powers. He is much more laboured and minute, in consequence, than either of his predecessors; he records the tints, the forms, the lights, the transient effects, with all a painter's enthusiasm and all a poet's power; and succeeds, in any mind at all familiar with the objects of nature, in conjuring up images as vivid, sometimes perhaps more beautiful, than the originals which he portrayed.

From the greatness of his powers, however, in this respect, and the facility with which he commits to paper the whole features of the splendid phantasmagoria with which his memory is stored, arises the principal defect of his work; and the circumstance which has hitherto prevented it, in this country at least, from acquiring general popularity commensurate to its transcendent merits. He is too rich in glowing images; his descriptions are redundant in number and beauty. The mind even of the most imaginative reader is fatigued by the constant drain upon its admiration--the fancy is exhausted in the perpetual effort to conceive the scenes which he portrays to the eye. Images of beauty enough are to be found in his four volumes of _Travels in the East_, to emblazon, with the brightest colours of the rainbow, forty volumes of ordinary adventure. We long for some repose amidst the constant repetition of dazzling objects; monotony, insipidity, ordinary life, even dulness itself, would often be a relief amidst the ceaseless flow of rousing images. Sir Walter Scott says, in one of his novels--"Be assured that whenever I am particularly dull, it is not without an object;" and Lamartine would sometimes be the better of following the advice. We generally close one of his volumes with the feeling so well known to travellers in the Italian cities, "I hope to God there is nothing more to be seen here." And having given the necessary respite of unexciting disquisition to rest our readers' minds, we shall again bring forward one of his glowing pictures:--

"Between the sea and the last heights of Lebanon, which sink rapidly almost to the water's edge, extends a plain eight leagues in length by one or two broad; sandy, bare, covered only with thorny arbutus, browsed by the camels of caravans. From it darts out into the sea an advanced peninsula, linked to the continent only by a narrow _chaussee_ of shining sand, borne hither by the winds of Egypt. Tyre, now called Sour by the Arabs, is situated at the extremity of this peninsula, and seems, at a distance, to rise out of the waves. The modern town, at first sight, has a gay and smiling appearance; but a nearer approach dispels the illusion, and exhibits only a few hundred crumbling and half-deserted houses, where the Arabs, in the evening, assemble to shelter their flocks which have browsed in the narrow plain. Such is all that now remains of the mighty Tyre. It has neither a harbour to the sea, nor a road to the land; the prophecies have long been accomplished in regard to it.

"We moved on in silence, buried in the contemplation of the dust of an empire which we trod. We followed a path in the middle of the plain of Tyre, between the town and the hills of grey and naked rock which Lebanon has thrown down towards the sea. We arrived abreast of the city, and touched a mound of sand which appears the sole remaining rampart to prevent it from being overwhelmed by the waves of the ocean or the desert. I thought of the prophecies, and called to mind some of the eloquent denunciations of Ezekiel. As I was making these reflections, some objects, black, gigantic, and motionless, appeared upon the summit of one of the overhanging cliffs of Lebanon, which there advanced far into the plain. They resembled five black statues, placed on a rock as their huge pedestal. At first we thought it was five Bedouins, who were there stationed to fire upon us from their inaccessible heights; but when we were at the distance of fifty yards, we beheld one of them open its enormous wings, and flap them against its sides with a sound like the unfurling of a sail. We then perceived that they were five eagles of the largest species I have ever seen, either in the Alps or our museums. They made no attempt to move when we approached; they seemed to regard themselves as kings of the desert, looked on Tyre as an appanage which belonged to them, and whither they were about to return. Nothing more supernatural ever met my eyes; I could almost suppose that behind them I saw the terrible figure of Ezekiel, the poet of vengeance, pointing to the devoted city which the divine wrath had overwhelmed with destruction. The discharge of a few muskets made them rise from their rock: but they showed no disposition to move from their ominous perch, and, soon returning, floated over our heads, regardless of the shots fired at them, as if the eagles of God were beyond the reach of human injury."--(II. 8-9.)

Jerusalem was a subject to awaken all our author's enthusiasm, and call forth all his descriptive powers. The first approach to it has exercised the talents of many writers in prose and verse; but none has drawn it in such graphic and brilliant colours as our author:--

"We ascended a mountain ridge, strewed over with enormous grey rocks, piled one on another as if by human hands. Here and there a few stunted vines, yellow with the colour of autumn, crept along the soil in a few places cleared out in the wilderness. Fig-trees, with their tops withered or shivered by the blasts, often edged the vines, and cast their black fruit on the grey rock. On our right, the desert of St John, where formerly 'the voice was heard crying in the wilderness,' sank like an abyss in the midst of five or six black mountains, through the openings of which, the sea of Egypt, overspread with a dark cloud, could still be discerned. On the left, and near the eye, was an old tower, placed on the top of a projecting eminence; other ruins, apparently of an ancient aqueduct, descended from that tower, overgrown with verdure, now in the sear leaf; that tower is Modin, the stronghold and tomb of the last heroes of sacred story, the Maccabees. We left behind us the ruins, resplendent with the first rays of the morning--rays, not blended as in Europe in a confused and vague illumination, but darting like arrows of fire tinted with various colours, issuing from a dazzling centre, and diverging over the whole heavens as they expand. Some were of blue, slightly silvered, others of pure white, some of tender rose-hue, melting into grey; many of burning fire, like the coruscations of a flaming conflagration. All were distinct, yet all united in one harmonious whole, forming a resplendent arch in the heavens, encircling, and issuing from a centre of fire. In proportion as the day advanced, the brilliant light of these separate rays was gradually dimmed--or rather, they were blended together, and composed the colourless light of day. Then the moon, which still shone overhead, 'paled her ineffectual fire,' and melted away in the general illumination of the heavens.

"After having ascended a second ridge, more lofty and naked than the former, the horizon suddenly opens to the right, and presents a view of all the country which extends between the last summits of Judea and the mountains of Arabia. It was already flooded with the increasing light of the morning; but beyond the piles of grey rock which lay in the foreground, nothing was distinctly visible but a dazzling space, like a vast sea, interspersed with a few islands of shade, which stood forth in the brilliant surface. On the shores of that imaginary ocean, a little to the left, and about a league distant, the sun shone with uncommon brilliancy on a massy tower, a lofty minaret, and some edifices, which crowned the summit of a low hill of which you could not see the bottom. Soon the points of other minarets, a few loopholed walls, and the dark summits of several domes, which successively came into view, and fringed the descending slope of the hill, announced a city. It was JERUSALEM, and every one of the party, without addressing a word to the guides or to each other, enjoyed in silence the entrancing spectacle. We rested our horses to contemplate that mysterious and dazzling apparition; but when we moved on, it was soon snatched from our view; for as we descended the hill, and plunged into the deep and profound valley which lay at its feet, we lost sight of the holy city, and were surrounded only by the solitude and desolation of the desert."--(II. 163-165.)

The environs of Jerusalem are described with equal force by the same master-hand:--

"The general aspect of the environs of Jerusalem may be described in a few words. Mountains without shade, and valleys without water--the earth without verdure, rocks without grandeur. Here and there a few blocks of grey stone start up out of the dry and fissured earth, between which, beneath the shade of an old fig-tree, a gazelle or a hyaena are occasionally seen to emerge from the fissures of the rock. A few plants or vines creep over the surface of that grey and parched soil; in the distance, is occasionally seen a grove of olive-trees, casting a shade over the arid side of the mountain--the mouldering walls and towers of the city appearing from afar on the summit of Mount Sion. Such is the general character of the country. The sky is ever pure, bright, and cloudless; never does even the slightest film of mist obscure the purple tint of evening and morning. On the side of Arabia, a wide gulf opens amidst the black ridges, and presents a vista of the shining surface of the Dead Sea, and the violet summits of the mountains of Moab. Rarely is a breath of air heard to murmur, in the fissures of the rocks, or among the branches of the aged olives; not a bird sings, nor an insect chirps in the waterless furrows. Silence reigns universally, in the city, in the roads, in the fields. Such was Jerusalem during all the time that we spent within its walls. Not a sound ever met our ears, but the neighing of the horses, who grew impatient under the burning rays of the sun, or who furrowed the earth with their feet, as they stood picketed round our camp, mingled occasionally with the crying of the hour from the minarets, or the mournful cadences of the Turks as they accompanied the dead to their cemeteries. Jerusalem, to which the world hastens to visit a sepulchre, is itself a vast tomb of a people; but it is a tomb without cypresses, without inscriptions, without monuments, of which they have broken the gravestones, and the ashes of which appear to cover the earth which surrounds it with mourning, silence, and sterility. We cast our eyes back frequently from the top of every hill which we passed on this mournful and desolate region, and at length we saw for the last time, the crown of olives which surmounts the Mount of the same name, and which long rises above the horizon after you have lost sight of the town itself. At length it also sank beneath the rocky screen, and disappeared like the chaplets of flowers which we throw on a sepulchre."--(II. 275-276.)

From Jerusalem he made an expedition to Balbec in the desert, which produced the same impression upon him that it does upon all other travellers:--

"We rose with the sun, the first rays of which struck on the temples of Balbec, and gave to those mysterious ruins that _eclat_ which his brilliant light throws ever over ruins which it illuminates. Soon we arrived, on the northern side, at the foot of the gigantic walls which surround those beautiful remains. A clear stream, flowing over a bed of granite, murmured around the enormous blocks of stone, fallen from the top of the wall which obstructed its course. Beautiful sculptures were half concealed in the limpid stream. We passed the rivulet by an arch formed by these fallen remains, and mounting a narrow breach, were soon lost in admiration of the scene which surrounded us. At every step a fresh exclamation of surprise broke from our lips. Every one of the stones of which that wall was composed was from eight to ten feet in length, by five or six in breadth, and as much in height. They rest, without cement, one upon the other, and almost all bear the mark of Indian or Egyptian sculpture. At a single glance, you see that these enormous stones are not placed in their original site--that they are the precious remains of temples of still more remote antiquity, which were made use of to encircle this colony of Grecian and Roman citizens.

"When we reached the summit of the breach, our eyes knew not to what object first to turn. On all sides were gates of marble of prodigious height and magnitude; windows, or niches, fringed with the richest friezes; fallen pieces of cornices, of entablatures, or capitals, thick as the dust beneath our feet; magnificent vaulted roofs above our heads; every where a chaos of confused beauty, the remains of which lay scattered about, or piled on each other in endless variety. So prodigious was the accumulation of architectural remains, that it defies all attempt at classification, or conjecture of the kind of buildings to which the greater part of them had belonged. After passing through this scene of ruined magnificence, we reached an inner wall, which we also ascended; and from its summit the view of the interior was yet more splendid. Of much greater extent, far more richly decorated than the outer circle, it presented an immense platform in the form of a long rectangle, the level surface of which was frequently broken by the remains of still more elevated pavements, on which temples to the sun, the object of adoration at Balbec, had been erected. All around that platform were a series of lesser temples--or chapels, as we should call them--decorated with niches, admirably engraved, and loaded with sculptured ornaments to a degree that appeared excessive to those who had seen the severe simplicity of the Parthenon or the Coliseum. But how prodigious the accumulation of architectural riches in the middle of an eastern desert! Combine in imagination the Temple of Jupiter Stator and the Coliseum at Rome, of Jupiter Olympius and the Acropolis at Athens, and you will yet fall short of that marvellous assemblage of admirable edifices and sculptures. Many of the temples rest on columns seventy feet in height, and seven feet in diameter, yet composed only of two or three blocks of stone, so perfectly joined together that to this day you can barely discern the lines of their junction. Silence is the only language which befits man when words are inadequate to convey his impressions. We remained mute with admiration, gazing on the eternal ruins.

"The shades of night overtook us while we yet rested in amazement at the scene by which we were surrounded. One by one they enveloped the columns in their obscurity, and added a mystery the more to that magical and mysterious work of time and man. We appeared, as compared with the gigantic mass and long duration of these monuments, as the swallows which nestle a season in the crevices of the capitals, without knowing by whom, or for whom, they have been constructed. The thoughts, the wishes, which moved these masses, are to us unknown. The dust of marble which we tread beneath our feet knows more of it than we do, but it cannot tell us what it has seen; and in a few ages the generations which shall come in their turn to visit our monuments, will ask, in like manner, wherefore we have built and engraved. The works of man survive his thought. Movement is the law of the human mind; the definite is the dream of his pride and his ignorance. God is a limit which appears ever to recede as humanity approaches him: we are ever advancing, and never arrive. This great Divine Figure which man from his infancy is ever striving to reach, and to imprison in his structures raised by hands, for ever enlarges and expands; it outsteps the narrow limits of temples, and leaves the altars to crumble into dust; and calls man to seek for it where alone it resides--in thought, in intelligence, in virtue, in nature, in infinity."--(II. 39, 46, 47.)

This passage conveys an idea of the peculiar style, and perhaps unique charm, of Lamartine's work. It is the mixture of vivid painting with moral reflection--of nature with sentiment--of sensibility to beauty, with gratitude to its Author, which constitutes its great attraction. Considering in what spirit the French Revolution was cradled, and from what infidelity it arose, it is consoling to see such sentiments conceived and published among them. True they are not the sentiments of the majority, at least in towns; but what then? The majority is ever guided by the thoughts of the great, not in its own but a preceding age. It is the opinions of the great among our grandfathers that govern the majority at this time; our great men will guide our grandsons. If we would foresee what a future age is to think, we must observe what a few great men are now thinking. Voltaire and Rousseau have ruled France for two generations; the day of Chateaubriand and Guizot and Lamartine will come in due time.

But the extraordinary magnitude of these ruins in the middle of an Asiatic wilderness, suggests another consideration. We are perpetually speaking of the march of intellect, the vast spread of intelligence, the advancing civilization of the world; and in some respects our boasts are well founded. Certainly, in one particular, society has made a mighty step in advance. The abolition of domestic slavery has emancipated the millions who formerly toiled in bondage; the art of printing has multiplied an hundredfold the reading and thinking world. Our opportunities, therefore, have been prodigiously enlarged; our means of elevation are tenfold what they were in ancient times. But has our elevation itself kept pace with these enlarged means? Has the increased direction of the popular mind to lofty and spiritual objects, the more complete subjugation of sense, the enlarged perception of the useful and the beautiful, been in proportion to the extended facilities given to the great body of the people? Alas! the fact is just the reverse. Balbec was a mere station in the desert, without territory, harbour, or subjects--maintained solely by the commerce of the East with Europe which flowed through its walls. Yet Balbec raised, in less than a century, a more glorious pile of structures devoted to religious and lofty objects, than London, Paris, and St Petersburg united can now boast. The Decapolis was a small and remote mountain district of Palestine, not larger in proportion to the Roman than Morayshire is in proportion to the British empire; yet it contained, as its name indicates, and as their remains still attest, _ten cities_, the least considerable of which, Gebora, contains, as Buckingham tells us in his _Travels beyond the Jordan_, the ruins of more sumptuous edifices than any city in the British islands, London itself not excepted, can now boast. It was the same all over the East, and in all the southern provinces of the Roman empire. Whence has arisen this astonishing disproportion between the great things done by the citizens in ancient and in modern times, when in the latter the means of enlarged cultivation have been so immeasurably extended? It is in vain to say, it is because we have more social and domestic happiness, and our wealth is devoted to these objects, not external embellishment. Social and domestic happiness are in the direct, not in the inverse ratio of general refinement and the spread of intellectual intelligence. The domestic duties are better nourished in the temple than in the gin-shop; the admirers of sculpture will make better fathers and husbands than the lovers of whisky. Is it that we want funds for such undertakings? Why, London is richer than ever Rome was; the commerce of the world, not of the eastern caravans, flows through its bosom. The sums annually squandered in Manchester and Glasgow on intoxicating liquors, would soon make them rival the eternal structures of Tadmor and Palmyra. Is it that the great bulk of our people are unavoidably chained by their character and climate to gross and degrading enjoyments? Is it that the spreading of knowledge, intelligence, and free institutions, only confirms the sway of sensual gratification, and that a pure and spiritual religion tends only to strengthen the fetters of passion and selfishness? Is it that the inherent depravity of the human heart appears the more clearly as man is emancipated from the fetters of authority? Must we go back to early ages for noble and elevated motives of action: is the spread of freedom but another word for the extension of brutality? God forbid that so melancholy a doctrine should have any foundation in human nature! We mention the facts, and leave it to future ages to discover their solution: contenting ourselves with pointing out to our self-applauding countrymen how much they have to do before they attain the level of their advantages, or justify the boundless blessings which Providence has bestowed upon them.

The plain of Troy, seen by moonlight, furnishes the subject of one of our author's most striking passages:--

"It is midnight; the sea is calm as a mirror; the vessel floats motionless on the resplendent surface. On our left, Tenedos rises above the waves, and shuts out the view of the open sea: on our right, and close to us, stretched out like a dark bar, the low shore and indented coasts of Troy. The full moon, which rises behind the snow-streaked summit of Mount Ida, sheds a serene and doubtful light over the summits of the mountains, the hills, the plain: its extending rays fall upon the sea, and reach the shadow of our brig, forming a bright path which the shades do not venture to approach. We can discern the _tumuli_, which tradition still marks as the tombs of Hector and Patroclus. The full moon, slightly tinged with red, which discloses the undulations of the hills, resembles the bloody buckler of Achilles; no light is to be seen on the coast, but a distant twinkling, lighted by the shepherds on Mount Ida--not a sound is to be heard but the flapping of the sail on the mast, and the slight creaking of the mast itself; all seems dead like the past in that deserted land. Seated on the forecastle, I see that shore, those mountains, those ruins, those tombs, rise like the ghost of the departed world, reappear from the bosom of the sea with shadowy form, by the rays of the star of night, which sleep on the hills, and disappear as the moon recedes behind the summits of the mountains. It is a beautiful additional page in the poems of Homer, the end of all history and of all poetry! Unknown tombs, ruins without a certain name; the earth naked and dark, but imperfectly lighted by the immortal luminaries; new spectators passing by the old coast, and repeating for the thousandth time the common epitaph of mortality! Here lies an empire, here a town, here a people, here a hero! God alone is great, and the thought which seeks and adores him alone is imperishable upon earth. I feel no desire to make a nearer approach in daylight to the doubtful remains of the ruins of Troy. I prefer that nocturnal apparition, which allows the thought to re-people those deserts, and sheds over them only the distant light of the moon and of the poetry of Homer. And what concerns me Troy, its heroes, and its gods! That leaf of the heroic world is turned for ever!"--(II. 248-250.)

What a magnificent testimonial to the genius of Homer, written in a foreign tongue, two thousand seven hundred years after his death!

The Dardanelles and the Bosphorus have, from the dawn of letters, exercised the descriptive talents of the greatest historians of modern Europe. The truthful chronicle of Villehardouin, and the eloquent pictures of Gibbon and Sismondi of the siege of Constantinople, will immediately occur to every scholar. The following passage, however, will show that no subject can be worn out when it is handled by the pen of genius:--

"It was five in the morning, I was standing on deck; we made sail towards the mouth of the Bosphorus, skirting the walls of Constantinople. After half an hour's navigation through ships at anchor, we touched the walls of the seraglio, which prolongs those of the city, and form, at the extremity of the hill which supports the proud Stamboul, the angle which separates the sea of Marmora from the canal of the Bosphorus, and the harbour of the Golden Horn. It is there that God and man, nature and art, have combined to form the most marvellous spectacle which the human eye can behold. I uttered an involuntary cry when the magnificent panorama opened upon my sight; I forgot for ever the bay of Naples and all its enchantments; to compare any thing to that marvellous and graceful combination would be an injury to the fairest work of creation.

"The walls which support the circular terraces of the immense gardens of the seraglio were on our left, with their base perpetually washed by the waters of the Bosphorus, blue and limpid as the Rhone at Geneva; the terraces which rise one above another to the palace of the Sultana, the gilded cupolas of which rose above the gigantic summits of the plane-tree and the cypress, were themselves clothed with enormous trees, the trunks of which overhang the walls, while their branches, overspreading the gardens, spread a deep shadow even far into the sea, beneath the protection of which the panting rowers repose from their toil. These stately groups of trees are from time to time interrupted by palaces, pavilions, kiosks, gilded and sculptured domes, or batteries of cannon. These maritime palaces form part of the seraglio. You see occasionally through the muslin curtains the gilded roofs and sumptuous cornices of those abodes of beauty. At every step, elegant Moorish fountains fall from the higher parts of the gardens, and murmur in marble basins, from whence, before reaching the sea, they are conducted in little cascades to refresh the passengers. As the vessel coasted the walls, the prospect expanded--the coast of Asia appeared, and the mouth of the Bosphorus, properly so called, began to open between hills, on one side of dark green, on the other of smiling verdure, which seemed variegated by all the colours of the rainbow. The smiling shores of Asia, distant about a mile, stretched out to our right, surmounted by lofty hills, sharp at the top, and clothed to the summit with dark forests, with their sides varied by hedge-rows, villas, orchards, and gardens. Deep precipitous ravines occasionally descended on this side into the sea, overshadowed by huge overgrown oaks, the branches of which dipped into the water. Further on still, on the Asiatic side, an advanced headland projected into the waves, covered with white houses--it was Scutari, with its vast white barracks, its resplendent mosques, its animated quays, forming a vast city. Further still, the Bosphorus, like a deeply imbedded river, opened between opposing mountains--the advancing promontories and receding bays of which, clothed to the water's edge with forests, exhibited a confused assemblage of masts of vessels, shady groves, noble palaces, hanging gardens, and tranquil havens.

"The harbour of Constantinople is not, properly speaking, a port. It is rather a great river like the Thames, shut in on either side by hills covered with houses, and covered by innumerable lines of ships lying at anchor along the quays. Vessels of every description are to be seen there, from the Arabian bark, the prow of which is raised, and darts along like the ancient galleys, to the ship of the line, with three decks, and its sides studded with brazen mouths. Multitudes of Turkish barks circulate through that forest of masts, serving the purpose of carriages in that maritime city, and disturb in their swift progress through the waves, clouds of alabastros, which, like beautiful white pigeons, rise from the sea on their approach, to descend and repose again on the unruffled surface. It is impossible to count the vessels which lie on the water from the seraglio point to the suburb of Eyoub and the delicious valley of the Sweet Waters. The Thames at London exhibits nothing comparable to it."--(II. 262-265.)

"Beautiful as the European side of the Bosphorus is, the Asiatic is infinitely more striking. It owes nothing to man, but every thing to nature. There is neither a Buyukdere nor a Therapia, nor palaces of ambassadors, nor an Armenian nor Frank city; there is nothing but mountains with glens which separate them; little valleys enameled with green, which lie at the foot of overhanging rocks; torrents which enliven the scene with their foam; forests which darken it by their shade, or dip their boughs in the waves; a variety of forms, of tints, and of foliage, which the pencil of the painter is alike unable to represent or the pen of the poet to describe. A few cottages perched on the summit of projecting rocks, or sheltered in the bosom of a deeply indented bay, alone tell you of the presence of man. The evergreen oaks hang in such masses over the waves that the boatmen glide under their branches, and often sleep cradled in their arms. Such is the character of the coast on the Asiatic side as far as the castle of Mahomet II., which seems to shut it in as closely as any Swiss lake. Beyond that, the character changes; the hills are less rugged, and descend in gentler slopes to the water's edge; charming little plains, checkered with fruit-trees and shaded by planes, frequently open; and the delicious Sweet Waters of Asia exhibit a scene of enchantment equal to any described in the Arabian Nights. Women, children, and black slaves in every variety of costume and colour; veiled ladies from Constantinople; cattle and buffaloes ruminating in the pastures; Arab horses clothed in the most sumptuous trappings of velvet and gold; caiques filled with Armenian and Circassian young women, seated under the shade or playing with their children, some of the most ravishing beauty, form a scene of variety and interest probably unique in the world." (III. 331-332.)

These are the details of the piece: here is the general impression:--

"One evening, by the light of a splendid moon, which was reflected from the sea of Marmora, and the violet summits of Mount Olympus, I sat alone under the cypresses of the 'Ladders of the Dead;' those cypresses which overshadow innumerable tombs of Mussulmans, and descend from the heights of Pera to the shores of the sea. No one ever passes at that hour: you would suppose yourself an hundred miles from the capital, if a confused hum, wafted by the wind, was not occasionally heard, which speedily died away among the branches of the cypress. These sounds weakened by distance; the songs of the sailors in the vessels; the stroke of the oars in the water; the drums of the military bands in the barracks; the songs of the women who lulled their children to sleep; the cries of the muetzlim, who, from the summits of the minarets, called the faithful to evening prayers; the evening gun which boomed across the Bosphorus, the signal of repose to the fleet--all these sounds combined to form one confused murmur, which strangely contrasted with the perfect silence around me, and produced the deepest impression. The seraglio, with its vast peninsula, dark with plane-trees and cypresses, stood forth like a promontory of forests between the two seas which slept beneath my eyes. The moon shone on the numerous kiosks; and the old walls of the palace of Amurath stood forth like huge rocks from the obscure gloom of the plane-trees. Before me was the scene, in my mind was the recollection, of all the glorious and sinister events which had there taken place. The impression was the strongest, the most overwhelming, which a sensitive mind could receive. All was there mingled--man and God, society and nature, mental agitation, the melancholy repose of thought. I know not whether I participated in the great movement of associated beings who enjoy or suffer in that mighty assemblage, or in that nocturnal slumber of the elements, which murmured thus, and raised the mind above the cares of cities and empires into the bosom of nature and of God."--(III. 283-284.)

"Il faut du tems," says Voltaire, "pourque les grandes reputations murissent." As a describer of nature, we place Lamartine at the head of all writers, ancient or modern--above Scott or Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael or Humboldt. He aims at a different object from any of these great writers. He does not, like them, describe the emotion produced on the mind by the contemplation of nature; he paints the objects in the scene itself, their colours and traits, their forms and substance, their lights and shadows. A painter following exactly what he portrays, would make a glorious gallery of landscapes. He is, moreover, a charming poet, an eloquent debater, and has written many able and important works on politics; yet we never recollect, during the last twenty years, to have heard his name mentioned in English society except once, when an old and caustic, but most able judge, now no more, said, "I have been reading Lamartine's _Travels in the East_--it seems a perfect rhapsody."

We must not suppose, however, from this, that the English nation is incapable of appreciating the highest degree of eminence in the fine arts, or that we are never destined to rise to excellence in any but the mechanical. It is the multitude of subordinate writers of moderate merit who obstruct all the avenues to great distinction, which really occasions the phenomenon. Strange as it may appear, it is a fact abundantly proved by literary history, and which may be verified by every day's experience, that men are in general insensible to the highest class of intellectual merit when it first appears; and that it is by slow degrees and the opinion oft repeated, of the really superior in successive generations, that it is at length raised to its deserved and lasting pedestal. There are instances to the contrary, such as Scott and Byron: but they are the exceptions, not the rule. We seldom do justice but to the dead. Contemporary jealousy, literary envy, general timidity, the dread of ridicule, the confusion of rival works, form so many obstacles to the speedy acquisition of a great living reputation. To the illustrious of past ages, however, we pay an universal and willing homage. Contemporary genius appears with a twinkling and uncertain glow, like the shifting and confused lights of a great city seen at night from a distance: while the spirits of the dead shine with an imperishable lustre, far removed in the upper firmament from the distractions of the rivalry of a lower world.

FOOTNOTES:

[46] We have translated all the passages ourselves: the versions hitherto published in this country give, as most English translations of French works do, a most imperfect idea of the original.

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_Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work._