Chapter 1

"The sky. it seems, would pour down stinking pitch, But that the sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek, Dashes the fire out."

The manuscript corrector of the folio, 1632, has substituted _heat_ for "cheek," which appears to me an alteration of no value whatever. Shakspeare was more likely to have written _cheek_ than _heat_; for elsewhere he uses the expression, "Heaven's face," "the welkin's face," and, though irregular, the expression is poetical.

At Miranda's exclamation,--

"A brave vessel, Who had no doubt some noble creature in her, Dash'd all to pieces,"--

Mr. Collier does Theobald the justice to observe, that he, as well as the corrector of the folio, 1632, adds the necessary letter _s_ to the word "creature," making the plural substantive agree with her other exclamation of, "Poor souls, they perished!"

Where Mr. Collier, upon the authority of his folio, substitutes _pre_vision for "provision" in the lines of Prospero,--

"The direful spectacle of the wreck . . . I have with such provision in mine art So safely ordered," etc.,--

I do not agree to the value of the change. It is very true that _pre_vision means the foresight that his art gave him, but _pro_vision implies the exercise of that foresight or _pre_vision; it is therefore better, because more comprehensive.

Mr. Collier's folio gives as an improvement upon Malone and Steevens's reading of the passage,--

"And thy father Was Duke of Milan; and his only heir A princess; no worse issued,"--

the following:--

"And thy father Was Duke of Milan,--thou his only heir And princess no worse issued."

Supposing the folio to be ingenious rather than authoritative, the passage, as it stands in Hanmer, is decidedly better, because clearer:--

"And thy father Was Duke of Milan,--thou, his only heir A princess--no worse issued."

In the next passage, given as emended by the folio, we have what appears to me one bad and one decidedly good alteration from the usual reading, which, in all the editions given hitherto, has left the meaning barely perceptible through the confusion and obscurity of the expression.

"He being thus _lorded_, Not only with what my revenue yielded, But what my power might else exact,--like one Who having _unto truth_ by telling of it Made such a sinner of his memory To credit his own lie,--he did believe He was indeed the Duke."

The folio says,--

"He being thus _loaded_."

And to this change I object: the meaning was obvious before; "lorded" stands clearly enough here for made lord of or over, etc.; and though the expression is unusual, it is less prosaic than the proposed word _loaded_. But in the rest of the passage the critic of the folio does immense service to the text, in reading

"Like one Who having _to untruth_ by telling of it Made such a sinner of his memory To credit his own lie,--he did believe He was indeed the Duke."

This change carries its own authority in its manifest good sense.

Of the passage,--

"Whereon, A treacherous army levied, one midnight Fated to the purpose, did Antonio open The gates of Milan, and in the dead of darkness The ministers for the purpose hurried thence Me and thy crying self,"--

Mr. Collier says that the iteration of the word "purpose," in the fourth line, after its employment in the second, is a blemish, which his folio obviates by substituting the word _practice_ in the first line. I think this a manifest improvement, though not an important one.

Mr. Collier gives Rowe the credit of having altered "butt" to _boat_, and "have quit it" to _had quit it_, in the lines,--

"Where they prepar'd A rotten carcase of a _butt_ not rigg'd, Nor tackle, sail, nor mast,--the very rats Instinctively _have quit it_."

Adding, that in both changes he is supported by the corrector of the folio, 1632. Hanmer gives the passage exactly as the latter, and as Rowe does.

We now come to the stage-directions in the folio, to which Mr. Collier gives, I think, a most exaggerated value. He says, that, where Prospero says,--

"Lend thy hand And pluck my magic garment from me,--so Lie there, my art,"--

the words, "Lay it down," are written over against the passage. Now this really seems a very unnecessary direction, inasmuch as the text very clearly indicates that Prospero lays down as well as plucks off his "magic garment,"--unless we are to suppose Miranda holding it over her arm till he resumes it. But still less do I agree with Mr. Collier in thinking the direction, "Put on robe again," at the passage beginning, "Now I arise," any extraordinary accession to the business, as it is technically called, of the scene: for I do not think that his resuming his magical robe was in any way necessary to account for the slumber which overcomes Miranda, "in spite of her interest in her father's story," and which Mr. Collier says the commentators have endeavored to account for in various ways; but putting "_because_ of her interest in her father's story," instead of "_in spite_ of," I feel none of the difficulty which beset the commentators, and which Mr. Collier conjures by the stage-direction which makes Prospero resume his magic robe at a certain moment in order to put his daughter to sleep. Worthy Dr. Johnson, who was not among the puzzled commentators on this occasion, suggests, very agreeably to common sense, that "Experience proves that any violent agitation of the mind easily subsides in slumber." But Mr. Collier says, the Doctor gives this very reasonable explanation of Miranda's sleep only because he was not acquainted with the folio stage-direction about Prospero's coat, and knew no better. Now we are acquainted with this important addition to the text, and yet know no better than to agree with Doctor Johnson, that Miranda's slumbers were perfectly to be accounted for without the coat. Mr. Collier does not seem to know that a deeper and heavier desire to sleep follows upon the overstrained exercise of excited attention than on the weariness of a dull and uninteresting appeal to it.

But let us consider Shakspeare's text, rather than the corrector's additions, for a moment. Within reach of the wild wind and spray of the tempest, though sheltered from their fury, Miranda had watched the sinking ship struggling with the mad elements, and heard when "rose from sea to sky the wild farewell." Amazement and pity had thrown her into a paroxysm of grief, which is hardly allayed by her father's assurance, that "there's no harm done." After this terrible excitement follows the solemn exordium to her father's story,--

"The hour's now come; The very minute bids thee ope thine ear. Obey and be attentive."

The effort she calls upon her memory to make to recover the traces of her earliest impressions of life,--the strangeness of the events unfolded to her,--the duration of the recital itself, which is considerable,--and, above all, the poignant personal interest of its details, are quite sufficient to account for the sudden utter prostration of her overstrained faculties and feelings, and the profound sleep that falls on the young girl. Perhaps Shakspeare knew this, though his commentators, old and new, seem not to have done so; and without a professed faith, such as some of us moderns indulge in, in the mysteries of magnetism, perhaps he believed enough in the magnetic force of the superior physical as well as mental power of Prospero's nature over the nervous, sensitive, irritable female organization of his child to account for the "I know thou canst not choose" with which he concludes his observation on her drowsiness, and his desire that she will not resist it. The magic gown may, indeed, have been powerful,--but hardly more so, we think, than the nervous exhaustion which, combined with the authoritative will and eyes of her lord and father, bowed down the child's drooping eyelids in profoundest sleep.

The strangest of all Mr. Collier's comments upon this passage, however, is that where he represents Miranda as, up to a certain point of her father's story, remaining "standing eagerly listening by his side." This is not only gratuitous, but absolutely contrary to Shakspeare's text,--a greater authority, I presume, than even that of the annotated folio. Prospero's words to his daughter, when first he begins the recital of their sea-sorrow, are,--

"Sit down! For thou must now know further."

Does Mr. Collier's folio reject this reading of the first line? or does he suppose that Miranda remained standing, in spite of her father's command? Moreover, when he interrupts his story with the words, "Now I arise," he adds, to his daughter, "Sit still," which clearly indicates both that she was seated and that she was about to rise (naturally enough) when her father did. We say, "Sit _down_," to a person who is standing; and, "Sit _still_," to a person seated who is about to rise; and in all these minute particulars, the simple text of Shakspeare, if attentively followed, gives every necessary indication of his intention with regard to the attitudes and movements of the persons on the stage in this scene; and the highly commended stage-directions of the folio are here, therefore, perfectly superfluous.

The next alteration in the received text is a decided improvement. In speaking of the royal fleet dispersed by the tempest, Ariel says,--

"They all have met again, And are upon the Mediterranean _flote_ Bound sadly home for Naples";--

for which Mr. Collier's folio substitutes,--

"They all have met again, And all upon the Mediterranean _float_, Bound sadly back to Naples."

Mr. Collier notices, that the improvement of giving the lines,

"Which any print of goodness will not take,"

to Prospero, instead of Miranda, dates as far back as Dryden and Davenant's alteration of "The Tempest," from which he says Theobald and others copied it.

The corrected folio gives its authority to the lines of the song,--

"Foot it featly here and there, And, sweet sprites, the burden bear,"--

which stands so in Hanmer, and, indeed is the usually received arrangement of the song.

This is the last corrected passage in the first act, in the course of which Mr. Collier gives us no fewer than sixteen, altered, emended, and commented upon in his folio. Many of the emendations are to be found _verbatim_ in the Oxford and subsequent editions, and three only appear to us to be of any special value, tried by the standard of common sense, to which we agreed, on Mr. Collier's invitation, to refer them.

The line in Prospero's threat to Caliban,--

"I'll rack thee with old cramps, Fill all thy bones with _aches_, make thee roar,"--

occasioned one of Mr. John Kemble's characteristic differences with the public, who objected, perhaps not without reason, to hearing the word "aches" pronounced as a dissyllable, although the line imperatively demands it; and Shakspeare shows that the word was not unusually so pronounced, as he introduces it with the same quantity in the prose dialogue of "Much Ado about Nothing," and makes it the vehicle of a pun which certainly argues that it was familiar to the public ear as _ache_ and not _ake_. When Hero asks Beatrice, who complains that she is sick, what she is sick for,--a hawk, a hound, or a husband,--Beatrice replies, that she is sick for--or of--that which begins them all, an _ache_,--an _H_. Indeed, much later than Shakspeare's day the word was so pronounced; for Dean Swift, in the "City Shower," has the line,--

"Old _aches_ throb, your hollow tooth will rage."

The opening of this play is connected with my earliest recollections. In looking down the "dark backward and abysm of time," to the period when I was but six years old, my memory conjures up a vision of a stately drawing-room on the ground-floor of a house, doubtless long since swept from the face of the earth by the encroaching tide of new houses and streets that has submerged every trace of suburban beauty, picturesqueness, or rural privacy in the neighborhood of London, converting it all by a hideous process of assimilation into more London, till London seems almost more than England can carry.

But in those years, "long enough ago," to which I refer,--somewhere between Lea and Blackheath, stood in the midst of well-kept grounds a goodly mansion, which held this pleasant room. It was always light and cheerful and warm, for the three windows down to the broad gravel-walk before it faced south; and though the lawn was darkened just in front of them by two magnificent yew-trees, the atmosphere of the room itself, in its silent, sunny loftiness, was at once gay and solemn to my small imagination and senses,--much as the interior of Saint Peter's of Rome has been since to them. Wonderful, large, tall jars of precious old china stood in each window, and my nose was just on a level with the wide necks, whence issued the mellowest smell of fragrant _pot-pourri_. Into this room, with its great crimson curtains and deep crimson carpet, in which my feet seemed to me buried, as in woodland moss, I used to be brought for recompense of having been "very good," and there I used to find a lovely-looking lady, who was to me the fitting divinity of this shrine of pleasant awfulness. She bore a sweet Italian diminutive for her Christian name, added to one of the noblest old ducal names of Venice, which was that of her family.

I have since known that she was attached to the person of, and warmly personally attached to, the unfortunate Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales,--then only unfortunate; so that I can now guess at the drift of much sad and passionate talk with indignant lips and tearful eyes, of which the meaning was then of course incomprehensible to me, but which I can now partly interpret by the subsequent history of that ill-used and ill-conducted lady.

The face of my friend with the great Venetian name was like one of Giorgione's pictures,--of that soft and mellow colorlessness that recalls the poet's line,--

"E smarrisce 'l bel volto in quel colore Che non è pallidezza, ma candore,"--

or the Englishman's version of the same thought,--

"Her face,--oh, call it fair, not pale!"

It seemed to me, as I remember it, cream-colored; and her eyes, like clear water over brown rocks, where the sun is shining. But though the fair visage was like one of the great Venetian master's portraits, her voice was purely English, low, distinct, full, and soft,--and in this enchanting voice she used to tell me the story of the one large picture which adorned the room.

Over and over again, at my importunate beseeching, she told it,--sometimes standing before it, while I held her hand and listened with upturned face, and eyes rounding with big tears of wonder and pity, to a tale which shook my small soul with a sadness and strangeness far surpassing the interest of my beloved tragedy, "The Babes in the Wood,"--though at this period of my existence it has happened to me to interrupt with frantic cries of distress, and utterly refuse to hear, the end of that lamentable ballad.

But the picture.--In the midst of a stormy sea, on which night seemed fast settling down, a helmless, mastless, sailless bark lay weltering giddily, and in it sat a man in the full flower of vigorous manhood. His attitude was one of miserable dejection, and, oh, how I did long to remove the hand with which his eyes were covered, to see what manner of look in them answered to the bitter sorrow which the speechless lips expressed! His other hand rested on the fair curls of a girl-baby of three years old, who clung to his knee, and, with wide, wondering blue eyes and laughing lips, looked up into the half-hidden face of her father.--"And that," said the sweet voice at my side, "was the good Duke of Milan, Prospero,--and that was his little child, Miranda."

There was something about the face and figure of the Prospero that suggested to me those of my father; and this, perhaps, added to the poignancy with which the representation of his distress affected my childish imagination. But the impression made by the picture, the story, and the place where I heard the one and saw the other, is among the most vivid that my memory retains. And never, even now, do I turn the magic page that holds that marvellous history, without again seeing the lovely lady, the picture full of sad dismay, and my own six-year-old self listening to that earliest Shakspearian lore that my mind and heart ever received. I suppose this is partly the secret of my love for this, above all other of the poet's plays;--it was my first possession in the kingdom of unbounded delight which he has since bestowed upon me.

* * * * *

THE GREAT ARM-CHAIR.

Shall I not to-day, Estelle, give you the history of this great arm-chair, the only historical piece of furniture in our house? The heavy oak frame was carved by an imprisoned poet. They took away his pen, and in larger lines he carved this chair. Heavily moulded Sphinxes form its arms; the strong legs and feet of some wild beast its support; the crest, a winged figure with bandaged eyes,--a Fate or Fortune we might call it,--that mild look not to be resisted in its gentle strength. But blind Fortune could not so master him: his prison made for him only a secure room, in which to study, to work out, the mysteries.

The rich covering was wrought long years ago, in some ancient convent, by a saintly nun. Holy, pious tears dropped on it as she wrought. She pricked out brave bright flowers with her needle, though her own life was pale and sad. I cover this sacred work with housewifely care; but it makes our rest there more hallowed.

This old chair we call our dreaming-chair,--to borrow a name, our Sleepy-Hollow. It is so simple and grand in workmanship, it should be the seat of honor in a king's palace; and yet it is in place in our small parlor. Perhaps some day I may tell you of the ancient dames and knights who once possessed it; but they have long since slept their last sleep,--no summer-afternoon's nap, but a sleep so long to last, now their long day's work is done.

Not quite finished is the old man's work who this afternoon sat in the chair and quietly dreamed back his youth. I saw the hardened, withered face soften, as the bright light of childhood played around it; the meagre, hard old man forgot for a little the sharp want that pinched him; when he waked, he still babbled of green fields.

"Did Robinson Crusoe ever come back to his father and mother?" he says to me. "Poor boy! poor boy! I went to sea when I was young. Father and mother didn't like it. Came back after a four-years' voyage, and off again, soon as the ship had unloaded, on another trip up the Channel: took all my money to fit out. Might have had the Custom-House, if there had been anybody to speak for me; would have done my work well, and maybe had kept it thirty or forty years. Should be glad to creep into a hay-mow and pay somebody to feed me. Wish old Uncle Jack was good for somethin' besides work, work,--nothin' but hard work! Wish he could talk and say somethin'.

"Now that was good, sensible poetry you were reading, wasn't it? Good stuff? Couldn't hear a word of it: poor old fellow can't hear much now. Wish my father had lived longer; he would have told me things; he used to be different to me. I could have been a sight of comfort to him in mathematics." (His father died when the son was fifty years old; the thirty years he had lived since seemed a long life to the old man.) "Mayn't I look at the poetry?"

I found the place for him,--"New England."

"Yes, the farmer takes lots of comfort, walking on the road, foddering cattle, cutting wood."

Uncle Jack believes heartily in New England corn, and in the planting and hoeing of Indian corn he takes great delight: not to corn-laws, but to Indian corn, the talk always drifts.

"I hear you are going to plant a couple of acres of corn, Sir. Glad of it. This is an excellent dish of tea, Marm. This bread tastes like my mother's bread; baked in a bake-kettle. These mangoes are nice,--such as we used to have."

Turning to Aunt Sarah, he says,--

"Did you ever notice a difference in eggs, Marm?"

"Yes, Aunt thinks there is a difference between fresh and stale eggs."

"But I mean, Marm, that some are thin-shelled, some rough, some round, some peaked: a hen lays 'em just so all her life. Ever see a difference?"

It is an open question.

Then turning to the master of the house,--

"Do you like choc'late, Sir? Well, how you going to fix it when you haven't got any milk? Well, you just beat up an egg, and pour on the choc'late, boiling hot, stirring all the time, and you won't want any milk, Sir. That was what kept me alive aboard the Ranger."

Now comes the story of the Ranger. He was getting in years, he said, and wanted a home for his old age; so he built him a boat. He put a little open stove in it, because an open fire felt kind o' comfortable to his toes. He named it the Ranger; because when he was a little boy he took a long walk to the beach with his father, the little Iulus following with unequal steps, and they saw a shipwrecked vessel, named the Ranger, and he liked the name. He kept that name in his heart many years. When at last, by dint of much saving and scraping together, much hoeing of Indian corn, the old stocking-foot was at last filled, all the little odd bits, poured out and counted up, came to enough to speak to the ship-builder. Oh, the model! how the old man's brain worked over that! Then the timber,--each was a chosen piece; oak, apple, cherry, pine, each tree sent a stick. The home was builded, was launched, was christened: The Ranger. Alas, it was an ill-omened name to him! Brave and young was he in heart, and loved right well his tossing, rolling home; and many a hard gale did he ride out in her alone, old as he was.

Too old was he to be trusted on the treacherous deep; and friends (?) advised and counselled, and the home of his old age was sold. (He never got the pay!) Now, with restless, wandering feet, he makes long tramps, trying to collect old debts. Kind-hearted old man that he is, thinking always he is hard on 'em when he gets a promise to pay! A wife has been sick; perhaps he had better not ask for it now. His ox has died; maybe he had better wait. Fumbling over old papers in his pocket-book, muttering something about a pension: he was on the list, but was never called out, or somebody took his place.

Poor old Uncle Jack, with his dream of a pension, his dream of an office, his dream of a home in a boat! With him "many a dream has gone down the stream."

May some friendly hand at last close his eyes to that last long sleep, when his turn comes to heave down!

He is always finding Indian arrowheads and hatchets and pestles. He picks full pails of the nicest-looking huckleberries. He is always dressed in clean, tidy clothes, a little scant and well patched. He pats me on the head and says, "Didn't know you were Evelyn's sister; thought it was a little three-year old." About to tell me a sad story he had read in the newspaper, he stops suddenly and says, "Believe I won't tell you, dear!" "Did you hear the newspipe has broke?" when the Atlantic Telegraph Cable parted. He had plans for shoving off the Leviathan when it stuck.

Shall I not tell you he brings me a little bunch of eels of his own spearing? that you must be careful at table he has enough to eat, he takes such small pieces? that he is altogether a sparse man? has rows of pins on his sleeve that he picks up?--an old-fashioned man, whose type is fast fading out from these "fast," "steep" times. He tells a story of a stream of black flies which came so thick and so fast pouring on, he looked as long as he darst to. Yet he can tell a good, big story yet, and when somebody was talking of turtles of good size, jumped up suddenly, "Did you ever see a terrapin, Sir?" and then walked round the long dining-table to tell how big he was and how high he stood on his feet. "When I was in the West Indies, Sir----Wish I could creep into a good English hay-mow and pay somebody to feed me!"

Do you remember, Estelle, the story we read together once, out of the "Casket" or "Gem," one of those old annuals, where a certain princess was sent to a desolate island, whose maids of honor were all old crones, once distinguished by their wonderful beauty? Her task was to discover each especial grace, long since buried by the rubbish which time and folly had heaped upon it; in each old, yellow, wrinkled hag to find the charm which had once adorned her: as she found the grace, it was transferred to her own youthful person. Slowly and patiently she unwound those wrapped-up mummies, and disclosed the gems hidden in those burial-clothes; and returned to her father's court enriched with all those long-buried graces, now revived to their former youthful beauty, and with the added charm which wisdom and patience give.

My task is not so difficult,--as I seek virtues, not perishable stuffs. We will learn the history of these thickly crossing wrinkles, that, checkering, map out the face like the streets of a busy city. We will read the story "that youth and observation copied there." Many sit in my chair with weather-beaten looks, but time and want and necessity have ploughed still deeper furrows.

It is not in vain, this brave encounter with the elements,--this battle to keep the wolf Want outside the door,--the patient, laborious building up of the small house, made almost a comfortable home by many years of toil,--the sufficient meal snatched from Nature by the line or the gun, or wrung from her by hard labor of the hands. Is the face too thin and hard, the lips compressed? Would you turn away from so much patient endurance of a hard lot? Turn again, and read the story the clear eye tells; listen to the words of a deep religious experience which the thin, cracked voice relates: how in visions of the night the Comforter has come to them, and henceforth the way of duty is clear, and the burden of life is lightened. Will you go with me, dear, into those homely houses, sit with me by the firesides, and hear the simple story of New England's farmers and farmers' wives? We cannot call those poor who are so rich in all the manly virtues, and in the deep experiences of a faithful life.

Uncle Jack stops on his way, going up to get the oxen, and passes the night,--says, "Other people can't find enough to do; for his part, he should like to lie down in the hay-mow and rest,--all worn out, used up. Now Josiah, good, conversable man, knows about geography and the country round. Well, when you've got that, got the best of him,--likes variety too well,--goes off, leaves the homestead like a dismantled ship. Now, if a man only gets three good days down cellar, that's something. Don't believe 'Siah ever does it. So many notions in's head bothers him." (Uncle Jack is quite right; 'tis not economical to have notions; besides, they are revolutionary, they subvert the order of things.) "Got a cunning little heifer used to have some manners. Lost some of our lambs; read in a book, that, take what care you might, you would lose some lambs at times."--To-day he has gone driving the oxen round by Perkins's.

"Had the rheumatism this winter,--guess Jack Frost pinched him."--Ah! dear old man, an older than Jack Frost has got hold of your aged limbs! Harder pinches old Time gives than any mortal man!

"Used to get a little bird, Harris and me, and roast it, and mother would give us a little apple-sauce in a clam-shell, and we would go off back the island and eat it. Harris was sent to school up to Perkins's; couldn't stay; run away, and _borrowed_ a boat, and came home again; afraid of his father, and hid in the barn. Dug a well in the hay, and they used to lower him down things to eat, and water to drink in scooped-out water-melon rinds."

* * * * *

THE SONG OF FATIMA.

On, sad are they who know not love, But, far from passion's tears and smiles, Drift down a moonless sea, and pass The silver coasts of fairy isles!

And sadder they whose longing lips Kiss empty air, and never touch The dear warm mouth of those they love, Waiting, wasting, suffering much!

But clear as amber, sweet as musk, Is life to those whose lives unite: They walk in Allah's smile by day, And nestle in his heart by night!

SOMETHING ABOUT HISTORY.

There is no kind of writing which is undertaken so much from will and so little from instinct as History. It seems the great resource of baffled ambition, of leisure, of minds disciplined rather than inspired, of men with pecuniary means and without professional obligations. Sympathy with or opposition to an author prompts those thus situated to write criticism; a dominant sentiment inspires poetical composition; and usually an impressive experience suggests adventure in the field of fiction: but we find educated men, in independent circumstances, not remarkable for sensibility to Nature, acute critical perception, or dramatic talent, whose literary aspirations are vague, and who desire to be occupied eligibly, turn to History as the most available vantage-ground, busy themselves with wars and councils that happened ages ago,--with kings and soldiers, institutions and adventures, politics and dynasties, so far removed from the associations and interests of the hour, that only a scholar's enthusiasm or ambition could sustain the research or keep alive the enterprise thus voluntarily assumed. It is this objective method and motive that chiefly accounts for the numberless inert and the few vital histories. Like any intellectual task assumed without special fitness therefor or motive thereto,--without a comprehensive grasp of mind that impels to historic exploration,--without a patriotic zeal that warms to national heroism,--without, especially, a love of some principle, a conviction of some truth, an admiration of some national development, irresistibly urging the cultivated and ardent mind to seek for the facts, to celebrate the persons, to evolve the truth involved in and manifest through public events,--the annals recorded are but dry chronology,--a monotonous, more or less authentic, perhaps quite respectable, but far from a very important or peculiarly interesting work. Thousands of such cumber the shelves of libraries and fill the pages of catalogues,--dusted once a year, perhaps, to verify a date, to authenticate the details of a treaty, or fix the statistics of a war, but never read consecutively and with zest, because there was no genuine relation between the writer and his book. He undertook the latter in the spirit of a mechanical job; industry and learning may be embodied therein, but no moral life, no human charm; yet the work is cited with respect, the author enrolled with honor;--whereas, had he sought in poetry or philosophy, in a novel or a drama, thus to occupy and celebrate himself with literature, the failure would have been signal, the attempt ignominious. There is, indeed, no safer investment for middling literary abilities than History; for, if it fail to yield any large harvest of renown, it is comparatively secure from the assaults of ridicule, such as make pretension in other spheres of writing conspicuous.

Even in what are considered the successful exemplars in this department of literature, the errors incident to artificiality, the conventional forms of writing, are patent. Only in passages do we recognize that beauty or truth, that reality and genuineness, which so often wholly pervade a poem, a story, a memoir, or even a disquisition: at some point, the flow incident to wilful instead of soulful utterance becomes apparent;--ambition, pride of opinion, love of display somewhere manifest themselves. It has been said that the chief element of Hume's mental power was skepticism; and, singular as it may appear, his doubts about what are deemed the vital interests of humanity gave a charm to his record of her political vicissitudes; while he made capital of touching "situations," he displayed his own strength of intellect; but, with all this, did not write complete and authentic history. And when analyzed, what was the _animus_ of Gibbon's elaborate chronicle? He "spent his time, his life, his energy," says a severe, but just critic, "in putting a polished gloss on human tumult, a sneering gloss on human piety." And who has not felt, in following Macaulay's animated periods and thorough exposition and illustration of some event, trait, or economy,--in itself of little importance and limited value,--how much better it would have been to reserve his brilliant descriptive and keen analytical powers for the grand episodes, the prolific crises, and the leading characters of history, instead of indiscriminately devoting them to a consecutive account of national incidents and persons, both great and small, illustrious and insignificant?

A popular British author of our own day, in order to demonstrate the law of compensation, as regards the literary vocation, cites its inexpensiveness,--arguing, that, whereas the artist must invest capital, however small, in colors, marble, canvas, and studio-hire, and the professional man occupy a costly locality, the author needs but a quire of foolscap and a pen and ink to set up in trade. While there is literal truth in this comparison, the fact is not applicable to historical writing, except in a very limited degree. The preparation of the most successful works in this department, in modern times, has been attended with an outlay impossible to the poor scholar. It has involved the examination and reproduction of voluminous manuscript authorities, distant travel, the purchase of rare books and family papers, and sometimes years of busy reference, observation, and study, lucrative only in prospect. The same amount of culture and facile vigor of composition which less prosperous authors expend on a masterly review would suffice to make them famous historians, if blessed with the pecuniary means to seek foreign sources of information, or gather about them scattered and rare materials wherewith to weave a chronicle of the past. Hence, not only has History become the chosen field of writers with no special gift for more individually inspired kinds of literature, but of the educated sons of fortune. Accordingly, it is curious to remark the contrast between the lives of historians and those of poets; and in the average circumstances of the former there is some justification for the title of an aristocratic guild in letters. Compare Cowper's humble home at Olney with Gibbon's elegant library at Lausanne,--the social environment of Hallam, Grote, or Macaulay with the rustic isolation of Wordsworth, the economies of Shelley, or the life-struggle of Jerrold. Of course, there can thence be inferred no general rule; and the very differences in temperament between inventive and reproductive writers suggest a consequent diversity of habits; but the very idea of historical composition, on an extensive scale and as a permanent occupation, implies the leisure which competency alone yields, the means indispensable for gradual literary achievement, and more or less of the luxury and social position which, when education obtains, usually attend upon these advantages.

It results from these considerations that there is no sphere of literature which is so often the refuge of wealthy scholars, idle men of taste, baffled politicians of independent means, ambitious and well-read but not specially gifted citizens who have inherited comfortable estates. It is so dignified an employment, that it gratifies pride,--so possible without trenchant opinions, that it does not alarm the conservative,--so thoroughly respectable, safe, and capable of being made illustrious, so comparatively easy to the fluent but unoriginal mind, and practicable to follow, when methodically carried out, in a stated, regular manner, that we can scarcely be astonished at the alacrity with which such voluntary tasks are undertaken or the steadiness with which they are followed; at the same time, it may be because so few are able to command the means and opportunity, that historical writing is so highly estimated. As a test of intellectual power, a gauge of individual sentiment, an evidence of original genius, it is immeasurably inferior to dramatic, philosophical, or any of the more personal forms of literature, when inspired by deep convictions, original ideas, or creative imagination. It requires more knowledge than reflection, more patience than earnestness, more judgment than sentiment; and those who have raised it to a vital significance and profound beauty and interest have done so by virtue of endowments which, otherwise directed, would have placed them high and firm on the roll of genius: for it is possible to write history without this transcendent gift,--possible to write it respectably without the slightest grandeur or grace of mind,--by virtue of command of words, industry, care, and good sense. We cannot imagine Shakspeare tracing out his conception of Hamlet, or giving language to Lear or Miranda, without a soulful experience as far above mere intellectual assiduity as humanity is above mechanism; we cannot think of Milton elaborating his sublime epic, without, in fancy, taking in the studious years, the Italian nights of music, starlight, and high converse, the beautiful youth, the self-sacrificing prime, the blind old age, the religious patriotism, the pious loyalty, the learning and love, and the isolated meditation, cheered by grand symphonies and hoarded wisdom, through and by which, concentrated into melodious expression, the life of a noble mind thus majestically expressed itself: but we can easily fancy cold and cultured Gibbon returning from the Continent, full of classic lore, disgusted with his failure in public life, not sympathetic enough to enjoy heartily a career either of pleasure or of society, and so, in his dreams of scholarship, seizing upon the idea of a long, laborious, erudite, and elegant task; and we can also well imagine Hume, with his love of speculation, turning gratefully to the records of the past for subjects of reflection, analysis, and inference. In these and other notable instances, we feel it is more an accident than an inspiration, more from circumstances than from innate and absolute endowment and impulse, that the historic Muse is wooed.

Within a brief period the grave has closed over one of the most irreproachable and assiduous of American writers of History,--whose career signally illustrates the blessing of such a resource to unoccupied and cultivated leisure, and at the same time the fortuitous circumstances which often originate and prolong this kind of literary labor. In a letter to a friend abroad, written by Prescott soon after he found himself thus congenially occupied, the case is most frankly stated. "Ennui crept over me, when I found myself a perfectly idle man, with nothing to do, and, what made it worse, with eyes so debilitated that I had no power of doing anything with them. However, 'necessity is the mother of invention,' and I resolved to turn author in spite of my eyes; and it is a great satisfaction to me to think that the volumes I have put together for my own amusement should have afforded some to my countrymen, and, above all, to my friends."[A]

[Footnote A: Letter of W. H. Prescott to Miss Preble, dated Boston, February 28, 1845. _Memoir of Harriet Preble_, by Professor R.H. LEE, p. 285-6.]

This modest and candid estimate of his vocation indicates how much more a thing of volition and opportunity, and how much less a work of special endowment and intuitive recognition is the literature of History than that of Poetry, Psychology, or Philosophy, notwithstanding all these may be fused therein. "Whatever may be the use of this sort of composition in itself and abstractedly," observes a judicious critic,[B] "it is certainly of great use relatively and to literary men. Consider the position of a man of that species. He sits beside a library-fire, with nice white paper, a good pen, a capital style, every means of saying everything, but nothing to say. What, again, if something would happen, and then one could describe it? Something has happened, and that something is History." To feel fully the difference between a formal, mechanical annalist and the revival of the past through poetic or artistic sympathy, it is only requisite to turn from some dry chronicle of political vicissitudes, duly registered by a dull, matter-of-fact, conscientious antiquary, to the fresh classical or colonial romance, of which such graceful and well-studied exemplars have been produced by Lockhart, Bulwer, D'Azeglio, Kingsley, Ware, Longfellow, and other bards and novelists. While the attempt, by intensity of description and brilliant generalities, to impart to veritable history the charm we accept in the historical romance, has caused many an old-school reader to place Macaulay's fascinating volumes, called "The History of England," on the same shelf with works of fiction,--Aytoun, Hugh Miller, and William Penn's champions have given special meaning to this principle or prejudice, whichever it may be, by challenging the delightful author to the test of fact.

[Footnote B: Bagehot.]

In statesmen, or those who have excelled in political writing, the ambition to write history, the desire to illustrate and record national events, is not only a natural, but an auspicious feeling; and so it is in educated poets in whom the sentiment of patriotism or the narrative art gives scope and glow to such an enterprise. That Fox and Bacon, Milton and Swift, Mackintosh, Schiller, and Lamartine, should have partially adventured in this field seems but a legitimate result of their endowments and experience, however fragmentary or inadequate may have been some of the fruits of their historic studies.

When an enlightened and executive or speculative man is an obvious part of the history of his own times, his chronicle must have a certain significance and value. Raleigh, when he wrote the "History of the World" in prison, gave hints by which subsequent and less obsolete annalists have wisely profited. The scholar and the patriot coalesced in the mind of Camden, prompting him to rescue and conserve the materials of English history and note the fading traditions,--a purely antiquarian service, which only those can appreciate who seek authentic data of the far past. Such as cavil at the legal tone and crude arrangement of Clarendon are none the less his debtors for specific memoirs, the personal element of history; and while Burnet has been vigorously repudiated by standard historians, he continues, and justly, to be a prolific authority. It is conceded by all candid explorers, that, as far as it goes, the account of England by Rapin is the best. Franklin's old friend Ralph was commended and quoted by Fox. As the enterprise of historical writers enlarged and their style became elaborate, these and such as these lost in popularity what they gained in usefulness. The charm of rhetorical elegance and broad generalizations gradually usurped the place of simple narrative and detailed statement. In the very design of Gibbon there is a certain poetical attraction; his work may aptly be described as panoramic, unrolling a vast picture or succession of pictures, too vague in outline and too monotonous in color for minute impressions, yet, on this account, the more remarkable for general effect. What Europe was in the Middle Ages we find more specifically in Hallam; the Moors in Spain have been more vividly painted by subsequent writers, whose aim was less comprehensive: but how the imperial sway of Rome subsided into the Christian era, how a republican episode gleamed athwart her waning power in the casual triumph of Rienzi, the later emperors, and what occurred in their reign in Jerusalem and Constantinople, pass emphatically before us in the stately pages which once charmed readers of English as the model of historic eloquence, and now excite the admiration of scholars as a monument of erudition and elaborate but artificial writing. There was a new attraction in the pleasing style of Robertson and the characterization of Hume; the winsome language of the one and the transparent diction of the other made historical reading not so much a task to cumber the memory as a pastime to entertain the mind; in the one chronicle we followed events gracefully unfolded, and in the other discussed persons with acuteness; yet, when to either was subsequently applied the test of absolute accuracy and sound deduction, large allowances were demanded for inadequate research on the part of Robertson and partial inferences on that of Hume. The theories of the latter indicate why and how, with all his intellectual abilities, the sympathies of his readers were inevitably limited; in his view of humanity we find the true cause of all his deficiencies as an historian: "Human life," he somewhere remarks, "is more governed by fortune than by reason, is to be regarded more as a dull pastime than a serious occupation, and is more influenced by particular humor than by general principles." Yet, in a philosophical retrospect of English historians, we can trace a progressive development from the purely antiquarian researches of Camden to the personal memoirs of Clarendon and Burnet; thence to the comprehensive erudition and majestic narrative of Gibbon; onward to the reasoning, lucid record of Hume and the fascinating narrative of Robertson;--all of which qualities of industry, characterization, broad knowledge, taste, emphasis, and reflection blend, culminate, and intensify along the copious, rhetorical, and vivid page of Macaulay.

The Italian historians prolong, in style at least, the method of their classic predecessors: _"La Storia del Guicciardini è considerata come opera classica,"_--we are told by one of the critics of that nation; who adds, "His descriptions are always accurate, clear, and expressed with eloquence; the causes of events and their consequences are enumerated with rare acuteness; and his personages are delineated in their true characters, the historian descending into the deepest penetralia of their hearts: but the most eminent merit of this History consists in the moral and political considerations with which it abounds; it is like Tacitus." In like manner, Machiavelli is compared to Thucydides; while Varchi's long periods, adulation of the Medici, and municipal details are condemned by the same authority: yet one familiar with modern literature in this department will, despite this general commendation of native critics, be apt to ascribe the conservative charm of the Italian historians to their style rather than their method or matter.

It is remarkable how late the French writers won laurels in the field of historical composition, and how long France, with all her national vanity, has lacked a complete and classical chronicle,--brilliant and invaluable fragments whereof abound. According to the most esteemed French critics, until this century the nation actually knew nothing of its own history; and it is characteristic of their speculative and methodical mind and taste, that History became popular and philosophical, a novelty and a reform, simultaneously. Guizot, Thierry, Sismondi, and others, created a new era in this branch of letters; Thiers and Michelet enlarged its sphere and increased its charms; and yet, while the graphic simplicity of Froissart, the critical insight and ingenious generalizations of Guizot, and the poetical glow and richness of Michelet have made the history of France both highly suggestive as regards the development of civilization, and picturesque and dramatic as a narrative, the greatest allowance for brilliant theorizing, political sympathies, and an errant fancy are indispensable in order to attain to a clear view of genuine facts and absolute principles. It has been said that "leading ideas" are fatal to accuracy of statement; and these dominate in the minds of French philosophical annalists; while the more sympathetic class are fond of rhetorical display and fanciful episodes. A recent critic, after bestowing merited encomiums on Michelet, gives the following instance of his absurd generalizations, which occur in the midst of grave historical statements and descriptions: "Wool and flesh are the primitive foundations of England and the English race; ere becoming the world's manufactory of hardware and tissues, England was a victualling-shop; before they became a commercial, they were a breeding and a pastoral people,--a race fatted on beef and mutton; hence their freshness of tint, their beauty and strength: _their greatest man, Shakspeare, was originally a butcher_."

Less prominent and more recent names on the roll of historic literature are as distinctly associated with special excellences and defects. Thus, Grote keeps attention more by the intelligence of his comments than by the flow of his narration; he is far more political than picturesque; and while he gives a masterly analysis of the Athenian system of government, so as to place it in a new light even to the scholar's apprehension, he discusses the arts and the literature so inspiring to most cultivated minds, when describing Greece, with comparative indifference. Those who would examine English annals unbiased by Protestant zeal, and realize how the events and characters look to a Roman Catholic vision, may gather from Lingard some views which may not disadvantageously modify their interpretation of familiar men and occurrences. Two English writers have hastily compiled her annals during certain epochs; but while they are equally chargeable with superficiality, the manner in which the work is done is by no means similar. Smollet's continuation of Hume was confessedly a bookseller's job: four octavo volumes in only ten times the number of months, even in our days of locomotive celerity, would be thought rather a suspicious piece of literary handiwork; and besides the indecent haste, so incompatible with thoroughness, the misrepresentations of Smollet are patent. Goldsmith, as unambitious in research as he was genial in expression, made so agreeable a story, that, with all its imperfection, his sketch still finds readers; while the rarely quoted work of Henry most conveniently enumerates, at the end of each reign, details economical and social which identify and illustrate both period and progress in Anglo-Saxon civilization. As a copious and consecutive record of the salient incidents in modern Continental history,--so needful now for reference, and the diverse phases of which are so widely chronicled in the memoirs, the journals, the diplomatic correspondence, and what may be called the incidental history of the period,--the plan of Alison's work might have achieved a triumph of industry and skill, valuable as well as interesting to general readers and professional writers: but the political opinions, with the partial feelings they engender, continually distort the view and influence the estimate of this positive yet pleasant historian; while his almost wilful blunders, like the errors of Lord Mahon in regard to the American War, have been repeatedly demonstrated. Mackintosh philosophized about events, measures, and men, better than he described either. Sharon Turner nobly illustrates the value of intrepid research and patient collation. Mitford represents the aristocratic as Grote the democratic element in Grecian history. Tytler wrote of the past in the life of nations with the exclusive reliance on written proof that a conveyancer places upon title-deeds, and beside the glowing and harmonious pictures of later annalists such writing now appears obsolete. Napier describes battles scientifically, and Carlyle revolutions melodramatically,--each with original power, in their respective methods,--while Miss Strickland brings to the record of queenly sorrows and duties a woman's sympathetic prepossessions.

Since those quaintly simple and emphatic statements which, under the name of Froissart's Chronicles, seem to perpetuate the instinctive notion of History, as an honest and earnest, but unadorned and unelaborate narrative of military and political facts,--not only has there been a continual refinement of style and enlargement of scope and art, but a greater complexity and subdivision in the historian's labors. Abstract political ideas, purely intellectual phenomena, have found their annalists, as well as executive enterprise; events have been analyzed, as well as described,--characters discussed, as well as pictured,--the elements of society laid bare with as much zeal and scrutiny as its development has been traced and delineated. European historical students read anew the records of the past by the light of philosophy; more subtile divisions than the geographer indicates organize the record; events are narrated with reference to a dominant idea; governments are chronicled through their ultimate results, and not exclusively with regard to their locality; rulers are considered in groups; a faith is made the nucleus of an historical development, instead of a nation. Thus, we have Ranke's "Popes" and D'Aubigne's "Reformation," Hallam's "Middle Ages" and "English Constitution"; De Quincey treats of "The Caesars"; Vico demonstrates that History is a science with positive laws; Gervinus illustrates it as a development of certain inevitably progressive ideas; Niebuhr interprets it by fresh tests and ordeals; Dr. Arnold teaches it by an original method; Humboldt points out its naturalistic tendencies and origin; Herder and Hegel, De Tocqueville and Guizot, the eminent writers on Civilization, on Art, on Education, Political Economy, Literature, and Natural History, more and more exhibit the facts of humanity and of time under such new combinations, by so many parallel truths and principles, that it is difficult to conceive that History, as now understood by the educated and the reflective, is the same thing once crudely embodied in a ballad or mystically conserved by an inscription. To multiply relations is the destiny of our age, and to converge all that is discovered through the laws of Science upon the records and relics of the past is a process now habitual and pervasive.

And yet how little positive satisfaction does the lover of truth, the aspirant for what is authentic and significant, find in current and even popular histories! Certain general notions of the character of nations we, indeed, distinctly and correctly attain: that Chinese civilization is stationary, the French instinctively a military race, the Swiss mercenary, and adventurous in engineering and religious reform,--that modern German literature was as sudden as simultaneous in its development,--that Holland redeemed her foundations from the sea,--that Italy owes to art, and England to manufactures, her growth and grandeur. These and such as these are problems which the history of the respective countries, however inadequately told, reveals with authenticity; but when we go beyond and below the patent facts of local civilization, to the analysis of character, and, through it, of destiny, few and far between are the satisfactory records whence we can draw legitimate materials for inference and conjecture. The most attractive method is apt to be that upon which least reliance can be placed. We seldom consult Sir Walter's essays at serious history, while the novels he created out of historic material are as familiar as they are endeared; but their imaginative charm is in the inverse ratio of their authenticity. With every new candidate for public favor in this sphere of literature, there arises a "mooted question" whereon the historian and his readers are irreconcilably divided. The character of Penn, of Marlborough, and of the facts of the Massacre at Glencoe are still vehemently discussed, whenever Macaulay's popular History is referred to. Froude advances a new and plausible theory of the character of Henry VIII.; few of Bancroft's American readers accept his estimate of John Jay, Sam Adams, or Dr. Johnson, or of the political character of the Virginia Colonists; and Palfrey and Arnold interpret quite diversely the influence and career of Roger Williams. Nor are such discrepancies surprising, when we remember how the history which transpires now and here fails of harmonious report. Every battle, diplomatic arrangement, political event, nay, each personal occurrence, which forms the staple of to-day's journalism and talk, is regarded from so many different points of view, and stated under so many modifying influences, that only judicial minds have a prospect of reaching the exact truth. Hence the true way to profit by History is eclectic.

Let the erudition of the German, the genial animation of the French, the Saxon good sense, the Italian grace be enjoyed, and whatsoever of glamour or of inadequacy these charms hide be duly estimated; reflection and sympathy will often separate the gold of truth from the alloy of prejudice or fantasy. Above all, let this eclectic test be applied beyond nominal history,--to the geological data on the ancient rock,--the handwriting of the ages upon race, costume, language,--the incidental, but genuine history innate in all true literature, vivid elements whereof live in passages of Milton's controversial writings, in Petrarch's sonnets, De Foe's fictions, our Revolutionary correspondence, South's sermons, Swift's diaries, Burke's speeches, French memoirs, Walpole's letters, in the poems, plays, and epistles of the past, and every fact and person which society and life offer to our cognizance or sympathy.

"When we are much attached to our ideas, we endeavor to attach everything to them," says Madame de Staël. "The secret of writing well," observes a Scotch professor, "is to write from a full mind." These two maxims seem to us to illustrate the whole subject of historical composition; an earnest votary thereof will instinctively find material in every interest and influence that sways events or moulds character, and from the assimilation of all these will educe a vital and harmonious picture and philosophy. There is an historical as well as a judicial or poetic type of mind; and to such there is no object too trifling, no fact too remote, not directly or indirectly to minister to the unwritten history which vaguely shapes itself to his intelligence. In his reading and travel it is by no means to the ostensible monuments and trophies of the past that his observation and inquiry are confined: the Letters of Madame de Sévigné give him authentic hints for the social tendencies of France and their influence upon politics, as the blood-stains at Holyrood identify the place of Rizzio's murder; the "Edinburgh Review" reveals the spirit of the Reform movement as clearly as the Parliamentary records its letter; the South-Sea House and the Temple are as suggestive as Whitehall and the Abbey,--for trade and jurisprudence, in the retrospect, are as much a part of the by-gone life and present character of a nation, as the fate and the fame of her dead kings; and a Spanish ballad is as valuable an illustration as a Madrid state-paper; while the life of Harry Vane vindicates the Puritan nature as clearly as the letter of a Venetian ambassador exhibits the domestic life of a Pope.

The redeeming influence of strong personal sympathy and earnest conviction, both in the choice of a subject and the method of its treatment, has been signally illustrated by a countryman of our own. The interest of the general reader and the approbation of historical scholars were at once enlisted by Motley's "Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic." That work differs from and is superior to any American historical composition by virtue of a certain fluent animation, a certain decided and sustained tone, such as can be derived only from an absolute relation between the author's mind and heart and his subject. Accordingly his record not only seizes upon the attention, but wins the sympathy of the reader, who recognizes a vital and genuine spirit in the work, which gives it unity, completeness, and a living style, whereby its incidents, characters, and philosophy are unfolded, not only with art, but with nature, and so made real, attractive, and significant. That we are right in ascribing these merits to the affinity between the author and his work is amply evidenced by his own confession in a letter called forth by the death of Prescott, in which he says,--

"It seems to me but as yesterday, though it must be now twelve years ago, that I was talking with our ever-lamented friend Stackpole about my intention of writing a history upon a subject to which I have since that time been devoting myself. I had then made already some general studies in reference to it, without being in the least aware that Prescott had the intention of writing the history of Philip II. Stackpole had heard the fact, and that large preparations had already been made for the work, although 'Peru' had not yet been published. I felt, naturally, much disappointed. I was conscious of the immense disadvantage to myself of making my appearance, probably at the same time, before the public, with a work not at all similar in plan to 'Philip II.,' but which must, of necessity, traverse a portion of the same ground. My first thought was, inevitably as it were, only of myself. It seemed to me that I had nothing to do but to abandon at once a cherished dream, and probably to renounce authorship. _For I had not first made up my mind to write a history, and then cast about to take up a subject. My subject had taken up me, drawn me on, and absorbed me into itself. It was necessary for me, it seemed, to write the book I had been thinking much of,--even if it were destined to fall dead from the press,--and I had no inclination or interest to write any other_."

The same inspiration is partially obvious in those portions of every history which come home to the writer's experience: as, for instance, some of the military episodes in Colletta's "History of Naples," he having been a soldier,--and the descriptive phases of Parkman's "History of Pontiac," the author having been a Prairie traveller, and familiar with the woods and the bivouac. In like manner, it is the idiosyncrasy of historians which gives original value to their labors: Botta's knowledge of American localities and civilization was meagre, but his sympathy with the patriots of the Revolution was strong, and this gave warmth and effect to his "Guerra Americana"; Niebuhr was specially gifted to develop what has been called the law of investigation, and hence he penetrates the Roman life, and lays bare much of its unapparent meaning and spirit. So apt and patient are the Germans in research, that they have been justly said to "quarry" out the past; while so native are rhetoric, theorizing, and fancifulness to the French, that they make history, as they do life and government, theatrical and picturesque, rather than gravely real and practically suggestive.

A peculiar feature in the labors of modern historians is the research expended upon what the elder annalists regarded as purely incidental and extraneous. The collation of archives, official correspondence, and state-papers is now but the rough basis of research; memoirs are equally consulted,--localities minutely examined,--the art and literature of a given era analyzed,--the geography, climate, and ethnology of the scene made to illustrate the life and polity,--social phases, educational facts estimated as not less valuable than statistics of armies and judicial enactments. Michelet has some charming rural pictures and female portraits in his History of France; Macaulay thinks no custom or economy of a reign insignificant in the great historical aggregate. Topography, botany, artistic knowledge are not less parts of the chronicler's equipment than philology, rhetoric, and philosophy; a newspaper is not beneath nor a traveller's gossip beyond his scope; architecture reveals somewhat which diplomacy conceals; an inscription is not more historical than the average temperature or the staple productions. Whatever affects national character and destiny, whatever accounts for national manners or confirms individual sway, is brought into the record. Diaries, like those of Pepys and Evelyn, the tithe-book of a county, the taste in portraiture, the costume and the play-bill yield authentic hints not less than the census, the parliamentary edicts, or the royal signatures; the popular poem, the social favorite, the _cause célèbre_, what pulpit, bar, peasant and beau, doctor and lady _à la mode_ do, say, and are, then and there, must coalesce with the battle, the legislation, and the treaty,--or these last are but technical landmarks, instead of human interests.

Even our most generalized historical ideas are made emphatic only through association and observation. How the vague sense of Roman dominion is deepened as we trace the outline of a camp, the massive ranges of a theatre, or the mouldy effigy on a coin, in some region far distant from the Imperial centre,--as at Nismes or Chester! How complete becomes the idea of mediaeval life, contemplated from the ramparts of a castle, in the "dim, religious light" of an old monastic chapel, or amid the obsolete trappings and weapons of an armory! What a distinct and memorable revelation of ancient Greece is the Venus or Apollo, a Parthenon frieze or a fateful drama! The best political essays on the French Revolution are based on the economical and social facts recorded in the Travels of Arthur Young. The equivocal action of Massena, when he commanded Paris against the Allies, is explained in the recently published letter of Joseph Bonaparte, wherein we learn his deficiency of muskets. Humboldt accounted for the defects of Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico" by the fact that the historian had never visited that country. Napoleon gave a key to the misfortunes of Italy, when he said, "It is a peninsula too long for its breadth." And the significance of the Seven Years' War is expressed in a single phrase by Milton's last biographer, when he defines it as the "consummation politically and the attenuation spiritually of the movement begun in Europe by the Lutheran Reformation."

Indeed, so intimate is the connection between private life and public events, between political and social phenomena, that the historical mind finds material in all literature, and the very attempt to keep to a high strain and to bend facts to theory limits the authenticity of professed annalists. What Macaulay says of an eminent party-leader is modified to those who have studied the character through his memoirs or writings. The charming narrative of Robertson, the characterization of Hume, the stately periods of Gibbon, fail to win implicit confidence, when the scene, the age, or the personages described are known to the reader through original authorities. When Bancroft declares a treaty of Colonial governors against Indian ravages the germ of democratic government, we know that it is his attachment to a theory, and not the actual circumstances, which leads to such an inference; for the very authority he cites merely indicates a defensive alliance among rulers, not a coalition of the ruled. And so when to an account of the Battle of Lexington he appends a rhetorical argument connecting that event, so meagre and simple in itself and so wonderful in its consequences, with the progress of truth and humanity in political science and reformed religion, we feel that the reasoning is forced and irrelevant,--more an experiment in fine writing than an evolution of absolute truth.

Thus continually is the independent reader of history taught eclecticism: he makes allowance for the want of careful research in this writer, for the love of effect in that,--for the skepticism of one, and the credulity of another,--for enthusiasm here, and fastidiousness there,--and especially for the greater or less attachment to certain opinions, and the absence or presence of strong convictions and genuine sympathies. Hence, to read history aright, we must read human nature as well; we must bring the light of philosophy and of faith, the calmness of judgment and the insight of love, to the record; collateral revelations drawn from our own experience, modified acceptance of both statement and inference, superiority to the blandishments of style, are as needful for the right interpretation of a chronicle as of a scientific problem. Thus history is perpetually rewritten; fresh knowledge opens new vistas in the past as well as the future; the discovery of to-day may rectify, in important respects, the statement which has been unchallenged for centuries; one new truth leavens a thousand old formulas; and nothing is more gradual than the elucidation of historical events and characters. Even our own brief annals suggest how large must be the historian's faith in time: only within a year or two has it been possible to demonstrate the justice of Washington's estimate of Lee, and how completely the sagacious provision of Schuyler secured the capture of Burgoyne. Since the American Revolution, one of these men has been as much overrated as the other has failed of just appreciation--because the documentary wisdom requisite for an enlightened judgment has not until now been patent.[C]

[Footnote C: See Lossing's _Life and Correspondence of General Schuyler_, and Professor Moore's paper on Charles Lee.]

With the imposing array of professed histories and historians in view, it is curious to revert to the actual sources of our own historic ideas,--those which are definite and pervasive. The vast number of intelligent readers, who have made no special study of this kind of literature, probably derive their most distinct and attractive impressions of the past from poetry, travel, and the choicest works of the novelist; local association and imaginative sympathy, rather than formal chronicles, have enlightened and inspired them in regard to Antiquity and the great events and characters of modern Europe. This fact alone suggests how inadequate for popular effect have been the average labors of historians; and so fixed is the opinion among scholars that it is impossible for the annalist to be profound and interesting, authentic and animated, at the same time, that a large class of the learned repudiate as spurious the renown of Macaulay,--although his research and his minuteness cannot be questioned, and only in a few instances has his accuracy been successfully impugned. They distrust him chiefly because he is agreeable, doubt his correctness for the reason that his style fascinates, and deem admiration for him inconsistent with their own self-respect, because he is such a favorite as no historian ever was before, and his account of a parliament, a coinage, or a feud as winsome as a portraiture of a woman. In one of his critical essays, Macaulay himself gives a partial explanation of this protest of the minority in his own case. "People," he remarks, "are very loath to admit that the same man can unite very different kinds of excellence. It is soothing to envy to believe that what is splendid cannot be solid and what is clear cannot be profound." And it has been most justly said of his own method of writing history, "He must make _everything_ clear and bright, and bring it into the range of his analysis; his exaggeration chiefly applies to individual characters, not to general facts"; and the reason given for the decided preference manifested for his vivid record is not less true than philosophical,--"We learn so much from him _enjoyably_." It is precisely the lack of this pleasurable trait which makes the greater part of the annals of the past a dead letter to the world, and wins to romance, ballad, epic, fiction, relic, and poetry the keen attention which facts coldly "set in a note-book" never enlisted. How many of us unconsciously have adopted the portraits of the early English kings as Shakspeare drew them! To what a host of living souls is the history of Scotland what the author of "Waverley" makes it! Charles I. haunts the fancy, not as drawn by Hume, but as painted by Vandyck. The institutions of the Middle Ages are realized to every reflective tourist through the architecture of Florence more than by the municipal details of Hallam. Pyramids, obelisks, mummies have brought home Egyptian civilization; the "old masters," that of Europe in the fifteenth century; the ruins of the Colosseum, Roman art and barbarism, as they never were by Livy or Gibbon. Lady Russell's letters tell us of the Civil War in England,--Saint Mark's, at Venice, of Byzantine taste and Oriental commerce,--the Escurial and the Alhambra, Versailles, a castle on the Rhine, and a "modest mansion on the banks of the Potomac," of their respective eras and their characteristics, social, political, religious,--more than the most elaborate register, muster-roll, or judicial calendar. For around and within these memorials lingers the life of Humanity; they speak to the eye as well as to memory,--to the heart as well as the intelligence; they draw us by human associations to the otherwise but technical statement; they lure us to repeople solitudes and reanimate shadows; and having become intimate with the scenes, the effigies, the monuments of the Past, we have, as it were, a vantage-ground of actual experience an impulse from personal observation and, perhaps, a sympathy born of local inspiration, whereby the phantoms of departed ages are once more clothed with flesh, and their sorrows and triumphs are renewed in the soul of enlightened contemplation.

* * * * *

MY NEIGHBOR, THE PROPHET.

The point of commencement for a story is altogether arbitrary. Some writers stick to Nature and go back to the Creation; others take a few dozen of the grandfatherly old centuries for granted; others seize Time by the forelock and bounce into the middle of a narrative; but, as I said before, the beginning is a mere matter of taste and convenience. I choose to open my tale with the day on which I took possession of my newly purchased country-house.

It was a pretty little cottage, wooden, old-fashioned, a story and a half high, with a long veranda, a shady door-yard, and a sunny garden. I bought it as it was, furniture included, of a gentleman who was about to remove southward on account of his wife's health, or, to speak more exactly, on account of her want of it. I laugh here to think how surprised you will be when you learn that these matters have no connection with my story. All the important events which I propose to relate might have happened had this gentleman never sold nor I purchased; and, as a proof of it, I can adduce the fact that they actually did occur some years before we enjoyed the honor of each other's acquaintance. But I could not resist the temptation of the episode. I am as delighted at getting into my first house as was my little son when he poked his chubby legs into his first trousers.

"Who is my nearest neighbor?" I asked of the former proprietor, when he made his parting call.

"What, the occupant of the new house just below you? I can tell you very little of him. I haven't made his acquaintance, and don't know his name. We call him the Mormon."

"Mercy on us! You don't mean to hint at anything in the way of polygamy, I hope. He doesn't keep an omnibus with seats for twenty, does he?"

"No, not so bad as that. In fact, I don't know much about him. I thought you were aware of his--his style of living," stammered my friend. "Oh, I dare say he is respectable enough. But then we noticed three or four women about the house, and only one man; and so we clapped the title of Mormon on him. Nicknaming is funny work, you know,--a short and easy way to be witty. I believe, however, that he does pretend to be a prophet."

"The Pilgrim Fathers protect us! Why, he may attempt to proselytize us by force. He may declare a religious war against us. It would be no joke, if he should invade us with the sword in one hand, and the Koran, or whatever he may call his revelation, in the other."

"Oh, don't be alarmed. He is quite harmless, and even unobtrusive. A sad-faced, pale, feeble-looking, white-bearded old man. He won't attack you, or probably even speak to you. I will tell you all I know of him. The house was built under his direction about six months ago. I understand that the women own it, and that they are not relatives according to the flesh, but simply sisters in faith. They have some queer sort of religion which I am shamefully ignorant of. At all events, they believe this old gentleman to be a prophet, and consider it a duty or a pleasure to support him. That is the extent of my knowledge. I hope it doesn't disgust you with your neighborhood?"

"By no means. May you find as pleasant a one, wherever you settle!"

"Thank you. Well, it is nearly train-time, and I suppose I must leave you and my old place. I wish you every happiness in it."

And so the old proprietor sighingly departed, leaving the new one smiling on the doorstep. I was just thinking how nicely the world is arranged, so that one man's trouble may turn out another man's blessing, (the illness in this gentleman's family, for instance, being the cause of my getting a neat country-house cheap,) when my attention was arrested by the appearance of a thin, feeble-looking, white-bearded old man, who passed down the street with head bent and hands joined behind him. I stared at him till he got by; then I ran down to the gate and looked after him earnestly; and at last I darted forward, hatless, in eager pursuit. He heard my approaching steps, and put his snowy beard against his right shoulder in the act of taking a glance rearward. I now recognized the profile positively, and began conversation.

"Is it possible? My dear Doctor Potter, how are you? Don't you know me? Your old friend Elderkin."

"Sir? Elderkin? Oh!--ah!--yes! How do you do, Mr. Elderkin?" he stammered, seeming very awkward, and hardly responding at all to my vigorous hand-shaking.

"I am delighted to see you again," I continued. "I have had no news of you these five years. Do you live in this neighborhood?"

"I--I reside in the next house, Sir," he replied, not looking me in the face, but glancing around uneasily, as if he wanted to run away.

"What! are you the prophet?" I blurted out before I could stop myself.

"I am, Mr. Elderkin," he said, blushing until I thought his white hair would turn crimson.

We stared at each other in silence for ten seconds, each wishing himself or his interlocutor at the antipodes.

"I congratulate you on your gift," I remarked, as soon as I could speak. "I will see you again soon, and have a talk on the subject. We have discussed similar matters before. Good day, Doctor."

"Good day, Mr. Elderkin," he replied, drawing himself up with a poor pretence at self-respect.

He was greatly changed. Heterodoxy had not been so fattening to him as Orthodoxy. When I knew him, six years before, as pastor of a flourishing church, Doctor of Divinity, and staunch Calvinist, he had a plump and rosy face, a portly form, and vigorous carriage. He was a great favorite with the ladies, as clergymen are apt to be, and consequently never lacked for delicate and appetizing sustenance. He was esteemed, self-respectful, and happy; and all these things tend to good health and good looks. I propose to make myself famous as the Gibbon of the decline and fall of this reverend gentleman, once so honorably established on the everlasting hills of Orthodoxy, and now so overthrown and trampled under foot by the Alaric of Spiritualism. I do not expect, indeed, that anybody will take warning by my friend's sad history; nor do I insist that people in general would find it advantageous to learn much wisdom from the experience of others; for it is very clear, that, if we attempted only what our neighbors or our fathers had succeeded in doing, we should kill all chance of variety or improvement. It would be a stupidly wise world; there would be no sins, and, very possibly, no virtues; instead of "Everything happens," it would be "Nothing happens." Believing and hoping, therefore, that Dr. Potter's calamities will not be the smallest check upon any person who shall feel disposed to follow in his footsteps, I present the story to the public, not at all as a lesson, but merely as an item of curious information.

Oddly enough, it was on that day of delusions, the first of April, that I stumbled into the Doctor's revival of the age of miracles. I had been engaged for three months on a geological survey in a Western Territory, during which time I had received very brief and vague news from the little city which was then my place of abode, and had not even had a hint of the signs and wonders which there awaited my astonished observation. Reaching home, I made it my first business to call on my reverend friend; for the Doctor, it must be known, was one of my most valued intimates, had baptized me, had counselled me, had travelled with me in foreign lands; we had many interests, many sympathies in common, and no differences except with regard to the extent of the Flood, the date of the Creation, and other matters of small personal importance. I found him in his study, surrounded by those seven hundred and odd volumes, the learning and excellent spirit of which gave to his sermons such a body of venerable divinity, such a bouquet of savory eloquence. He was walking to and fro rapidly, studying a slip of manuscript with an air of serious ecstasy. He did not look up until I had seized his hand, and even then he stared at me as a man might be supposed to stare who had been passing a fortnight with angels or other spiritual existences and unexpectedly found himself among natural and reasonable beings again.

"Ah, my dear Elderkin," he said at last, "I am glad to see you. How are you, and how have you been? Excuse me for not recognizing you at once. I had just lost myself in the consideration of a mystery which I believe to be of the sublimest importance. Oh, my dear friend, I hope you will be brought to attend to these things! They are above and beyond all your geologies; they preceded and will outlive them."

"Indeed!" I replied. "Nothing in the way of chaos, I hope?"

"Look here at this sheet of foolscap," he exclaimed, waving it excitedly. "Do you remember the belief which I have often expressed to you,--the belief that the dispensation of miracles has never yet ceased from earth,--that we have still a right to expect signs, wonders, instantaneous healings, and unknown tongues,--and that, but for our wretched incredulity, these things would constantly happen among us? You have disputed it and ridiculed it, but here I hold a proof of its truth. A month ago this blessing was vouchsafed to me. It was at one of our Wednesday-evening exercises. I had just been speaking of supernatural gifts, and of the duty which we lie under of expecting and demanding them. The moment I sat down, a stranger (a gentleman whom I had previously noticed at church) rose up with a strangely beaming look and broke out in a discourse of sounds that were wholly unintelligible. You need not smile. It was a true language, I am confident; it flowed forth with a moving warmth and fluency; and the gestures which accompanied it were earnest and most expressive."

"That was fortunate," said I; "otherwise you must have been very little edified. But isn't it rather odd that the man should use earthly gestures with an unearthly language?"

The Doctor shook his head reprovingly, and continued,--

"Deacon Jones, the editor of the 'Patriot,' is a phonographer. He took down the close of the stranger's address, and next day brought it to me written out in the ordinary alphabet. Let me read it to you. As you are acquainted with several modern languages, perhaps you can give me a key to an interpretation."

"I don't profess to know the modern languages of the other world," said I. "However, let us hear it."

"Isse ta sopon otatirem isais ka rabatar itos ma deok," began the Doctor, with a gravity which almost made me think him stark mad. "De noton irbila orgonos ban orgonos amartalannen fi dunial maran ta calderak isais deluden homox berbussen carantar. Falla esoro anglas emoden ebuntar ta diliglas martix yehudas sathan val caraman mendelsonnen lamata yendos nix poliglor opos discobul vanitarok ken laros ma dasta finomallo in salubren to mallomas. Isse on esto opos fi sathan."

And so he read on through more than a page and a half of closely written manuscript, his eyes flashing brighter at each line, and his right hand gesturing as impressively as if he understood every syllable.

"Bless you, it's nothing new," said I. "There's an institution at Hartford where they cure people of talking that identical language."

"Just what I expected you to say," he replied, flushing up. "I know you,--you scientific men,--you materialists. When you can't explain a phenomenon, you call it nonsense, instead of throwing yourselves with childlike faith into the arms of the supernatural. That is the sum and finality of your so-called science. But, come, be rational now. Don't you catch a single glimpse or suspicion of meaning in these remarkable words?"

"I am thankful to say that I don't," declared I. "If ever I go mad, I may change my mind."

"Well now, I _do_" he asseverated loudly. "There are words here that I believe I understand, and I am not ashamed to own it. Why, look at it, yourself," he added, pleadingly. "That word _sathan_, twice repeated, can it be anything else than _Satan_? _Yehudas_, what is that but _Jews?_ And then _homox_, how very near to the Latin _homo!_ I think, too, that I have even got a notion of some of the grammatical forms of the language. That termination of _en_, as in _deluden, salubren,_ seems to me the sign of the present tense of the plural form of the verb. That other termination of _tar_, as in _ebuntar, carantar_, I suppose to be the sign of the infinitive. Depend upon it that this language is one of absolute regularity, undeformed by the results of human folly and sorrow, and as perfect as a crystal."

"But not as clear," I observed,--"at least, not to our apprehension. Well, how was this extraordinary revelation received by the audience?"

"In dumb silence," said the Doctor. "Faith was at too low an ebb among us to reach and encircle the amazing fact. I had to call out the astonished brethren by name; and even then they responded briefly and falteringly. But the leaven worked. I went round the next day and talked to all my leading men. I found faith sprouting like a grain of mustard-seed. I found my people waking up to the great idea of a continuous, deathless, present miracle-demonstration. And these dim suspicions, these far-off longings and fearful hopes, were, indeed, precursors of such a movement of spirits, such a shower of supernatural mercies, as the world has not perhaps seen for centuries. Yes, there have been wonders wrought among us, and there are, I am persuaded, greater wonders still to come. What do you think must be my feelings when I see my worthiest parishioners rise in public and break out with unknown tongues?"

"I should suppose you would rather see them break out with the small-pox," I answered.

"Ah, Professor! wait, wait, and soon you will not laugh," said the Doctor, solemnly.

"Perhaps not. I am a sincere friend of yours, and a tolerably good-hearted sort of man, I hope. I shall probably feel more like crying. But the world may laugh long and loud, Doctor. All who hate the true revelation may laugh to see it mocked and caricatured by those who profess and mean to honor it. Just consider, while it is yet time to mend matters, how imprudent you are. Why, what do you know of the man who has been your Columbus in this sea of wonders? Are you sure that he is not a sharper, or an impostor, or a lunatic?"

"Impossible! He brought letters to three of our most respectable families. His name is Riley, John M. Riley, of New York; and he is son of the wealthy old merchant, James M. Riley, who has been such a generous donor to all good works. As for his being a lunatic, you shall hear his conversation."

"I should be a very poor judge of it, if he always speaks in his unknown tongues."

"English! English! he talks English as good as your own. A more gentlemanly person, a more intelligent mind, a meeker and more believing spirit, I have not met this many a day. He is still here, and he is my right hand in the work. I shall soon have the pleasure of making you acquainted with him."

"Thank you; I shall be delighted," said I. "Only be good enough to hint to him that I like to understand what is said to me. If he comes at me with unknown tongues, I shall wish him in unknown parts. I can't stand mysteries. I am a geologist, and believe that there are rocks all the way down, and that we had much better stand on them than wriggle in mere chaotic space. Good morning, Doctor. I shall come again soon; I shall keep a lookout on you."

"Good morning," he replied, kindly. "I hope to see you in a better frame before many days."

I hurried back to my hotel, and questioned the landlord about this revival of the age of miracles. He gave me a long account of the affair, and then every neighbor who strolled in gave me another, until by dinner-time I had heard wonders and absurdities enough to make a new "Book of Mormon." The lunacies of this Riley had entered into Dr. Potter and his parishioners, like the legion of devils into the herd of swine, and driven them headlong into a sea of folly. There had been more tongues spoken during the past month in this little Yankee city than would have sufficed for our whole stellar system. Blockheads who were not troubled with an idea once a fortnight, and who could neither write nor speak their mother English decently, had undertaken to expound things which never happened in dialects which nobody understood. People who hitherto had been chiefly remarkable for their ignorance of the past and the slowness of their comprehension of the present fell to foretelling the future, with a glibness which made Isaiah and Ezekiel appear like minor prophets, and a destructiveness which nothing would satisfy out the immediate advent of the final conflagration. Gouty brothers whose own toes were a burden to them, and dropsical sisters with swelled legs, hobbled from street to street, laying would-be miraculous hands on each other, on teething children, on the dumb and blind, on foundered horses and mangy dogs even, or whatsoever other sickly creature happened to get under their silly noses. The doctors lost half their practice in consequence of the reliance of the people on these spiritual methods of physicking. Children were taken out of school in order that they might attend the prophesyings and get all knowledge by supernatural intuition. Logic and other worldly methods of arriving at truth were superseded by dreams, discernings of spirits, and similar irrational processes. The public madness was immense, tempestuous, and unequalled by anything of the kind since the "jerks" which appeared in the early part of this century under the thundering ministrations of Peter Cartwright. That nothing might be lacking to make the movement a fact in history, it had acquired a name. As its disciples used the word "dispensation" freely, the public called them Dispensationists, and their faith Dispensationism, while their meetings received the whimsical title of Dispensaries.

Amid this clamor of daft delusion, Dr. Potter congratulated his people on the resurrection of the age of miracles, and preached in furtherance of the work with a fervid sincerity and eloquence rarely surpassed by men who support the claims of true religion and right reason. Had he brought the same zeal to bear against mathematics, it seems to me he might have shaken the popular faith in the multiplication-table. The wonders transacting in his church being noised abroad, the town was soon crowded with curious strangers, mostly laymen, but several clergymen, some anxious to believe, others ready to sneer, but all resolute to see. As might have been expected, the nature of the excitement alarmed the wiser pastors of the vicinity for the cause of Orthodoxy. They saw that several of the asserted miracles were simply hoaxes or delusions; they suspected that the unknown tongues might be nothing but the senseless bubbling of overheated brainpans; they perceived that the Doctor in his enthusiastic flights was soaring clear into the murky clouds of Spiritualism; and they dreaded lest the scoffing world should make a weapon out of these absurdities for an attack upon the Christian faith. They began to preach against the fanaticism; and, of course, my friend denounced them as infidels. High war ensued among the principalities and powers of theology in all that portion of Yankeedom.

The reaction roused by the unbelieving clergymen reached the Doctor's congregation, and emboldened all the sensible members to combine into an anti-miracle party. At a meeting of these persons a committee was appointed to wait upon the pastor and respectfully request him to dismiss Riley, to cease his efforts after the supernatural, and to return to his former profitable manner of ministration. Dr. Potter was amazed and indignant; he replied, that he should preach the truth as it was revealed to himself; he scouted the dictation of the committee, and fell back upon the solemn duty of his office; he ended by informing the gentlemen that they were unbelievers and materialists. Naturally the dissenters grew all the more fractious for this currying, and held another meeting, in which the reaction kicked up higher than ever. Being resolved now to proceed to extremities, and, if necessary, to form a new congregation, they drew up the following recantation and sent it to Dr. Potter,--not with any hope that he would put his name to it, but for the purpose of ridiculing his infatuation, and driving him to resign his pulpit.

"I, the undersigned, pastor of the First Church in Troubleton, having been led far from the truth by the absurdities of modern miracleism and spiritualism, and having seen the error of my ways, do penitently subscribe to the accompanying articles.

"1st. I promise to cease all intercourse with a blasphemous blockhead named John M. Riley, who has been the human cause of my downfall.

"2d. I promise to avoid in future all rhapsodies, ecstasies, frenzies, and whimseys which throw ridicule on true religion by caricaturing its influences.

"3d. I promise to regard with the profoundest contempt and indifference both my own dreams or somnambulisms and those of other people.

"4th. I promise not to unveil the secret things of Infinity, nor to encourage others to unveil them, but to mind my own finite business, and to rest satisfied with the revelations that are contained in the Bible.

"5th. I promise not to speak unknown tongues as long as I can speak English, and not to listen to other people who commit the like absurdity, unless I know them to be Frenchmen or Dutchmen or other foreigners of some human species.

"6th. I promise not to heal the sick by any unnatural and miraculous means, but rather to call in for their aid properly educated physicians, giving the preference to those of the allopathic persuasion.

"7th. I promise not to work signs in heaven nor wonders on earth, but to let all things take the course allotted to them by a good and wise Providence."

Of course Dr. Potter looked upon this production as the height of irreverence and irreligion, and proposed to excommunicate the authors of it. Hence the dissenters declared themselves seceders, and took immediate steps to form a new society.

It was at this stage of the excitement that I returned to Troubleton and made my call upon the Doctor. I felt anxious to save my old friend and worthy pastor. I saw, that, if he continued in his present courses, he would strip himself, one after the other, of his influence, his position, his religion, and his reason. That very evening, after the usual conference-meeting was over, I called again on him, and found him in a truly lyrical frame of spirit.

"Ah, my dear friend, there is no end to it!" exclaimed he. "The doors are opening, one beyond another. Wonder shows forth after wonder, miracle after miracle. Behind the veil! behind the veil!"

"Indeed!" said I, rather vexed. "You'll find yourself behind a grate some day."

"There is now no question of the physical value as well as the spiritual sublimity of these revelations," he continued, without observing my sneer. "Life and death, the sparing of precious blood, the prevention of crime, the punishment of the guilty,--you can appreciate these things, I presume."

"When I am in my senses," returned I. "But what is the row? if I may use that worldly expression. Has Mr. John M. Riley been brought to confess any state-prison offences?"

"Ah, Elderkin!" sighed the Doctor, letting go my hand with a look of sad reproach. "But no: you cannot remain forever in this skepticism; you will be brought over to us before long. Let me tell you what has happened. But, remember, you must keep the secret until to-morrow, as you value precious lives. Mr. Riley has just left me. He has made me a revelation, a prophecy, which will be proof to all men of the origin of our present experiences. He has had a vision, thrice repeated. It foretold that this very night a robbery and murder would be attempted in the city of New Haven. The evil drama will open between two and three o'clock. There will be three burglars. The house threatened is situated in the suburbs, to the east of the city, and about a mile from the colleges."

"Is it? And what are you going to do about it?--telegraph?"

"No. We will be there in person. We will ourselves prevent the crime and seize the criminals. I shall have a word in season for that family, Sir. I wish to improve the occasion for its conversion to a full belief in these sublime mysteries. Mr. Riley, with three of my people, will meet me at the station. We shall be in New Haven by eleven, stay an hour or two in some hotel, and at half past one go to the house."

"My dear Sir, I remonstrate," exclaimed I. "You will get laughed at. You will get shot at. You will get into disgrace. You will get into jail. For pity's sake, give up this quixotic expedition, and grant me an absolution before the fact for kicking Riley out of doors."

The Doctor turned his face away from me and walked to a window. His air of profound, yet uncomplaining grief, struck me with compunction, and, following him, I held out my hand.

"Come, excuse me," said I. "Look here,--if this comes true, I'll quit geology and go to working miracles to-morrow. I'll come over to your faith, if I have to wade through my reason."

"Will you?" he responded, joyfully. "You will never repent it. There, shake hands. I am not angry. Your unbelief is natural, though saddening. To-morrow night, then, come and see me again and I will tell you the whole adventure. I must be off to the train now. Excuse me for leaving you. Would you like to sit here awhile and look at Humby's 'Modern Miracles'?"

"No, thank you. Prefer to look at your miracles. I am going with you."

"Going with me? Are you? I'm delighted!" he cried, not in the least startled or embarrassed by the proposition. "Now you shall see with your own eyes."

"Yes, if it isn't too dark, I will,--word of a geologist. Well, shall we start?"

"But won't you have a weapon? We go armed, of course, inasmuch as the scoundrels may show fight when we come to arrest them."

"I don't want it," said I, gently pushing away a pocket-pistol, about as dangerous as a squirt. "All the burglars you see to-night may shoot at me, and welcome."

We walked to the station, and found our party waiting for the Boston train. The Doctor introduced me, with much affectionate effusion and many particulars concerning my family and early history, to the man of unearthly lingoes. He was a tall, lean, flat-chested, cadaverous being, of about forty, his sandy hair nicely sleeked, thin yellow whiskers spattered on his hollow cheeks, his nose short and snub, his face small, wilted, and so freckled that it could hardly be said to have a complexion. In short, by its littleness, by its yellowness, by its appearance of dusty dryness, this singular physiognomy reminded me so strongly of a pinch of snuff, that I almost sneezed at sight of it. His diminutive green eyes were fringed with ragged flaxen lashes, and seemed to be very loose in their reddened lids, as if he could cry them out at the shortest notice. I observed that he never looked his interlocutors in the face, but stared chiefly at their feet, as if surmising whether they would kick, or gazed into remote distance, as if trying to see round the world and get a view of his own back. His dress was a full suit of black, fine in texture, but bagging about him in a way that made you wonder whether he had not lost a hundred-weight or so in training for his spiritual battles. His manners were quiet, and would not have been disagreeable, but for an air of uncomfortably stiff solemnity, which draped him from head to foot like a robe of moral oilcloth, and might almost be said to rustle audibly. Whether he was a practical joker, a swindler, a fanatic, or a madman, my spiritual vision was not keen enough to discover at first sight. Beside him and ourselves the party consisted of a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick-maker, all members of the Doctor's church and indefatigable workers of miracles,--plain men and foolish, but respectable in standing and sincere in their folly. Mr. Riley was so commonplace as to address me in English, probably because he wanted an answer.

"Do you accompany us, Sir, on this blessed crusade against crime and unbelief?" he asked.

"My friend, Dr. Potter, has granted me that inestimable privilege," responded I.

"I hope--in fact, I firmly believe--that Providence will aid us," he continued.

"I hope so, too," said I. "But wouldn't it be advisable to have a policeman, too?"

"By no means! Certainly not!" he returned, with considerable excitement. "All we want is a band of saints, of justified souls, of men fitted for the martyr's crown."

"Oh, that's all, is it, Sir? Well, shall we get into the cars? There they are."

The train was full, and our party had to scatter, but Mr. Riley and I got seats together.

"I have not seen you at our meetings, Sir," he continued. "Allow me to ask, are you a believer in Dispensationism?"

"Not so strong as I might be. However, I have been absent from Troubleton for three months, and only returned yesterday."

"Ah! you have lost precious opportunities. You must lose no more. Life is short."

"And uncertain," I added. "Especially in railroad travelling."

"My dear Sir, I hope this road is prudently conducted," he said, with a look of some little anxiety.

"Not many accidents," I answered. "And then, you know, we are always in the hands of Providence. No fear of slipping through the fingers unnoticed."

"No, Sir, certainly not," he remarked, wrapping his moral oilcloth about him again. "Have you felt any extraordinary spiritual impressions since you returned?"

"Nothing lasting, I think. Nothing that a night's sleep wouldn't take off the edge of."

"No desire to lay hands on some sin-stricken wretch and cure him of the evil that is in him?"

Now I did feel a strong desire to lay hands on this very Riley and pull out his snub nose for him; but I forbore to say so, and simply shook my head despondently.

"I know, that, if you would come to our Dispensaries and join in our exercises, you would be sensible of a softening," he observed.

"Yes, in the brain," thought I; but I still remained silent.

"You should meditate upon the value of manifestations, unknown tongues, the laying on of hands, visions, ecstasies, and such like matters," he continued.

"So I have," said I.

"And with no result?"

"Nothing that particularly astonishes me. I think that I hate humbug more than I did."

"That's a good sign," he replied, after a brief, sharp glance of inquiry at me. "This vain world is a humbug, as you phrase it. Dead Orthodoxy is a humbug. Human reason is a humbug. We are all humbugs, unless we are made true by Dispensation. This age will be a humbug, unless it can be wrought into an age of miracles. If you could be brought to hate earnestly all these things, it would be a hopeful sign."

I was on the point of disputing the hypothesis, but prudently checked myself. Suddenly he removed my hat and put his broad, hard palm upon my organs with an impudent dexterity which made me doubt whether he had not been a pickpocket or a phrenological lecturer.

"I lay my hand upon your head and desire you to note the effect," said he. "Can no life come into these dry bones? Shall they not live? Yea, they shall live! Do you feel no irrepressible emotion, Sir,--no shaking?"

"Not a shake," replied I,--"unless it be from the bad grading."

"Evil is mighty, but the good must eventually prevail," he observed, impertinently cocking his snub nose toward heaven.

"I believe you are quite right in both propositions," I admitted. "Cardinal points of mine. But excuse me, Sir, if you could spare my hat, I should like to put it on my head."

I had lost patience with the man, partly because it irks me to have strangers take liberties with my person, and also because I had reached the conclusion that he was simply a shallow dissembler and rascal. In a minute more I had cause to reconsider my charge of hypocrisy, and to question whether he might not lay claim to the nobler distinction of lunacy. The conductor came down the car, picking out Troubletonians with his undeceivable eye, and leaned toward us with outstretched fingers. Mr. Riley rose to his whole gaunt height at a jerk, and laid his hand on the official's arm with a fierce, bony gripe, which seemed to startle him as if it were the clutch of a skeleton.

"There is my ticket," said he. "Where is yours? Have you one for the Holy City? None? Then you are lost, lost, lost!"

The last words rose to a high, clear shriek, which pierced the heavy rumble of the train and rang throughout the car. The conductor, in spite of the coolness which becomes second nature to men of his profession, turned slightly pale and shrank back before this wild apostrophe, with a thrill of spiritual horror at the solemn meaning of the words, (I thought,) and not because he considered the man a maniac. The fanaticism of Troubleton had already flown far and cast a vague shadow of dread over a large community.

Turning abruptly from the conductor, my companion flung out his long arms toward the staring passengers, and continued in his strident, startling tenor:--"I have warned him. I call you all to witness that I have warned this man of his fearful peril. His blood be on his own head! The blood of your souls will be upon your heads, unless you turn to Dispensationism. I have said it. Amen!"

Before he had sat down again I was in the alley on my way to another car, not anxious to become known as the intimate of this extraordinary apostle. I found an empty seat by the Doctor, dropped into it, and told my story.

"My dear friend, give the fellow up," I concluded. "He's as mad as he can possibly be."

"So Festus thought of Paul," returned my poor comrade, with hopeless fatuity.

"Festus be d----d!" said I, losing my temper, and swearing for the first time since I graduated.

"I fear he was so," remarked the Doctor, severely. "Let me urge you to take warning from his fate."

"I beg your pardon, and that of Festus," I apologized. "But when I see you losing your reason, I can't keep my patience, and don't wish to."

"You will wonder at these feelings before many hours," he responded gently. "To-morrow you will be a believer."

"That makes no difference with me now," said I. "I am just as skeptical as if I hadn't a chance of conversion. Why, Doctor,--well, come now,--I'll argue the case with you. In the first place, all Church history is against you. There isn't a respectable author who upholds the doctrine of modern miracles."

"Mistake!" he exclaimed. "I wish I had you in my library. I could face you with writer on writer, fact on fact, all supporting my views. I can prove that miracles have not ceased for eighteen centuries; that they appeared abundantly in the days of the venerable Catholic fathers; that a stream of prophecies and healings and tongues ran clear through the Dark Ages down to the Reformation; that the superhuman influence flamed in the dreams of Huss, the ecstasies of Xavier, and the marvels of Fox and Usher. Look at the French Prophets, or Tremblers of the Cevennes, who had prophesyings and healings and discoverings of spirits and tongues and interpretations. Look at the ecstatic Jansenists, or Convulsionists of St. Médard, who were blessed with the same holy gifts. Look at the Quakers, from Fox downward, who have held it as a constant principle to expect powers, revelations, discernings of spirits, and instantaneous healings of diseases. Why, here we are in our own days; here we are with our chain of miracles still unbroken; here we are in the midst of this geological and unbelieving nineteenth century."

"Yes, here we are," said I; "and we must make the best of it. It's a bad affair, of course, to live in scientific times; and it's a great pity that we were not born in the Dark Ages; but it is too late to try to help it."

"Ah! you answer with a sneer; you are materialistic and infidel."

"Stop, Doctor! Let me make a bargain with you. If you won't call me names, I won't call you names. You are not in the pulpit now, and you have no right to domineer over me."

"But what do you say to all these signs and wonders which I have mentioned?"

"What do you say to the Rochester knockings and the Stratford mysteries and the Mormon miracles?"

"All deceptions, or works of the Devil," affirmed the Doctor, without a moment's hesitation.

"Excuse me for smiling," I replied "It is pleasant to observe what a quick spirit you have for discerning the true wonders from the false."

"You will see, you will see," he answered, and relapsed into a grave silence.

We reached New Haven and took rooms at the New Haven Hotel. I had anticipated a little nap before going out on our expedition; but I had not made allowance for the proselyting zeal of Dispensationists. My poor bewildered friend Potter uttered something which he sincerely meant to be a prayer, but which sounded to me painfully like blasphemy. Next they sang a queer hymn of theirs in discordant chorus. After that, Mr. Riley rolled up his sleeves and his eyes, flung his arms about, wept and shrieked unknown tongues for twenty minutes. Then the butcher, the baker, and candlestick-maker had a combined convulsion on the floor, rolling over each other and upsetting furniture. By this time the hotel was roused and the landlord made us a call.

"What the Old Harry are you about?" he demanded, angrily. "Don't you know it's after midnight?"

"We are holding a Dispensary," said Mr. Riley, solemnly.

"Well, I'll dispense with your company, if you don't stop it," returned mine host. "There's a nervous lady in the next room, and you've worried her into fits."

"Let me see her," cried the Doctor, eagerly. "It may be that the power of our faith is upon her. Which is her door?"

"You're drunk, Sir," returned the landlord, severely. "Keep quiet now, or I'll have you put to bed by the porters."

So saying, he shut the door and went muttering down-stairs. This untoward incident put an end to our exercises. A whispered palaver on Dispensationism followed, during which I tilted my chair back against the wall and stole a pleasant little nap.

It was about half past one when the Doctor shook me up and said, "It is time." We slipped down-stairs in our stockinged feet, got the front-door open without awakening the porter, shut it carefully after us, and put on our boots outside. Mr. Riley immediately started up College Street, which, as all the world is aware, runs northerly to the Canal Railroad, where it changes to Prospect Street and goes off in a half-wild state up country. At the end of College Street we left the city behind us, struck the rail-track, forsook that presently for a desert sort of road known as Canal Street, and kept on in a northwesterly direction for half a mile farther. It was a dark, cool, and blustering night, such as the New Englanders are very apt to have on the second of April. The wind blew violently down the open country, shaking the scattered trees as if it meant to wake them instantly out of their winter's slumber, and screeching in the murky distances like a tomcat of the housetops, or rather like a continent of tomcats. The Doctor lost his hat, chased it a few rods, and then gave it up, lest he should miss his burglars. Once I halted and watched, thinking that I saw two or three dark shapes dogging us not far behind, but concluded that I had been deceived by the black-art of magical Night, and hastened on after my crazy comrades. Presently Riley stopped, pointed to a dark mass on our right which seemed about large enough to be a story-and-a-half cottage, and whispered, "Here we are, brethren."

"No doubt about that," said I. "But what the mischief is to come of it?"

"Oh! let's go back and call the police," urged the baker, in a tremulous gurgle.

"Too late!" returned Riley. "It is given to me to see the burglars. They are inside. They are taking the silver out of the closet. There will be murder in five minutes."

"If there must be murder, why, of course we ought to have a hand in it," I suggested. "Our motives at least will be good."

"Right!" said Riley. "Come on, brethren! We must prove our faith by our works."

But the baker hung back in a most dough-faced fashion, while the butcher and the candlestick-maker encouraged him in his cowardice. At last it was agreed that this unheroic trio should wait in the yard as a reserve, while Riley, the Doctor, and I went in to worry the burglars. Leaving the weaker brethren in a clump of evergreen shrubbery, we, the forlorn-hope, stole around the house to get at a back-door which Prophet Riley had plainly seen in his dream, and which he foretold us we should find unlocked. I was not much amazed to discover a back-door, inasmuch as most houses have one, but I really was surprised to learn that it was unfastened. My astonishment at this circumstance, however, was over- balanced by my alarm at finding that the Doctor still persisted in his intention of entering; for I had hoped that at the last moment his faith would give way, and let him slide down from the elevation of his ridiculous and reckless purpose.

"But you are not really going in?" I whispered, jerking at his coat-tails.

"Certainly," he replied. "The robbers are surely there. The door was unlocked."

"Mere carelessness of the servants. Stop! Come back! Nonsense! Madness! You'll get into a scrape. Respectable family. Good gracious, what a pack of fools!"

While I was rapidly muttering these observations, he was pulling away from me and stealing into the house after his prophet. Finding that there was no stopping him, I followed, in obedience, perhaps, to that great and no doubt beneficent, but as yet unexplained, instinct which causes sheep to leap after their bellwether. We were in a basement, or semi-subterranean story. I felt the walls of a narrow passage on either side of me, and can swear to a kitchen near by, for I smelt its cooking-range. I walked on the foremost end of my toes, and would have paid five dollars for a pair of list slippers. Rather than take another such little promenade as I had in that passage, I would submit to be placed on the middle sleeper of a railroad-bridge, with an express-train coming at me without a cowcatcher. Presently I overtook the Doctor's coat-tails again, and found that they were ascending a staircase. At the top of the stairs was a door, and on the other side of the door was a room, the uses of which I won't undertake to swear to, for I never saw it, although I was in it longer than I wanted to be. All I know is that it seemed to be as full of chairs, and tables, and sofas, and sideboards, and stoves, and crickets, as if it had been a shop for second-hand furniture. I was just rubbing my shins after an encounter with a remarkably solid object, nature uncertain, when somebody near me fell over something with a crash and a groan. Immediately somebody else seized me by the cravat and began to throttle me. Whoever it was, I floored him with a right-hander, and sent him across the other person, as I judged by the combined grunt, and the desperate, though dumb struggle which followed. Now there were two of them down, and how many standing I could not guess. An instant afterward, a muffled voice, like that of a man only half awake, shouted from a room behind me, "Who's there? Get out! I'm a-coming!" This seemed to encourage the individuals who were having a rough-and-tumble on the carpet, for they commenced roaring simultaneously, "Help! murder! thieves! fire!" without, however, relaxing hostilities for a moment.

The next pleasant incident was a pistol-shot, the ball of which whizzed so near my head that it made me dodge, although I have not the least notion who fired it or whom it was aimed at. Female screams and masculine shouts now sounded from various directions. Thinking that I had done all the good in my power, I concluded to get out of this confusion; but either the doorway by which we entered had suddenly walled itself up, or else I had lost my reckoning; for, stumble where I would, feel about as I would, I could not find it. I did, indeed, come to an opening in the wall, but there was no staircase the other side of it, and it simply introduced me to another invisible apartment. I had no chance to reflect upon the matter and decide of my own free will whether I would go in or not. A sudden rush of fighting, howling persons swept me along, jammed me against a pillar, pushed me over a table, and forced me to engage in a furious struggle, exceedingly awkward by reason of the darkness and the extraordinary amount of furniture. A tremendous punch in the side of the head upset me and made me lose my temper. Rising in a rage, I grappled some man, tripped up his heels, got on his chest, and never left off belaboring him until I felt pretty sure that he would keep quiet during the rest of the _soiree_. I hope sincerely that this suffering individual was Mr. John M. Riley; but, from the rotundity of stomach which I bestrode, I very much fear that it was the Doctor.

All this while the house resounded with outcries of, "Who's there?" "What's the matter?" "Father!" "Henry!" "Jenny!" "Maria!" "Thieves!" "Murder!" "Police!" and so forth. Of course I did not feel disposed to tell who was there; and in actual fact I could not have explained what was the matter. Accordingly I left all these inquisitive people unsatisfied, and busied myself solely with my fallen antagonist. Quitting him at last in a state of quiescence, I knocked over a person who had been attacking me in the rear, and then blundered into a passage, which I suppose to have been the front-hall, just as a light glimmered up in the rooms behind me. It gives one a very odd sensation to tread on a prostrate body, not knowing whether it is dead or alive, whether it is a man or a woman. I had that sensation in ascending a stairway which seemed to be the only egress from the aforesaid passage. The individual made no movement, and I did not stop to count his or her pulses. Without feeling at all disposed to take my oath on the matter, I rather suspect that a negro servant-girl had fainted away there in the act of trying to run off in her nightgown. Upstairs I tumbled, resolved to get upon the roof and slide down the lightning-rod, or else jump from a window. Pushing open a door, which I fell against, I found myself in a pretty little bedroom lighted by a single candle, articles of female costume banging across chairs and scattered over dressing-tables, while on the floor, just as she had swooned in her terror, lay a blonde girl of nineteen or twenty, pale as marble, but beautiful. Right through my alarm jarred a throb of mingled self-reproach and pity and admiration. I tossed a pile of bedclothes over her, kissed the long light-brown hair which rippled on the straw matting, daguerreotyped the face on my memory with a glance, blew out the light, opened a window, and slipped out of it. It is unpleasant to drop through darkness, not knowing how far you will fall, nor whether you will not alight on iron pickets. Fortunately, I came down in a fresh flower-bed, with no unpleasant result, except a sensation of having nearly bitten my tongue off. I had scarcely steadied myself on my feet, when a tall figure made a rush from some near ambuscade and seized me by the collar. Supposing him to be one of our reserve force, I quietly suffered him to lead me forward, and was on the point of whispering my name, when my eye caught a glimmer of metal, and I knew that I was in the hands of a policeman.

"Come in and help," said I. "The house is full of rascals."

Thinking me one of the family, he loosed his hold on my broadcloth and hurried away to the back-door. Whoever reads this story has already taken it for granted that I did not follow him, but that I did, on the contrary, make for the city and never cease travelling until I had reached the hotel. Let no man reproach me with forsaking my friend, the Doctor, in his extremity. I was brought up to reverence the law and to entertain a virtuous terror of policemen; and, besides, what could I have effected in that horrible labyrinth of dark rooms and multitudinous furniture? I rang up the porter, went to bed, and lay awake alt the rest of the night, listening for the return of my companions. No one came: no Doctor, no Riley, no butcher, no baker, no candlestick-maker. I was apparently the sole survivor of our little army. In the morning I walked over to the police-station, peeped cautiously through the grated door of a long room where the night's gatherings are lodged, and discovered my five friends, tattered and bruised, but holding a lively Dispensary in one corner. From that moment I despaired of the Doctor and resolved to let him manage his own monomania. I was still peeping when two of the police and a sly-looking man in citizen's dress came up and stared boldly at the prisoners.

"Well, Old Cock, do you see your game?" asked one of the "force."

"Thaht's him," returned the Old Cock, speaking with the soft drawl of the New York cockney. "Tall fellah thah with thah black eye, thaht's a-goin' it now. Thundah, what a roarah!"

"Well, what is he?" inquired the second of the New-Haveners.

"Joseph Hull, 'ligious lunatic," said the Old Cock. "Was in thah Bloomingdale Asylum. Cut off one night about foah months ago and stole a suit o' clothes that belonged to John M. Riley, with a lot o' money and papahs and lettahs in thah pockets. How'd you get hold of him?"

"Broke into a house eout here last night," related the first New-Havener. "He and them other fellers, and one more that we ha'n't found. I was on my beat 'bout one o'clock, and see 'em puttin' up College Street full chisel. I thought they looked kinder dangerous. So I called Doolittle here, and Jarvis, and Jacobs, and we after 'em. Chased 'em 'bout a mild and treed 'em at Square Russoll's, way up Canal, eout in the country. Three was in the yard and gin right up without doublin' a fist, though they had their pockets chuck full o' little pistols. We locked 'em into the cellar, and then, went upstairs, where there was a devil of a yellin' and fightin'. Hanged if I know what they come there for. They'd been pitchin' into one another and knockin' one another's heads off, besides smashin' furnichy and chimbly crockery, but hadn't stole a thing. The fat one and the long one--them two with white chokers--was lyin' on the floor pootty much used up. There was another that got up-stairs and jumped out a winder. Jarvis was outside and collared him, but thought he was Russell's son-in-law,--ho, ho, ho!--and let him off,--ho, ho, ho! Tell ye, Jarvis feels thunderin' small 'bout it. Ha'n't been reound this mornin'."

"Well, I'll leave my warrant with your big-wigs, and come after my man when they've got through with him," said the New York detective, turning away.

Fearing the return of the enlightened Jarvis, I now left, and, taking the first train to Troubleton, informed some of the leading Dispensationists concerning their pastor's calamity. By dint of heavy bail and strong representations they saved him, together with the butcher and baker and candlestick-maker, from the disgrace of prison and the lunatic asylum. But the adventure was the ruin of Dispensationism. Mr. Joseph Hull had to give up Mr. John M. Riley's valuables, and return to his seclusion at Bloomingdale. Deprived of the apostle who had set them on fire, and overwhelmed by public ridicule, the Dispensationists lost their faith, got ashamed of their minister, and turned him adrift. He disappeared in the great whirl of men and other circumstances which fills this wonderful country. From time to time, during five years, I had made inquiries concerning him of mineralogists, botanists, and other vagrant characters, without getting the smallest hint as to his whereabouts. At last he had turned up as the private prophet of three middle-aged widows.

"Jenny," said I to my wife, "do you remember the night I frightened you so and kissed you as you lay in a fainting-fit?"

"You always say you kissed me, but I don't believe it," returned that dear woman whom I love, honor, and cherish. "Yes, I remember the night well enough."

"Well, that poor Doctor Potter, who was my Mahomet on that occasion, and led me to victory in your parlor, and was the indirect means of my getting my houri,--I have heard from him. He is our next neighbor."

"Mercy on us, Frederic! I hope not! What mischief won't he do to people who are so handy?"

"Don't be worried, my dear," said I. "I sha'n't go over to his religion again,--unless, indeed, you should insist upon it. But here he is, and still a supernaturalist. I am anxious to know just how mad he is. I shall call on him in a day or two."

So I did. One of the three widows met me with a tearful countenance and told me that Doctor Potter had disappeared. So he had. I think that he was ashamed to meet me again, and therefore ran away. The widows thought not. They came to the conclusion, that, like Enoch and Elijah before him, he had been translated. They cried for him a good deal more than he was worth, quarreled scandalously among themselves, sold their house at a loss, and dispersed. I know nothing more of them. Neither do I know anything further of my neighbor, the prophet.

* * * * *

THE PILOT'S STORY.

I.

It was a story the pilot told, with his back to his hearers,-- Keeping his hand on the wheel and his eye on the globe of the jack-staff, Holding the boat to the shore and out of the sweep of the current, Lightly turning aside for the heavy logs of the drift-wood, Widely shunning the snags that made us sardonic obeisance.

II.

All the soft, damp air was full of delicate perfume From the young willows in bloom on either bank of the river,-- Faint, delicious fragrance, trancing the indolent senses In a luxurious dream of the river and land of the lotus. Not yet out of the west the roses of sunset were withered; In the deep blue above light clouds of gold and of crimson Floated in slumber serene, and the restless river beneath them Rushed away to the sea with a vision of rest in its bosom. Far on the eastern shore lay dimly the swamps of the cypress; Dimly before us the islands grew from the river's expanses,-- Beautiful, wood-grown isles,--with the gleam of the swart inundation Seen through the swaying boughs and slender trunks of their willows; And on the shore beside its the cotton-trees rose in the evening, Phantom-like, yearningly, wearily, with the inscrutable sadness Of the mute races of trees. While hoarsely the steam from her 'scape-pipes Shouted, then whispered a moment, then shouted again to the silence, Trembling through all her frame with the mighty pulse of her engines, Slowly the boat ascended the swollen and broad Mississippi, Bank-full, sweeping on, with nearing masses of drift-wood, Daintily breathed about with hazes of silvery vapor, Where in his arrowy flight the twittering swallow alighted, And the belated blackbird paused on the way to its nestlings.

III.

It was the pilot's story:--"They both came aboard there, at Cairo, From a New Orleans boat, and took passage with us for Saint Louis. She was a beautiful woman, with just enough blood from her mother, Darkening her eyes and her hair, to make her race known to a trader: You would have thought she was white. The man that was with her,--you see such,-- Weakly good-natured and kind, and weakly good-natured and vicious, Slender of body and soul, fit neither for loving nor hating. I was a youngster then, and only learning the river,-- Not over-fond of the wheel. I used to watch them at _monte_, Down in the cabin at night, and learned to know all of the gamblers. So when I saw this weak one staking his money against them, Betting upon the turn of the cards, I knew what was coming: _They_ never left their pigeons a single feather to fly with. Next day I saw them together,--the stranger and one of the gamblers: Picturesque rascal he was, with long black hair and moustaches, Black slouch hat drawn down to his eyes from his villanous forehead: On together they moved, still earnestly talking in whispers, On toward the forecastle, where sat the woman alone by the gangway. Roused by the fall of feet, she turned, and, beholding her master, Greeted him with a smile that was more like a wife's than another's, Rose to meet him fondly, and then, with the dread apprehension Always haunting the slave, fell her eye on the face of the gambler, Dark and lustful and fierce and full of merciless cunning. Something was spoken so low that I could not hear what the words were; Only the woman started, and looked from one to the other, With imploring eyes, bewildered hands, and a tremor All through her frame: I saw her from where I was standing, she shook so. 'Say! is it so?' she cried. On the weak, white lips of her master Died a sickly smile, and he said,--'Louise, I have sold you.' God is my judge! May I never see such a look of despairing, Desolate anguish, as that which the woman cast on her master, Griping her breast with her little hands, as if he had stabbed her, Standing in silence a space, as fixed as the Indian woman, Carved out of wood, on the pilot-house of the old Pocahontas! Then, with a gurgling moan, like the sound in the throat of the dying, Came back her voice, that, rising, fluttered, through wild incoherence, Into a terrible shriek that stopped my heart while she answered:-- 'Sold me? sold me? sold----And you promised to give me my freedom!-- Promised me, for the sake of our little boy in Saint Louis! What will you say to our boy, when he cries for me there in Saint Louis? What will you say to our God?--Ah, you have been joking! I see it!-- No? God! God! He shall hear it,--and all of the angels in heaven,-- Even the devils in hell!--and none will believe when they hear it! Sold me!'--Fell her voice with a thrilling wail, and in silence Down she sank on the deck, and covered her face with her fingers."

IV.

In his story a moment the pilot paused, while we listened To the salute of a boat, that, rounding the point of an island, Flamed toward us with fires that seemed to burn from the waters,-- Stately and vast and swift, and borne on the heart of the current. Then, with the mighty voice of a giant challenged to battle, Rose the responsive whistle, and all the echoes of island, Swamp-land, glade, and brake replied with a myriad clamor, Like wild birds that are suddenly startled from slumber at midnight; Then were at peace once more, and we heard the harsh cries of the peacocks Perched on a tree by a cabin-door, where the white-headed settler's White-headed children stood to look at the boat as it passed them, Passed them so near that we heard their happy talk and their laughter. Softly the sunset had faded, and now on the eastern horizon Hung, like a tear in the sky, the beautiful star of the evening.

V.

Still with his back to us standing, the pilot went on with his story:-- "Instantly, all the people, with looks of reproach and compassion, Flocked round the prostrate woman. The children cried, and their mothers Hugged them tight to their breasts; but the gambler said to the captain,-- 'Put me off there at the town that lies round the bend of the river. Here, you! rise at once, and be ready now to go with me.' Roughly he seized the woman's arm and strove to uplift her. She--she seemed not to heed him, but rose like one that is dreaming, Slid from his grasp, and fleetly mounted the steps of the gangway, Up to the hurricane-deck, in silence, without lamentation. Straight to the stern of the boat, where the wheel was, she ran, and the people Followed her fast till she turned and stood at bay for a moment, Looking them in the face, and in the face of the gambler. Not one to save her,--not one of all the compassionate people! Not one to save her, of all the pitying angels in heaven! Not one bolt of God to strike him dead there before her! Wildly she waved him back, we waiting in silence and horror. Over the swarthy face of the gambler a pallor of passion Passed, like a gleam of lightning over the west in the night-time. White, she stood, and mute, till he put forth his hand to secure her; Then she turned and leaped,--in mid air fluttered a moment,-- Down, there, whirling, fell, like a broken-winged bird from a tree-top, Down on the cruel wheel, that caught her, and hurled her, and crushed her, And in the foaming water plunged her, and hid her forever."

VI.

Still with his back to us all the pilot stood, but we heard him Swallowing hard, as he pulled the bell-rope to stop her. Then, turning,-- "This is the place where it happened," brokenly whispered the pilot. "Somehow, I never like to go by here alone in the night-time." Darkly the Mississippi flowed by the town that lay in the starlight, Cheerful with lamps. Below we could hear them reversing the engines, And the great boat glided up to the shore like a giant exhausted. Heavily sighed her pipes. Broad over the swamps to the eastward Shone the full moon, and turned our far-trembling wake into silver. All was serene and calm, but the odorous breath of the willows Smote like the subtile breath of an infinite sorrow upon us.

A DAY WITH THE DEAD.

"Good morning!" said the old custodian, as he stood in the door of the lodge, brushing out with his knuckles the cobwebs of sleep entangled in his eyelashes, and ventilating the apartments of his fleshly tabernacle with prolonged oscitations. "You are on hand early _this_ time, a'n't you? You're the first live man I've seen since I got up."

So saying, he vanished, and reappearing in a moment with a huge brass key, entered the arch, unlocked the gate which closed the aperture fronting the east like the cover of a porthole, and sent it with a heavy push wide open.

Wading through the flood of sunlight which poured into the passage-way----But stop! I was about,--who knows?--in imitation of divers admired models, to tell the reader in choicest poetic diction how the City of the Dead, with its magnificent streets, shining palaces, and lofty monuments, burst upon my dazzled vision,--how I walked for half a mile along a spacious avenue, beneath an arcade of giant elms hung with wreaths of mist and vocal with singing, feathery fruit,--past marble tombs whose yards were filled with bright and fragrant flowers,-- among waving grassy knolls spread with the silver nets of spiders and sparkling dew,--through vales of cool twilight and ravines of sombre dusk,--and so on for more than a page, until finally, step by step, through laboriously elegant sentences, I worked my way up to the top of a lofty hill, the view from which to be graphically described as a picture and a poem dissolved together into mingled glory and mirage, and inundating with a billowy sea of beauty the landscape below;--and then further depicting to the delighted fancy of the reader, how on one side was a most remarkable river,--such as was never heard of before, probably,--in fact, a web of water framed between the hills, its rushing warp-currents, as it rolled along, woven by smoking steam-shuttles with a woof of foam,--how, at the entrance of a bay, flocks of snowy sails, with black, shining beaks, and sleek, unruffled plumage, were swimming out to sea,--how another river, not quite so unique as the last, was also in sight, coiling among emerald steeps and crags and precipices and forest,--while beyond, green woodlands, checkered fields, groves, orchards, villages, hills, farms, and villas, all glowed in an exceedingly charming manner in the morning sun;--and then, still further, to say something as brilliant as possible about a certain city, designated as the Great Metropolis,--how it resembled, perhaps, a Cyclopean type-form, with blocks of buildings for letters, domes, turrets, and towers for punctuation-points, church-spires for interrogation and exclamation marks, and squares and avenues for division-spaces between the paragraphs, set up and leaded with streets into a vast editorial page of original matter on Commerce and Manufactures, rolled every morning with the ink of toil, and printing before night an edition of results circulated to the remotest quarters of the globe. And the tall chimneys yonder were to be called--let me see--oh, the smoking cathedral-towers of the Holy Catholic Church of Labor, islanding the air with clouds of incense more grateful to the Deity than the fume of priest-swung censers. All this, and much more of a similar nature, including an eloquent address to the ocean hard by, it is possible I was about to say. But, unwilling to smother the reader beneath a mountain of rhetorical flowers,--which accident might happen, should I resolve to be "equal to the occasion,"--I shall contain myself, and state, in the way of a curt preface, in plain prose, and directly to the point, that I entered a remarkably large and populous cemetery, no matter where, very early one morning,--in fact, you have the gate-keeper's word for it that I was the first person there,--that I climbed to the summit of a high hill and enjoyed the view of a beautiful landscape, just after sunrise; and with this finally said and done, let us proceed.

As I stood listening to the music of the sea-breeze in the pine-forests below, and watching the ships sinking into the ocean from view or dropping through the sky into sight at the rim of the horizon, and the clouds changing their picturesque sunrise-dress for a uniform of sober white, forming into rank and file, marching and countermarching, sending off scouts into the far distance and foraging-parties to scour the yellow fields of air, pitching their tents and placing sentinels on guard around the camp,--amusing myself with fashioning quaint, arabesque fancies,--a sort of intellectual whittling-habit I have when idle,--I was roused from my reverie by the creaking of an iron gate.

Descending a few steps into a cluster of trees, I saw through their leafy lattice-work, in an inclosure ornamented with rose-bushes and other flowering shrubs, a young woman, richly dressed in black, kneeling by the side of a new-made grave. The mound, evidently covering a full-grown person, was nicely laid at the top with carefully cut sods, the dark edges of which projected a little over the lighter-colored gravel that sloped gradually down to the greensward. I was not long in becoming satisfied that the person I saw was a young widow at the grave of her husband, now three or four weeks dead, hither on her accustomed morning visit to display her love and affection for his memory.

Bowing her head, for a few moments she gave way to sobs and weeping, and then, removing the cover from a little willow basket, which stood by her side, she took from it handfuls of bright flowers, and began to adorn the table of sods upon the top of the mound.

As I regard her thus employed, weaving the tokens of her affection into garlands, chaplets, and fanciful devices, arranging their symbolic characters into interpretable monograms and hieroglyphs, matching their colors and blending their hues and shades with the skill of an artist, she becomes more and more absorbed in her work, the tears disappear from her eyes, and the morning light flushes her pale and beautiful face. Is she thinking now, I wonder, of the dead husband, or of something else? What has she found among the flowers so consoling? Do they suggest pleasant fancies, or recall the memories of happy days? Have they, perhaps, a double meaning,--souvenirs of felicity as well as symbols of sorrow? Are they opiates obliterating actual suffering, or prophets uttering hopeful predictions? Or is it none of these things, and does she find her work pleasant only because duty makes its performance cheerful labor? I cannot say _what_ it is, but _something_ has assuaged her grief; for I see her smiling now, as she holds a rosebud in her fingers, and gazes at it abstractedly; and her thoughts and feelings, whatever they may be, are indubitably not of a mournful character;--in fact, I am sure that she never was happier in her life than she is at this moment.

"Happy, do you say?"

Yes, I say happy.

The nature of woman, it is conceded by all men, is a curious, interesting, and perplexing, if not, in respect of positive practical results, a most unsatisfactory study. But nothing puzzles us so much to comprehend as the fact just alluded to. The tenderest female constitution will sustain a burden of grief which would crush a robust and iron-nerved man, and drive him to despair and suicide. A woman rarely succumbs to a calamity; however sudden and overwhelming the initial shock may be, she revives and grows cheerful and happy under it in a way and to a degree marvellous to behold. What singular secret is there among the psychological mysteries of her nature which is able to account for this phenomenon?--A gentle, timid girl of sixteen, whom the sight of a spider or a live snake would have frightened into hysterics, I had once an opportunity, on a tour through Italy, to observe, while she took little or no notice of other works of art, would gaze, as if fascinated, at the writhings of Laocoön and his sons in the folds and fangs of the serpents, at the sculptured death of the Gladiator, and even at the ghastly, repulsive pictures of martyrdoms and barbaric mutilations and tortures,--the hideous monstrosities of a diseased and degraded imagination found in the churches and convents of Rome, which made others turn their backs with a shivering of the bones and a creeping of the flesh. On expressing surprise at such a singular exhibition of taste, I received this innocent, unpremeditated reply:--"Why, I don't like them; the sight of them almost freezes my blood; but--somehow I do like to look at them, _for I always feel better after it_!" Now is there not involved in this artless answer a possible explanation of the above-mentioned fact? Has not woman, hidden somewhere among her other (of course angelic)--affections, a positive _love_ of sickness, death, sorrow, and suffering, which man does not possess? Is not the pain they cause, in her case, qualified by actual pleasure? Do they not act as a stimulus upon her sensitive nervous system, and produce, somehow, a _delightfully intoxicated state of the feelings_? Would not this explain her otherwise unaccountable fondness for witnessing the execution of murderers, for the horrible in novels and the deaths and catastrophes in the newspapers, that she has a constitutional relish for such horrid things, and that she enjoys them, not because they are _in se_ productive of pleasure, but just, as is the case with her "crying," _because she feels better after it_? And I think it would be found, if an investigation of the subject were instituted, that a foreknowledge of this inevitable result, derived from intuition or experience, is the agent which breaks up the clouds of her sorrow: so that, while the grief of a man stricken down by misfortune is an equinoctial storm, dark and dismal, which lasts for weeks and months, the grief of woman is a succession of refreshing April showers, each of brief duration, and the spaces between them filled with sunshine and rainbows.

But the sweets of that widow's present sorrow will be soon extracted. How many weeks will she find it a pleasure to make morning visits here and plait pretty flowers on the grave of her husband?--The grave in the next inclosure furnishes an answer to the question. A few months ago, it, too, was tended at sunrise by just such a tearful woman; but now the wreaths of evergreen are yellow, and the weeds are springing up among the withered garlands. The living partner has visited already the "mitigated grief" department of the mourning store, and the severed cords of her affections have been spliced and made almost as good as new. Not that I would not have it so; not that I believe the grief of woman to be less real and sincere than man's, though it _be_ enjoyed; not that I would have her thrum a long mournful threnody on the harpstrings of her heart, and waste on the dead, who need them not, affections which, Heaven knows, the living need too much.

Retracing my steps, and descending the opposite slope of the hill, I entered a beautiful vale covered with stately tombs and containing a little lake, in the middle of which a fountain was springing high into the air. In a spot so much frequented at a later hour of the day only a single human being was in sight,--a young man, perhaps five-and-twenty years of age, jauntily dressed, and his upper lip adorned with a long moustache, who was leaning lazily upon a marble balustrade, and staring, with a stupid, vacant look, at the massive monument it surrounded. As nothing appeared at the moment more attractive to my eyes, I fixed them upon him. No great skill in deciphering human character is required to tell his past or foretell his future history, or even to read the few poor spent thoughts that flicker in his brain. His father--some city merchant--died last year, and left him a man of leisure, with a fortune on his hands to spend in idleness and dissipation. This is the first anniversary of the old gentleman's decease and departure to another and better world, and the hopeful heir of his bank-stock and buildings has, as a matter of etiquette, come out here from the city this morning to pass an hour of solemn meditation--as he calls the sixty minutes in which he does not smoke or swear--by the old man's grave. I observe him every moment forming a firm resolution to fix his feeble thoughts upon sober things and his latter end, and breaking it the second afterwards: the effort is too much for the exhausted condition of his mind, and results in a total failure. He is evidently well pleased that any attention is directed towards him, and fancies that I regard him as a very dutiful son, and his appearance here, so early in the morning and long before breakfast, a remarkable example of posthumous filial affection. To intensify, if possible, this sentiment in my breast, he has just now pulled out a white cambric handkerchief and pretends to be wiping tears from his eyes. Poor fellow! you have no natural talent for the solemn parts in acting, or you would know that the expression which your face now wears is not that of sorrow, solemnity, meekness, gentleness, humility, or any other sober Christian grace or virtue. But I leave you, for I see something more attractive now. Stand thy hour out, young man! we shall meet again.

"In the other world?"

No: to-morrow evening, as I am taking my accustomed walk into the country, I shall be wellnigh run over by a swiftly driven team; I shall spring suddenly aside, when thou wilt pass, O bogus son of Jehu, with thy dog-cart and two-forty span of bays, dashing down the road, thy thoughts fixed on horse-flesh instead of eternity, and thy soul bounded, north by thy cigar, east and west by the wheels thy vehicle, and south by the dumb beasts that drag thee along.

But, not to introduce the reader to more solemn scenes of affliction and sorrow which are witnessed here during the first vigil of the day, we pass to a later hour. The mourners who come hither in the early morning to decorate the graves of the recent dead, and to weep over them undisturbed by visitors, have now departed. The sun is already high, the dew has disappeared from the trees and the shrubs, and the paths and walks and avenues begin to be thronged with loungers and sight-seers from the city.

I had stopped at the forks of a lane and was hesitating which branch to take and what to do with myself, when a tall and beautiful Willow, standing upon a knoll a few rods distant, with thick drooping boughs sweeping the ground on every side, beckoned to me. On approaching him, he extended a branch, shook me cordially by the hand, and invited me to accept the shelter and hospitality of his roof. The proposal so generously made was at once accepted with profuse thanks, and, parting the boughs, I entered the tent and threw myself upon the soft grass.

Do you ever talk with trees? It is a custom of mine, and I usually find their conversation much more entertaining and profitable than that of most men I know. "Good morning!" I say to an acquaintance. "Fine day," he replies; "how's business?" And so on for an hour, over themes of every nature, the current of conversation rippled with trite truisms, and whirling in the surface-eddies of Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy." But the tree takes the whole of the Tupperian philosophy for granted at the start, and the truisms which most men utter, and takes _you_ for granted likewise,--supposing neither half of your eyeballs blind, and that you have a soul as well as a body,--and enters at once into conversation upon the high table-land of science, reason, and poetry. The entire talk of a fashionable tea-party, strained from its lees of scandal, filtered through a sober reflection of the following morning, is not equal in value to the quivering of a single leaf. A tree will discourse with you upon botany, physiology, music, painting, philosophy, and a dozen arts and sciences besides, none of which it simply chats about, but all of which it _is_: and if you do not understand its language and comprehend what it tells you about them, so much the worse for you; it is not the fault of the tree.

I say, I talk with trees for this reason,--because their wisdom is so much greater than that of my ordinary acquaintances,--and further, (to put the major after the minor premise,) because they are virtually living beings, endowed with instinct, feeling, reason, and display every essential attribute of sentient creatures,--in fact, because they have souls as well as men, only they are clothed in vegetable flesh.

"That is transcendental moonshine, and you don't believe a word of it!"

Well, my friend, allow me, then, to tell you, in all charity and with bowels of compassion, that you hold dangerous and fatal views respecting one of the cardinal doctrines of mythology,--yes, to be plain, you are a Joveless infidel, and in fearful danger of being locked out of Elysium; and I shall offer up a smoking sacrifice, the next time I get a sirloin, and pour out a solemn libation, in the presence of my whole family seated around the domestic altar early in the morning, for your speedy conversion.

Know, then, O obtuse, faithless, and perverse skeptic, that these things are so: that ocular and auricular evidence, indubitable and overwhelming, exists, that the arboreal and human natures are in substance one. Know that once on a time, as Daphne, the lovely daughter of Peneus, was amusing herself with a bow and arrows in a forest of Thessaly, she was surprised by a rude musician named Phoebus. Timid and bashful, as most young ladies are, she turned and fled as fast as her [Greek: skelae] could carry her. After running, closely pursued by the eager Delphian, for several miles, and becoming very much fatigued, she felt inclined to yield: but wishing to faint in a reputable manner, she lifted up her hands and asked the gods to help her. Her call was heard in a jiffy, and quicker than you could say, "Presto: change!" she was a Laurel-tree, which Phoebus married on the spot. This was the Eve of the Laurel family, so that all these trees you meet in the world at present must be rational beings, since they are the descendants of the beautiful Greek maiden Daphne. And to satisfy you that this is no foolish legend, but, on the contrary, a well-authenticated fact, clinched and riveted in the boiler-head of historical truth, permit me to assure you,--for I have seen it myself,--that in the Villa Borghese, near Rome in Italy, is an exact representation of the wonderful incident, cut in Carrara marble,--the bark of the Laurel growing over the vanishing girl, and her hands and fingers sprouting into branches and leaves,--supposed to have been copied from a photograph taken on the spot,--for there is a photograph in existence exactly like the marble statue.

We know positively--for we have an equally minute account of the transaction--that the Cypress originated in a similar way. And is it not reasonable to infer, therefore, though we may not find the facts stated in _every_ case, that all trees were created out of men and women, their bodies being miraculously clothed in woody tissue? In the time of Virgil this was certainly the established orthodox belief; for he relates an anecdote, expressing no doubt whatever of its truth, of a party of travellers who commenced one day in a forest the indiscriminate destruction of some young trees, when their roots forthwith began to bleed, and voices proceeded from them, begging to be spared from laceration. And, in fact, hundreds of instances, similarly weighty as evidence, from equally veracious and trustworthy classic authors, might be cited to the point, did time and space permit. But we hasten to the other proof of their essential humanity, which I set out with assuming as an undoubted fact, and which is already foreshadowed in the adventure of the Trojan wanderers just related,--namely, that they possess the faculty of speech.

Tasso, the author of a well-known metrical history, states distinctly, as you shall see in half a moment, that a tree upon one occasion discoursed with Major General Tancred,--

"Pur tragge alfin la spada e con gran forza Percuote l' alta pianta. Oh, maraviglia! ----quasi di tomba, uscir ne sente Un indistinto gemito dolente, Che poi _distinto in voci_."

And then it goes on to tell the General how it once rejoiced in extensive hoops, wore a coal-scuttle on its head, and rubbed its face with prepared chalk,--(w-w-w-hy! what _was_ I saying? such a mistake! I should say)--was a woman by the name of Clorinda, and is still animated and sentient both in trunk and limbs, and that he will presently be guilty of murder, if he continues to hack her with his sword.

The celebrated explorer, Sir John Mandeville, relates in the history of his discoveries that he heard whole groves of trees talking _to one another_. And when we come down to the present day, R.W. Emerson, of Concord, asseverates that trees have conversed with him,--that they speak Italian, English, German, Basque, Castilian, and several other languages perfectly,--

"Mountain speech to Highlanders, Ocean tongues to islanders,"--

and that he himself was on one occasion transformed into a Pine (_Pinus rigida_) and talked quite a large volume of philosophy while in that condition. Walter Whitman, Esq., author of "Leaves of Grass," relates similar personal experience. Tennyson, (Alfred,) now the Laureate of England, and upon whom the University of Oxford, a few years ago, conferred the title of Doctor of Laws, gives us a long conversation he once held with an Oak, reporting the exact words it said to him: they are excellent English, and corroborate what I said above respecting the wisdom of trees.

If all this evidence, and I might add much more equally conclusive, did I think it necessary, does not, O skeptic, convince you of the humanity of trees, why, let me say that you hold for true a hundred things not based upon half so good testimony as this,--that I have seen juries persuaded of facts, and bring in verdicts in accordance with them, not nearly so well authenticated as these,--and that I have heard clergymen preach sermons two hours long, constructed out of arguments which they positively persisted you should regard as decisive, that were, to say the least, no _better_ than those here advanced. And now, if these things be so, in the words of the great Grecian, John P., _what are you going to do about it_?

Trees, like animals, are righteously sacrificed only when required to supply our wants. A man does not go out into the fields and mutilate or destroy his horses and oxen: let him treat the oaks and the elms with the same humanity. I would that enough of the old mythology to which I have alluded, and which our fathers called religion, still lived among us to awaken a virtuous indignation in our breasts when we witnessed the wanton destruction of trees. I once remonstrated with a cruel wretch whom I saw engaged in taking the life of some beautiful elms inhabiting a piece of pasture-land. He replied, that in the hot days of summer the cattle did nothing but lie under them and chew their cud, when they should be at work feeding on the grass,--that his oxen did not get fat fast enough, nor his cows give as much milk as they should give,--"and so," said he, "I'm goin' to fix 'em,"--and down came every one of the hospitable old trees. We are not half so humane in our conduct towards the inferior races and tribes as the old Romans whom we calumniate with the epithet of Pagans. The Roman Senate degraded one of its members for putting to death a bird that had taken refuge in his bosom: would not the Senate of the United States "look pretty," undertaking such a thing? A complete Christian believes not only in the dogmas of the Bible, but _also_ in the mythology, or religion of Nature, which teaches us, no less than it taught our fathers, to regard wanton cruelty towards any vegetable or animal creature which lives in the breath and smile of the Creator, as a sin against Heaven.

Having in the above paragraph got into the parson's private preserve, as I shall be liable anyhow to an action for trespass, I am tempted to commit the additional transgression of poaching, and to give you a few extracts from a _sermon_ a friend of mine once delivered. [It was addressed to a small congregation of Monothelites in a village "out West," just after the annual spring freshet, when half the inhabitants of the place were down with the chills and fever. It was his maiden effort,--he having just left the Seminary,--and did not "take" at all, as he learned the next day, when Deacon Jenners (the pious philanthropist of the place) called to tell him that his style of preaching "would never do," that his thoughts were altogether of too worldly a nature, and his language, decidedly unfit for the sacred "desk." Besides,--though he would not assume the responsibility of deciding that point before he had consulted with the Standing Committee,--he did not think his sentiments exactly orthodox. My friend was disgusted on the spot, and, being seized with a chill shortly afterwards, concluded not to accept the "call," and, packing his trunk, started in quest of a healthier locality and a more enlightened congregation.]

"And here permit me to add a word or two for the purpose of correcting a very prevalent error.

"Most men, I find, suppose that this earth belongs to them,--to the human race alone. It does not,--no more than the United States belong to Rhode Island. Human life is not a ten-thousand-millionth of the life on the planet, nor the race of men more than an infinitesimal fraction of the creatures which it nourishes. A swarm of summer flies on a field of clover, or the grasshoppers in a patch of stubble, outnumber the men that have lived since Adam. And yet we assume the dignity of lords and masters of the globe! Is not this a flagrant delusion of self-conceit? Let a pack of hungry wolves surround you here in the forest, and who is master? Let a cloud of locusts descend upon a hundred square miles of this territory, and what means do you possess to arrest their ravages?...

"As a matter of _fact_, then, we do not own the world. And now let me say, that, as a matter of _right_, we ought not: man was the last created of creatures. When our race appeared on the earth, it had been for millions of years in quiet, exclusive, undisputed possession of the birds, beasts, fishes, and insects: it was _their_ world then, and we were intruders and trespassers upon their domain....

"If, then, the other races have a right to exist on the planet as much as we, what follows? Surely, that they have a right to their share and proportion of the ground and its fruits, and the blessings of Heaven by which life here is sustained: man has no right to expect a monopoly of them. If we get a week of sunshine which supplies our wants, we have no reason to complain of the succeeding week of rain which supplies the wants of other races. If we raise a crop of wheat, and the insect foragers take tithes of it, we have no right to find fault: a share of it belongs to them. If you plant a field with corn, and the weeds spring up also along with it, why do you complain? Have not the weeds as much right there as the corn? If you encamp in one of the numberless swamps which surround this settlement, and get assailed by countless millions of robust mosquitoes, why do you rave and swear (as I know most of you would do under such circumstances) and want to know 'what in the ---- mosquitoes were made for'? Why, to puncture the skin of blockheads and blasphemers like you, and suck the last drop of blood from their veins. Why, let me ask you, did you go out there? That place belonged to the mosquitoes, not to you; and you knew you were trespassing upon their land. The mosquitoes exist for themselves, and were created for the enjoyment of their own mosquito-life. Why was _man_ created? The Bible does not answer the question directly; the divines in the Catechism say, 'To glorify God.' Now I should like to know if a Westminster Catechism of the mosquitoes would'nt make as good an answer for them?

"And here I am just in the act of annihilating with a logical stroke a multitude of grumblers and croakers. If this world does not belong exclusively to man, and the other races have as much right here as he, and, consequently, a claim to their proportion of land, water, and sky, and their share of food for the sustenance of life, what follows?

"A great many men, taking northeast storms, bleak winds, thunder-showers, flies, mosquitoes, Canada thistles, hot sunshine, cold snows, weeds, briers, thorns, wild beasts, snakes, alligators, and such like things, which they don't happen to like, and putting them all together, attempt to persuade you that this green earth is a complete failure, a wreck and blasted ruin. Don't you believe that, for it's wicked infidelity. I tell you the world is not all so bad as Indiana, and especially that part of the State which you, unfortunately, inhabit. I have seen, my friends, a large portion of the planet, and if there is another spot anywhere quite so infernal as Wabashville, why, I solemnly assure you I never found it.--And now for the point which shall prick your conscience and penetrate your understanding! Do the bears and wolves, the coons and foxes, the owls and wild-geese, find this region unhealthy, and get the chills and fever, and go around grumbling and cursing? Don't they find this climate especially salubrious and suited exactly to their constitutions? Well, then, that's because they belong here, _and you don't_. This region was never intended for the habitation of man: it belongs exclusively to the wild beasts and the fowls of the air, and you have no business here. [Manifest signs of disapprobation on part of Deacon Taylor, an extensive owner of town-lots.] And if you persist in remaining here, what moral right have you to complain of God?...

"Remember, then, in conclusion, that, for millions of years before our race existed, mosquitoes, weeds, briers, thorns, thistles, snow-storms, and northeast winds prevailed upon this planet, and that during all this time it was pronounced by the Deity himself to be '_very good_.' If, then, the earth appears to be evil, is it not because 'thine eye is evil'? We share this world, my friends, with other races, whose wants are different from ours; and we are all of equal importance in the eyes of our Maker, who distributes to each its share of blessings--man and monster both alike--with impartial favor. Is not thus the fallacy of the corruption of Nature exposed, and the lie against our Creator's wisdom, love, and goodness dragged into noonday light?"

* * * * *

But it is time to recommence our rambles through the City of the Dead.

Right here I come across on a tombstone,--"All our children. Emma, aged 1 mo. 23 days. John, 3 years 5 days. Anna, aged 1 year 1 mo." As a physiologist, I might make some very instructive comments upon this; but I forbear.

And here, upon another, a few rods farther on, is an epitaph in verse:--

(FIRST VERSE.)

"Calm be her slumbers near kindred are sighing, A husband deplores in deep anguish of heart, Beneath the cold earth _unconsciously lying_, No murmur can reach her, no tempest can start."

(SECOND VERSE.)

"Calm be her sleep as the silence of even When hearts unto deep invocation give birth. With a prayer she has _knelt at the portal of heaven_ And found the admission she hoped for on earth_."

Not to speak of the "poetry" just here, how charmingly consistent with each other are the ideas contained in the passages I have italicized! In the first verse, you observe, the inmate is sleeping unconscious beneath the ground: in the second verse, she has ascended to heaven and found admittance to mansions in the skies!--A similar confusion and contradiction of ideas occur in most of the epitaphs I see. Does our theology furnish us with no clear conception of the state of the soul after death? The Catholic Church teaches that the spirit at death descends into the interior of the earth to a place called Hades, where it is detained until the day of judgment, when it is reunited with the dust of the body, and ascends to a heaven in the sky. This doctrine has the merit of being positive, clear, and comprehensible, and, consequently, whenever expressed, it always means something exact and well-defined. Has the Protestant Church equally definite notions on the subject, or, in fact, any fixed opinions respecting it whatever? If not, why, as a matter of good taste, for no weightier reason, in records almost imperishable like these, leave the matter alone! Silence is better than nonsense. Suppose a few thousand years hence our civilization to have become extinct, and that some antiquary from the antipodes should visit this desolate hill to excavate, like Layard at Nineveh, for relics of the old Americans. Suppose, having collected a ship-load of broken tombstones, he should forward them to the Polynesian Museum, and set the _savans_ of the age at work deciphering their inscriptions, what sense would be made out of these epitaphs? How would they interpret our notions of a future state? Taking our own monuments, cut with our own hands, inscribed with our own signs-manual, what would they infer our system of religion to have been? If the Egyptians were as vague and careless as we in this matter, our archaeologists must have made some amusing blunders.

Here are two epitaphs which suggest something else:--

No. I.

"I loved him in his beauty, A _mother_ boy while here, I knew he was an angel bright Formed for another sphere."

No. II.

"Farewell my wife and children dear God calls you home to rest. Still Angels _wisper_ in my ear We'll meet in heavenly bliss."

I want to make two annotations upon these. In No. 1 you will notice that a possessive _'s_ is wanting, and in No. 2 that the _h_ is omitted from _whisper_. A marble-cutter told me once, that a Pennsylvania Dutchman came to him one day to have an inscription cut upon a gravestone for his daughter, whose name was Fanny. The father, upon learning that the price of the inscription would be ten cents a letter, insisted that Fanny should be spelt with one _n_, as he should thereby save a dime! The marble-cutter, unable to overcome the obstinacy of the frugal Teuton, and unwilling to set up such a monument of his ignorance of spelling, compromised the matter by conforming to the current orthography, and inserted the superfluous consonant for nothing. And my second annotation shall consist of an inquiry: What is there in corrupt and diseased human nature which makes persons prefer such execrable rhyme as that quoted above, and that which I find upon two-thirds of the tombstones here, to decent English prose, which one would suppose might have been produced at a much less expenditure of intellectual effort? But since it is an unquestionable fact that we are thus totally depraved in taste and feeling, why don't some of our bards, to whom the Muse has not been propitious in other departments of metrical composition, and who, to be blunt, are good for nothing else, such as ----, or ----, and many others you know, come out here among the marble-cutters and open an _epitaph-shop_? Mournful stanzas might then be procured of every size and pattern, composed with decent reverence for the rules of grammar, respect for the feet and limbs of the linear members, and possibly some regard for consistency in the ideas they might chance occasionally to express. Genin the hatter, and Cockroach Lyon, each keeps a poet. Why cannot the marble-cutters procure some of the Heliconian fraternity as partners? Bards would thus serve the cause of education, benefit future antiquaries, and earn more hard dimes ten times over than they do in writing lines for the blank corners of newspapers and the waste spaces between articles in magazines. I throw this hint out of the window of the "Atlantic," in the fervent hope that it will be seen, picked up, and pocketed by some reformer who is now out of business; and I would earnestly urge such individual to agitate the question with all his might, and wake up the community to the vital importance, by making use of "poetic fire" and "inspired frenzy" now going to waste, or some other instrumentality, of a reformation in epitaphic necrology.

Seriously, modern epitaphs are a burlesque upon religion, a caricature of all things holy, divine, and beautiful, and an outrage upon the common sense and culture of the community. A collection of comic churchyard poetry might be made in this place which would eclipse the productions of Mr. K.N. Pepper, and cause a greater "army of readers to explode" than his "Noad to a Whealbarrer" or the "Grek Slaiv" has done.

* * * * *

During our rambles among the tombstones the sun has long since passed the meridian, and the streets and avenues of the cemetery are crowded with carriages and thronged with pedestrians, the tramping of horses' feet, the rumbling of wheels, and the voices of men fill the air, and the place which was so silent and deserted this morning is now as noisy and bustling as the metropolis yonder. And soon begin to arrive thick and fast the funeral trains. Many of the black-plumed hearses are followed by only a single hired coach or omnibus, others by long trails of splendid equipages. Upon the broad slope of a hill, whither the greater number of the processions move, entirely destitute of trees and flooded with sunshine, many thousand graves, mostly unmarked by headstones, lie close together, resembling in appearance a corn-field which has been permitted to run to grass unploughed. Standing upon an elevated point near the summit, and looking down those acres of hillocks to where the busy laborers are engaged in putting bodies into the ground, covering them with earth, and rounding the soil over them, one is perhaps struck for the first time with the full force, meaning, and beauty of the language of Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians:--"That which thou sowest is not that body which shall be, but bare grain. It [the human body] is sown in corruption, is sown in dishonor, is sown in weakness. It is sown a natural body; it is raised [or springs up, to complete the figure] a spiritual body. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven."--I once heard a distinguished botanist dispute the accuracy of this simile, inasmuch, he said, as the seed, when it is sown in the ground, does not _die_, but in fact then first begins to _live_ and to display the vital force which was previously asleep in it; while the human body decays and is resolved into its primitive gaseous, mineral, and vegetable elements, the particles of which, disseminated everywhere, and transferred through chemical affinities into other and new organisms, lose all traces of their former connection.--In answer to such a finical criticism as this, intended to invalidate the authority of the great Apostolic Theologian, I replied, that Paul was not an inspired _botanist_,--in fact, that he probably knew nothing whatever about botany as a science,--but an inspired religious teacher, who employed the language of his people and the measure of knowledge to which his age had attained, to expound to his contemporaries the principles of his Master's religion. I am not familiar with the nicer points of strict theological orthodoxy, but, from modern sermons and commentaries, I should infer that few doctors of even the most straitest school of divinity hold to the doctrine of verbal inspiration. That the Prophets and Apostles were acquainted with botany, chemistry, geology, or any other modern science, is a notion as unfounded in truth as it is hostile and foreign to the object and purpose of Revelation, which is strictly confined to religion and ethics. Those persons, therefore, (and they are a numerous class,) who resort to the Bible, assuming that it professes to be an inspired manual of universal knowledge, and then, because they find in its figurative Oriental phraseology, or in its metaphors and illustrations, some inaccuracies of expression or misstatements of scientific facts, would throw discredit upon the essential religious dogmas and doctrines which it is its object to state and unfold, are, to say the least, extremely disingenuous, if not deficient in understanding.

But a much more prolific source of injury to the character of the Bible than that just mentioned is the injudicious and impertinent labors of many who volunteer in its defence. "Oh, save me from my friends!" might the Prophets and Apostles, each and all, too often exclaim of their supporters.--It is said that all men are insane upon some point: so are classes and communities. The popular monomania which at present prevails among a class of persons whose zeal surpasses their prudence and knowledge is a foolish fear and trembling lest the tendencies of science should result in the overthrow of the Bible. They seem, somehow, to be fully persuaded that the inspired word of God has no inherent power to stand alone,--that it has fallen among thieves and robbers,--is being pelted with fossil coprolites, suffocated with fire-mist and primitive gases, or beaten over the head with the shank-bones of Silurian monsters, and is bawling aloud for assistance. Therefore, not stopping to dress, they dash out into the public notice without hat or coat, in such unclothed intellectual condition as they happen to be in,--in their shirt, or stark naked often,--and rush frantically to its aid.

The most melancholy case of this intellectual _delirium tremens_ that probably ever came under the notice of any reader is found in a professed apology for the Scriptures, recently published, under the pompous and bombastic title of "COSMOGONY, OR THE MYSTERIES OF CREATION."--A volume of such puerile trash, such rubbish, twaddle, balderdash, and crazy drivelling[A] as this, was never before vomited from the press of any land, and beside it the "REVELATIONS" of Andrew Jackson Davis, the "Poughkeepsie Seer," rises to the lofty grandeur of the "Novum Organon,"--a sight that makes one who really respects the Bible hang his head for shame.

[Footnote A: As the reader may never have seen this unique volume, and will be amused by a specimen of its grammar, rhetoric, wisdom, and learning, let him take a _morceau_ or two from the commencement of a chapter entitled, "_Naturalists.--Their Classification of Man and Beasts_."--"We look upon the animal in no different light from that of a vegetable, a plant, or a rock-crystal, which forms under the Creative hand, performs its part for the use of man, dissolves and reproduces by its parts another comfort for him. The animal bears _no resemblance_ to man, not even in his brain."--"One tree may bear apples, and another acorns, but they are not to be compared, the one as bearing a relation to the other, because they have each a body and limbs. They are distinct trees, and one will always produce apples and the other acorns, as long as they produce anything." (Indeed!)--"The usual classification of animals, is that of Vertebrata, Articulata, Mollusca, and Radiata. This is not only offensive to man,--_but is impiety towards God_." (Why?)--"We are told by these naturalists that man belongs to the class called 'Vertebrata.' So does the snake, the monkey, the lizard and crocodile, and many other low and mean animals.--Have these creatures the reasoning faculties of man? Do they walk erect like man? Have they feet, hands, legs, arms, _hair upon their heads, or beards upon their faces_? Do they speak languages and _congregate and worship at the altar_?" (!!)--"Those who are ambitious of such relations, may plant their heraldic coat-of-arms in the serpent, the lizard, the crocodile, or the monkey, but we disclaim such relationship--we do not think it _good taste or good morals_ to place the fair daughters of Eve on a level with horrid and hideous animals, simply from some apparent similarity, which we are certain never existed."]

The belligerent pundit who has flung in the face of peaceful geologists this octavo _camouflet_ of his scientific lucubrations professes to have scoured the surface and ravaged the bottom (in a suit of patent sub-marine Scriptural armor) of a no less abysmal subject than the cryptology of Genesis,--to have undermined with his sapping intellect and blown up with his explosive wisdom the walled secrets of time and eternity, carrying away with him in the shape of plunder a whole cargo of the plans and purposes of the Omnipotent in the Creation. I have not the least doubt, if he were respectfully approached and interrogated upon the subject, he would answer with the greatest ease and accuracy the famous question with which Dean Swift posed the theological tailor. The man who can tell us all about the institution of the law of gravity, how the inspired prophet thought and felt while writing his history, and who knows everything respecting "affinity and attraction when they were in Creation's womb," could not hesitate a moment to measure an arch-angel for a pair of breeches.--But I was talking of _funerals_.

* * * * *

A friend once assured me that the heartiest laugh of which he was ever guilty on a solemn occasion occurred at a funeral. A trusty Irish servant, who had lived with him for many years, and for whom he had great affection, died suddenly at his house. As he was attending the funeral in the Catholic burial-place, and stood with his wife and children listening to the service which the priest was reading, his heart filled with grief and his eyes moist with tears, the inscription on a gravestone just before him happened to attract his attention. It was this_:--"Gloria in Excelsis Deo!_ Patrick Donahoe died July 12. 18--." Now the exclamation-point after _"Deo"_ and the statement of the fact of Mr. D.'s demise following immediately thereafter made the epitaph to read, "Glory to God in the highest! Patrick is dead." This, which at another time would perhaps have caused no more than a smile, struck him as irresistibly funny, and drove in a moment every trace of sadness from his face and sorrow from his heart,--to give place to violent emotions of another nature, which his utmost exertions could not conceal.

["I beg your pardon! I've been afloat," was the graceful parenthetical apology which a distinguished naval officer used to make, when by mistake he let drop one of "those big words which lie at the bottom of the best man's vocabulary," in conversation with sensitive persons whose ears he feared it might offend. I ought possibly, at the end of the following anecdote, to make some such excuse to the scrupulous reader, whose notions of propriety it will perhaps slightly infringe: "I beg your pardon! I couldn't help telling it."]

An eminent divine once described to me a scene he witnessed at a funeral, which he said nearly caused him to expire with--well, you shall see. An intimate acquaintance of his, who belonged to a neighboring parish, having died, he was naturally induced to assist at the burial-service. The rector of this parish was a man who, though sensitive in the extreme to the absurdities of others,--being, in fact, a regular son of Momus,--was entirely unconscious of his own amusing eccentricities. Among these, numerous and singular, he had the habit of suddenly stopping in the middle of a sentence, while preaching, and calling out to the sexton, across the church, "Dooke, turn on more gas!" or "Dooke, shut that window!" or "Dooke, do"--something else which was pretty sure to be wanting itself done during the delivery of his discourse. Nearly every Sunday, strangers not acquainted with his ways were startled out of their propriety by some such unexpected behavior.

On the occasion referred to, the funeral procession having entered the churchyard, and my informant and the officiating clergyman having taken their places at the head of the grave, the undertaker and his assistants having removed the coffin from the hearse, and the mourners, of whom there was a large crowd, having gathered into a circular audience, the Reverend Doctor ---- began the service.

"'Man that is born of a woman'--Oh, stop those carriages! don't you see where they are going to?" (he suddenly broke out, rushing from the place where he stood, frantically, among the bystanders; and then returning to his former position, continued,)--"'hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up'--Oh, don't let that coffin down yet! wait till I tell you to," (addressed to the undertaker, who was anticipating the proper place in the service,)--"'and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow,'--Please to hold the umbrella a little further over my head," (_sotto voce_ to the man who was endeavoring to protect his head from the sun,)-"'and never continueth in one stay.'--Hold the umbrella a little higher, will you?" (_sotto voce_ again to the man holding the umbrella.)--"'In the midst of life we are in death.'--Stand down from there, boys, and be quiet!" (addressed to some urchins who were crowding and pushing one another about the grave, in their efforts to look at the coffin.) At length he had proceeded without further interruptions as far as the sentence, "'We therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,'"--when Dooke, the sexton,--a queer, impetuous fellow,--who was vainly endeavoring to keep the boys away from the edge of the grave, seized suddenly the rope with which the coffin had just been lowered down, and, stooping forward, laid it like a whip-lash, "cut!" across the shins of a dozen youngsters, making them leap with "Oh! oh! oh!" a foot from the ground, and scatter in short order,--"'looking for the'"--(turning to my friend, as he witnessed the successful exploit of his favorite sexton, and whispering in his ear,) "_Dooke made 'em hop that time, didn't he!_--'general resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come.'"

Dooke's mode of dispersing the boys, and the officiating clergyman's comment upon it, parenthesized into the middle of the most solemn sentence of the burial-service, were too much for the usual stern gravity of my clerical friend, and, under pretence of shedding tears, he buried his face in his handkerchief and his handkerchief in his hat and shook with laughter.

Speaking of funerals reminds me of a congenial subject.--Nothing in New York astonishes visitors from the country so much as the magnificent coffin-shops, rivalling, in the ostentatious and tempting display of their wares, the most elegant stores on Broadway. Model coffins, of the latest style and pattern, are set up on end in long rows and protected by splendid show-cases, with the lids removed to exhibit their rich satin lining. Fancy coffins, decorated with glittering ornaments, are placed seductively in bright plate-glass windows, and put out for baiting advertisements upon the side-walks: as much as to say, "Walk in, walk in, ladies and gentlemen! Now's your chance! here's your fine, nice coffins!"--while in ornamental letters upon extensive placards hung about the doors, "IRON COFFINS," "ROSEWOOD COFFINS," "AIR-TIGHT COFFINS," "MAHOGANY COFFINS," "PATENT SARCOPHAGI," address the eyes and appeal to the purses of the passers-by. And I saw in one of these places, the other day, painted on glass and inclosed in an elegant gilt frame, "ICE COFFINS," which struck me as queer enough. As though it were not sufficiently cool to be dead!

It seems to me, that, in this matter, the undertakers, digging a little too deep below the surface of the present age, have thrown out some of the mystical and grotesque remains of a very antique religious faith, which look as singular just now to the eyes of common people as would an Egyptian temple with its sacred Apis in Broadway, or a Sphinx on Boston Common. To the eyes of an old Egyptian, no object could be more grateful than the sarcophagus in which he was to repose at death. He purchased it as early in life as he could raise the means, and displayed it in his parlor as an attractive and costly ornament. Indeed, I do not know but it was useful as well, and the children kept their playthings in it, or the young ladies their knitting-work and embroidery.

Are we not, in this class of our tastes and feelings, becoming rapidly Egyptianized? Why, I expect in a year or two to see coffins introduced into the parlors of the Fifth Avenue, and to find them, when their owners fail or absquatulate, advertised for sale at auction, with the rest of the household furniture, at a great sacrifice on the original cost.

"--> ONE SUPERB COFFIN OF ELEGANT PATTERN AND SUPERIOR WORKMANSHIP, AS GOOD AS NEW. TWO DITTO, SLIGHTLY DAMAGED."

And then the fashion will become popular with the less aristocratic portion of the community, and you will see crowds of servant-girls and street-loungers around the windows of our magnificent coffin-bazaars, and hear from them such exclamations as these: "Oh! do look here, Matilda! Wouldn't you like to have such a nice coffin as that?" or, "What a dear, sweet sarcophagus that one is there!" or, "Faith, I should like to own that air-tight!"

* * * * *

But the day is now far advanced. The funeral processions have ceased to arrive, and the husbandmen, having sown the immortal seed furnished by the metropolis, with shovels and empty dinner-pails, are on their way, whistling and talking in groups, homeward. The number of loungers and sight-seers is rapidly diminishing as the light in the more thickly shaded walks becomes dim, and the clock at the gateway indicates the near approach of the hour when the portals will be closed.

--Alone with the dead! Alone in the night among tombs and graves! How many readers do not at the sight of these words feel an involuntary _soupçon_ of a shudder? Would not the cause of this indefinable secret dread of the darkness which covers a graveyard be a curious matter of inquiry? Let one ever so cultivated and skeptical, familiar as a physician or a soldier with the spectacle of death, ever so full of mental and physical courage, passing alone late at night through a graveyard, hear the least sound among the graves, or see a moving object of any kind, especially a white one, and he will instantly feel an _alloverishness_ foreign to ordinary experience, and I will not answer for him that his hair does not stand on end and his flesh grow rough as a nutmeg-grater. A company of three or four persons would feel far less disturbed. This proves the emotion to be genuine _fear_. And with this recognized as a fact, ask the question, Of what are you afraid? What makes your feet stick to the ground so fast, or inspires you to take to your legs and run for your life? "A ridiculous, foolish superstition," reason answers.

I do not intend by this to intimate that you, reader, bold and courageous person that I know you to be, would not dare to go through a graveyard at night. By no means. I only predicate the existence within you of this ridiculous, foolish superstition, and maintain that you would do so under _all_ circumstances with peculiar feelings which you did not possess before you entered it and which you will not possess as soon as you have left it, and under _certain_ circumstances with a trembling of the nerves and a palpitation of the heart, and that the occasion _might_ occur when you would be still _more_ strongly and strangely affected. To illustrate the latter case I have an anecdote _à-propos_.

A college class-mate, (Poor B----! the shadows of the Pyramids now fall upon his early grave!) a young man easily agitated, to be sure, and possibly timid, on his way home, late one autumn night, from the house of a relative in the country, was hurrying past a dismal old burying-yard in the midst of a gloomy wood, when he was suddenly startled by a strange noise a short distance from the road. Turning his head, alarmed, in the direction whence it proceeded, he was horror-struck at seeing through the darkness a white object on the ground, struggling as if in the grasp of some terrible monster. Instantly the blood froze in his veins; he stood petrified,--the howlings of the wind, clanking of chains, and groans of agony, filling his ears,--with his eyes fixed in terror upon the white shape rolling and plunging and writhing among the tombs. Attempting to run, his feet refused to move, and he swooned and fell senseless in the road. A party of travellers, happening shortly to pass, stumbled over his body. Raising him upon his feet, they succeeded by vigorous shakes in restoring him to a state of consciousness.

While explaining to them the cause of his fright, the noise was renewed. The men, although somewhat alarmed, clubbed their individual courage, climbed the wall, and found--nearly in the centre of the graveyard--_an old white horse_ thrown down by his fetters and struggling violently to regain his feet.

B---- assured me, the explanation of the spectacle instinctively occurring to his mind at the moment as indubitable was that some reprobate had just been buried there, and that the Devil, coming for his body, was engaged in binding his unwilling limbs, preparatory to carrying him away!

The reader may smile at the weakness and folly displayed in this case, but the assertion may nevertheless be safely ventured, that there is not one person in a hundred who would not under the same circumstances have been greatly disturbed, or would have invented a much less frightfully absurd solution of the phenomenon than poor B----'s.

I think the singular feelings associated with graveyard darkness, which the wisest and bravest of men find slumbering beneath all their courage and philosophy, would be found upon investigation to proceed principally from two sources,--a constitutional inclination to religious superstition, and an acquired educational belief in the reality of the dreams and fancies of poets, mingled, of course, with some natural cowardice.

The dryest and hardest men have more poetry in them than they or we begin to suspect. Indeed, if we could take our individual or collective culture to pieces and award to each separate influence its due and just share of results, I should not be surprised at finding that the poet had done more in the way of fashioning our education than the scientist or any other teacher. Milton, to give but a single example, with his speculations concerning the Fall,--its effects upon humanity, the brute creation, and physical nature,--and his imaginary conflicts between the hostile armies of heaven, and his celestial and Satanic personifications, has had so much influence in Anglo-Saxon culture, that nine-tenths of the people believe, without knowing it, as firmly in "Paradise Lost" as in the text of the Bible. The Governor of Texas, citing in his proclamation a familiar passage in Shakspeare as emanating from the inspired pen of the Psalmist, is not to so great extent an example of ignorance as an illustration of the lofty peerage instinctively assigned the great dramatist in the ordinary associations of our thoughts. This faith in the visionary world of poets is instilled into us (and it is for this reason that Rousseau, in his masterly work on education, the "Émile," reprobates the custom as promotive of superstition) in early infancy by our parents and nurses with their stories of nymphs, fairies, elves, dwarfs, giants, witches, hobgoblins, and the like fabulous beings, and, as soon as we are able to read, by the tales of genii, sorcerers, demons, ghouls, enchanted caves and castles, and monsters and monstrosities of every name. The exceedingly impressible and poetical nature of children (for all children are poets and talk poetry as soon as they can lisp) appropriates and absorbs with intense relish these fanciful myths, and for years they believe more firmly in their truth than in the realities of the actual world. And I more than suspect that this child-credulity rather slumbers in the grown man, smothered beneath superimposed skepticisms and cognitions, than is ever eradicated from his mind, and thus, upon the shock of an emergency disturbing him suddenly to the foundation, is ready to burst up through the crevices of his shattered practical experience and appear on the surface of his judgment and understanding.

In addition, then, to an instinctive tendency to religious superstition, (of which I shall here say nothing,) to the fairy mythology of the nursery, and the phantom machinery invented by poets to clothe with the semblance of reality their dreams and fancies, can be traced in a great measure the existence in the mind of the _credulity_ which renders the _fear_ in question possible, opening an introduction for it into the heart excited by inexplicable phenomena or circumstanced where such phenomena might, according to our superstitious beliefs, easily occur.

Without entering into an analysis of the _fear_ itself, beyond the remark that any extraordinary sight or sound not immediately explicable by the eye or ear to the understanding (as a steamboat to the Indians or a comet to our ancestors) is a legitimate cause of the emotion, as well as the _possibility_ of the occurrence of such sights and sounds, for believing which we have seen man prepared, first by natural superstitious inclination, and secondly by a peculiar education,--I will only further add, for the purpose of a brief introduction to an anecdote I wish to relate, that there is another fountain of knowledge, from which we drink at a later period than childhood, as well as then, whose waters are strongly impregnated with this superstitious, fear-provoking credulity: I mean the stories of _ghosts_ which have been seen and heard in all ages and countries, revealing important secrets, pointing out the places where murder has been committed or treasure concealed, foretelling deaths and calamities, and forewarning men of impending dangers. Hundreds of books familiar to all have been written upon this subject and form an extensive department of our literature, especially of our older literature.

The philosopher attempts to account for such phenomena by referring them to optical illusions or a disordered condition of the brain, making them _subjective_ semblances instead of _objective_ realities. But one is continually being puzzled and perplexed with evidence contradicting this hypothesis, which, upon any other subject _a priori_ credible to the reason and judgment, would be received as satisfactory and decisive without a moment's hesitation. In truth, with all the light which science is able to shed upon it, and all the resolute shutting of the eyes at points which no elucidating theory is available to explain, there are facts in this department of supernaturalism which stagger the unbelief of the stoutest skeptic.

It is constantly urged, among other objections to the credibility of supernatural apparitions, that the names of the witnesses have singularly and suspiciously disappeared,--that you find them, upon investigation, substantiated thus: A very worthy gentleman told another very worthy gentleman, who told a very intelligent lady, who told somebody else, who told the individual who finally communicated the incident to the world. There are, however, as just intimated, instances in which such ambiguity is altogether wanting. Among these is one so well authenticated by well-known witnesses of undoubted veracity, that, having never before been published, I venture to relate it here.

My informant was Professor Tholuck, of Halle University, the most eminent living theologian in Germany, and the principal ecclesiarch of the Prussian Church. He prefaced the account by assuring me that it was received from the lips of De Wette himself, immediately after the occurrence,--that De Wette was an intimate personal friend, a plain, practical man, of remarkably clear and vigorous intellect, with no more poetry and imagination in his nature than just sufficient to keep him alive,--in a word, that he would rely upon his coolness of judgment and accuracy of observation, under any possible combination of circumstances, as confidently as upon those of any man in the world.

Dr. De Wette, the famous German Biblical critic, returning home one evening between nine and ten o'clock, was surprised, upon arriving opposite the house in which he resided, to see a bright light burning in his study. In fact, he was rather more than surprised; for he distinctly remembered to have extinguished the candles when he went out, an hour or two previously, locked the door, and put the key in his pocket, which, upon feeling for it, was still there. Pausing a moment to wonder by what means and for what purpose any one could have entered the room, he perceived the shadow of a person apparently occupied about something in a remote corner. Supposing it to be a burglar employed in rifling his trunk, he was upon the point of alarming the police, when the man advanced to the window, into full view, as if for the purpose of looking out into the street. _It was De Wette himself!_--the scholar, author, professor,--his height, size, figure, stoop,--his head, his face, his features, eyes, mouth, nose, chin, every one,--skullcap, study-gown, neck-tie, all, everything: there was no mistaking him, no deception whatever: there stood Dr. De Wette in his own library, and he out in the street:--why, he must be _somebody else!_ The Doctor instinctively grasped his body with his hands, and tried himself with the psychological tests of self-consciousness and identity, doubtful, if he could believe his senses and black were not white, that he longer existed his former self, and stood, perplexed, bewildered, and confounded, gazing at his other likeness looking out of the window. Upon the person's retiring from the window, which occurred in a few moments, De Wette resolved not to dispute the possession of his study with the other Doctor before morning, and ringing at the door of a house opposite, where an acquaintance resided, he asked permission to remain over night.

The chamber occupied by him commanded a full view of the interior of his library, and from the window he could see his other self engaged in study and meditation, now walking up and down the room, immersed in thought, now sitting down at the desk to write, now rising to search for a volume among the book-shelves, and imitating in all respects the peculiar habits of the great Doctor engaged at work and busy with cogitations. At length, when the cathedral clock had finished striking through first four and then eleven strokes, as German clocks are wont to do an hour before twelve, De Wette Number Two manifested signs of retiring to rest,--took out his watch, the identical large gold one the other Doctor in the other chamber felt sure was at that moment safe in his waistcoat-pocket, and wound it up, removed a portion of his clothing, came to the window, closed the curtains, and in a few moments the light disappeared. De Wette Number One, waiting a little time until convinced that Number Two had disposed himself to sleep, retired also his-self to bed, wondering very much what all this could mean.

Rising the next morning, he crossed the street, and passed up-stairs to his library. The door was fastened; he applied the key, opened it, and entered. No one was there; everything appeared in precisely the same condition in which he had left it the evening before,--his pen lying upon the paper as he had dropped it on going out, the candles on the table and the mantel-piece evidently not having been lighted, the window-curtains drawn aside as he had left them; in fine, there was not a single trace of any person's having been in the room. "Had he been insane the night before? He must have been. He was growing old; something was the matter with his eyes or brain; anyhow, he had been deceived, and it was very foolish of him to have remained away all night." Endeavoring to satisfy his mind with some such reflections as these, he remembered he had not yet examined his bed-room. Almost ashamed to make the search, now convinced it was all an hallucination of the senses, he crossed the narrow passageway and opened the door. He was thunderstruck. The ceiling, a lofty, massive brick arch, had fallen during the night, filling the room with rubbish and crushing his bed into atoms. De Wette the Apparition had saved the life of the great German scholar.

Tholuck, who was walking with me in the fields near Halle when relating the anecdote, added, upon concluding, "I do not pretend to account for the phenomenon; no knowledge, scientific or metaphysical, in my possession, is adequate to explain it; but I have no more doubt it actually, positively, literally did occur, than I have of the existence of the sun _im Himmel da_."

CULTURE.

The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the theory of success. A man is the prisoner of his power. A topical memory makes him an almanac; a talent for debate, a disputant; skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success. For performance Nature has no mercy, and sacrifices the performer to get it done,--makes a dropsy or a tympany of him. If she wants a thumb, she makes one at the cost of arms and legs, and any excess of power in one part is usually paid for at once by some defect in a contiguous part.

Our efficiency depends so much on our concentration, that Nature usually, in the instances where a marked man is sent into the world, overloads him with bias, sacrificing his symmetry to his working power. It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances. If she create a policeman like Fouché, he is made up of suspicions and of plots to circumvent them. "The air," said Fouché, "is full of poniards." The physician Sanctorius spent his life in a pair of scales, weighing his food. Lord Coke valued Chaucer highly, because the Canon Yeman's Tale illustrates the Statute _Hen. V. Chap. 4_, against Alchemy. I saw a man who believed the principal mischiefs in the English state were derived from the devotion to musical concerts. A freemason, not long since, set out to explain to this country, that the principal cause of the success of General Washington was the aid he derived from the freemasons.

But, worse than the harping on one string, Nature has secured individualism by giving the private person a high conceit of his weight in the system. The pest of society is egotists. There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. 'Tis a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as _chorea_, the patient sometimes turns round and continues to spin slowly on one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady? The man runs round a ring formed by his own talent, falls into an admiration of it, and loses relation to the world. It is a tendency in all minds. One of its annoying forms is a craving for sympathy. The sufferers parade their miseries, tear the lint from their bruises, reveal their indictable crimes, that you may pity them. They like sickness, because physical pain will extort some show of interest from the bystanders; as we have seen children, who, finding themselves of no account when grown people come in, will cough till they choke, to draw attention.

This distemper is the scourge of talent,--of artists, inventors, and philosophers. Eminent spiritualists shall have an incapacity of putting their act or word aloof from them, and seeing it bravely for the nothing it is. Beware of the man who says, "I am on the eve of a revelation!" It is speedily punished, inasmuch as this habit invites men to humor it, and, by treating the patient tenderly, to shut him up in a narrower selfism, and exclude him from the great world of God's cheerful fallible men and women. Let us rather be insulted, whilst we are insultable. Religious literature has eminent examples; and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists, and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.

This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in Nature which it subserves,--such as we see in the sexual attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such necessity, that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which each individual persists to be what he is.

This individuality is not only not inconsistent with culture, but is the basis of it. Every valuable nature is there in its own right; and the student we speak to must have a mother-wit invincible by his culture, which uses all books, arts, facilities, and elegancies of intercourse, but is never subdued and lost in them. He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is, not to destroy this,--God forbid!--but to train away all impediment and mixture, and leave nothing but pure power. Our student must have a style and determination, and be a master in his own specialty. But, having this, he must put it behind him. He must have a catholicity, a power to see with a free and disengaged look every object. Yet is this private interest and self so overcharged, that, if a man seeks a companion who can look at objects for their own sake, and without affection or self-reference, he will find the fewest who will give him that satisfaction; whilst most men are afflicted with a coldness, an incuriosity, as soon as any object does not connect with their self-love. Though they talk of the object before them, they are thinking of themselves, and their vanity is laying little traps for your admiration.

But after a man has discovered that there are limits to the interest which his private history has for mankind, he still converses with his family, or a few companions,--perhaps with half a dozen personalities that are famous in his neighborhood. In Boston, the question of life is the names of some eight or ten men. Have you seen Mr. Allston, Doctor Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, Mr. Greenough? Have you heard Everett, Garrison, Father Taylor, Theodore Parker? Have you talked with Messieurs Turbinewheel, Summitlevel, and Lacofrupees? Then you may as well die. In New York, the question is of some other eight, or ten, or twenty. Have you seen a few lawyers, merchants, and brokers,--two or three scholars, two or three capitalists, two or three editors of newspapers? New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which make up our American existence. Nor do we expect anybody to be other than a faint copy of these heroes.

Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confusion of insanities would come up! The "causes" to which we have sacrificed, Tariff or Democracy, Whiggism or Abolition, Temperance or Socialism, would show like roots of bitterness and dragons of wrath: and our talents are as mischievous as if each had been seized upon by some bird of prey, which had whisked him away from fortune, from truth, from the dear society of the poets, some zeal, some bias, and only when he was now gray and nerveless was it relaxing its claws, and he awaking to sober perceptions.

Culture is the suggestion from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities, through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses his balance, puts him among his equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.

'Tis not a compliment, but a disparagement, to consult a man only on horses, or on steam, or on theatres, or on eating, or on books, and, whenever he appears, considerately to turn the conversation to the bantling he is known to fondle. In the Norse heaven of our forefathers, Thor's house had five hundred and forty floors: and Man's house has five hundred and forty floors. His excellence is facility of adaptation, and of transition through many related points to wide contrasts and extremes. Culture kills his exaggeration, his conceit of his village or his city. We must leave our pets at home when we go into the street, and meet men on broad grounds of good meaning and good sense. No performance is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy. In the Norse legend, Allfadir did not get a drink of Mimir's spring, (the fountain of wisdom,) until he left his eye in pledge. And here is a pedant that cannot unfold his wrinkles, nor conceal his wrath at interruption by the best, if their conversation do not fit his impertinency,--here is he to afflict us with his personalities. 'Tis incident to scholars, that each of them fancies he is pointedly odious in his community. Draw him out of this limbo of irritability. Cleanse with healthy blood his parchment skin. You restore to him his eyes which he left in pledge at Mimir's spring. If you are the victim of your doing, who cares what you do? We can spare your opera, your gazetteer, your chemic analysis, your history, your syllogisms. Your man of genius pays dear for his distinction. His head runs up into a spire, and, instead of a healthy man, merry and wise, he is some mad dominie. Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them. To wade in marshes and sea-margins is the destiny of certain birds; and they are so accurately made for this, that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.

The antidotes against this organic egotism are--the range and variety of attractions, as gained by acquaintance with the world, with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with eminent persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and religion: books, travel, society, solitude.

The hardiest skeptic, who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or who has visited a menagerie, or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education. "A boy," says Plato, "is the most vicious of all wild beasts"; and, in the same spirit, the old English poet Gascoigne says, "A boy is better unborn than untaught." The city breeds one kind of speech and manners; the back-country a different style; the sea another; the army a fourth. We know that an army which can be confided in may be formed by discipline,--that by systematic discipline all men may be made heroes. Marshal Lannes said to a French officer, "Know, Colonel, that none but a poltroon will boast that he never was afraid." A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before. And, in all human action, those faculties will be strong which are used. Robert Owen said, "Give me a tiger, and I will educate him." 'Tis inhuman to want faith in the power of education, since to meliorate is the law of Nature; and men are valued precisely as they exert onward or meliorating force. On the other hand, poltroonery is the acknowledging an inferiority to be incurable.

Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal distemper. There are people who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given to your words, or any humor,--but remain literalists, after hearing the music and poetry and rhetoric and wit of seventy or eighty years. They are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can understand pitchforks and the cry of "Fire!"--and I have noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of earthquakes.

Let us make our education brave and preventive. Politics is an after-work, a poor patching. We are always a little late. The evil is done, the law is passed, and we begin the up-hill agitation for repeal of that of which we ought to have prevented the enacting. We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up,--namely, in Education.

Our arts and tools give to him who can handle them much the same advantage over the novice as if you extended his life ten, fifty, or a hundred years. And I think it the part of good sense to provide every fine soul with such culture, that it shall not, at thirty or forty years, have to say, "This which I might do is made hopeless through my want of weapons."

But it is conceded that much of our training fails of effect,--that all success is hazardous and rare,--that a large part of our cost and pains is thrown away. Nature takes the matter into her own hands, and, though we must not omit any jot of our system, we can seldom be sure that it has availed much, or that as much good would not have accrued from a different system.

Books, as containing the finest records of human wit, must always enter into our notion of culture. The best heads that ever existed, Pericles, Plato, Julius Caesar, Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, were well-read, universally educated men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters. Their opinion has weight, because they had means of knowing the opposite opinion. We look that a great man should be a good reader, or in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power. Good criticism is very rare, and always precious. I am always happy to meet persons who perceive the transcendent superiority of Shakspeare over all other writers. I like people who like Plato. Because this love does not consist with self-conceit.

But books are good only as far as a boy is ready for them. He sometimes gets ready very slowly. You send your child to the schoolmaster; but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class; but much of his tuition comes on his way to school, from the shop-windows. You like the strict rules and the long terms; and he finds his best leading in a by-way of his own, and refuses any companions but of his choosing. He hates the grammar and _Gradus_, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is right; and you are not fit to direct his bringing-up, if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training. Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod, horse and boat, are all educators, liberalizers; and so are dancing, dress, and the street-talk; and--provided only the boy has resources, and is of a noble and ingenuous strain--these will not serve him less than the books. He learns chess, whist, dancing, and theatricals. The father observes that another boy has learned algebra and geometry in the same time. But the first boy has acquired much more than these poor games along with them. He is infatuated for weeks with whist and chess; but presently will find out, as you did, that, when he rises from the game too long played, he is vacant and forlorn, and despises himself. Thenceforward it takes place with other things, and has its due weight in his experience. These minor skills and accomplishments--for example, dancing--are tickets of admission to the dress-circle of mankind, and the being master of them enables the youth to judge intelligently of much on which otherwise he would give a pedantic squint. Landor said, "I have suffered more from my bad dancing than from all the misfortunes and miseries of my life put together." Provided always the boy is teachable, (for we are not proposing to make a statue out of punk,) football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding, are lessons in the art of power, which it is his main business to learn,--riding specially, of which Lord Herbert of Cherbury said, "A good rider on a good horse is as much above himself and others as the world can make him." Besides, the gun, fishing-rod, boat, and horse constitute, among all who use them, secret freemasonries.

They are as if they belonged to one club.

There is also a negative value in these arts. Their chief use to the youth is, not amusement, but to be known for what they are, and not to remain to him occasions of heartburn. We are full of superstitions. Each class fixes its eyes on the advantages it has not: the refined, on rude strength; the democrat, on birth and breeding. One of the benefits of a college-education is, to show the boy its little avail. I knew a leading man in a leading city, who, having set his heart on an education at the university and missed it, could never quite feel himself the equal of his own brothers who had gone thither. His easy superiority to multitudes of professional men could never quite countervail to him this imaginary defect. Balls, riding, wine-parties, and billiards pass to a poor boy for something fine and romantic, which they are not; and a free admission to them on an equal footing, if it were possible, only once or twice, would be worth ten times its cost, by undeceiving him.

I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. I think there is a restlessness in our people which argues want of character. All educated Americans, first or last, go to Europe,--perhaps because it is their mental home, as the invalid habits of this country might suggest. An eminent teacher of girls said, "The idea of a girl's education is whatever qualifies them for going to Europe." Can we never extract this tape-worm of Europe from the brain of our country-men? One sees very well what their fate must be. He that does not fill a place at home cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you suppose there is any country where they do not scald milkpans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can find only so much beauty or worth as he carries.

Of course, for some men travel may be useful. Naturalists, discoverers, and sailors are born. Some men are made for couriers, exchangers, envoys, missionaries, bearers of despatches, as others are for farmers and working-men. And if the man is of a light and social turn, and Nature has aimed to make a legged and winged creature, framed for locomotion, we must follow her hint, and furnish him with that breeding which gives currency as sedulously as with that which gives worth. But let us not be pedantic, but allow to travel its full effect. The boy grown up on the farm which he has never left is said in the country to have had _no chance_, and boys and men of that condition look upon work on a railroad or drudgery in a city as opportunity. Poor country-boys of Vermont and Connecticut formerly owed what knowledge they had to their peddling-trips to the Southern States. California and the Pacific Coast are now the university of this class, as Virginia was in old times. "To have _some chance_" is their word. And the phrase, "to know the world," or to travel, is synonymous with all men's ideas of advantage and superiority. No doubt, to a man of sense travel offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison where-from to judge his own. One use of travel is, to recommend the books and works of home; (we go to Europe to be Americanized;) and another, to find men. For as Nature has put fruits apart in latitudes, a new fruit in every degree, so knowledge and fine moral quality she lodges in distant men. And thus, of the six or seven teachers whom each man wants among his contemporaries, it often happens that one or two of them live on the other side of the world.

Moreover, there is in every constitution a certain solstice, when the stars stand still in our inward firmament, and when there is required some foreign force, some diversion or alternative, to prevent stagnation. And, as a medical remedy, travel seems one of the best. Just as a man witnessing the admirable effect of ether to lull pain, and, meditating on the contingencies of wounds, cancers, lockjaws, rejoices in Dr. Jackson's benign discovery, so a man who looks at Paris, at Naples, or at London, says, "If I should be driven from my own home, here, at least, my thoughts can be consoled by the most prodigal amusement and occupation which the human race in ages could contrive and accumulate."

Akin to the benefit of foreign travel, the aesthetic value of railroads is to unite the advantages of town and country life, neither of which we can spare. A man should live in or near a large town, because, let his own genius be what it may, it will repel quite as much of agreeable and valuable talent as it draws, and, in a city, the total attraction of all the citizens is sure to conquer, first or last, every repulsion, and drag the most improbable hermit within its walls some day in the year. In town he can find the swimming-school, the gymnasium, the dancing-master, the shooting-gallery, opera, theatre, and panorama,--the chemist's shop, the museum of natural history, the gallery of fine arts, the national orators in their turn, foreign travellers, the libraries, and his club. In the country he can find solitude and reading, manly labor, cheap living, and his old shoes,--moors for game, hills for geology, and groves for devotion. Aubrey writes, "I have heard Thomas Hobbes say, that, in the Earl of Devon's house, in Derbyshire, there was a good library and books enough for him, and his Lordship stored the library with what books he thought fit to be bought. But the want of good conversation was a very great inconvenience, and, though he conceived he could order his thinking as well as another, yet he found a great defect. In the country, in long time, for want of good conversation, one's understanding and invention contract a moss on them, like an old paling in an orchard."

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man. A great part of our education is sympathetic and social. Boys and girls who have been brought up with well-informed and superior people show in their manners an inestimable grace. Fuller says, that "William, Earl of Nassau, won a subject from the King of Spain every time he put off his hat." You cannot have one well-bred man without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any high point. Especially women: it requires a great many cultivated women,--saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant society,--in order that you should have one Madame de Staël. The head of a commercial house, or a leading lawyer or politician, is brought into daily contact with troops of men from all parts of the country,--and those, too, the driving-wheels, the business-men of each section,--and one can hardly suggest for an apprehensive man a more searching culture. Besides, we must remember the high social possibilities of a million of men. The best bribe which London offers to-day to the imagination is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts.

I wish cities could teach their best lesson,--of quiet manners. It is the foible especially of American youth,--pretension. The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy. How the imagination is piqued by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito, as a king in gray clothes!--of Napoleon affecting a plain suit at his glittering levee!--of Burns, or Scott, or Beethoven, or Wellington, or Goethe, or any container of transcendent power, passing for nobody!--of Epaminondas, "who never says anything, but will listen eternally!"--of Goethe, who preferred trifling subjects and common expressions in intercourse with strangers, worse rather than better clothes, and to appear a little more capricious than he was! There are advantages in the old hat and box-coat. I have heard, that, throughout this country, a certain respect is paid to good broadcloth: but dress makes a little restraint; men will not commit themselves. But the box-coat is like wine; it unlocks the tongue, and men say what they think. An old poet says,--

"Go far and go sparing; For you'll find it certain, The poorer and the baser you appear, The more you'll look through still."[A]

[Footnote A: Beaumont and Fletcher: The Tamer Tamed.]

Not much otherwise Milnes writes, in the "Lay of the Humble":--

"To me men are for what they are, They wear no masks with me."

'Tis odd that our people should have--not water on the brain,--but a little gas there. A shrewd foreigner said of the Americans, that "whatever they say has a little the air of a speech." Yet one of the traits down in the books, as distinguishing the Anglo-Saxon, is a trick of self-disparagement. To be sure, in old, dense countries, among a million of good coats, a fine coat comes to be no distinction, and you find humorists. In an English party, a man with no marked manners or features, with a face like red dough, unexpectedly discloses wit, learning, a wide range of topics, and personal familiarity with good men in all parts of the world, until you think you have fallen upon some illustrious personage. Can it be that the American forest has refreshed some weeds of old Pictish barbarism just ready to die out,--the love of the scarlet feather, of beads, and tinsel? The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock-plumes, and embroidery; and I remember, one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was in a blaze with scarlet umbrellas. The English have a plain taste. The equipages of the grandees are plain. A gorgeous livery indicates new and awkward city-wealth. Mr. Pitt, like Mr. Pym, thought the title of _Mister_ good against any king in Europe. They have piqued themselves on governing the whole world in the poor, plain, dark committee-room which the House of Commons sat in before the fire.

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles. The countryman finds the town a chop-house, a barber's shop. He has lost the lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and, with them, sobriety and elevation. He has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion. Life is dragged down to a fracas of pitiful cares and disasters. You say the gods ought to respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have betrayed you to a cloud of insignificant annoyances:--

"Mirmidons, race féconde, Mirmidons, Enfins nous commandons; Jupiter livre le monde Aux mirmidons, aux mirmidons."[B]

[Footnote B: Béranger.]

'Tis heavy odds Against the gods, When they will match with myrmidons. We spawning, spawning myrmidons, Our turn to-day; we take command: Jove gives the globe into the hand Of myrmidons, of myrmidons.

What is odious but noise, and people who scream and bewail?--people whose vane points always east, who live to dine, who send for the doctor, who raddle themselves, who toast their feet on the register, who intrigue to secure a padded chair and a corner out of the draught? Suffer them once to begin the enumeration of their infirmities, and the sun will go down on the unfinished tale. Let these triflers put us out of conceit with petty comforts. To a man at work, the frost is but a color; the rain, the wind, he forgot them when he came in. Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard. The least habit of dominion over the palate has certain good effects not easily estimated. Neither will we be driven into a quiddling abstemiousness. 'Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants. How can you mind diet, bed, dress, or salutes or compliments, or the figure you make in company, or wealth, or even the bringing things to pass, when you think how paltry are the machinery and the workers? Wordsworth was praised to me, in Westmoreland, for having afforded to his country neighbors an example of a modest household, where comfort and culture were secured without display. And a tender boy who wears his rusty cap and outgrown coat, that he may secure the coveted place in college and the right in the library, is educated to some purpose. There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet,--that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials,--that goes rusty, and educates the boy,--that sells the horse, but builds the school,--works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.

We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they must be used,--yet cautiously, and haughtily,--and will yield their best values to him who best can do without them. Keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men,--from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, solitude," said Pythagoras,--that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul, in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude. The high advantage of university-life is often the mere mechanical one, I may call it, of a separate chamber and fire,--which parents will allow the boy without hesitation at Cambridge, but do not think needful at home. We say solitude, to mark the character of the tone of thought; but if it can be shared between two, or more than two, it is happier, and not less noble. "We four," wrote Neander to his sacred friends, "will enjoy at Halle the inward blessedness of a _civitas Dei_, whose foundations are forever friendship. The more I know you, the more I dissatisfy and must dissatisfy all my wonted companions. Their very presence stupefies me. The common understanding withdraws itself from the one centre of all existence."

Solitude takes off the pressure of present importunities, that more catholic and humane relations may appear. The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public than in his private quality. Here is a new poem, which elicits a good many comments in the journals and in conversation. From these it is easy, at last, to eliminate the verdict which readers passed upon it; and that is, in the main, unfavorable. The poet, as a craftsman, is interested only in the praise accorded to him, and not in the censure, though it be just; and the poor little poet hearkens only to that, and rejects the censure, as proving incapacity in the critic. But the poet _cultivated_ becomes a stockholder in both companies,--say Mr. Curfew,--in the Curfew stock, and in the _humanity_ stock; and, in the last, exults as much in the demonstration of the unsoundness of Curfew as his interest in the former gives him pleasure in the currency of Curfew. For the depreciation of his Curfew stock only shows the immense values of the humanity stock. As soon as he sides with his critic against himself, with joy, he is a cultivated man.

We must have an intellectual quality in all property and in all action, or they are nought. I must have children, I must have events, I must have a social state and history, or my thinking and speaking want body or basis. But to give these accessories any value, I must know them as contingent and rather showy possessions, which pass for more to the people than to me. We see this abstraction in scholars, as a matter of course: but what a charm it adds when observed in practical men! Bonaparte, like Caesar, was intellectual, and could look at every object for itself, without affection. Though an egotist _à l'outrance_, he could criticize a play, a building, a character, on universal grounds, and give a just opinion. A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade gains largely in our esteem, if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill: as when we learn of Lord Fairfax, the Long Parliament's general, his passion for antiquarian studies; or of the French regicide Carnot, his sublime genius in mathematics; or of a living banker, his success in poetry; or of a partisan journalist, his devotion to ornithology. So, if, in travelling in the dreary wildernesses of Arkansas or Texas, we should observe on the next seat a man reading Horace, or Martial, or Calderon, we should wish to hug him. In callings that require roughest energy, soldiers, sea-captains, and civil engineers sometimes betray a fine insight, if only through a certain gentleness when off duty: a good-natured admission that there are illusions, and who shall say that he is not their sport? We only vary the phrase, not the doctrine, when we say that culture opens the sense of beauty. A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be said to have arrived at self-possession. I suffer, every day, from the want of perception of beauty in people. They do not know the charm with which all moments and objects can be embellished,--the charm of manners, of self-command, of benevolence. Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman,--repose in energy. The Greek battle-pieces are calm; the heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene aspect: as we say of Niagara, that it falls without speed. A cheerful, intelligent face is the end of culture, and success enough; for it indicates the purpose of Nature and wisdom attained.

When our higher faculties are in activity, we are domesticated, and awkwardness and discomfort give place to natural and agreeable movements. It is noticed that the consideration of the great periods and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind and an indifference to death. The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships. Even a high dome, and the expansive interior of a cathedral, have a sensible effect on manners. I have heard that stiff people lose something of their awkwardness under high ceilings and in spacious halls. I think sculpture and painting have an effect to teach us manners and abolish hurry.

But, over all, culture must reinforce from higher influx the empirical skills of eloquence, or of politics, or of trade and the useful arts. There is a certain loftiness of thought and power to marshal and adjust particulars, which can come only from an insight of their whole connection. The orator who has once seen things in their divine order will never quite lose sight of this, and will come to affairs as from a higher ground, and, though he will say nothing of philosophy, he will have a certain mastery in dealing with them, and an incapableness of being dazzled or frighted, which will distinguish his handling from that of attorneys and factors. A man who stands on a good footing with the heads of parties at Washington reads the rumors of the newspapers and the guesses of provincial politicians with a key to the right and wrong in each statement, and sees well enough where all this will end. Archimedes will look through your Connecticut machine at a glance, and judge of its fitness. And much more, a wise man who knows not only what Plato, but what Saint John can show him, can easily raise the affair he deals with to a certain majesty. Plato says, Pericles owed this elevation to the lessons of Anaxagoras. Burke descended from a higher sphere when he would influence human affairs. Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, stood on a fine humanity, before which the brawls of modern senates are but pot-house politics.

But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends. Ben Jonson specifies in his address to the Muse:--

"Get him the time's long grudge, the court's ill-will, And, reconciled, keep him suspected still, Make him lose all his friends, and, what is worse, Almost all ways to any better course; With me thou leav'st a better Muse than thee, And which thou brought'st me, blessed Poverty."

We wish to learn philosophy by rote, and play at heroism. But the wiser God says, Take the shame, the poverty, and the penal solitude that belong to truth-speaking. Try the rough water, as well as the smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth knowing. When the state is unquiet, personal qualities are more than ever decisive. Fear not a revolution which will constrain you to live five years in one. Don't be so tender at making an enemy now and then. Be willing to go to Coventry sometimes, and let the populace bestow on you their coldest contempts. The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once. He must hold his hatreds also at arm's length, and not remember spite. He has neither friends nor enemies, but values men only as channels of power.

He who aims high must dread an easy home and popular manners. Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit. If there is any great and good thing in store for you, it will not come at the first or the second call, nor in the shape of fashion, ease, and city drawing-rooms. Popularity is for dolls. "Steep and craggy," said Porphyry, "is the path of the gods." Open your Marcus Antoninus. In the opinion of the ancients, he was the great man who scorned to shine, and who contested the frowns of Fortune. They preferred the noble vessel too late for the tide, contending with winds and waves, dismantled and unrigged, to her companion borne into harbor with colors flying and guns firing. There is none of the social goods that may not be purchased too dear, and mere amiableness must not take rank with high aims and self-subsistency.

Bettine replies to Goethe's mother, who chides her disregard of dress,--"If I cannot do as I have a mind, in our poor Frankfort, I shall not carry things far." And the youth must rate at its true mark the inconceivable levity of local opinion. The longer we live, the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women: and every brave heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to dictate.

"All that class of the severe and restrictive virtues," said Burke, "are almost too costly for humanity." Who wishes to be severe? Who wishes to resist the eminent and polite, in behalf of the poor and low and impolite? and who that dares do it can keep his temper sweet, his frolic spirits? The high virtues are not debonair, but have their redress in being illustrious at last. What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries! The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

Let me say here, that culture cannot begin too early. In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem. I find, too, that the chance for appreciation is much increased by being the son of an appreciator, and that these boys who now grow up are caught not only years too late, but two or three births too late, to make the best scholars of. And I think it a presentable motive to a scholar, that, as, in an old community, a well-born proprietor is usually found, after the first heats of youth, to be a careful husband, and to feel an habitual desire that the estate shall suffer no harm by his administration, but shall be delivered down to the next heir in as good condition as he received it,--so, a considerate man will reckon himself a subject of that secular melioration by which mankind is mollified, cured, and refined, and will shun every expenditure of his forces on pleasure or gain, which will jeopardize this social and secular accumulation.

The fossil strata show us that Nature began with rudimental forms, and rose to the more complex as fast as the earth was fit for their dwelling-place,--and that the lower perish, as the higher appear. Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him. If Love, red Love, with tears and joy,--if Want with his scourge,--if War with his cannonade,--if Christianity with its charity,--if Trade with its money,--if Art with its portfolios,--if Science with her telegraphs through the deeps of space and time, can set his dull nerves throbbing, and by loud taps on the tough chrysalis can break its walls and let the new creature emerge erect and free,--make way, and sing paean! The age of the quadruped is to go out,--the age of the brain and of the heart is to come in. The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all the material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power. The formidable mischief will only make the more useful slave. And if one shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna. He will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells into benefit.

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR.

Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations That is known as the Children's Hour.

I hear in the chamber above me The patter of little feet, The sound of a door that is opened, And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight, Descending the broad hall-stair, Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, And Edith with golden hair.

A whisper, and then a silence: Yet I know by their merry eyes They are plotting and planning together To take me by surprise.

A sudden rush from the stairway, A sudden raid from the hall! By three doors left unguarded They enter my castle wall!

They climb up into my turret O'er the arms and back of my chair; If I try to escape, they surround me; They seem to be everywhere.

They almost devour me with kisses, Their arms about me entwine, Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti, Because you have scaled the wall, Such an old moustache as I am Is not a match for you all?

I have you fast in my fortress, And will not let you depart, But put you down into the dungeons In the round-tower of my heart.

And there will I keep you forever, Yes, forever and a day, Till the walls shall crumble to ruin, And moulder in dust away!

THREE-MILE CROSS.

It seems but yesterday, although more than thirteen years have gone by, since I first opened the little garden-gate and walked up the path leading to Mary Russell Mitford's cottage at Three-Mile Cross. A friend in London had given me his card to the writer of "Our Village," and I had promised to call on my way to Oxford, and have a half-hour's chat over her geraniums with the charming person whose sketches I had read with so much interest in my own country. Her cheerful voice at the head of the stairs, telling her little maid to show me the way to her sitting-room, sounded very musically, and I often observed in later interviews how like a melody her tones always appeared in conversation. Once when she read a lyrical poem, not her own, to a group of friends assembled at her later residence, in Swallowfield, of which number it was my good-fortune to be one, the verses came from her lips like an exquisite chant. Her laugh had a ringing sweetness in it, rippling out sometimes like a beautiful chime of silver bells; and when she told a comic story, which she often did with infinite tact and grace, she joined in with the jollity at the end, her eyes twinkling with delight at the pleasure her narrative was always sure to bring. Her enjoyment of a joke was something delicious, and when she heard a good thing for the first time her exultant mirth was unbounded. As she sat in her easy-chair, listening to a Yankee story which interested her, her "Dear me! dear me! dear me!" (three times repeated always)

"Rang like a golden jewel down a golden stair."

The sunny summer-day was falling full on her honeysuckles, lilies, and roses, when I first saw her face in the snug cottage at Three-Mile Cross. As we sat together at the open casement, looking down on the flowers that sent up their perfumes to her latticed window like fragrant tributes from a fountain of distilled sweet waters, she pointed out, among the neighboring farm-houses and villas, the residences of her friends, in all of whom she seemed to have the most affectionate interest. I noticed, as the village children went by her window, they all stopped to bow and curtsy. One curly-headed urchin made bold to take off his well-worn cap and wait to be recognized as "little Johnny,"--"no great scholar," said the kind-hearted old lady to me, "but a sad rogue among our flock of geese. Only yesterday, the young marauder was detected by my maid with a plump gosling stuffed half-way into his pocket!" While she was thus discoursing of Johnny's peccadilloes, the little fellow looked up with a knowing expression, and very soon caught in his cap a gingerbread dog, which the old lady threw to him from the window. "I wish he loved his book as well as he relishes sweet cake," sighed she, as the boy kicked up his heels and disappeared down the lane.

Full of anecdote, her conversation that afternoon ran on in a perpetual flow of good-humor, until it was time for me to be on my way toward the University City. From that time till she died, our friendship continued, and, during other visits to England, I saw her frequently, driving about the country with her in her pony-chaise, and spending many happy hours under her cottage-roof. She was always the same cheerful spirit, enlivening our intercourse with shrewd and pertinent observations and reminiscences, some of which it may not be out of place to reproduce here. Country life, its scenery and manners, she was never tired of depicting; but not infrequently she loved to talk of those celebrities in literature and art whom she had known intimately, with a vivacity and sweetness of temper never-failing and delightful. I well remember, one autumn evening, when half a dozen friends were sitting in her library after dinner, talking with her of Tom Taylor's Life of Haydon, then lately published, how graphically she described to us the eccentric painter, whose genius she was among the fore-most to recognize. The flavor of her discourse I cannot reproduce; but I was too much interested in what she was saying to forget the main incidents she drew for our edification, during those pleasant hours now far away in the past.

"I am a terrible forgetter of dates," she used to say, when any one asked her of the time when; but for the _manner how_ she was never at a loss. "Poor Haydon!" she began. "He was an old friend of mine, and I am indebted to Sir William Elford, one of my dear father's correspondents during my girlhood, for a suggestion which sent me to look at a picture then on exhibition in London, and thus was brought about my knowledge of the painter's existence. He, Sir William, had taken a fancy to me, and I became his child-correspondent. Few things contribute more to that indirect after-education, which is worth all the formal lessons of the school-room a thousand times told, than such good-humored condescension from a clever man of the world to a girl almost young enough to be his granddaughter. I owe much to that correspondence, and, amongst other debts, the acquaintance of Haydon. Sir William's own letters were most charming,--full of old-fashioned courtesy, of quaint humor, and of pleasant and genial criticism on literature and on art. An amateur-painter himself, painting interested him particularly, and he often spoke much and warmly of the young man from Plymouth, whose picture of the 'Judgment of Solomon' was then on exhibition in London. 'You must see it,' said he, 'even if you come to town on purpose.'"--The reader of Haydon's Life will remember that Sir William Elford, in conjunction with a Plymouth banker named Tingecombe, ultimately purchased the picture. The poor artist was overwhelmed with astonishment and joy when he walked into the exhibition-room and read the label, "Sold," which had been attached to his picture that morning before he arrived. "My first impulse," he says in his Autobiography, "was gratitude to God."

"It so happened," continued Miss Mitford, "that I merely passed through London that season, and, being detained by some of the thousand and one nothings which are so apt to detain women in the great city, I arrived at the exhibition, in company with a still younger friend, so near the period of closing, that more punctual visitors were moving out, and the doorkeeper actually turned us and our money back. I persisted, however, assuring him that I only wished to look at one picture, and promising not to detain him long. Whether my entreaties would have carried the point or not, I cannot tell; but half a crown did; so we stood admiringly before the 'Judgment of Solomon.' I am no great judge of painting; but that picture impressed me then, as it does now, as excellent in composition, in color, and in that great quality of telling a story which appeals at once to every mind. Our delight was sincerely felt, and most enthusiastically expressed, as we kept gazing at the picture, and seemed, unaccountably to us at first, to give much pleasure to the only gentleman who had remained in the room,--a young and very distinguished-looking person, who had watched with evident amusement our negotiation with the doorkeeper. Beyond indicating the best position to look at the picture, he had no conversation with us; but I soon surmised that we were seeing the painter, as well as his painting; and when, two or three years afterwards, a friend took me by appointment to view the 'Entry into Jerusalem,' Haydon's next great picture, then near its completion, I found I had not been mistaken.

"Haydon was, at that period, a remarkable person to look at and listen to. Perhaps your American word _bright_ expresses better than any other his appearance and manner. His figure, short, slight, elastic, and vigorous, looked still more light and youthful from the little sailor's-jacket and snowy trousers which formed his painting costume. His complexion was clear and healthful. His forehead, broad and high, out of all proportion to the lower part of his face, gave an unmistakable character of intellect to the finely placed head. Indeed, he liked to observe that the gods of the Greek sculptors owed much of their elevation to being similarly out of drawing! The lower features were terse, succinct, and powerful,--from the bold, decided jaw, to the large, firm, ugly, good-humored mouth. His very spectacles aided the general expression; they had a look of the man. But how shall I attempt to tell you of his brilliant conversation, of his rapid, energetic manner, of his quick turns of thought, as he flew on from topic to topic, dashing his brush here and there upon the canvas? Slow and quiet persons were a good deal startled by this suddenness and mobility. He left such people far behind, mentally and bodily. But his talk was so rich and varied, so earnest and glowing, his anecdotes so racy, his perception of character so shrewd, and the whole tone so spontaneous and natural, that the want of repose was rather recalled afterwards than felt at the time. The alloy to this charm was a slight coarseness of voice and accent, which contrasted somewhat strangely with his constant courtesy and high breeding. Perhaps this was characteristic. A defect of some sort pervades his pictures. Their great want is equality and congruity,--that perfect union of qualities which we call _taste_. His apartment, especially at that period when he lived in his painting-room, was in itself a study of the most picturesque kind. Besides the great picture itself, for which there seemed hardly space between the walls, it was crowded with casts, lay figures, arms, tripods, vases, draperies, and costumes of all ages, weapons of all nations, books in all tongues. These cumbered the floor; whilst around hung smaller pictures, sketches, and drawings, replete with originality and force. With chalk he could do what he chose. I remember he once drew for me a head of hair with nine of his sweeping, vigorous strokes! Among the studies I remarked that day in his apartment was one of a mother who had just lost her only child,--a most masterly rendering of an unspeakable grief. A sonnet, which I could not help writing on this sketch, gave rise to our long correspondence, and to a friendship which never flagged. Everybody feels that his life, as told by Mr. Taylor, with its terrible catastrophe, is a stern lesson to young artists, an awful warning that cannot be set aside. Let us not forget that amongst his many faults are qualities which hold out a bright example. His devotion to his noble art, his conscientious pursuit of every study connected with it, his unwearied industry, his love of beauty and of excellence, his warm family affection, his patriotism, his courage, and his piety, will not easily be surpassed. Thinking of them, let us speak tenderly of the ardent spirit whose violence would have been softened by better fortune, and who, if more successful, would have been more gentle and more humble."

And so with her vigilant and appreciative eye she saw, and thus in her own charming way she talked of the man, whose name, says Taylor, as a popularizer of art, stands without a rival among his brethren.

* * * * *

Her passion for the Drama continued through life, and to see a friend's play would take her up to London when nothing else would tempt her to leave her cottage. It was delightful to hear her talk of the old actors, many of whom she had known. She loved to describe John Kemble, Mrs. Siddons, Miss O'Neill, and Edmund Kean, as they were wont to electrify the town. Elliston was a great favorite, and she had as many good things to tell of him as Elia ever had. One autumn afternoon she related all the circumstances attending the "first play" she ever saw,--which, by the way, was a tragedy enacted in a barn somewhere in the little town of Alresford, where she was born. The winking candles dividing the stage from the audience, she used to say, were winking now in her memory, although fifty years had elapsed since her father took her, a child of four years, to see "Othello." Her talent at mimicry made her always most interesting, when she spoke of Munden and his pleasant absurdities on the stage. For Bannister, Johnstone, Fawcett, and Emery she had a most exquisite relish, and she said they had made comedy to her a living art full of laughter and tears. Her passion for the stage, and overclouded prospects for the future, led her in early youth to write a play. She had already written a considerable number of verses which had been printed, and were honored by being severely castigated by Gifford in the "Quarterly."

"I didn't mind the great reviewer's blows at all," she used to say. "My poems had been republished in America; and Coleridge had prophesied that I should one day write a tragedy."

Talfourd was then, though a young man, a most excellent critic, and lent a helping hand to the young authoress. Her anxieties attending the first representation of her play at Covent Garden she was always fond of relating, and in such a manner that we who listened fell into such boisterous merriment with her, that I have known carriages stop in front of her window, and their inmates put out anxiously inquiring heads, to learn, if possible, what it all meant inside the cottage.

She never forgot "the warm grasp of Mrs. Charles Kemble's hand, when she saw her, all life and heartiness, at her house in Soho Square,--or the excellent acting of Young and Kemble and Macready, who did everything actors could do to secure success for her."

"These are the things," she once wrote, "one thinks of, when sitting calm and old by the light of a country fire."

The comic and the grotesque that were mingled up with her first experiences of the stage as a dramatic author were inimitably rendered by herself, whenever she sat down to relate the story of that visit to London for the purpose of bringing out her tragedy. The rehearsals, where "the only grave person present was Mr. Liston!--the tragic heroines sauntering languidly through their parts in bonnets and thick shawls,--the untidy ballet-girls" (there was a dance in "Foscari") "walking through their quadrille to the sound of a solitary fiddle,"--she was never weary of calling up for the amusement of her listeners.

The old dramatists she had grown up to worship,--Shakspeare first, as in all loyalty bound, and after him Fletcher. "Affluent, eloquent, royally grand," she used to call both Beaumont and Fletcher; and whole scenes from favorite plays she knew by heart. Dr. Valpy was her neighbor, he being in the days of her youth headmaster of Reading School. A family intimacy of long standing had existed between her father's household and that of the learned and excellent scholar, so that his well-known taste for the English dramatists had no small influence on Doctor Mitford's studious daughter. "He helped me also," she said, "to enter into the spirit of those mighty masters who dealt forth the stern Tragedies of Destiny."

One of the dearest friends of her youth was Miss Porden, (afterwards married, as his first wife, to Sir John Franklin,) and at her suggestion Miss Mitford wrote "Rienzi." I have heard her say, that, going up to London to bring out that play, she saw her old friend, then Mrs. Franklin, working a flag for the captain's ship, then about to sail on one of his early adventurous voyages. The agitation of parting with her husband was too great for her delicate temperament, and before the expedition was out of the Channel Mrs. Franklin was dead.

* * * * *

Often and often, when the English lanes were white with blossoms, I have sat by her side while her faithful servant guided her low-wheeled pony-chaise among the pleasant roads about Reading and Swallowfield. Once we went to a cricket-ground together, and as we sat under the trees, looking on as the game proceeded, she, who fell in love with Nature when a child, and had studied the landscape till she knew familiarly every flower and leaf that grows on English soil, assembled all that was best in poesy from her memory to illustrate the beautiful scene before us, and to prove how much better and more truly the great end of existence is answered in a rural life than in the vexatious cares of city occupation. As we sat looking at the vast lawn, magnificent in its green apparel, she quoted Irving as one who had understood English country-life perhaps more deeply and fully than any other foreign author who had ever written.

Speaking, one day, of the slowness of poetical fame, she said,--

"It always takes ten years to make a poetical reputation in England; but America is wiser and bolder, and dares say at once, '_This is fine!_'"

She rejoiced greatly in several of the American poets, and was never weary of quoting certain ringing couplets which she has celebrated in her "Notes of a Literary Life." "Is there anything under the sun," she exclaims, "that Dr. Holmes cannot paint?"

During the last six years of her life she became a great invalid and moved about only with severe pain. "It is not age," she said, "that has thus prostrated me, but the hard work and increasing anxieties of thirty years of authorship, during which my poor labors were all that my dear father and mother had to look to; besides which, for the greater part of that time I was constantly called upon to attend the sick bed, first of one parent, and then of the other. I have only to be intensely thankful that the power of exertion did not fail until the necessity for such exertion was removed."

"I love poetry and people as well at sixty as I did at sixteen," she said one day, when I gave her a new volume by an American friend, "and can never be sufficiently grateful to God for having permitted me to retain the two joy-giving faculties of admiration and sympathy." The "Ballad of Cassandra Southwick" she esteemed as one of the finest things of our time; and of "Astrea" she said,--"Nobody in England can write the glorious resonant metre of Dryden like that strain, nowadays."

Pope was a great favorite with her, and she took me one morning to an old house where he was a frequent guest, and where Arabella Fermor, the heroine of the "Rape of the Lock," passed her married life. On the way she often quoted the poet, whose works she seemed to know by heart. Returning at sunset, she was very anxious that I should hear my first nightingale among the woody lanes of her pretty country; but we were both disappointed. We listened long, but, although the air was full of birdsongs that evening, the sweet-voiced warbler was not of the choir. She talked much, as we rode along, of Kingsley and Ruskin, both of whom she loved as friends as well as authors. "John Ruskin," she said, "is good and kind, and charming beyond the common lot of mortals, and there are pages of his prose, to my thinking, more eloquent than any thing out of Jeremy Taylor."

Speaking of Humor, she said,--"Between ourselves, I always have a little doubt of genius, when there is none of that quality: certainly, in the very highest poetry, the two go together."

She greatly admired Béranger, and often spoke of him as the beautiful old man, the truest and best type of perfect independence. Hazlitt she ranked highly as an essayist, and she mentioned that she had heard both Charles Lamb and Talfourd praise him as not only the most brilliant, but the soundest of critics.

Among modern romances, those by the author of "The Scarlet Letter" seemed to impress her almost more than any others; and when "The House of the Seven Gables" was translated into Russian, she was filled with delight. Indeed, she was always among the first to cry, "Bravo!" over any good words for American literature.

"Do coax Mr. Hawthorne and Dr. Holmes," she said one day, "into visiting England. I want them to be welcomed as they deserve, and as they are sure to be."

Her interest in the French Emperor's career amounted to enthusiasm, and one day she told us a very pretty story about him which she knew to be true. She said, when he was in England after Strasbourg and before Boulogne, he spent a twelvemonth at Leamington, living in the quietest manner. One of the principal persons in that town, Mr. H., a very liberal and accomplished man, made a point of showing every attention in his power to the Prince; and they very soon became intimate. There was in the town an old officer of the Emperor's Polish Legion, who, compelled to leave France after Waterloo, had taken refuge in England, and, having a natural talent for languages, maintained himself by teaching French, Italian, and German in different families. The old exile and the young one found each other out, and the language-master was soon an habitual guest at the Prince's table, where he was treated with the most affectionate attention. At last Louis Napoleon was obliged to repair to London, but before he went he called on his friend Mr. H. to take leave. After warm thanks to him for all the pleasure he had experienced in his society, the Prince said,--

"I am about to prove to you my entire reliance upon your unfailing kindness by leaving you a legacy. I wish to ask that you would transfer to my poor old friend the goodness you have lavished on me. His health is failing,--his means are small; pray, call upon him sometimes, and see that the lodging-house people do not neglect him. Draw upon me for what may be wanting for his needs or for his comforts."

Mr. H. promised, and faithfully replaced the Prince in his kind attentions to his old friend. The poor old man grew ill at last, and died, Mr. H. defraying all the charges of his illness and of his funeral. "I would willingly have paid them myself," said he, "but I knew that would have offended and grieved the Prince. I found that provision had been made at his banker's to answer my drafts to a much larger amount than the actual debt."

Miss Mitford used to say that she kept this anecdote for non-admirers of the Emperor.

One day she came limping into the room, with her dog Fanchon following in the same lame plight,--she laughing heartily at their similarity of gait, and holding up a letter just in from the post.

"Here," said she, "is an epistle from my dear old friend, Lady M.," (Gibbon's correspondent,) "who at the age of eighty-three is caught by new books, and is as enthusiastic as a girl. She commissions me to inquire of you all about your new authoress, the writer of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' who she is, and all you know of her. So let me hear what you have to say about the lady."

During a brief visit to her cottage not long before she died, the chase was started one evening to find, if possible, the origin of the line quoted by Byron,--

"A fellow-feeling makes one wondrous kind."

In vain we searched among the poets, and at last all the party gave up in despair. I went up to London soon after, thinking no more of the lost line. In a few days, however, came a brief note, as follows:--

"Hurrah, dear friend! I have found the line without any other person's aid or suggestion! Last night it occurred to me that it was in some prologue or epilogue; and my little book-room being very rich in the drama, I have looked through many hundreds of those bits of rhyme, and at last made a discovery, which, if it have no other good effect, will at least have 'emptied my head of Corsica,' as Johnson said to Boswell; for never was the great biographer more haunted by the thought of Paoli than I by that line. It occurs in an epilogue by Garrick, on quitting the stage, June, 1776, when the performance was for the benefit of sick and aged actors.

"Not finding it quoted in Johnson convinced me that it would probably have been written after the publication of the Dictionary, and ultimately guided me to the right place. It is singular that epilogues were just dismissed at the first representation of one of my plays, 'Foscari,' and prologues at another, 'Rienzi.'

"Ever most affectionately yours,

"M.R. MITFORD.

"P.S. I am still a close prisoner in my room. But when fine weather comes, I will get down in some way or other, and trust myself to that which never hurts anybody, the honest open air. Spring, and even the approach of spring, sets me dreaming. I see leafy hedges in my sleep, and flowery banks, and then I long to make the vision a reality. I remember that my dog Flush, Fanchon's father, who was a famous sporting-dog, used, at the approach of the covering season, to hunt in his sleep, doubtless by the same instinct that works in me. So, as soon as the sun tells the same story with the primroses, I shall make a descent after some fashion, and, no doubt, aided by Sam's stalwart arm, successfully."

* * * * *

After leaving Three-Mile Cross for Swallowfield, her health, never of late years robust, seemed failing. In one of her letters to me she gives this pleasant picture of her home:--

"Ill as I am, my spirits are as good as ever; and just at this moment I am most comfortably seated under the acacia-tree at the corner of the house,--the beautiful acacia literally loaded with its snowy chains. The flowering-trees this summer, the lilacs, laburnums, and rhododendrons, have been one mass of blossoms, but none are so graceful as this waving acacia. On one side is a syringa, smelling and looking like an orange-tree,--a jar of roses on the table before me,--fresh gathered roses,--the pride of my gardener's heart. Little Fanchon is at my feet, too idle to eat the biscuits with which I am trying to tempt her,--biscuits from Boston, sent to me by kind Mrs. S., and which Fanchon ought to like; but you know her laziness of old, and she improves in it every day."

It was about this period that Walter Savage Landor sent to her these exquisite lines:--

"The hay is carried; and the Hours Snatch, as they pass, the linden-flowers; And children leap to pluck a spray Bent earthward, and then run away. Park-keeper! catch me those grave thieves, About whose frocks the fragrant leaves, Sticking and fluttering here and there, No false nor faltering witness bear.

"I never view such scenes as these In grassy meadow girt with trees, But comes a thought of her who now Sits with serenely patient brow Amid deep sufferings: none hath told More pleasant tales to young and old. Fondest was she of Father Thames, But rambled to Hellenic streams; Nor even there could any tell The country's purer charms so well As Mary Mitford.

"Verse! go forth And breathe o'er gentle hearts her worth. Needless the task: but should she see One hearty wish from you and me, A moment's pain it may assuage,-- A rose-leaf on the couch of Age."

In the early days of the year 1855 she sent, in her own handwriting, kind greetings to her old friends only a few hours before she died. Sweetness of temper and brightness of mind, her never-failing characteristics, accompanied her to the last; and she passed on in her usual cheerful and affectionate mood, her sympathies uncontracted by age, narrow fortune, and pain.

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.