Chapter 1

The notion that Painting and Sculpture are concerned only with the "imitation of Nature,"--that is, with copying the forms and colors of existing things,--though so often expelled, as it were, with a pitchfork, persistently recurs, not only in popular talk, but in deliberate criticism, and in the practice of artists. There are periods when this notion gets the upperhand, as at the end of the fifteenth century, and again at the end of the eighteenth, when Rousseau prescribed a return to Nature as the panacea for all defect, in Art as elsewhere. Then Winckelmann and his successors triumphed over it for a while,--showed at least the crudity of that statement. This is the purpose of much of Sir Joshua Reynolds's lectures. Now it seems to be coming up again,--thanks partly to Mr. Ruskin, though he might be quoted on both sides,--and this time with some prospect of demonstrating, by the aid of photography, what it does in fact amount to.

It is a very general opinion that photography has made painting superfluous,--or, at least, that it will do so as soon as further improvements in the process shall enable it to render color as well as light and shade. And our artists seem to give in to this view, in the deference they show to the subject, as if it mattered not so much what it was, or how, as that it is _there_,--a pious tenderness towards barns and rail-fences and stone walls and the confused monotony of the forest, not as having any special fitness, not as beautiful, but because they exist,--a scrupulous anxiety to give the every-day look of the objects they portray, as any passer-by would see them, free from any distorting personality. To do them justice, however, this submissiveness to the matter-of-fact, with the more gifted at least, is a virtue that is praised and starves. They do it lip-service, and suppose themselves loyal; but when they come to paint, they are under a spell that does not allow them to see in things only material qualities, but, without any violence to Nature, raises it to a higher plane, where other values and other connections prevail. Art, where it exists to any serious purpose, follows Nature, but not the natural,--according to Raphael's maxim, that "the artist's aim is to make things not as Nature makes them, but as she intends them."

But these audacities, though they make their own excuse in the work itself, do not pass in a statement without cavil at the arrogance that would exalt the work of men's hands above the work of God. Shall we strive with our pigments to outshine the sun, or teach the secrets of form to the cunning Artificer by whom the world was made? What room for Art, except as the feeble reflex of the splendors of the actual world?

But if that be all, how to account for the existence of Art as distinct from upholstery? Why pile our mole-hills by the side of the mountains? We can see the landscape itself any day;--whence this extraordinary interest in seeing a bit of it painted,--except, indeed, as furniture for the drawing-room, to be ordered with the frame at so much the yard from the picture-dealer?

The root of the difficulty lies in this slippery phrase, Nature. We talk of the facts of Nature, meaning the existence now and here of the hills, sky, trees, etc., as if these were fixed quantities,--as if a house or a tree must be the same at all times and to everybody. But in a child's drawing we see that these things are not the same to us and to him. He is careful to give the doors and windows, the chimneys with their smoke, the lines of the fence, and the walk in front; he insists on the divisions of the bricks and the window-panes: but for what is characteristic and essential he has no eye. He gives what the house is to him, merely _a house_ in general, any house; it would not help it, but only make the defect more prominent, to straighten and complete the lines. An artist, with fewer and more careless lines, would give more of what we see in it; and if he be a man of high power, he may teach us in turn the limitation of our seeing, by showing that the vague, half-defined sentiment that attaches to it has also a visible expression, if we knew where to look for it.

We hear people say they know nothing of Art, but that they can judge as well as anybody whether a picture is like Nature or not. No doubt Giotto's contemporaries thought so, too, and they were grown men, with senses as good as ours; but we smile when Boccaccio says, "There was nothing in Nature that Giotto could not depict, whether with the pencil, the pen, or the brush, so like that it seemed not merely like, but the thing itself." We smile superior, but Giotto had as keen an eye and as ready a hand as any man since. The lesson is, that we, too, have not come to the end of even the most familiar objects, but that to another age our view of them may seem as queer as his seems to us. For the facts in Nature are not fixed, but transcendental quantities, and their value depends on the use that is made of them. It is in this direction that the artist's genius avails; his skill in execution is secondary and incidental. The measure of his ability is the depth to which he has penetrated the world of matter, not the number or the accuracy of his facts. Every landscape wears many faces, as many as there are men and different moods of the same man. To one the forest is so many cords of wood; to another, an arboretum; to another, a workshop or a museum; to another, a poem. What each sees is there; the forest exists for beauty and for firewood, and lends itself indifferently to either use.

Nature wears this air of impartiality, because her figures are only zeros, deriving all their significance from their position. We do not require a like impartiality in the artist, because what he is to give is not Nature, but what Nature inspires. His endeavor to be impartial would result only in giving us his opinions or the opinions of others, instead of the utterance of the oracle. For Nature hides her secret, not by silence, but in a Babel of sweet voices, heard by each according to the fineness of his sense: by one as mere noise, by another as a jangle of pleasing sounds, by the artist as harmony. They are all of them Nature's voices;--he adds nothing and omits nothing, but hears with a preoccupied attention, the justification being that his hearing is thus most complete, as one who understands a language seizes the sense of words rapidly spoken better than he who from less acquaintance with it strives to follow all the sounds.

The test of "truth," therefore, in the sense of fact, is insufficient. The question is, Truth for whom? Not for a child or a savage. If we were to show a fine landscape to a Hottentot, it would be a mistake to say he saw it, though the image might be demonstrable on the retina of his eye. He would not see what we mean when we speak of it, any more than we should see the footstep on the ground or hear the stirring in the grass that is plain enough to him, and hits our organs, too, though we are not trained to perceive it. If the test of merit be the production of a likeness to something we see, then the artist should know no more of Nature than we do. But then, though it may surprise us into momentary admiration to recognize familiar things in this translation,--just as common talk sounds finer in a foreign tongue,--yet it is but for a time, and then the inevitable limitations of the counterfeit come in,--its narrowness and fixity,--crude paint for sunbeams, cold and colorless stone for the living form. The only test of a work of Art is, how far it will carry us,--not any comparison by the yardstick. We demand to be raised above our habitual point of view, and be made aware of a deeper interest than we knew of. It is in hope of this alone that we pardon the necessary shortcoming of the means.

This deeper interest has its root in nothing arbitrary, or personal to the artist. It is not inventing something finer than Nature, but seeing more truly what Nature shows, that makes the artistic faculty. This is the lesson taught by the history of Art. Take it up where you will, this history is nothing but the successive unfolding of a truer conception of Nature, only speaking here the language of form and color, instead of words. It is this that lies at the bottom of all its revolutions, and appears in its downfall as well as in its prosperity.

Where the human form is the theme, the aim must of course be to give its typical perfection. No naturalist describes the defects of his specimens, though it may happen that all are imperfect. Comparatively few persons ever saw our robin in the plumage in which it is always described. Only in early spring, not very commonly then, is the black of the head and tail seen pure. But no one hesitates to call this the true color. The sculptor does not reproduce the peculiarities of his model, but aims to give ideal form as the most natural form of man.

But in Painting, and especially in Landscape, it seems less easy to fix upon any ideal, not only from the multifariousness of the details, but, above all, from the elusiveness of the standard. We might agree upon an ideal of human beauty, but hardly upon the ideal of anything else. The sophist in the Hippias Major was prepared to define the beauty of a maiden, or of a mare; but he was confounded when it was required that the beauty of a pipkin should be deducible from the same principle, and yet worse when it was shown to involve that a wooden spoon was more beautiful than a gold one.

What you see in the woods and mountains depends on what you go for and what you carry with you. We may go to them as to a quarry or a wood-pile, or for pleasantness,--the cool spring and the plane-tree shade, as the ancients did,--or to see fine trees, waterfalls, mountains. To many persons the beauty of any scene is measured by its abundance in such _specimens_ of streams, mountains, waterfalls, etc. Of course the connection is demonstrable enough: one collocation of features is more readily suggestive of beauty than another. We expect to find the scenery of a hill-country more attractive than a sand-desert. But comparing a landscape with a statue, or even Painting generally with Sculpture, the connection between a happy effect and any definite arrangement of lines is much looser, and depends on the combination rather than the ingredients. It is in every one's experience that an accidental light, or even an accidental susceptibility, will impart to the meagrest landscape--a bare marsh, a scraggy hill-pasture--a charm of which the separate features, or the whole, at another time, give no hint. Often mere bareness, openness, absence of objects, will arouse a deeper feeling than the most famous scenes. We learn from such experiences that the difference between one patch of earth and another is wholly superficial, and indicates not so much anything in it as a greater or less dulness in us. The celebrated panoramas and points of view are not the favorite haunts of great painters. They do not need to travel far for their subjects. Mr. Ruskin tells us that Turner did not paint the high Alps, nor the _cumulus_, the grandest form of cloud. Calame gives us the nooks and lanes, the rocks and hills, of Switzerland, rather than the high peaks; Lambinet, an apple-orchard, a row of pollard-elms, or a weedy pond,--not cataracts or forests. This is not affectation or timidity, but an instinct that the famous scenes are no breaks in the order of Nature,--that what is seen in them is visible elsewhere as well, only not so obvious, and that the office of Art is not to parrot what is already distinct, but to reveal it where it is obscure. This makes the inspiration of the artist; this is the source of all his power, and alone distinguishes him from the topographer and view-maker.

This transcendentalism is more evident in Painting, as the later and more developed form; but it is common to all Art, and may be read also in the Greek sculptures. The experience of every one who with some practice of eye comes for the first time to see the best antiques is not that he falls at once to admiring the perfection of their anatomy, and wondering at the symmetry and complete development of the men and women of those days, but rather that he is carried away from all comparison and criticism into a solitude from which returning he discovers that his previous acquaintance with Sculpture was with masks only, and that the meaning of plastic art as a capital interest of the human mind is now for the first time made known to him. He sees that it was no whim of the Greeks, but an instinct of the infinity it typifies, that made them take the human form as alone possessing beauty enough to stand by itself. Not the images of their deities alone, but all their statues were gods. The charm of the Lizard-Slayer of Praxiteles, or of those immortal riders that swept along the friezes of the Parthenon, is something quite distinct from the beauty of a naked boy playing with an arrow, or a troop of Athenian citizens on horseback. These are the deathless forms of the happy Olympians, high above the cares and turmoil of the finite, self-centred and independent. It is the Paradise age of the world, before the knowledge of good and evil, before sin and death came; the worship of the Visible, when God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. Hence the air of repose, of eternal duration, that marks these figures. They have nothing to regret or to hope, no past or future, but only a timeless existence.

It is from this essential self-sufficingness, not from fancied rules, that Sculpture is limited with respect to dramatic expression, that is, expression of passing feeling, accidental action, not identified with the form. In the best period the first requisite was that the interest should be thoroughly identified with the shape in which it is manifested, and not imparted, as by history, association, etc. The decline began when this lofty isolation was felt as negative, needing to have interest and expression added to it. But whatever was added only emphasized without curing the defect. Even the "awful diagonal" of the Laocoön and the godlike triumph of the Belvedere Apollo show a lower age. Why triumph, if he was supreme before? These are casual incidents only, examples of what might happen as well to anybody, not the adequate conclusive embodiment of an idea. The more elaborately the meaning is wrought into the form, the more evident that they are not originally identical.

In Modern Sculpture this deification of the human form is either expressly banished from the artist's aim, or at least he is not quite in earnest with it. For instance, in Mr. Palmer's White Captive,--exhibited not long since in Boston,--the sculptor's account of his work is, that it portrays an American girl captured by Indians and bound to a tree. We have to take with us the history and the circumstances: a Christian woman of the nineteenth century, dragged from her civilized home and helpless in the hands of savages. This is not at all incidental to the work, but the work is incidental to it. It is a story which the figure helps to tell. This is no universal type of womanhood, nor even American womanhood. American women do not stand naked in the streets, but go about clothed and active on their errands of duty and pleasure; if we must needs represent one naked, we must invent some such accident, some extraordinary dislocation of all usual relations and circumstances. In place of the antique harmony of character and situation, we have here a painful incongruity that no study or skill can obviate.

Nor has Modern Sculpture any better success, when, instead of the pretence of history, it adopts the pretence of personification. Its highest result in this direction is, perhaps, Thorwaldsen's bas-relief of Night,--a pretty parlor-ornament. There is a fatal sense of unreality about works of this kind that even Thorwaldsen's genius was unable to remove. They are toys, and it seems rather flat to have toys so cumbrous and so costly.

The reason of this insipidity is, that the ideality aimed at is all on the outside. There is no soul in these bodies, but only an abstraction; and so the body remains an abstraction, too. In each case the radical defect is the same, namely, that the interest is external to the form: they do not coalesce, but are only arbitrarily connected. We cannot have these ideal forms, because we do not believe in them. We do not believe in gods and goddesses, but in men and women; that is, we do not at last really identify the character with its manifestation. Such was the fascination of beauty to the Greek mind, that it banished all other considerations. What mattered it to Praxiteles whether his Satyr was a useful member of society or not, or whether the young Apollo stood thus idle and listless for an instant or for a millennium, as long as he was so beautiful? And the charm so penetrated their works that something of it reaches down even to us, and holds us as long as we look upon them. But as soon as we quit the magic circle, the illusion vanishes,--Apollo is a handsome vagabond whom we incline to send about his business. He ought to be slaying Pythons and drying up swamps, instead of loitering here.

We do not believe in gods, nor quite as the ancients did in heroes,--but in representative men, that is, in ideas, and in men as representing them. Washington is not to us what Achilles or Agamemnon was to the Greeks. The form of Achilles would do as well for a god; the antiquaries do not know whether the Ludovisi Mars was not an Achilles,--perhaps nobody ever knew. But in all our veneration of Washington, it is not his person we revere, but his virtues,--precisely the impersonal part of him, or his person only from association. There is nothing incongruous in this association as it exists in the mind, any more than there would have been in his presence, because of the overpowering sense of his character and history, to which all the outward show of the man is constantly subordinate. But if we isolate this by making a statue of him, we have only an apotheosis of cocked-hat and small-clothes, in which we see what it really was to us. This awkward prominence of the costume does not come from the accident of modern dress, but from our unconscious repugnance to petrifying the man in one of his aspects. It is a touch of grave humor in the genius of Art, thus to give us just what we ask for, though not what we want.

The Greeks could have portrait-statues, because all they looked for in the man they saw in his form, and, seeing it, could portray it. If the modern sculptor truly saw in the figure of Washington all that the name means to him, he could make a statue worthy to be placed by the side of the Sophocles and the Phocion. These were true portraits, no doubt; thus it was that these men appeared to their fellow-citizens; but it does not follow that they would have appeared so to us. What they saw is there; it is a reality both for them and for us; but the literal identification of it with the form belongs to them, not to us, and our mimicry of it can result only in these abstraction's. For us it is elsewhere, beyond these finite shapes, on which, by an illusion, it seemed to rest. The Greek statues are tropes, which we gladly allow in their original use, but, repeated, they become flat and pedantic. Hence the air of caricature in modern portrait-statues; for caricature does not necessarily imply falsification, but only that what is given is insisted on at the expense of more important truth.

To the view of the early Christian ages, too, the body is old clothes, ready to be cast off at any moment, good only as means to something higher. It might seem that Christianity should give a higher value to the body, since it was believed to have been inhabited by God himself. But the Passion was a fact of equal importance with the Incarnation. This honor could be allowed to matter only for an instant, and on the condition of immediate resumption. That the Highest should suffer death as a man might well seem to the Greeks foolishness. To the understanding it is the utmost conceivable contradiction. Yet it is only a more complete statement of what is involved in the Greek worship of beauty. _The complete incarnation of Spirit_, which is the definition of beauty, demands equally that there be no point it does not inhabit, and none in which it abides. The transience of things is no defect in them, but only the affirmation of their reality through the incessant casting-off of its inadequate manifestations. It is not from the excellence, but from the impotence of its nature, that the stone endures and does not pass away as the plant and the animal. The higher the organization, the more rapid and thorough the circulation.

The same truth holds in Art, also, and drives it to forsake these beautiful petrifactions and seek an expression less bound to the material. Ideal form is good so far as it brings together in one compact image what in Nature is scattered and partial; but it is an ideality of the surface only, not of the substance. It shuts out the defect of this or that form, but not of Form itself. The Greek ideal is after all _a thing_, and its impassive perfection a stony death.

The justification is, that the sculptor did not say quite what he meant. He said flesh, but he meant spirit, and this is what the Greek statues mean to us. The modern sculptor does not mean spirit, and knows that he does not; and so, with all his efforts, he gives us only the outside. Is it asked, Whence this divorce of flesh and spirit? why not give both at once as Nature does? Then we must do as Nature does, and make our forms as fluid as hers. But this the sculptor contravenes at the outset. To follow Nature, he should make his statue of snow. To make it of stone is to pretend that the form is something of itself. This the Greeks never meant, for then it would follow that all parts of it were alike significant. Haydon was delighted to find reproduced in the Elgin marbles certain obscure and seeming insignificant details of the anatomy that later schools had overlooked, such as a fold of skin under the armpit of the Neptune, etc. But any beginner at a life-school could have pointed out in the same statue endless deficiencies in anatomical detail. The fold was put in, not because it was there, but because to the mind of the Greek artist it meant something. Sculptors of the present day comfort themselves with the belief that their works are more complete and more accurate in the anatomy than the antique. Very likely, for the ancients did not dissect. But this accuracy, if it is founded on no interest beyond accuracy, is after all an impertinence.

The Greek ideal is founded on the exclusion of accident. It is a declaration that the casual shape is not the true form; it is only a step farther to the perception that all shape is casual,--the reality seen, not in it, but through it. The ideal is then no longer perfect shape, but transparency to the sentiment; the image is not sought to be placed before the beholder's eyes, but painted as it were in his mind. Henceforth, suggestion only is aimed at, not representation; the coöperation of the spectator is relied upon as the indispensable complement of the design. The Zeus of Phidias seemed to the Greeks, Plotinus says, Zeus himself, as he would be, if he chose to appear to human eyes. But a Crucifixion is of itself not at all what the artist meant. It is not the agony of the flesh, but the triumph of the spirit, that is intended to be portrayed. If the end be attained, the slighter and more unpromising the means the better. Thus a new scale of values is established; nothing is worthy or unworthy of itself; nothing is excluded, but also in nothing is the interest identified with the thing, but imparted.

Christian Art, after mere tradition had died out,--for instance, in the Byzantine and early Italian pictures from the eighth to the middle of the thirteenth century,--presents the strongest contrast to all that had gone before. The morose and lifeless monotony or barbarous rudeness of these figures seems like contempt not only of beauty, but of all natural expression. They are meaningless of themselves, and quite indifferent to the character they represent, which is appended to them by inscriptions,--their relative importance, even, indicated only by size, more or less splendor of costume, etc., but the faces all alike, and no attempt made to adapt the action to the occasion. It is another world they belong to; the present they pointedly renounce and disdain, condescending to communicate with it only indirectly and by signs.

The main peculiarities were common to Painting and Sculpture, though most noticeable in Painting. An interest in the actual world seems never so far lost sight of, and earlier revived, in Sculpture. Even down to the spring-tide of Modern Art in the thirteenth century, the "pleasant days" when Guido of Siena was painting his Madonna, the improvement in Painting was rather a stirring within the cerements of conventional types, a flush on the cheek of the still rigid form,--while in the bas-reliefs of the Pisan sculptors we meet already a realism as much in excess of the antique as the Byzantine fell short of it.

It is commonly said that Nicola Pisano revived Art through study of the antique; his models, even, are pointed out, particularly a sarcophagus, said to have been brought to Pisa in the eleventh century from Greece. But this sarcophagus, wherever it came from, is not Greek, but late Roman work; and we find in Nicola no mark of direct Greek influence, but only of the late Roman and early Christian sarcophagus-sculptures. In the reliefs upon his celebrated pulpit at Pisa we have the same short-legged, large-headed, indigenous Italian or Roman figures, and the same arrangement of hair, draperies, etc., as on those sarcophagi. Taken by themselves, his works would, no doubt, indicate a new direction. But by the side of his son Giovanni, or the sculptors of the Northern cathedrals, he seems to belong to the third century rather than to the thirteenth.

In Giovanni Pisano the new era was distinctly announced. The Inferno, usually ascribed to him, among the reliefs on the front of Orvieto Cathedral,[1] and in his noble pulpit at Pistoia, shows the traces of the antique only in unimportant details, ornamentation, etc. The antique served him, no doubt, as a hint to independent study, but the whole intent is different,--all the beauties and all the defects arrived at by a different road. In place of the impassive Minos of the Shades, we have a fiend, serpent-girt,[2] his judicial impartiality enforced apparently against his will by manacles and anklets of knotted snakes; and throughout, instead of the calm impersonality of the Greek, dealing out the typical forms of things like a law of Nature, we have the restless, intense, partisan, modern man, not wanting in tenderness, but full of a noble scorn at the unworthiness of the world, and grasping at a reality beyond it. He is intent, first of all and at all risks, upon vivid expression, upon telling the story, and speedily outruns the possibilities of his material. He must make his creatures alive to the last superficies; and as he cannot give them motion, he puts an emphasis upon all their bones, sinews, veins, and wrinkles,--every feather is carved, and even the fishes under the water show their scales. That mere literalness is not the aim is shown by the open disregard of it elsewhere; for instance, the size of each figure is determined, not by natural rules, but by their relative importance, so that in the Nativity, Mary is twice as large as Joseph and three times as large as the attendants. And the detail is not everywhere equally minute, but follows the intensity of the theme, reaching its height in the lower compartment, where the damned are in suffering, and especially in the figures of the fiends. This is no aim at literalness, but a struggle for an emphasis beyond the reach of Sculpture,--taking these means in despair of others, and, in its thirst for expression, careless alike of natural probability, typical perfection of form, and pleasing effect. Different as it seems, the same spirit is at work here and in Painting. In both it is the repudiation of the classic ideal,--in Sculpture by a _reductio ad absurdum_, putting its implicit claims to the test of realization,--in Painting by mere negation, as was natural at the outset of a new career, before the means of any positive expression were discovered.

Ideal form was to the Greeks the highest result, the success of the universe. The end of Art was conceived as Nature's end as well, whether actually attained or not. Nor was this preference of certain forms arbitrary, but it followed the plain indications written on every particle of matter. What we call brute matter is whatever is means only, not showing any individuality, or end within itself. A handful of earth is definable only by its chemical or physical properties, which do not distinguish it, but confound it with other things. By itself it is only so much phosphate or silicate, and can come to be something only in a foreign organism, a plant or an animal. In form is seen the dawning of individuality, and just as the thing rises in the scale the principle of form becomes dominant. The handful of earth is sufficiently described by the chemist's formula,--these ingredients make this substance. But an organic body cannot be so described. The chemist's account of sugar, for instance, is C^{6} H^{10} O^{5}. But if we ask what starch is, we have, again, C^{6} H^{10} O^{5},--and the cellular tissue of plants, also, is the same. These things, then, as far as he knows, are identical. Evidently, he is beyond his depth, and the higher we go in the scale the less he has to say to the purpose,--the separate importance of the material ingredients constantly decreasing, and the importance of their definite connection increasing, as the reference to an individual centre predominates over helpless gravitation. First, aggregation about a centre, as in the crystal,--then, arrangement of the parts, as upper, under, and lateral, as in the plant,--then, organization of these into members. Form is the self-assertion of the thing as no longer means only; this makes its attractiveness to the artist. The root of his delight in ideal form is that it promises some finality amid the endless maze of matter. But this higher completeness, which is beauty, whether it happen to exist or not, is never the immediate aim of Nature. It is everywhere implied, but nowhere expressed; for Nature is unwearied in producing, but negligent of the product. As soon as the end seems anywhere about to be attained, it is straightway made means again to something else, and so on forever. The earth and the air hasten to convert themselves into a plant, the flower into fruit, the fruit into flesh, and the animal at last to die and give back again to the air and the earth what they have transmitted to him. Whatever beauty a thing has is by the way, not as the end for which it exists, and so it is left to be baffled and soiled by accident. This is the "jealousy of the gods," that could not endure that anything should exist without some flaw of imperfection to confess its mortal birth.

The world is full of beauty, but as it were hinted,--as in the tendency to make the most conspicuous things the most beautiful, as flowers, fruits, birds, the insects of the sunshine, the fishes of the surface, the upper side of the leaf; and perhaps more distinctly (in accordance with Lord Bacon's suggestion that "Nature is rather busy not to err, than in labor to produce excellency") in the tendency to hide those that are ugly, as toads, owls, bats, worms, insects that flee the light, the fishes of the bottom, the intestines of animals. But these are hints only, and Nature, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, will sometimes introduce "not ugliness only, but ugliness in the wrong place." Were beauty the aim, it should be most evident in her chief products; whereas it is in things transient, minute, subordinate,--flowers, snow-flakes, the microscopic details of structure,--that it meets us most invariably, rather than in the higher animals or in man. Nor in man does it keep pace with his civilization, but obeys laws that belong to the lower regions of his nature.

This ambiguity of every fact in Nature comes from the difficulty of detecting its true connection. There is reality _there_, even in blight and corruption; something is forwarded, only perhaps not the thing before us,--as the virtue of the compost-heap appears not in it, but in the rose-bed. The artist cannot forego a jot of reality, but the obvious facts are not this, any more than the canvas and the pigment are the picture. The prose of every-day life is reality in fragments,--the Alps split into paving-stones,--Achilles with a cold in the head. Seen in due connection, they make up the reality; but their prominence as they occur is casual and shifting, and the result dependent on the spectator's power of discerning, amid the endless series in which they are involved, more or less of their vital relations.

Art is not to be blamed for idealizing, for this is only completing what Nature begins. But the completion of the design is also its limitation. It is final to the artist as well as to the theme, and cannot yield to further expansion. In Nature there is no such pretence of finality, and so her work, though never complete, is never convicted of defect. Her circuits are never closed; she does not aim to cure the defect in the thing, but in something else. Each in turn she abandons, and appeals to a future success, which never is, but always about to be. The reason is, that the scope of each is wider than immediately appears. It is not simple completeness that is aimed at, but ascent to higher levels, so that the consummation it demands, if granted, would cut it off from more vital connections elsewhere. The ideal of the crystal seems to be clearness and regularity, but better things are in store for it. It must become opaque and shapeless in order to be fitted for higher transformations. The leaf must be cramped to make the flower. Homer's heroes must hoe potatoes and keep shop before the higher civilization of the race can be reached.

The Greek ideal is an endeavor to ignore the imperfections of natural existence. The ideal life is to be rich, strong, powerful, eloquent, high-born, famous. It was a glorification of the earthly, not by transcending, but by keeping its limitations out of sight. But this is only making the limitation essential and irrevocable, so that it infects the ideal also, which in this very avoidance submits to recognize it. The statue is not _less_, but more, a thing than the natural body. Life is not mere exclusion of decay, but organization of it, so that the fury of corruption passes into fresh vital power. It is a cycle of changes, the type and show of which are the circulation, constantly removing effete particles and building up new, and therein giving its hue to the flesh. But sculpture supposes the current checked, and one aspect fit to stand for all the rest. The statue is not only a particle, but an isolated particle, and must first of all divert attention from its fragmentariness. Mr. Garbett has remarked that plants should not be copied in sculpture, because the plant is not seen entire, but is partly hidden in the ground. But the point is not the being seen or not, but the suggestion of incompleteness. The same remark applies to animals, and even to man, unless his relations to the world, as an individual among individuals, can be kept out of sight.

But the finite thus isolated is not honored, but degraded. This stagnant perfection is atrophy,--as some poisons are said to kill by arresting the transformation of the tissues, and so to preserve them at the expense of their life. The new era is marked by the perception that these shortcomings are not accidental, but inherent and intended. The chasm is not to be bridged or avoided,--or, as Plato says, the human to become godlike by taking away here and adding there,--but remains a radical incongruity of Nature, never to be escaped from. It brings death and dissolution to the fair shapes of the earlier world,--for the worship of form is justified only so long as the mind thinks forms and not ideas.

The statue may embody an infinite meaning, but to the artist form and meaning are one. It is not a sentiment that he puts into this shape, but it is the shape itself that inspires him. The symbolism of Greek Art was the discovery of a later age. We know what is meant by Circe and Athene, but Homer did not. It was thus only that the Greek mind could grasp ideas,--this is the thoroughly _artistic_ character of that people. Their philosophers were always outlaws. What excited the rage of the Athenians against Socrates was his endeavor to detach religion from the images of the gods. When it comes to comparisons between meaning and expression, as adequate or inadequate, it is evident their unity is gone;--the meaning is first, and the expression only adjunct or illustration. It did not impair the sacredness of the Greek deities that they were the work of the poets and sculptors. But the second Nicene Council forbade as impious any images of Christ as God, and allowed only his human nature to be represented,--a strange decree, if the Church had realized its own doctrine, that the humanity of Christ is as real as his divinity. But the meaning is, that the finite is not there to stand for the infinite, but only to indicate it negatively and indirectly,--that its glory is not to persist in its finiteness, not to hold on to its form, but to be transformed. The figure of Thersites would be very unsuitable for Achilles, but is suitable enough for a saint; it was a pardonable exaggeration to make it even more suitable.

The hero is now the saint; the ideal life a life of poverty, humility, weakness, labor,--to be long-suffering, to despise and forsake the world. The present life, the heaven of Achilles, is now Hades, the forced abode of phantoms having no reality but what is given to them by religion, and the Hades of the Greek the only true and substantial world. The new church fled the light of the sun, and sought impatiently to bury itself in the tomb. The Roman catacombs were not the mere refuge of a persecuted sect,--their use as places of worship continued long after such need had ceased. But "among the graves" they found the point nearest to the happy land beyond, and the silence and the darkness made it easier to ignore for the few miserable moments that yet remained the vain tumult of the surface. In such a mood the beauty of the outward could awaken no delight, but only suspicion and aversion. Not the earth and its glories, but the fading of these before the unseen and eternal, was the only possible inspiration of Art. The extreme of this direction we see in the Iconoclasm of the eighth century, but it has never completely died out. Gibbon tells us of a Greek priest who refused to receive some pictures that Titian had painted for him, because they were too real:--"Your scandalous figures," said he, "stand quite out from the canvas; they are as bad as a group of statues." It is a tenderness towards the idea, lest it should be dishonored by actuality. Matter is gross, obscure, evil, an obstacle to spirit,--and material existence tolerable only as momentary, vanishing, and, as it were, under constant protest, and with the suspicion that the Devil has a hand in it. It belongs especially to the Oriental mind, and its logical result is the Buddhist heaven of annihilation.

The defect of this view is not that it is too ideal, but that it is not ideal enough. It is an incomplete idealism that through weakness of faith does not hold fast its own point of view, and so does not dispose of matter, but leaves it outside, as negation, obstacle. The body is allowed to exist, but remains in disgrace and reduced to the barest indication. But it is honoring matter far too much to allow that it can be an obstacle. It is no obstacle, for it is _nothing_ of itself. Rightly understood, this contempt of the body is directed only against the false emphasis placed upon single aspects or manifestations. It is a feeling that the true ideal is not thus shut up in a forced exception, as if it were the subtilized product of a distillation whereby the earthly is to be purged of its dross; but that it is the all-pervading reality, which the finite can neither hinder nor help, but only obey, which death and corruption praise, which establishes itself through imperfection and transience.

Gibbon, speaking of the Iconoclasts, says,--"The Olympian Jove, created by the muse of Homer and the chisel of Phidias, might inspire a philosophic mind with momentary devotion; but these Catholic images were faintly and flatly delineated by monkish artists in the last degeneracy of taste and genius." Such comparisons mistake the point. These are not parallel attempts, but opposed from the outset. The "Catholic image" was a declaration that the problem cannot be solved in that way. An early legend relates, that a painter, undertaking to copy his Christ from a statue of Jove, had his hand suddenly withered. The attempt is accused because of the pretence it makes to coordinate body and spirit, Nature and God,--as if one configuration of matter were more godlike than another. The figure of the god claims to complete what Nature has _partly_ done. But now the world is seen to be not merely the product of Mind working upon Matter, but the Creation of God out of nothing,--thus altogether His, in one part as much as in another. The only conceivable separateness, antagonism, is that of the sinful Will, setting itself up in its vanity; this it must be that arrogates to itself the ability to _represent_ its Creator.

The Christian image is without form or comeliness,--rejects all outward graces, seemingly glories in abasement and deformity, fearing only to attribute to Matter some value of its own.

Henceforth the connection is no longer at arm's-length, as of the workman and the material. Resistance to limitation is changed into joyful acceptance; for it is not in the limitation, but in the resistance, that the misery of earth consists. The quarrel with imperfection is over. The finite shall neither fortify itself in its finiteness, nor seek to abolish it, but only make it the willing instrument of universal ends. Thus the true self first exists, and no longer needs to be extenuated or apologised for.

The key-note of all this is contained in those verses of the "Dies Iræ,"--

"Quærens _me_ sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus; Tantus labor non sit cassus."

Here we have in its compactest expression the difference between this age and the classic: that I, the vilest of sinners, am the object of God's highest care,--not the failure and mistake I seem, not the slag and refuse of Nature's working, but the object of this most stupendous mystery of the Divine economy. It is no purification or idealizing that is needed,--any such attempt must be abomination,--but a new birth of the self, by devotion of it to the purpose for which it was made.

The astounding discovery is slowly realized, and the statement of it difficult, from the need to distinguish between the true self and the false, and to declare that this importance belongs to the individual in virtue of his spiritual nature alone. The sainthood of the saint is not to be confounded with his personality. What have his virtues to do with his gown and shoes? what, indeed, with his natural disposition, as courageous, irascible, avaricious? The difficulty is pervading, not to be avoided; every aspect of him reveals only what is external, dies from him daily, and, if isolated, has already lost its meaning. It is only in his work, in his connection with the world, that we see him truly. Accordingly, the statue becomes the group, and the group a member of a series, a cycle in which each is incomplete without the rest. The classic ideal is shivered into fragments, all to be taken together to make up the meaning. Of the hundreds of statues and reliefs that surround the great Northern cathedrals, (Didron counts eighteen hundred upon the outside of Chartres,--nine thousand in all, carved or painted, inside and outside,) each has its appointed place in the sacred _epos_ in stone that unfolds about the building from left to right of the beholder the history of the world from the Creation to the Judgment, and subordinated in parallel symbolism the daily life of the community, whatever occupied and interested men,--their virtues and vices, trades and recreations, the seasons and the elements, jokes, even, and sharp hits at the great and at the clergy, scenes from popular romances, and the radicalism of Reynard the Fox,--in short, all that touched the mind of the age, an impartial reflex of the great drama of life, wherein all exists alike to the glory of God.

It is not the glory of earth that is here celebrated. M. Didron says the statues which the mob pulled down from the churches, at the first French Revolution, as the images of their kings, were the kings and heroes of the Old Testament. Had they known this, it might not have saved the statues, but it shows how wide a gulf separated these men from their fathers, that their hands were not held by some instinct that here was the first hint of the fundamental idea of Democracy,--the sovereign importance of man, not as powerful, wise, beautiful, not in virtue of any chance advantage of birth, but in virtue of his religious nature, of the infinite possibilities he infolds.

The need to indicate that the source of value is not the accident of Nature, but Nature redeemed, regenerated by spirit, that all values are moral values, led to a certain abstractness of treatment,--on one side qualities to be embodied, on the other figures to receive them, so that the character seems adventitious, detachable, not thoroughly at one with the form. For instance, the fiends in the Orvieto Inferno are not terror embodied, as the Jove of Phidias embodied dignity and command; but the terrific is accumulated on the outside of them, as tusks, claws, etc. One can easily believe that the ancient sculptors, had it been lawful, could have put more horror into the calm features of a Medusa than is contained in all this apparatus and grimace. The concreteness of the antique, the form and meaning existing only for each other, is gone; the union is _occasional_ only, and needs to be certified and kept up afresh on every new occasion. The form must assert itself, must show itself alive and quick, not the dead sign of a meaning that has fled. It would have been a poor compliment to a Greek sculptor to say that his work was life-like; he might answer with the classically disposed visitor of the Elgin marbles in Haydon's anecdote,--"Like life! Well, what of that?" He meant it for something much better. But during the Middle Ages this is constantly the highest encomium. Amid the utmost rudeness of conception and of execution, we see the first trace of awakening Art in the unmistakable effort to indicate that the figures are alive; and in the cathedral-sculpture of the best time this is still a leading characteristic. Even the single statues have for their outlines curves of contrary flexure, expressing motion; they seem to wave in the air, and their faces to glow with passing emotion. The animals are often uncouth, but the more life-like; a turn of the head or of the eye, a restless, unbalanced attitude, brings us nearer to the actual living creature than the magnificent repose of the antique lions and eagles,--as if they did not trust to our recognizing their character, but were prepared to demonstrate it with beak and claws. Even in the plants, though strictly conventionalized, it is the freedom and spring of their lines that more than anything else characterizes them and defies copying.

The world of matter, being no longer endowed with independent reality, is no longer felt as a contamination incurred by the idea in its descent into existence. The discrepancy is not final, so that the supremacy of the spirit is not shown by resistance, but by taking it to heart, carrying it out, and thereby overcoming it. In a Crucifixion of the twelfth century, Life is figured on one side crowned and victorious, and on the other Death overcome and slain. The finiteness of the finite is not the barrier, but the liberation, of the infinite.

But the statue remains stone; this unmeaning emphasis of weight and bulk, though diminished, is not to be got rid of. The life that sculpture can give is superficial and abstract, does not penetrate and possess the work; it is still the petrifaction of an instant, that does not instantly pass away, but remains as a contradiction to the next. It is the struggle against this fixity that gives to the sculpture of the Renaissance its aspect of unrest, of disdain of the present, of endless unsatisfied search. Hence the air of conflict that we see in Giovanni Pisano, and still more in later times,--the sculptor going to the edge of what the stone will allow, and beyond it, and, still unsatisfied, seeking through all means to indicate a yet unexecuted possibility. It is this that seethes in those strange, intense, unearthly figures of Donatello's, wasted as by internal fire,--the rage for an expression that shall at the same time declare its own insufficiency.

All that is done only makes the failure more evident. The fixity continues, and is only deepened into contortion and grimace. What we see is the effort alone. Hence in modern statues the uneasy, self-distrustful appeal to the spectator, in place of the lofty indifference of the antique. In Michel Angelo the same striving to indicate something in reserve, not expended, led to the exaggerated emphasis of certain parts, (as the length of the neck, depth of the eye-sockets, etc.,) and of general muscularity,--a show of _force_, that gave to the Moses the build of a Titan, and to the Christ of the Last Judgment the air of a gladiator. Michel Angelo often seems immersed in mere anatomy and academic _tours de force_, especially in his later works. He seems to see in the subject only a fresh problem in attitude, foreshortening, muscular display,--and this not only where he invents, but also where he borrows,--sometimes most strangely overlooking the sentiment; as in the figure of Christ, which he borrows from Orcagna and the older painters, even to the position of the arms, but with the touching gesture of reproof perverted into a savage menace; or in the Expulsion, taken almost line for line from Masaccio, but with the infinite grief expressed in Adam's figure turned into melodrama by showing his face.

It was not for the delight of the eye, nor from over-reverence of the matter-of-fact. He despised the copying of models, as the makeshift of ignorance. His profound study of anatomy was not for greater accuracy of imitation, but for greater license of invention. Of grace and pleasingness he became more and more careless, until he who at twenty had carved the lovely angel of S. Domenico, came at last to make all his men prize-fighters and his women viragos. It is clear that we nowhere get his final meaning,--that he does not fairly get to his theme at all, but is stopped at the outset, and loses himself in the search for a mode of expression more adequate to that "immense beauty" ever present to his mind,--so that the matter in hand occupies him only in its superficial aspects. What he sought on all hands, in his endless questioning of the human frame, his impatience of drapery, the furious haste to reach the live surface, and the tender modulation of it when it is reached, was to make the flesh itself speak and reveal the soul present at all points alike and at once. Nothing could have satisfied him but to impart to the marble itself that omnipresence of spirit of which animal life furnishes the hint. In this Titanic attempt the means were in open and direct contradiction to the end. It was a violation of the wise moderation of Sculpture, whose rigid and colorless material pointedly declines a rivalry it could not sustain. Else why not color the stone? The hue of flesh is the most direct assertion of life, but at the same time a direct negative to that totality and emphasis of the particular shape on which Sculpture relies. The color of the flesh comes from its transparency to the circulation,--the eternal flux of matter coming to the surface in this its highest form. It is the display in matter itself of what its true nature is,--not to resist, but to embody change,--to reduce itself to mere appearance, and be taken up without residuum in the momentary manifestation, and then at once give place to fresh manifestations.

That the earlier practice of coloring statues was given up just when the need would seem to be the greatest shows its incompatibility with the fundamental conditions of the art. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries statues were still painted and gilded. Afterwards, color is restricted to parts not directly affected by the circulation, the hair and the eyes; and at last, when Sculpture is given over to pictorial effect and is about to yield entirely to Painting, it is wholly relinquished. Evidently it was felt that to color a statue in imitation of flesh would only enforce the fact that it is stone.

What Art was now aiming at was not the mere appearance of life, but a unity like that which life gives, in place of the abstractness and partiality inherent in Sculpture. This makes the interest of the fact of life,--that it is the presence of the soul,--the unity established amid the sundered particularity of matter. In free motion a new centre is declared, whereby the inertia of the body, its gravitation to a centre outside of it, is set aside. In sensibility this new centre declares itself supreme, superseding the passive indifference of extension. The whole pervades each part, each testifies to the whole and may stand for it. But the statue, having no such internal unity, is less able to dispense with outward completeness. All the sides must be given, so that the whole cannot be seen at one view, but only successively, as an aggregate.

In the earlier Greek statues the head remains lifeless, abstract, whilst the limbs are full of expression. In a contrary spirit, more akin to modern ideas, the Norse myth relates that Skadi, having her choice of a husband from among all the gods, but having to choose by the feet alone, meaning to take Baldur, got by mistake Niordr, an inferior deity. This does not seem so strange to us; but a Greek would have wondered that the daughter of a wise Titan should not know the feet of Apollo from those of Nereus. It was said of Taglioni that she put mind into her legs. But to the modern way of thinking this is clearly exceptional. It is in the face, and especially in the eye, that we look to see the soul present and at work, and not merely in its effects as character. As types of character, the lineaments of the face were explored by the later Greek Art as profoundly as the rest of the body. But the statue is sightless,--its eyes do not meet ours, but seem forever brooding over a world into which the present and its interests do not enter. To the Greek this was no defect; but to us the omission seems to affect the most vital point of all, since our conception of the soul involves its eternity, that is, that it lives always in the present, is not too fine to exist, secure that it is bound neither by past nor future, but capable of revolutionizing the character at all moments. Here is the ground of the remarkable difference that meets us already in the reliefs of the later classic times. In the reliefs of the best age the figures are always in profile and in action. Complete personification being out of the question, it is expressly avoided,--each figure waives attention to itself, merges itself in the plot. Later, when the profounder idea of a personality that does not isolate or degrade has begun to make itself felt, this constraint is given up,--the figures face the spectator, and enter as it were into relation with the actual world.

The Church very early expressed this feeling of the higher significance of the head, by allowing it to be sufficient if the head alone were buried in holy ground. In Art it is naïvely indicated by exaggerated size of the head and of the eyes,--a very common trait of the earlier times, and not quite obsolete at the time of the Pisani. This clumsy expedient is relinquished, but the need it indicated continued, without the possibility of finding any complete satisfaction in Sculpture, instead of the intensity and directness that Art now insists upon, Sculpture can give only extension and indirect hints; instead of mind present, only its effects and products, with the working cause expressly removed.

This is the ground of the seeming injustice to Sculpture at the time of the Revival. Its relative excellence was undervalued, because what it could do was not quite to the point. While the painters went on producing their antediluvian forms, the sculptors saw things much more as we do,--yet the paintings seemed the most life-like. It is astonishing, when we remember that Nicola was older than Cimabue, Giovanni than Giotto, Ghiberti than Frà Angelico, that the painters did not learn from the sculptors more of the actual appearance of things. It is still more astonishing that it is the painters that get all the praise for accuracy. Vasari is endless in his praises of Giotto, Spinello, Stefano, (called Scimia, or the Ape of Nature,) and a host of others, for accurate imitation. Giovanni Villani boasts that "it is our fellow-citizen Giotto who has portrayed most naturally every form and action." Ghiberti finishes an admiring account of some paintings of Ambrogio Lorenzotto's with the exclamation that it is truly marvellous to think that all this is only a picture. Few persons, probably, would see in the specimens of Ambrogio's work that still remain anything wonderful for resemblance to Nature,--whilst in Ghiberti's everybody acknowledges the astonishing truth of the detail. He tells us that he sought "to imitate Nature as far as was possible to him,"--but he seems not to be aware how much better he succeeded than the people he praises. Paolo Uccello, who was twenty years younger than Ghiberti, got his nickname from his skill in painting birds. But one would rather undertake to paint birds as well as Paolo than to carve them as well as Ghiberti.

We may learn here how little the demand to "imitate Nature" expresses what is intended. No accuracy, however demonstrable, will satisfy it. To interest me in a picture, it is not enough that _something_ is as visible there as it is elsewhere; it must be something that I was already striving to see. It was not a greater circumstantiality of statement than was demanded, but greater directness,--that it should be relieved of what was unessential to its purpose, tending only to obscure it. A painting, however rude, has at least this negative merit, that, by the express substitution of the appearance for the actual image, needless entanglement in the material is avoided. Weight and bulk are not indeed annihilated, but they are no longer of primary importance, and thus less obstructive. The work gains precisely in what it gives up. By the flat omission of depth infinite depth is acquired,--by the ignoring of size the expression of size becomes possible; a mountain, for instance, which would be an absurdity in Sculpture is representable in Painting. Thus, instead of being more abstract than Sculpture, Painting is in truth less so, since what it omits is only negative to the purpose of Art.

It seems to us easier to paint than to carve, and we might expect to find Painting the older art. But the difficulty lies less in the execution than in the conception. Painting is not a tinting of surfaces, but the power to see a complex subject in unity. We may think we have no difficulty in seeing the landscape, but most persons, if called upon to state what they saw, pictorially, would show that they could not see the wood for the trees. Beginners suppose it is some knack of the hand that they are to acquire, when they learn to draw; but that is a small part of the matter; the great difficulty is in the seeing. Ordinary vision is piecemeal: we see the parts; but not the picture, or only vaguely. Even the degree of facility that is implied in any enjoyment of scenery is not so much a matter of course as it seems. Cæsar occupied himself, while crossing the Alps, with composing a grammatical treatise. There is no evidence that there was anything odd in this. Perhaps Petrarch was the first man that ever climbed a hill to enjoy the view. We are not aware how much of what we see in Nature is due to pictures. Hardly any man is so unsophisticated, but that, if he should try to sketch a landscape, he would betray, in what he did or in what he omitted, that he saw it more or less at second-hand, through the interpretations of Art. A portfolio of Calame's or Harding's or Turner's drawings will give us new eyes for the most familiar scenes.

But we are aided still more by our habit of looking at things theoretically, apart from their immediate practical bearing. A savage can comprehend a carved image, but not so readily a picture. An Indian whom Catlin painted with half his face in shadow became the laughingstock of the tribe, as "the man with half a face." It is not necessary to suspect Mr. Catlin's chiaroscuro; what puzzled them was, doubtless, the bringing together in one view what they had seen only separate. They were accustomed to see the man in light and in shadow; but what they cared for, and therefore what they saw, was only the effect in making it more or less easy to recognize him and to ascertain his state of mind, intentions, etc. His face was either visible or obscured; if they could see enough for their purpose, they regarded only that. For it to be both at once was possible only from a point of view which they had not reached. A child takes the shading of the portrait for dirt,--that being the form in which darkening of the face is familiar to him. A carved image is easier comprehended, because it can be handled, turned about, and looked at on different sides, and a material connection thereby assured between the various aspects. To transfer this connection to the mind--to see varying distances in one vertical plane, so that mere gradations of light and shade shall suggest all these aspects arranged and harmonized in one view--is a farther step, and the difficulty increases with the variety embraced. Cicero was struck with this superiority in the artists of his time. "How much," he says, "do painters see in shadow and relief that we do not see!" Yet their perception seems strangely limited to us. The ancients had little notion of perspective. Their eyes were too sure and too well-practised to overlook the effect of position in foreshortening objects, and they were much experienced in the corrections required, and the effect of converging lines in increasing apparent distance was taken advantage of in their theatre-scenes. But they had not learned that the difference between the actual and the apparent form is thorough-going, so that the picture no longer stands in the attitude of passive indifference towards the beholder, but imposes upon him its own point of view. It was thought remarkable in the Minerva of Fabullus, that it had the appearance of always looking at the spectator, from whatever point it was viewed. This would be miraculous in a statue, and must seem so in the picture so long as it is looked upon only as one side of a statue. The wall-paintings of Pompeii, doubtless copies or reminiscences of Greek originals,--with masterly skill in the parts, and with some success in the landscape as far as it was easily reducible to one plane,--are only collections of fragments, and show utter incapacity to see the whole at once as a picture. For instance, in one of the many pictures of Narcissus beholding himself in the well, the head, which is inclined sideways, instead of being simply inverted in the reflection, is reversed,--so that the chin, which is on the spectator's left in the figure, is on the right in the reflected image: as if the artist, knowing no other way, had placed himself head downwards, and in that position had repeated the face as already painted. Such a blunder could not originate with a copyist, for it would have been much easier to copy correctly. It is clear from the general excellence of the figure that it is not the work of an inferior artist. Nor can it have come from mere carelessness; it is too elaborate for that,--and, moreover, here is the main point of the picture, that which tells the story. Doubtless the painter had noticed the pleasingness of such reflections, as repeating the human form, the supreme object of interest; but the interest stopped there. He saw the face above and the face below, as he would see the different sides of a statue; but so incapable was he of perceiving the connection and interdependence of them, that, even when Nature had made the picture for him, he could not see it. This is no isolated, casual mistake, but only a good chance to see what is really universal, though not often so obvious.

In this and other pictures the water is like a bit of looking-glass stuck up in front,--without perspective, without connection with the ground,--the mere assertion of a reflection. The conception embraced only the main figure; the rest was added like a label, for explanation only. These men did not see the landscape as we see it, because the interest was wanting that combines it into a picture for our eyes. Our "love of Nature" would have been incomprehensible and disgusting to a Greek; he would have called our artists "dirt-painters." And from his point of view he would be right. Dirt it is, if we abide by the mere facts. The interest of Art lies not in the facts, but in the truth,--that is, in the facts organized, shown in their place. It is not that we care more about stocks and stones than they did, but that we hold the key to an arrangement that gives these things a significance they have not of themselves.

* * * * *

SNOW.

Lo, what wonders the day hath brought, Born of the soft and slumberous snow! Gradual, silent, slowly wrought,-- Even as an artist, thought by thought, Writes expression on lip and brow.

Hanging garlands the eaves o'erbrim,-- Deep drifts smother the paths below; The elms are shrouded, trunk and limb, And all the air is dizzy and dim With a whirl of dancing, dazzling snow.

Dimly out of the baffled sight Houses and church-spires stretch away; The trees, all spectral and still and white, Stand up like ghosts in the failing light, And fade and faint with the blinded day.

Down from the roofs in gusts are hurled The eddying drifts to the waste below; And still is the banner of storm unfurled, Till all the drowned and desolate world Lies dumb and white in a trance of snow.

Slowly the shadows gather and fall,-- Still the whispering snow-flakes beat; Night and darkness are over all: Rest, pale city, beneath their pall! Sleep, white world, in thy winding-sheet!

Clouds may thicken, and storm-winds breathe; On my wall is a glimpse of Rome,-- Land of my longing!--and underneath Swings and trembles my olive-wreath; Peace and I are at home, at home!

* * * * *

HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.

BY CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD.

II.

I am a frank, open-hearted man, as, perhaps, you have by this time perceived, and you will not, therefore, be surprised to know that I read my last article on the carpet to my wife and the girls before I sent it to the "Atlantic," and we had a hearty laugh over it together. My wife and the girls, in fact, felt that they could afford to laugh, for they had carried their point, their reproach among women was taken away, they had become like other folks. Like other folks they had a parlor, an undeniable best parlor, shut up and darkened, with all proper carpets, curtains, lounges, and marble-topped tables, too good for human nature's daily food; and being sustained by this consciousness, they cheerfully went on receiving their friends in the study, and having good times in the old free-and-easy way; for did not everybody know that this room was not their best? and if the furniture was old-fashioned and a little the worse for antiquity, was it not certain that they had better, which they could use, if they would?

"And supposing we wanted to give a party," said Jane, "how nicely our parlor would light up! Not that we ever do give parties, but if we should,--and for a wedding-reception, you know."

I felt the force of the necessity; it was evident that the four or five hundred extra which we had expended was no more than such solemn possibilities required.

"Now, papa thinks we have been foolish," said Marianne, "and he has his own way of making a good story of it; but, after all, I desire to know if people are never to get a new carpet. Must we keep the old one till it actually wears to tatters?" This is a specimen of the _reductio ad absurdum_ which our fair antagonists of the other sex are fond of employing. They strip what we say of all delicate shadings and illusory phrases, and reduce it to some bare question of fact, with which they make a home-thrust at us.

"Yes, that's it; are people _never_ to get a new carpet?" echoed Jane.

"My dears," I replied, "it is a fact that to introduce anything new into an apartment hallowed by many home-associations, where all things have grown old together, requires as much care and adroitness as for an architect to restore an arch or niche in a fine old ruin. The fault of our carpet was that it was in another style from everything in our room, and made everything in it look dilapidated. Its colors, material, and air belonged to another manner of life, and were a constant plea for alterations; and you see it actually drove out and expelled the whole furniture of the room, and I am not sure yet that it may not entail on us the necessity of refurnishing the whole house."

"My dear!" said my wife, in a tone of remonstrance; but Jane and Marianne laughed and colored.

"Confess, now," said I, looking at them, "have you not had secret designs on the hall- and stair-carpet?"

"Now, papa, how could you know it? I only said to Marianne that to have Brussels in the parlor and that old mean-looking ingrain carpet in the hall did not seem exactly the thing; and, in fact, you know, mamma, Messrs. Ketchem & Co. showed us such a lovely pattern, designed to harmonize with our parlor-carpet."

"I know it, girls," said my wife; "but you know I said at once that such an expense was not to be thought of."

"Now, girls," said I, "let me tell you a story I heard once of a very sensible old New-England minister, who lived, as our country-ministers generally do, rather near to the bone, but still quite contentedly. It was in the days when knee-breeches and long stockings were worn, and this good man was offered a present of a very nice pair of black silk hose. He declined, saying, he 'could not afford to wear them.'

"'Not afford it?' said the friend; 'why, I _give_ them to you.'

"'Exactly; but it will cost me not less than two hundred dollars to take them, and I cannot do it.'

"'How is that?'

"'Why, in the first place, I shall no sooner put them on than my wife will say, "My dear, you must have a new pair of knee-breeches," and I shall get them. Then my wife will say, "My dear, how shabby your coat is! You must have a new one," and I shall get a new coat. Then she will say, "Now, my dear, that hat will never do," and then I shall have a new hat; and then I shall say, "My dear, it will never do for me to be so fine and you to wear your old gown," and so my wife will get a new gown; and then the new gown will require a new shawl and a new bonnet; all of which we shall not feel the need of, if I don't take this pair of silk stockings, for, as long as we don't see them, our old things seem very well suited to each other.'"

The girls laughed at this story, and I then added, in my most determined manner,--

"But I must warn you, girls, that I have compromised to the utmost extent of my power, and that I intend to plant myself on the old stair-carpet in determined resistance. I have no mind to be forbidden the use of the front-stairs, or condemned to get up into my bedroom by a private ladder, as I should be immediately, if there were a new carpet down."

"Why, papa!"

"Would it not be so? Can the sun shine in the parlor now for fear of fading the carpet? Can we keep a fire there for fear of making dust, or use the lounges and sofas for fear of wearing them out? If you got a new entry- and stair-carpet, as I said, I should have to be at the expense of another staircase to get up to our bedroom."

"Oh, no, papa," said Jane, innocently; "there are very pretty druggets, now, for covering stair-carpets, so that they can be used without hurting them."

"Put one over the old carpet, then," said I, "and our acquaintance will never know but it is a new one."

All the female senate laughed at this proposal, and said it sounded just like a man.

"Well," said I, standing up resolutely for my sex, "a man's ideas on woman's matters may be worth some attention. I flatter myself that an intelligent, educated man doesn't think upon and observe with interest any particular subject for years of his life without gaining some ideas respecting it that are good for something; at all events, I have written another article for the 'Atlantic,' which I will read to you."

"Well, wait one minute, papa, till we get our work," said the girls, who, to say the truth, always exhibit a flattering interest in anything their papa writes, and who have the good taste never to interrupt his readings with any conversations in an undertone on cross-stitch and floss-silks, as the manner of some is. Hence the little feminine bustle of arranging all these matters beforehand. Jane, or Jennie, as I call her in my good-natured moods, put on a fresh clear stick of hickory, of that species denominated shag-bark, which is full of most charming slivers, burning with such a clear flame, and emitting such a delicious perfume in burning, that I would not change it with the millionnaire who kept up his fire with cinnamon.

You must know, my dear Mr. Atlantic, and you, my confidential friends of the reading public, that there is a certain magic or spiritualism which I have the knack of in regard to these mine articles, in virtue of which my wife and daughters never hear or see the little personalities respecting _them_ which form parts of my papers. By a particular arrangement which I have made with the elves of the inkstand and the familiar spirits of the quill, a sort of glamour falls on their eyes and ears when I am reading, or when they read the parts personal to themselves; otherwise their sense of feminine propriety would be shocked at the free way in which they and their most internal affairs are confidentially spoken of between me and you, O loving readers.

Thus, in an undertone, I tell you that my little Jennie, as she is zealously and systematically arranging the fire, and trimly whisking every untidy particle of ashes from the hearth, shows in every movement of her little hands, in the cock of her head, in the knowing, observing glance of her eye, and in all her energetic movements, that her small person is endued and made up of the very expressed essence of housewifeliness,--she is the very attar, not of roses, but of housekeeping. Care-taking and thrift and neatness are a nature to her; she is as dainty and delicate in her person as a white cat, as everlastingly busy as a bee; and all the most needful faculties of time, weight, measure, and proportion out to be fully developed in her skull, if there is any truth in phrenology. Besides all this, she has a sort of hard-grained little vein of common sense, against which my fanciful conceptions and poetical notions are apt to hit with just a little sharp grating, if they are not well put. In fact, this kind of woman needs carefully to be idealized in the process of education, or she will stiffen and dry, as she grows old, into a veritable household Pharisee, a sort of domestic tyrant. She needs to be trained in artistic values and artistic weights and measures, to study all the arts and sciences of the beautiful, and then she is charming. Most useful, most needful, these little women: they have the centripetal force which keeps all the domestic planets from gyrating and frisking in unseemly orbits,--and properly trained, they fill a house with the beauty of order, the harmony and consistency of proportion, the melody of things moving in time and tune, without violating the graceful appearance of ease which Art requires.

So I had an eye to Jennie's education in my article which I unfolded and read, and which was entitled,

HOME-KEEPING _vs._ HOUSE-KEEPING.

There are many women who know how to keep a house, but there are but few that know how to keep a _home_. To keep a house may seem a complicated affair, but it is a thing that may be learned; it lies in the region of the material, in the region of weight, measure, color, and the positive forces of life. To keep a home lies not merely in the sphere of all these, but it takes in the intellectual, the social, the spiritual, the immortal.

Here the hickory-stick broke in two, and the two brands fell controversially out and apart on the hearth, scattering the ashes and coals, and calling for Jennie and the hearth-brush. Your wood-fire had this foible, that it needs something to be done to it every five minutes; but, after all, these little interruptions of our bright-faced genius are like the piquant sallies of a clever friend,--they do not strike us as unreasonable.

When Jennie had laid down her brush, she said,--

"Seems to me, papa, you are beginning to soar into metaphysics."

"Everything in creation is metaphysical in its abstract terms," said I, with a look calculated to reduce her to a respectful condition. "Everything has a subjective and an objective mode of presentation."

"There papa goes with subjective and objective!" said Marianne. "For my part, I never can remember which is which."

"I remember," said Jennie; "it's what our old nurse used to call internal and _out_-ternal,--I always remember by that."

"Come, my dears," said my wife, "let your father read"; so I went on as follows:--

I remember in my bachelor days going with my boon companion, Bill Carberry to look at the house to which he was in a few weeks to introduce his bride. Bill was a gallant, free-hearted, open-handed fellow, the life of our whole set, and we felt that natural aversion to losing him that bachelor friends would. How could we tell under what strange aspects he might look forth upon us, when once he had passed into "that undiscovered country" of matrimony? But Bill laughed to scorn our apprehensions.

"I'll tell you what, Chris," he said, as he sprang cheerily up the steps and unlocked the door of his future dwelling, "do you know what I chose this house for? Because it's a social-looking house. Look there, now," he said, as he ushered me into a pair of parlors,--"look at those long south windows, the sun lies there nearly all day long; see what a capital corner there is for a lounging-chair; fancy us, Chris, with our books or our paper, spread out loose and easy, and Sophie gliding in and out like a sunbeam. I'm getting poetical, you see. Then, did you ever see a better, wider, airier dining-room? What capital suppers and things we'll have there! the nicest times,--everything free and easy, you know,--just what I've always wanted a house for. I tell you, Chris, you and Tom Innis shall have latch-keys just like mine, and there is a capital chamber there at the head of the stairs, so that you can be free to come and go. And here now's the library,--fancy this full of books and engravings from the ceiling to the floor; here you shall come just as you please and ask no questions,--all the same as if it were your own, you know."

"And Sophie, what will she say to all this?"

"Why, you know Sophie is a prime friend to both of you, and a capital girl to keep things going. Oh, Sophie'll make a house of this, you may depend!"

A day or two after, Bill dragged me stumbling over boxes and through straw and wrappings to show me the glories of the parlor-furniture,--with which he teemed pleased as a child with a new toy.

"Look here," he said; "see these chairs, garnet-colored satin, with a pattern on each; well, the sofa's just like them, and the curtains to match, and the carpets made for the floor with centrepieces and borders. I never saw anything more magnificent in my life. Sophie's governor furnishes the house, and everything is to be A No. 1, and all that, you see. Messrs. Curtain and Collamore are coming to make the rooms up, and her mother is busy as a bee getting us in order."

"Why, Bill," said I, "you are going to be lodged like a prince. I hope you'll be able to keep it up; but law-business comes in rather slowly at first, old fellow."

"Well, you know it isn't the way I should furnish, if my capital was the one to cash the bills; but then, you see, Sophie's people do it, and let them,--a girl doesn't want to come down out of the style she has always lived in."

I said nothing, but had an oppressive presentiment that social freedom would expire in that house, crushed under a weight of upholstery.

But there came in due time the wedding and the wedding-reception, and we all went to see Bill in his new house splendidly lighted up and complete from top to toe, and everybody said what a lucky fellow he was; but that was about the end of it, so far as our visiting was concerned. The running in, and dropping in, and keeping latch-keys, and making informal calls, that had been forespoken, seemed about as likely as if Bill had lodged in the Tuileries.

Sophie, who had always been one of your snapping, sparkling, busy sort of girls, began at once to develop her womanhood, and show her principles, and was as different from her former self as your careworn, mousing old cat is from your rollicking, frisky kitten. Not but that Sophie was a good girl. She had a capital heart, a good, true womanly one, and was loving and obliging; but still she was one of the desperately painstaking, conscientious sort of women whose very blood, as they grow older, is devoured with anxiety, and she came of a race of women in whom house-keeping was more than an art or a science,--it was, so to speak, a religion. Sophie's mother, aunts, and grandmothers for nameless generations back, were known and celebrated housekeepers. They might have been genuine descendants of the inhabitants of that Hollandic town of Broeck, celebrated by Washington Irving, where the cows' tails are kept tied up with unsullied blue ribbons, and the ends of the firewood are painted white. He relates how a celebrated preacher, visiting this town, found it impossible to draw these housewives from their earthly views and employments, until he took to preaching on the _neatness_ of the celestial city, the unsullied crystal of its walls and the polish of its golden pavement, when the faces of all the housewives were set Zionward at once.

Now this solemn and earnest view of housekeeping is onerous enough when a poor girl first enters on the care of a moderately furnished house, where the articles are not too expensive to be reasonably renewed as time and use wear them; but it is infinitely worse when a cataract of splendid furniture is heaped upon her care,--when splendid crystals cut into her conscience, and mirrors reflect her duties, and moth and rust stand ever ready to devour and sully in every room and passage-way.

Sophie was solemnly warned and instructed by all the mothers and aunts,--she was warned of moths, warned of cockroaches, warned of flies, warned of dust; all the articles of furniture had their covers, made of cold Holland linen, in which they looked like bodies laid out,--even the curtain-tassels had each its little shroud--and bundles of receipts and of rites and ceremonies necessary for the preservation and purification and care of all these articles were stuffed into the poor girl's head, before guiltless of cares as the feathers that floated above it.

Poor Bill found very soon that his house and furniture were to be kept at such an ideal point of perfection that he needed another house to live in,--for, poor fellow, he found the difference between having a house and a home. It was only a year or two after that my wife and I started our _menage_ on very different principles, and Bill would often drop in upon us, wistfully lingering in the cozy arm-chair between my writing-table and my wife's sofa, and saying with a sigh how confoundedly pleasant things looked there,--so pleasant to have a bright, open fire, and geraniums and roses and birds, and all that sort of thing, and to dare to stretch out one's legs and move without thinking what one was going to hit. "Sophie is a good girl," he would say, "and wants to have everything right, but you see they won't let her. They've loaded her with so many things that have to be kept in lavender, that the poor girl is actually getting thin and losing her health; and then, you see, there's Aunt Zeruah, she mounts guard at our house, and keeps up such strict police-regulations that a fellow can't do a thing. The parlors are splendid, but so lonesome and dismal!--not a ray of sunshine, in fact not a ray of light, except when a visitor is calling, and then they open a crack. They're afraid of flies, and yet, dear knows, they keep every looking-glass and picture-frame muffled to its throat from March to December. I'd like for curiosity to see what a fly would do in our parlors!"

"Well," said I, "can't you have some little family sitting-room, where you can make yourselves cozy?"

"Not a bit of it. Sophie and Aunt Zeruah have fixed their throne up in our bedroom, and there they sit all day long, except at calling-hours, and then Sophie dresses herself and comes down. Aunt Zeruah insists upon it that the way is to put the whole house in order, and shut all the blinds, and sit in your bedroom, and then, she says, nothing gets out of place; and she tells poor Sophie the most hocus-pocus stories about her grandmothers and aunts, who always kept everything in their houses so that they could go and lay their hands on it in the darkest night. I'll bet they could in our house. From end to end it is kept looking as if we had shut it up and gone to Europe,--not a book, not a paper, not a glove, or any trace of a human being, in sight. The piano shut tight, the bookcases shut and locked, the engravings locked up, all the drawers and closets locked. Why, if I want to take a fellow into the library, in the first place it smells like a vault, and I have to unbarricade windows, and unlock and rummage for half an hour before I can get at anything; and I know Aunt Zeruah is standing tiptoe at the door, ready to whip everything back and lock up again. A fellow can't be social, or take any comfort in showing his books and pictures that way. Then there's our great, light dining-room, with its sunny south windows,--Aunt Zeruah got us out of that early in April, because she said the flies would speck the frescos and get into the china-closet, and we have been eating in a little dingy den, with a window looking out on a back-alley, ever since; and Aunt Zeruah says that now the dining-room is always in perfect order, and that it is such a care off Sophy's mind that I ought to be willing to eat down-cellar to the end of the chapter. Now, you see, Chris, my position is a delicate one, because Sophie's folks all agree, that, if there is anything in creation that is ignorant and dreadful and mustn't be allowed his way anywhere, it's 'a man'. Why, you'd think, to hear Aunt Zeruah talk, that we were all like bulls in a china-shop, ready to toss and tear and rend, if we are not kept down-cellar and chained; and she worries Sophie, and Sophie's mother comes in and worries, and if I try to get anything done differently, Sophie cries, and says she don't know what to do, and so I give it up. Now, if I want to ask a few of our set in sociably to dinner, I can't have them where we eat down-cellar,--oh, that would never do! Aunt Zeruah and Sophie's mother and the whole family would think the family-honor was forever ruined and undone. We mustn't ask them, unless we open the dining-room, and have out all the best china, and get the silver home from the bank; and if we do that, Aunt Zeruah doesn't sleep for a week beforehand, getting ready for it, and for a week after, getting things put away; and then she tells me, that, in Sophie's delicate state, it really is abominable for me to increase her cares, and so I invite fellows to dine with me at Delmonico's, and then Sophie cries, and Sophie's mother says it doesn't look respectable for a family-man to be dining at public places; but, hang it, a fellow wants a home somewhere!"

My wife soothed the chafed spirit, and spake comfortably unto him, and told him that he knew there was the old lounging-chair always ready for him at our fireside. "And you know," she said, "our things are all so plain that we are never tempted to mount any guard over them; our carpets are nothing, and therefore we let the sun fade them, and live on the sunshine and the flowers."

"That's it," said Bill, bitterly, "Carpets fading!--that's Aunt Zeruah's monomania. These women think that the great object of houses is to keep out sunshine. What a fool I was, when I gloated over the prospect of our sunny south windows! Why, man, there are three distinct sets of fortifications against the sunshine in those windows: first, outside blinds; then, solid, folding, inside shutters; and, lastly, heavy, thick, lined damask curtains, which loop quite down to the floor. What's the use of my pictures, I desire to know? They are hung in that room, and it's a regular campaign to get light enough to see what they are."

"But, at all events, you can light them up with gas in the evening."

"In the evening! Why, do you know my wife never wants to sit there in the evening? She says she has so much sewing to do that she and Aunt Zeruah must sit up in the bedroom, because it wouldn't do to bring work into the parlor. Didn't you know that? Don't you know there mustn't be such a thing as a bit of real work ever seen in a parlor? What if some threads should drop on the carpet? Aunt Zeruah would have to open all the fortifications next day, and search Jerusalem with candles to find them. No; in the evening the gas is lighted at half-cock, you know; and if I turn it up, and bring in my newspapers and spread about me, and pull down some books to read, I can feel the nervousness through the chamber-door. Aunt Zeruah looks in at eight, and at a quarter past, and at half-past, and at nine, and at ten, to see if I am done, so that she may fold up the papers and put a book on them, and lock up the books in their cases. Nobody ever comes in to spend an evening. They used to try it when we were first married, but I believe the uninhabited appearance of our parlors discouraged them. Everybody has stopped coming now, and Aunt Zeruah says 'it is such a comfort, for now the rooms are always in order. How poor Mrs. Crowfield lives, with her house such a thoroughfare, she is sure she can't see. Sophie never would have strength for it; but then, to be sure, some folks a'n't as particular as others. Sophie was brought up in a family of _very_ particular housekeepers.'"

My wife smiled, with that calm, easy, amused smile that has brightened up her sofa for so many years.

Bill added, bitterly,--

"Of course, I couldn't say that I wished the whole set and system of housekeeping women at the--what-'s-his-name? because Sophie would have cried for a week, and been utterly forlorn and disconsolate. I know it's not the poor girl's fault; I try sometimes to reason with her, but you can't reason with the whole of your wife's family, to the third and fourth generation backwards; but I'm sure it's hurting her health,--wearing her out. Why, you know Sophie used to be the life of our set; and now she really seems eaten up with care from morning to night, there are so many things in the house that something dreadful is happening to all the while, and the servants we get are so clumsy. Why, when I sit with Sophie and Aunt Zeruah, it's nothing but a constant string of complaints about the girls in the kitchen. We keep changing our servants all the time, and they break and destroy so that now we are turned out of the use of all our things. We not only eat in the basement, but all our pretty table-things are put away, and we have all the cracked plates and cracked tumblers and cracked teacups and old buck-handled knives that can be raised out of chaos. I could use these things and be merry, if I didn't know we had better ones; and I can't help wondering whether there isn't some way that our table could be set to look like a gentleman's table; but Aunt Zeruah says that 'it would cost thousands, and what difference does it make as long as nobody sees it but us?' You see, there's no medium in her mind between china and crystal and cracked earthen-ware. Well, I'm wondering how all these laws of the Medes and Persians are going to work when the children come along. I'm in hopes the children will soften off the old folks, and make the, house more habitable."

Well, children did come, a good many of them, in time. There was Tom, a broad-shouldered, chubby-cheeked, active, hilarious son of mischief, born in the very image of his father; and there was Charlie, and Jim, and Louisa, and Sophie the second, and Frank,--and a better, brighter, more joy-giving household, as far as temperament and nature were concerned, never existed.

But their whole childhood was a long battle, children _versus_ furniture, and furniture always carried the day. The first step of the housekeeping powers was to choose the least agreeable and least available room in the house for the children's nursery, and to fit it up with all the old, cracked, rickety furniture a neighboring auction-shop could afford, and then to keep them in it. Now everybody knows that to bring up children to be upright, true, generous, and religious, needs so much discipline, so much restraint and correction, and so many rules and regulations, that it is all that the parents can carry out, and all the children can bear. There is only a certain amount of the vital force for parents or children to use in this business of education, and one must choose what It shall be used for. The Aunt-Zeruah faction chose to use it for keeping the house and furniture, and the children's education proceeded accordingly. The rules of right and wrong of which they heard most frequently were all of this sort: Naughty children were those who went up the front-stairs, or sat on the best sofa, or fingered any of the books in the library, or got out one of the best teacups, or drank out of the cut-glass goblets.

Why did they ever want to do it? If there ever is a forbidden fruit in an Eden, will not our young Adams and Eves risk soul and body to find out how it tastes? Little Tom, the oldest boy, had the courage and enterprise and perseverance of a Captain Parry or Dr. Kane, and he used them all in voyages of discovery to forbidden grounds. He stole Aunt Zeruah's keys, unlocked her cupboards and closets, saw, handled, and tasted everything for himself, and gloried in his sins.

"Don't you know, Tom," said the nurse to him once, "if you are so noisy and rude, you'll disturb your dear mamma? She's sick, and she may die, if you're not careful."

"Will she die?" said Tom, gravely.

"Why, she _may_."

"Then," says Tom, turning on his heel,--"then I'll go up the front-stairs."

As soon as ever the little rebel was old enough, he was sent away to boarding-school, and then there was never found a time when it was convenient to have him come home again. He could not come in the spring, for then they were house-cleaning, nor in the autumn, because _then_ they were house-cleaning; and so he spent his vacations at school, unless, by good luck, a companion who was so fortunate as to have a home invited him there. His associations, associates, habits, principles, were as little known to his mother as if she had sent him to China. Aunt Zeruah used to congratulate herself on the rest there was at home, now he was gone, and say she was only living in hopes of the time when Charlie and Jim would be big enough to send away too; and meanwhile Charlie and Jim, turned out of the charmed circle which should hold growing boys to the father's and mother's side, detesting the dingy, lonely play-room, used to run the city-streets, and hang round the railroad-depots or docks. Parents may depend upon it, that, if they do not make an attractive resort for their boys, Satan will. There are places enough, kept warm and light and bright and merry, where boys can go whose mothers' parlors are too fine for them to sit in. There are enough to be found to clap them on the back, and tell them stories that their mothers must not hear, and laugh when they compass with their little piping voices the dreadful litanies of sin and shame. In middle life, our poor Sophie, who as a girl was so gay and frolicsome, so full of spirits, had dried and sharpened into a hard-visaged, angular woman,--careful and troubled about many things, and forgetful that one thing is needful. One of the boys had run away to sea; I believe he has never been heard of. As to Tom, the oldest, he ran a career wild and hard enough for a time, first at school and then in college, and there came a time when he came home, in the full might of six feet two, and almost broke his mother's heart with his assertions of his home rights and privileges. Mothers who throw away the key of their children's hearts in childhood sometimes have a sad retribution. As the children never were considered when they were little and helpless, so they do not consider when they are strong and powerful. Tom spread wide desolation among the household gods, lounging on the sofas, spitting tobacco-juice on the carpets, scattering books and engravings hither and thither, and throwing all the family-traditions into wild disorder, as he would never have done, had not all his childish remembrances of them been embittered by the association of restraint and privation. He actually seemed to hate any appearance of luxury or taste or order,--he was a perfect Philistine.

As for my friend Bill, from being the pleasantest and most genial of fellows, he became a morose, misanthropic man. Dr. Franklin has a significant proverb,--"Silks and satins put out the kitchen-fire." Silks and satins--meaning by them the luxuries of housekeeping--often put out not only the parlor-fire, but that more sacred flame, the fire of domestic love. It is the greatest possible misery to a man and to his children to be _homeless_; and many a man has a splendid house, but no home.

"Papa," said Jennie, "you ought to write and tell what are your ideas of keeping a _home_."

"Girls, you have only to think how your mother has brought you up."

Nevertheless, I think, being so fortunate a husband, I might reduce my wife's system to an analysis, and my next paper shall be,--

_What is a home, and how to keep it?_

* * * * *

THE CONVULSIONISTS OF ST. MÉDARD

Of all the mental epidemics that have visited Europe, beyond question the most remarkable, and in some of its features the most inexplicable, is that which prevailed in Paris some hundred and thirty years ago, among what were called _the Convulsionists of St. Médard_.

The celebrated Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, during his life the opponent and enemy of the Jesuits, whom he caused to be excluded from the theological schools of Louvain, left behind him, at his death, a treatise, posthumously published in 1640, entitled, "Augustinus," in which he professed to set forth the true opinions of St. Augustine on those century-long disputed questions of Grace, Free-Will, and Predestination. Taking ground against the Molinists, he contended for the doctrine of Predestination antecedent and absolute, a gift purely gratuitous, of God's free grace, independent of any virtue or merit in the recipient soul. This doctrine, set forth in five propositions, was condemned, in the middle of the seventeenth century, by Popes Innocent X. and Alexander VII.; and against it, when revived by Father Quesnel in the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was fulminated, in 1713, by Pope Clement XI., the famous Bull _Unigenitus_.

From this Bull, accepted in France after long opposition, the Jansenist party appealed to a future Papal Council, thence deriving their name of _Appellants_. Among these, one of the most noted and zealous was the Diacre Pâris, who refused a curacy, to avoid signing his adhesion to what he regarded as heresy, consumed his fortune in works of charity, and his health in austerities of a character so excessive that they abridged his life. Dying, as his partisans have it, in the odor of sanctity, and protesting with his last breath against the doctrines of the obnoxious Bull, his remains were deposited, on the second of May, 1727, in the small church-yard of St. Médard, situated in the twelfth _arrondissement_ of Paris, on the Rue Mouffetard, not far from the Jardin des Plantes.

To the tomb of one whom they regarded as a martyr to their cause the Jansenist Appellants habitually resorted, in all the fervor of religious zeal, heated to enthusiasm by the persecution of the dominant party. And there, after a time, phenomena presented themselves, which caused for years, throughout the French capital and among the theologians of that age, a fever of excitement; and which, though they have been noticed by medical and other writers of our own century, have not yet, in my judgment, attracted, either from the medical profession or from the pneumatological inquirer, the attention they deserve.

Of these phenomena a portion were physical, and a portion were mental or psychological. The former, first appearing in the early part of the year 1731, consisted (as alleged) partly of extraordinary cures, the apparent result of violent convulsive movements which overtook the patients soon after their bodies touched the marble of the tomb, sometimes even without approaching it, by swallowing, in wine or water, a small portion of the earth gathered from around it, the effect being heightened by strict fasting and prayer,--partly of what were called the "_Grands Secours_," literally "Great Succors," consisting of the most desperate, one might say _murderous_, remedies, applied, at their urgent request, to relieve the sufferings of the Convulsionists. These measures, called of relief, and carried to an incredible excess, were of such a character, that, during any normal state of the human system, they would have destroyed, not one, but a hundred lives, if the patient, or victim, had been endowed with so many. Those who regarded this marvellous immunity from what seemed certain immolation as a miraculous interposition of God were called _Succorists_; their opponents, ascribing such effects to the interference of the Devil in protection of his own, or (a somewhat rare opinion in those days) to natural agency, went by the name of _Anti-Succorists_. (_Secouristes_ and _Anti-Secouristes_.)

Some of these alleged cures, but more especially some of these so-called _succors_, were of a nature so far passing belief, that one would be tempted to cast them aside as sheer impostures, were not the main facts vouched for by evidence, not from the Jansenists alone, but from their bitterest opponents, so direct, so overwhelmingly multiplied, so minutely circumstantial, that to reject it would amount to a virtual declaration, that, in proof of the extraordinary and the improbable, we will accept no testimony whatever, let its weight or character be what it may. Accordingly, we find dispassionate modern writers, medical and others, while reminding us, as well they may, that enlightened observers of these strange phenomena were lacking,[3] and while properly suggesting that we ought to make allowance for exaggeration in some of the details, yet admitting as incontestable realities the substantial facts related by the historians of St. Médard.

Among these historians the chief is Carré de Montgéron, a magistrate of rank and high character, Counsellor of the Parliament of Paris. An enthusiast, and a weak logician, as hot enthusiasts generally are, Montgéron's honesty is admitted to be beyond question. Converted to Jansenism on the seventh of September, 1731, in the church-yard of St. Médard, by the strange scenes there passing, he expended his fortune, sacrificed his liberty, and devoted years of his life, in the preparation and publication of one of the most extraordinary works that ever issued from the press.[4] It consists of three quarto volumes, of some nine hundred closely printed pages each. Crowded with repetitions, and teeming with false reasoning, these volumes nevertheless contain, backed by certificates without number, such an elaborate aggregation of concurrent testimony as I think human industry never before brought together to prove any contested class of phenomena.

Not less zealous, if less voluminous, were the writers opposed to what was called "the work of the convulsions." Of these one of the chief was Dom La Taste, Bishop of Bethléem, author of the "Lettres Théologiques," and of the "Mémoire Théologique," in both of which the extravagances of the Convulsionists are severely handled; a second was the Abbé d'Asfeld, who, in 1738, published his "Vains Efforts des Discernans," in the same strain; and another, M. Poncet, who put forth an elaborate reply to the Succorists, entitled "Réponse des Anti-Secouristes à la Réclamation."

The convulsions, commencing in the year 1731, almost immediately assumed an epidemical character, spreading so rapidly that in a few months the affected reached the number of eight hundred. These were to be found not only on the tomb and in the cemetery itself, but in the streets, lanes, and houses adjoining. Many, after returning from the exciting scenes of St. Médard, were seized with convulsions in their own dwellings.

The numbers and the excitement went on increasing, and conversions to Jansenism were counted by thousands; the scenes became daily more extravagant, and the phenomena more extraordinary, until the King, moved either by the representations of physicians or by the remonstrances of Jesuit theologians, caused the cemetery to be closed on the twenty-ninth of January, 1732.[5]

Not for such interdiction, however, did the phenomena, once in progress, intermit. For fifteen years, or longer,[6] the symptoms continued, with more or less violence. Indeed, the number of Convulsionists greatly increased after the cemetery was closed, extending to those who had no ailment or bodily infirmity.[7]

The symptoms, though varying in different individuals, were of one general character, partaking, especially as to the muscular phenomena, of the nature of hysteria, or hystero-catalepsy. The patient, soon after being placed on the revered tomb, or on the ground near it, was commonly attacked by a tumultuous movement of all his members. Contractions exhibited themselves in the neck, shoulders, and principal muscles all over the body. The nervous system became dreadfully excited. The heart beat violently, and the patient, sometimes retaining partial consciousness and suffering extreme pain, could not restrain violent cries. He usually experienced, also, a tingling or pricking sensation in any diseased member. Those who from birth had been afflicted with paralysis, or partial paralysis, of a limb, or one side of the body, felt the convulsions chiefly in that limb or side. The convulsions were often so violent that numerous assistants could scarcely restrain the patient from seriously injuring himself by dashing his body or limbs against the marble.[8]

The Demoiselle Fourcroy, alleged to have been suddenly cured, on the fourteenth of April, 1732, by means of these convulsions, of a confirmed anchylosis, which had deformed her left foot, and which the physicians had pronounced incurable,[9] thus describes, in her deposition, her sensations:--"They caused me to take wine in which was some earth from the tomb of M. de Pâris, and I immediately engaged in prayer, as the commencement of a _neuvaine_" (that is, a nine-days' act of devotion). "Almost at the same moment I was seized with a great shuddering, and soon after with a violent agitation of the members, which caused my whole body to jerk into the air, and gave me a force I had never before possessed,--so that the united strength of several persons present could scarcely restrain me. After a time, in the course of these violent convulsive movements, I lost all consciousness. As soon as they passed off, I recovered my senses, and felt a sensation of tranquillity and internal peace, such as I had never experienced before."[10]

It was usually at the moment of recovery from these convulsions, as Montgéron alleges and the certificates published by him declare, that the cures deemed by him miraculous were effected. Sometimes, however, these cures were gradual only, extending through several days or weeks.

In Montgéron's work fourteen distinct cures are minutely reported, all of persons declared by the attendant physicians to be incurable. Each of these cures, with the documentary evidence in support of it, occupies from fifty to one hundred pages of his book. The greater number are cases of paralysis, usually of one entire side of the body, in some instances complicated with general dropsy, in others with cancer, in others again with attacks of apoplexy. There are four cases where the eyesight was restored,--one of them of a lachrymal fistula; one of a young Spanish nobleman, who suddenly recovered the use of his right eye, the left, however, remaining uncured; and there is a case in which a young woman, deaf and dumb from birth, is reported to have been suddenly and completely cured on the tomb of M. de Pâris, at the moment the convulsions ceased, immediately repeating, though not understanding, any word that was spoken to her by the bystanders.

My limits do not permit me to follow Montgéron through the details and the documentary proof of these cures. That the patient, in each case, previously examined by some physician of reputation, was pronounced incurable, does not prove that he was so. Yet, unless Montgéron lie, some of the cures are inexplicable, upon any received principles of medical science. One man, (Philippe Sergent,) whose right knee had shrunk to such a degree that the right leg was, and had been for more than a year, three finger-breadths shorter than the left, was, according to the certificates, cured on the spot, threw away his crutches, and walked home, unaided, followed by a wondering crowd. Another patient, (Marguerite Thibault,) affected by general dropsy, and whose feet and legs were swollen to three times their natural size, is reported to have been cured so suddenly that before she left the tomb her servant could put on her feet the same slippers she had worn previously to her malady. This woman had also been afflicted, for three years, with paralysis of the left side, so complete as to deprive it of all power of motion. Yet she is stated to have raised herself, unaided, on the tomb, to have walked from the spot, and even to have ascended the stairs of her house on her return. The symptom immediately preceding her cure is said to have been "a beneficent heat, which diffused itself over the entire left side, so long deadly cold." This was followed by a consciousness of power to move it; and her first effort was to stretch out her paralytic arm.[11]

But these cures, wonderful as they appear, are far less marvellous than another class of phenomena already referred to.

The convulsions were often accompanied by an urgent instinctive desire for certain extreme remedies, sometimes of a frightful character,--as stretching the limbs with a violence similar to that of the rack,--administering on the breast, stomach, or other parts of the body, hundreds of terrible blows with heavy weapons of wood, iron, or stone,--pressing with main force against various parts of the body with sharp-pointed swords,--pressure under enormous weights,--exposure to excessive heat, etc. Montgéron, viewing the whole as miraculous, says,--"God frequently causes the convulsionists the most acute pains, and at the same time intimates to them, by a supernatural instinct, that the formidable succors which He desires that they should demand will cause all their sufferings to cease; and these sufferings usually have a sort of relation to the succors which are to prove a remedy for them. For instance, an oppression on the breast indicates the necessity for blows of extreme violence on that part; an excessive cold, or a devouring heat, when it suddenly seizes a convulsionist, requires that he should be pushed into the midst of flames; a sharp pang, similar to that caused by an iron point piercing the flesh, demands a thrust of a rapier,[12] given in the spot where the pain is felt, be it In the throat, in the mouth, or in the eyes, of which there are numerous examples; and let the rapier be pushed as it may, the point, no matter how sharp, cannot pierce the most tender flesh, not even the eye of the patient: of this, in my third proposition, I shall adduce proof the most incontestable."[13]

To _some_ extent, it would seem, the symptoms themselves, attending the convulsions, appeared, to the observant physician, to warrant the propriety of the remedy desired. Montgéron copies a report of a case made to him, and attested by a gentleman of his acquaintance, a Jansenist, who had persuaded his cousin, Dr. M----, at that time a distinguished physician of Paris, and much prejudiced against the Jansenist movement, to accompany him to a house where there was a young girl subject to the reigning epidemic. They found her in a room with twenty or thirty persons, and at the moment in convulsions. The assistants agreed to place the case in the hands of the physician, and he carefully noted the movements of the patient.

"After a time," proceeds the reporter, "he was greatly astonished to observe a sudden convulsive retraction of all the members. Examining the patient closely, touching her breast and limbs, he became aware of a contraction of the nerves, which gradually reached such a degree of violence that the whole body was disfigured in a frightful manner. His surprise was extreme, and it was soon changed to alarm, which induced him to forget his prejudices, and to resort to the very means he had previously condemned as useless or dangerous. He caused us to place ourselves, one at the head and one at each hand and foot, and bade us pull moderately. We did so.

"'Not enough,' he said, with his hand on the patient's breast; 'stronger!'

"We obeyed.

"'Stronger yet!' he exclaimed.

"We told him we were exerting our entire strength.

"'Two, then, to each limb,' he said.

"It was done, (by the aid of long and very strong pieces of cloth-listing,) but proved insufficient.

"'Three to each!' he cried; 'the child will die; pull with all your force! Stronger still!'"

"'We cannot.'"

"'Then four to each!'"

"He was obeyed."

"'Ah, that relieves,' he said; 'the nerves resume their tone; the symptoms improve. But do not relax the tension.'"

"Then again, after a pause,--"

"'Strong! stronger! The contractions increase. Put all your strength to it.'"

Ultimately five persons were assigned to each band; and the nearest aided themselves by bracing their feet against the bed. They continued their efforts during half an hour, sometimes pulling with all their strength, sometimes less strongly, as the physician observed the contraction of the nerves to increase or relax. Finally he ordered the tension to be gradually diminished, in proportion as the convulsion passed off.

After a time this convulsion was succeeded by another, causing a sudden and alarming swelling of the chest. "The girl stood leaning against a wall, and in that position he caused us, as had been our wont, to press with force on her chest. This we did, interposing a small cushion composed of listing. At first, I alone assisted." Then Dr. M---- ordered three, four, five, ultimately even a greater number of persons, to aid them. "The convulsion ceased gradually, and in the same proportion he caused us to diminish the pressure."

"Afterwards the physician, having retired to another room, said to us, before going away, 'You would be homicides, gentlemen, if you did not render these succors; for the symptoms require them; and the girl would die, if you refused them. There is nothing but what is natural in the relation between her state and these succors.'"[14]

Another example, occurring in 1740, and still more striking, because the case was that of a girl only three years of age, is given by Montgéron on the authority (among other witnesses) of Count de Novion, a near relative of the Duke de Gesvres, Governor of Paris. The Count, having been present throughout this case, testifies from personal observation.

The child's limbs, as in the previous example, were drawn up by violent convulsive movements, and the muscles became as it were knotted, causing extreme pain. The little creature urgently begged that they would draw her legs and arms. Moderate tension caused no diminution of the pain; violent tension, administered with fear and trembling, relieved her immediately. She complained also of acute pain in the breast, which swelled to an alarming extent. To remove this, nothing proved effectual but excessive pressure with the knee on the part affected.

After a time, however, some of the Anti-Succorist theologians persuaded the mother that the succors ought not to be administered,--and even raised doubts in her mind and in that of the Count, as to whether the Devil had not some agency in the affair. "Who knows," said the latter, "if the Arch-Enemy has no part in this?" So they intermitted the succors for some weeks. During this time the infant gradually sank from day to day, would scarcely eat or drink, seldom slept, and death seemed imminent.

The physician, being called in, declared that the only hope was in resuming the succors, terrible as they appeared, and that, too, promptly. To the father he said, "If you delay, it will be too late. While you are trying all your fine experiments with her, your child will die." They resumed the same violent remedies as before; and the child was gradually restored to perfect health.[15]

But these examples, whatever we may think of them, are but some of the most moderate, which Montgéron himself admits to be explicable on natural principles. He says: "During the first months that the succors commenced, the power of resistance offered by the convulsionists did not appear so surprising, and seemed, indeed, to be the effect of an excessive swelling which was observed in the muscles upon which the convulsionists requested the blows to be given, and of the violent agitation of the animal spirits; so that the succors demanded by the sufferers appeared, in a measure, the natural remedy for the state in which God had placed them. But when, every day, the violence of the blows increased, it became evident that the natural force of the muscles could not equal that of the tremendous strokes which the convulsionists demanded, in obedience, as they said, to the will of God. And here was manifested the miracle."[16]

I proceed to give, as an example of one of the more violent succors here spoken of as miraculous, a narrative, not only vouched for by Montgéron himself as a witness present, but put forth, in the first instance, by one of the most violent Anti-Succorists, the Abbé d'Asfeld, in his work already referred to,--and put forth by him in order to be condemned as a wicked tempting of Providence,[17] or, worse, an accepting of aid from the Prince of Darkness himself. It occurred in 1734.

"Here," says the Abbé, "is an example, all the more worthy of attention, inasmuch as persons of every station and condition, ecclesiastics, magistrates, ladies of rank, were among the spectators. Jeanne Moler, a young girl of twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, standing up with her back resting against a stone wall, an extremely robust man took an andiron,[18] weighing, as was said, from twenty-five to thirty pounds, and therewith gave her, with his whole force, numerous blows on the stomach. They counted upwards of a hundred at a time. One day a certain friar, after having given her sixty such blows, tried the same weapon against a wall; and it is said that at the twenty-fifth blow he broke an opening through it."[19]

Dom La Taste, the great opponent of Jansenism, alluding to the same circumstance, says, "I do not dispute the fact, that the andiron sunk so deeply that it appeared to penetrate to the very backbone."[20]

Montgéron, after quoting the above, adds his own testimony, as to this same occurrence, in these words:--

"As I am not ashamed to confess that I am one of those who have followed up most closely the work of the convulsions, I freely admit that I am the person to whom the author alludes, when he speaks of a certain friar who tried against a wall the effect of blows similar to those he had given the convulsionist. As this is an occurrence personal to myself, I trust the reader will perceive the propriety of my presenting to him the narrative in a more exact and detailed form than that in which it is given by the author of the 'Vains Efforts.'

"I had begun, as I usually do, by giving the convulsionist very moderate blows. But after a time, excited by her constant complaints, which left me no room to doubt that the oppression in the pit of the stomach of which she complained could be relieved only by violent blows, I gradually increased the force of mine, employing at last my whole strength; but in vain. The convulsionist continued to complain that the blows I gave her were so feeble that they procured her no relief; and she caused me to put the andiron into the hands of a large and stout man who happened to be one of the spectators. He kept within no bounds. Instructed by the trial he had seen me make that nothing could be too severe, he discharged such terrible blows, always on the pit of the stomach, as to shake the wall against which the convulsionist was leaning.

"She caused him to give her one hundred such blows, not reckoning as anything the sixty I had just administered. She warmly thanked the man who had procured her such relief, and reproached me for my weakness and my lack of faith.

"When the hundred blows were completed, I took the andiron, desirous of trying against the wall itself whether my blows, which she thought so feeble and complained of so bitterly, really did produce no effect. At the twenty-fifth stroke the stone against which I struck, and which had been shaken by the previous blows, was shattered, and the pieces fell out on the opposite side, leaving an opening of more than six inches square.

"Now let us observe what were the portions of the body of the convulsionist on which these fearful blows were dealt. It is true that they first came in contact with the skin, but they sank immediately to the back of the patient; their force was not arrested at the surface.

"I insist unnecessarily, perhaps, upon this fact, since all, even our greatest enemies, admit its truth. But, however incontestable it is, I conceive that I cannot too strongly prove it to those who have not themselves witnessed what happened; inasmuch as the principal objection made by the author of the 'Mémoire Théologique' consists in supposing that the violence of the most tremendous blows given to convulsionists is suspended by the Devil, who thus nullifies the effect they would naturally produce."[21]

Montgéron further says, that "the greatest enemies of these miraculous succors admitted the fact that such terrible blows, far from producing the slightest wound, or causing the convulsionist the least suffering, actually cured the pains of which she complained."[22]

The convulsionist sometimes demanded enormous pressure instead of violent blows. To this also, the Abbé d'Asfeld testifies. I translate from his "Vains Efforts."

"Next came the exercise of the platform. It consisted in placing on the convulsionist, who was stretched on the ground, a board of sufficient size to cover her entirely; and as many men as could stand upon it mounted on the board. The convulsionist sustained them all."[23]

Montgéron adds,--"This relation is tolerably exact, and it only remains for me to observe, that, as they gave each other the hand, for reciprocal support, most of those who were on the board rested the whole weight of the body on a single foot. Thus, twenty men at a time often stood upon the board, and were supported on the body of a young convulsionist. Now, as most men weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, and many weigh more, the body of the girl must have sustained a weight of three thousand pounds, if not sometimes nearly four thousand,--a load sufficient to crush an ox. Yet, not only was the convulsionist not oppressed by it, but she often found the pressure insufficient to correct the swelling which distended her muscles. With what force must not God have endowed the body of this girl! Since the days of Samson, was ever seen such a prodigy?"[24]

If these incidents, attested as they are by friend and foe, seem to us incredible, what shall we say of another, not less strongly attested?

Let us first, as before, take the statement of an adversary. I translate from the "Mémoire Théologique."

"A convulsionist laid herself on the floor, flat on her back; and a man, kneeling beside her, and raising a flint stone, weighing upwards of twenty pounds, as high as he could, after several preliminary trials, dashed it, with all his force, against the breast of the convulsionist, giving her one hundred such blows in succession."[25]

To this Montgéron subjoins,--"But the author ought to have added, that, at each blow, the whole room shook, the floor trembled, and the spectators could not repress a shudder at the frightful noise which was heard, as each blow fell on the convulsionist's breast." We need not be surprised that he adds,--"Not only ought such strokes naturally to rupture the minute vessels, the delicate glands, the veins and the arteries of which the breast is composed,--not only ought they, in the course of Nature, to have crushed and reduced the whole to a bloody mass,--but they ought to have shattered to pieces the bones and cartilages by which the breast is inclosed."[26]

This was the view of the case taken by a celebrated physician of the day. Montgéron tells us:--"This philosopher maintained that the facts alleged could not be true, because they were physically impossible. He raised, among other objections, this,--that the flexible, delicate nature of the skin, of the flesh, and of the viscera, is incompatible with a force and a consistency so extraordinary as the alleged facts presuppose; and, consequently, that it was impossible, without ceasing to be what they are,--without a radical change in their qualities,--that they should acquire a force superior to that of the hardest and most solid bodies. They let him quietly complete his anatomical argument, and set forth all his proofs, and merely answered, 'Come and see; test the truth of the facts for yourself.' He went. At first sight, he is seized with astonishment; he doubts the evidence of his eyes; he asks to be allowed himself to administer the succors. They immediately place in his hands iron bars of a crushing weight. He does not spare his blows; he exerts his utmost strength. The weapon sinks into the flesh, seems to penetrate to the entrails. But the convulsionist only laughs at his idle efforts. His blows but procure her relief, without leaving the least impression, the slightest trace, even on the epidermis."[27]

Space fails me to furnish more than a very few additional specimens of the endless incidents of which the details are scattered by Montgéron over hundreds of pages,--incidents occurring in various parts of Paris, daily, for many years. Three or four more of these may suffice for my present purpose.

A certain Marie Sonnet had made herself so remarkable by the incredible succors she demanded, that a physician of Paris, Dr. A----, published, in regard to her case, a satirical letter addressed to M. de Montgéron, in which, after attacking the girl's moral character, be assumed this strange position: "It is a sentiment universally established, that it is in the power of the Devil, when God permits, to communicate to man forces above those of Nature. Nor must it be said that God never permits this; the case of the girl Sonnet is unanswerable proof to the contrary."[28]

Among the incidents which appear to have led to this opinion one is thus stated by him:--"They let fall upon her stomach, from the height of the ceiling, a stone weighing fifty pounds, while her body, bent back like a bow, was supported on the point of a sharpened stake, placed just under the spine; yet, far from being crushed by the stone, or pierced by the stake, it was a relief to her."[29]

Montgéron supplies further particulars of this case. He says:--"It was not once, it was a hundred times in succession, and that daily repeated, that this flint stone was raised by main force, by the aid of a pulley, to the ceiling of the room, and thence suddenly let fall on the stomach of the patient. This stone weighed, it is true, fifty pounds only; but, descending from a great height, its effect was immensely increased by the momentum it acquired in falling, as soon as the cord was detached by which it was suspended in the air.' And, in truth, the ribs of the convulsionist bent under the terrible shock, sinking under the weight till her stomach and bowels were so completely flattened that the stone seemed wholly to displace them. Yet she received no injury whatever, but was relieved, as Dr. A---- himself admits. He confesses, also, that the body of the convulsionist was bent back so that the head and feet touched the floor, and was supported only on the sharp point of a stake right under her reins, and placed perpendicularly beneath the spot where the stone was to fall. The weight of the stone in falling was, therefore, arrested only by the point of this stake, the body of the convulsionist being between them, so that the entire force of the blow was concentrated opposite that point.... The stake appeared to penetrate to a certain depth into the body, yet neither the skin nor the flesh received the slightest injury, nor did the convulsionist experience any pain whatever."[30]

This same Marie Sonnet exposed herself to terrible tests by fire. A certificate in regard to this matter, signed by eleven persons, of whom one was an English lord, one a Doctor of Theology in the Sorbonne, and another the brother of Voltaire, Armand Arouet, Treasurer of the Chamber of Accounts, is given by Montgéron, and I here translate it:--

"We, the undersigned, certify, that this day, between eight and ten o'clock, P.M., Marie Sonnet, being in convulsion, was placed, her head resting on one stool and her feet on another, these stools being entirely within a large chimney and under the opening of the same, so that her body was suspended in the air above the fire, which was of extreme violence, and that she remained in that position for the space of thirty-six minutes, at four different times; yet the cloth [_drap_] in which she was wrapped (she having no other dress) was not burned, though the flames sometimes passed above it: all which appears to us entirely supernatural. In testimony whereof, we have signed our names, this twelfth of May, 1736."

To this certificate, which was afterwards legally recorded, a postscript is appended, stating, that, while they were writing out the certificate, Marie placed herself a fifth time over the fire, as before, remaining there nine minutes; that she appeared to sleep, though the fire was excessively hot; fifteen logs of wood, besides fagots, having been consumed in the two hours and a quarter during which the witnesses remained.

Montgéron adds, that this exhibition has been witnessed at least a hundred times, and by a multitude of persons. And he expressly states, that the stools, which consisted of iron frames, with a board upon each, were placed entirely within the fireplace, and one on each side of the fire; so that, as Marie Sonnet rested her head on one stool and her feet on the other, her body remained suspended immediately above the fire; and further, that, "no matter how intense the heat, not only did she suffer no inconvenience, but the cloth in which she was wrapped was never injured, nor even singed, though it was sometimes actually in the flames."[31]

He declares, also, that Marie, on other occasions, remained over the fire much longer than is above certified. The author of the "Vains Efforts" admits that "she remained exposed to the fire long enough to roast a piece of mutton or veal."

Montgéron informs us, in addition, that Marie Sonnet sometimes varied the form of this experiment, with a somewhat varying result. He says,--"I have seen her five or six times, and in the presence of a multitude of persons, thrust both her feet, with shoes and stockings on, into the midst of a burning brazier; but in this case the fire did not respect the shoes, as, in the other, it had respected the cloth that enwrapped her. The shoes caught fire, and the soles were reduced to ashes, but without the convulsionist experiencing pain in her feet, which she continued to keep for a considerable time in the fire. Once I had the curiosity to examine the soles of her stockings, in order to ascertain if they, too, were burnt. As soon as I touched them they crumbled to powder, so that the sole of the foot remained bare."[32]

Dr. A----, in the letter already alluded to, which he published against this girl, admits, that, "while in the midst of flames, or stretched over a burning brazier, she received no injury whatever."[33]

M. Poncet, whom I have elsewhere mentioned as one of the chief writers against the Succorists, admits the following:--

"This convulsionist [Gabrielle Moler] placed herself on her knees before a large fire full of burning coals all in flame. Then, a person being seated behind her, and holding her by a band, she plunged her head into the flames, which closed over it; then, being drawn back, she repeated the same, continuing it with a regular alternate movement. She has been seen thus to throw herself on the fire six hundred times in succession. Usually she wore a bonnet, but sometimes not; and when she did wear one, the top of the bonnet was occasionally burned."[34] Montgéron adds, "but her hair never."[35]

Gabrielle was the first who (in 1736) demanded what was called the _succor of the swords_. Montgéron says,--"She was prompted by the supernatural instinct which guided her to select the strongest and sharpest sword she could find among those worn by the spectators. Then setting herself with her back against a wall, she placed the point of the sword just above her stomach, and called upon him who seemed the strongest man to push it with all his force; and though the sword bent into the form of a bow from the violence with which it was pushed, so that they had to press against the middle of the blade to keep it straight, still the convulsionist cried out, 'Stronger! stronger!' After a time she applied the point of the sword to her throat, and required it to be pushed with the same violence as before. The point caused the skin to sink into the throat to the depth of four finger-breadths, but it never pierced the flesh, let them push as violently as they would. Nevertheless, the point of the sword seemed to attach itself to the skin; for, when drawn back, it drew the skin with it, and left a trifling redness, such as would be caused by the prick of a pin. For the rest, the convulsionist suffered no pain whatever."[36]

Similar is the testimony of an Advocate of the Parliament of Paris, extracts from whose certificate in regard to the succors rendered to the Sister Madeleine are given by Montgéron. Here is one of these:--

"One day, extended on the ground, she caused a spit to be placed upright, with the point on her bare throat. Then a stout man mounted on a chair, and suspended his whole body from the head of the spit, pressing with all his force, as if to transfix the throat and pierce the floor beneath. But the flesh merely sank in with the point of the spit, without being in the least injured.

"Another day, she placed the point of a very sharp sword against the hollow of the throat, just below the epiglottis, and, standing with her back against the wall, called on them to push the sword. A vigorous man did so, till the blade bent, though not so much as to form a complete arc. The point sank into the flesh about an inch. I was curious to measure the exact depth, and found that the flesh rose so far around the sword-point that I could sink a finger in beyond the first joint. She received this succor twice. The sword was one of the sharpest I have ever seen. We tried it against a portfolio containing the paper intended for the minutes which on such occasions I always make out. It perforated the pasteboard and a considerable part of the papers within."[37]

The Sister Madeleine carried her temerity in this matter still farther. Here is a portion of the certificate of an ecclesiastic, for whose uprightness and truthfulness Montgéron vouches in strong terms, and who relates what he alleges he saw on the thirty-first of May, 1744.

"Madeleine caused them to hold two swords in the air horizontally. She herself placed the point of one in the inner corner of the right eye, and of the other in the inner corner of the left, and then called out to those who held the swords, 'In the name of the Father, push!' They did so with all their force; and I confess that I shuddered from head to foot.... A second time Madeleine caused them to set two swords against the pupils of her eyes, and to press them strongly, as before. This time I took especial notice of the part of the sword that was on a level with the surface of the eye when the pressure was the strongest, and I perceived that the point had penetrated a good inch into the pupil."[38]

The Chaplain in Ordinary of the King, under date of the fourth of October, 1744, testifies to confirmatory facts. He says,--"I have seen them push sword-points against the eyes of Sisters Madeleine and Félicité, sometimes on the pupil, sometimes in the corner of the eye, sometimes on the eyelid,--with such force as to cause the eyeball to project, till the spectators shuddered."[39]

Another officer of the royal household gives a certificate of succors administered to this same Madeleine, of a character scarcely less wonderful, with pointed spits, of which two were broken against her body.

This officer certifies, also, that, on one occasion, when pushing a sharp sword against Madeleine, not being able to push strongly enough to satisfy her, he placed a book bound in parchment on his own breast, placed the hilt of his sword against it, and pressed with so much force that the cover of the book was quite spoiled by the deep indentation made by the sword-hilt. He adds,--"The instinct of her convulsion caused her sometimes to demand as many as twenty-two swords at a time. These were placed, some in front, some against her back, some against her sides, in every direction. I myself never saw quite so many employed; but I was present, and was myself assisting, when eighteen swords were pushed at once against various parts of her body. Although the force with which this prodigious succor was administered caused deep indentations in the flesh, she never received the slightest wound. It often happened that her convulsions caused the flesh to react under the pressure of the sword-points, so as forcibly to push back the assistants."[40]

The Advocate of the Parliament of Paris, already mentioned, certifies to the same phenomenon. His words are,--"One can feel, under the sword-point, a movement of the flesh, which, from time to time, thrusts back the sword. This occurs the most strongly when the succor is nearly at an end. The convulsionist calls out, 'Enough!' as soon as the pains are relieved."[41]

The same Advocate states, that sometimes the convulsionist threw the weight of her body on the swords, the hilts resting on the floor, and being secured from slipping. He speaks of one case in which, "while she was balancing herself on the points of several swords upon which she had thrown herself with all her weight, [_où elle se jettoit à corps perdû_,] one of them broke."[42]

The officer of the king's household already spoken of testifies to a similar fact. A certain Sister Dina, he says, caused six swords thus to break against her body. He adds, that he himself broke the blade of a sword while thrusting against her; and that he saw two others broken in the same way.[43]

In regard to what Montgéron considers the exacting instinct, the same officer says,--"I had the curiosity to ask Sister Madeleine, in her natural state, what was the sort of suffering which caused her to have recourse to such astonishing succors. She replied, that the pain she suffered was the same as if swords were actually piercing her; that she felt relieved of this pain as soon as the sword-points penetrated to her skin, and quite cured when the assistants put their whole force to it. She laughed when the swords pierced her dress, saying, 'I feel the points on my skin. That relieves. That does me good.'"[44]

Both the Advocate of Parliament and the ecclesiastic from whose certificates I have quoted testify that the convulsionists were repeatedly undressed and examined by a committee of their own sex, consisting in part of incredulous ladies of fashion, to ascertain that they had nothing concealed under their clothes to resist the sword-points. But in every case it was ascertained that they wore but the ordinary articles of under-clothing. The Sister Dina was examined in this way; and it was ascertained that she had nothing under her gown except a chemise and a simple linen stomacher. Her clothing was found pierced in many places, but the flesh wholly uninjured.[45]

Although throughout the writings of the Anti-Succorists there are constant denunciations of these succors as flagrant and wicked temptings of Providence, yet I do not find therein any allegation that serious injury was ever sustained by any of the patients. Montgéron himself, however, admits, that, on one occasion, a wound was received. He tells us that a certain convulsionist long resisted the instinct which bade her demand the succor of a triangular-bladed sword against the left breast, fearing the result. At last, however, the pain became so intense that she was fain to consent. For the first seven or eight minutes the sword-point only indented the flesh, as usual. But then, says Montgéron, "her faith suddenly failing her, she cried out, 'Ah! you will kill me!' No sooner had she pronounced the words than the sword pierced the flesh, making a wound two inches in depth." He alleges, further, that the instinct of the convulsionist informed her that the wound would have no bad consequences, and could be cured by severe blows of a club on the same spot; which, he declares, happened accordingly.[46]

Besides the incidents above related, and a hundred others of similar character, which, if time and the reader's patience permitted, I might cull from Montgéron's pages, the restless enthusiasm of the convulsionists ultimately betrayed them into extravagances, in which it is often hard to decide whether the grotesque or the horrible more predominated. One convulsionist descended the long stairs of an infirmary head-foremost, lying on her back; another caused herself to be attached, by a rope round her neck, to a hook in the wall. A third repeated her prayers while turning somersets. A fourth, suspended by the feet, with the head hanging down, remained in that position three-quarters of an hour. A fifth, lying down on a tomb, caused herself to be covered to the neck with baked earth mixed with sand and saturated with vinegar. A sixth made her bed, in winter, on billets of wood; a seventh on bars of iron. The Sister Félicité was in the habit of causing herself to be nailed to the cross, and of remaining there half an hour at a time, gayly conversing with the pious who surrounded her.[47] Another sister, named Scholastique, after long hesitation between different modes of mortification, having one day remarked the manner in which they constructed the pavement of the streets, had her dress tightly fastened below the knee, and then ordered one of the assistants to take her by the legs, and, with her head downward, to dash it repeatedly against the tiled floor, after the fashion of paviors, when using a rammer.

"If," says Calmeil, "the idea had chanced to suggest itself to one of these theomaniacs, that disembowelling alive would be a sacrifice pleasing to the Supreme Being, she would undoubtedly have insisted upon being subjected to such a martyrdom."[48]

The mental and physiological phenomena connected with this epidemic remain to be noticed, together with the theories and suggestions put forth by medical and other contemporary writers, in explanation of what has here been sketched, the substance of which is usually admitted by these commentators, however incredible, when related at this distance of time, it may appear. Next month the subject will be continued.

* * * * *

PRESENCE.

The wild, sweet water, as it flows,-- The winds, that kiss me as they pass,-- The starry shadow of the rose, Sitting beside her on the grass,--

The daffodilly, trying to bless With better light the beauteous air,-- The lily, wearing the white dress Of sanctuary, to be more fair,--

The lithe-armed, dainty-fingered brier, That in the woods, so dim and drear, Lights up betimes her tender fire To soothe the homesick pioneer,--

The moth, his brown sails balancing Along the stubble crisp and dry,-- The ground-flower, with a blood-red ring On either hand,--the pewet's cry,--

The friendly robin's gracious note,-- The hills, with curious weeds o'errun,-- The althea, with her crimson coat Tricked out to please the wearied sun,--

The dandelion, whose golden share Is set before the rustic's plough,-- The hum of insects in the air,-- The blooming bush,--the withered bough,--

The coming on of eve,--the springs Of daybreak, soft and silver-bright,-- The frost, that with rough, rugged wings Blows down the cankered buds,--the white,

Long drifts of winter snow,--the heat Of August, falling still and wide,-- Broad cornfields,--one chance stalk of wheat, Standing with bright head hung aside,--

All things, my darling, all things seem In some strange way to speak of thee; Nothing is half so much a dream, Nothing so much reality.

My soul to thine is dutiful, In all its pleasure, all its care; O most beloved! most beautiful! I miss, and find thee everywhere!

* * * * *

GLACIAL PERIOD.

In the early part of the summer of 1840, I started from Switzerland for England with the express object of finding traces of glaciers in Great Britain. This glacier-hunt was at that time a somewhat perilous undertaking for the reputation of a young naturalist like myself, since some of the greatest names in science were arrayed against the novel glacial theory. And it was not strange that it should be at first discredited by the scientific world, for hitherto all the investigations of geologists had gone to show that a degree of heat far greater than any now prevailing characterized the earlier periods of the world's history. Even Charpentier, my precursor and master in glacial research, who first showed the greater extent of Swiss glaciers in former times, had not thought of any more general application of his result, or connected their former boundaries with any great change in the climatic conditions of the whole continent. His explanation of the phenomena rested upon the assumption that the Alps formerly rose far beyond their present height; their greater altitude, he thought, would account for the existence of immense glaciers extending from the Alps across the plain of Switzerland to the Jura. Inexperienced as I then was, and ignorant of the modes by which new views, if founded on truth, commend themselves gradually to general acceptation, I was often deeply depressed by the skepticism of men whose scientific position gave them a right to condemn the views of younger and less experienced students. I can smile now at the difficulties which then beset my path, but at the time they seemed serious enough. It is but lately, that, in turning over the leaves of a journal, published some twelve or fifteen years ago, to look for a forgotten date, I was amused to find a formal announcement, under the signature of the greatest geologist of Europe, of the demise of the glacial theory. Since then it has risen, phoenix-like, from its own funeral pile.

Even when I arrived in England, many of my friends would fain have dissuaded me from my expedition, urging me to devote myself to special zoölogical studies, and not to meddle with general geological problems of so speculative a character. "Punch" himself did not disdain to give me a gentle hint as to the folly of my undertaking, terming my journey into Scotland in search of moraines a sporting-expedition after "moor-hens." Only one of my older scientific friends in England, a man who in earlier years had weathered a similar storm himself, shared my confidence in the investigations looked upon by others as so visionary, and offered to accompany me in my excursion to the North of England, Scotland, and Wales. I cannot recur to that delightful journey without a few words of grateful and affectionate tribute to the friend who sustained me by his sympathy and guided me by his knowledge and experience.

For many years I had enjoyed the privilege of personal acquaintance with Dr. Buckland, and in 1834, when engaged in the investigation of fossil fishes, I had travelled with him through parts of England and Scotland, and had derived invaluable assistance from his friendly advice and direction. To him I was indebted for an introduction to all the geologists and palæontologists of Great Britain, with none of whom, except Lyell, had I any previous personal acquaintance; and through him I obtained not only leave to examine all the fossil fishes in public and private collections throughout England, but the unprecedented privilege of bringing them together for closer comparison in the rooms of the Geological Society of London. A few years later he visited Switzerland, when I had the pleasure of showing him, in my turn, the glacial phenomena of my native country, to the study of which I was then devoting all my spare time. After a thorough survey of the facts I had collected, he became satisfied that my interpretation of them was likely to prove correct, and even then he recalled phenomena of his own country, which, under the new light thrown upon them by the glacial phenomena of Switzerland, gave a promise of success to my extraordinary venture. We then resolved to pursue the inquiry together on the occasion of my next visit to England; and after the meeting in Glasgow of the British Association for Advancement of Science, we started together for the mountains of Scotland in search of traces of the glaciers, which, if there was any truth in the generalizations to which my study of the Swiss glaciers had led me, must have come down from the Grampian range, and reached the level of the sea, as they do now in Greenland.

On the fourth of November of that year I read a paper before the Geological Society of London, containing a summary of the scientific results of that excursion, which I had extended with the same success to Ireland and parts of England. This paper was followed by one from Dr. Buckland himself, containing an account of his own observations, and another from Lyell on the same subject. From that time, the investigation of glaciers in regions where they no longer occur has been carried to almost every part of the globe. Before giving a more special account of this expedition, I will say a word of the mass of facts which I had brought from my Alpine researches, on which my own convictions were founded, and which seemed to Buckland worthy of careful consideration. To explain these more fully to my readers, I must leave the Scotch hills for a while, and beg them to return with me to Switzerland once more.

Thus far I have spoken chiefly of the advance of glaciers, and very justly, since they are in constant onward motion, being kept within their limits only by a waste at their lower extremity proportionate to their advance. But in considering the past history of glaciers, we must think of their changes as retrograde, not progressive movements; since, if the glacial theory be true, a great mass of ice, of which the present glaciers are but the remnants, formerly spread over the whole Northern hemisphere, and has gradually disappeared, until now no traces of it are to be found, except in the Arctic regions and in lofty mountain-ranges. Every terminal moraine, such as I described in the last article, is the retreating footprint of some glacier, as it slowly yielded its possession of the plain, and betook itself to the mountains; wherever we find one of these ancient semicircular walls of unusual size, there we may be sure the glacier resolutely set its icy foot, disputing the ground inch by inch, while heat and cold strove for the mastery. There may have been a succession of cold summers, or, if now and then a warmer summer intervened, a colder one followed, so that the glacier regained the next year the ground it had lost during the preceding one, thus continuing to oscillate for a number of years along the same line, and adding constantly to the _débris_ collected at its extremity. Wherever such oscillations and pauses in the retreat of the glacier occurred, all the materials annually brought down to its terminus were collected; and when it finally disappeared from that point, it left a wall to mark its temporary resting-place.

By these semicircular concentric walls we can trace the retreat of the ice as it withdrew from the plain of Switzerland to the fastnesses of the Alps. It paused at Berne, and laid the foundation of the present city, which is built on an ancient moraine; it made a stand again at the Lake of Thun, and barred its northern outlet by a wall which holds its waters back to this day. Other moraines, though less distinct, are visible nearer the base of the Bernese Alps, and, above Meyringen, the valley is spanned by one of very large dimensions. Again, on the other side of the first chain of high peaks, the glacier of the Rhone, descending the valley toward the Lake of Geneva, has everywhere left traces of its ancient extension. We find the valley crossed at various distances by concentric moraines, until we reach the lake. There are no less than thirteen concentric moraines immediately below the present termination of the glacier of the Rhone, the one nearest to the ice, and the last formed, marking its present boundary. Others are visible half a mile, a mile, and two or three miles beyond, near the villages of Obergestelen and Münster. One of the largest and finest of these ancient moraines of the glacier of the Rhone stands at Viesch, and extends across the whole valley, while the Rhone, already swollen by many mountain-torrents, has cut its way through it. Lower down, we meet with traces of other ancient glaciers, reaching laterally the main glacier, which occupied the centre of the valley: such was the glacier of Viesch, when it extended as far down as the village;[49] such was the glacier of Aletsch, when it added its burden of ice to that coming from the upper valley; such was the glacier of the Simplon, whose moraines, of less antiquity, may now be seen by the road-side leading over the Alps to Italy; such were the two gigantic twin glaciers that drained the northern slopes of the mountain-colosses around Monte Rosa and Matterhorn, united at Stalden, and thence, losing their independence, became simply lateral tributaries of the great glacier of the Rhone; such were, farther on, the glaciers coming down from all the side-valleys opening into the Rhone basin; such were the glaciers of the St. Bernard, and even those of Chamouni, which in those early days crossed the Tête Noire to unite below Martigny with those that filled the valley of the Rhone. Thus the outlines of this glacier may be followed from its present remnant at the summit of the Valais, where the Rhone now springs forth from the ice, to the very shores of the Lake of Geneva, where, near the mouth of the river, on both banks of the valley, the ancient moraines may be traced to this day, thousands of feet above the level of the water, marking the course the glacier once followed.

It is evident that here the remains of the glacier mark a process of retrogression; for had these successive walls of loose materials been deposited in consequence of the advance of the glacier, they would have been pushed together in one heap at its lower end. That such would have been the case is not mere inference, but has been determined by direct observation in other localities. We know, for instance, by historical record, (see Gruner's "Natural History of the Glaciers of Switzerland,") that in the seventeenth century a number of successive moraines existed at Grindelwald, which have since been driven together by the advance of the glacier, and now form but one. Indeed, we have ample traditional evidence of the oscillations of glacier-boundaries in recent times. When I was engaged in the investigation of this subject, I sought out all the chronicles kept in old convents or libraries which might throw any light upon it. Among other records, I chanced upon the following, which may have some interest for the historian as well as the geologist.

During the religious wars of the sixteenth century, when the Catholics gained the ascendancy in the Canton of Valais, the inhabitants of the upper valleys adhered to the Protestant faith. Shut out from ordinary communication with the Protestant churches by the Bernese Oberland, the account states that these peasants braved every obstacle to the exercise of their religion, and used to carry their children over a certain road by the valley of Viesch, across the Alps, to be baptized at Grindelwald, on the farther side of the glaciers of Aletsch and Viesch. I could not understand this statement, for no such road exists, or could be conceived possible at present; nor was there any knowledge of it among the guides, intimate as they are with every feature of the region. Impressed, however, with the idea that there must be some foundation for the statement, I carefully examined the ground, and, penetrating under the glacier of Aletsch, I actually found, a number of feet below the present level of the ice, the paved road along which these hardy people travelled to church with their children, and some traces of which are still visible. It has been almost completely buried, although here and there it reappears; but at this day it is completely impassable for ordinary travel.

Evidence of a like character is found in a number of facts cited by Venetz in his celebrated paper upon the variations of temperature in the Swiss Alps, drawn from the parish and commune registers of the Canton of Valais. Among these are acts concerning the right to roads which are now either entirely hidden by ice, or rendered nearly useless by the advance of the glacier, a lawsuit respecting the use of a forest which no longer exists, but the site of which is covered by a glacier, and other records of a similar character. The only document, so far as I know, previous to this century, which furnishes the means of delineating with any accuracy the former boundary of a glacier, is a topographical plan of the environs of the Grimsel, including the extremity of the Aar, making a part of Altmann's work upon the Alps.

In 1740, Kapeler, a physician of Lucerne, undertook a journey to the mountains of the Aar, to visit certain crystal grottos, now well known, but then recently discovered. He prepared a map of these grottos and their vicinity, in which they are represented as being situated at some distance from the extremity of the glacier, the lower end of which is now considerably beyond them.[50]

But to return to the glacier of the Rhone. We can detect the sequence and relative age of its ancient moraines, not only by their position with reference to each other and to the present glacier, but also by their vegetation. The older ones have a mature vegetation; indeed, some of the largest trees of the valley stand upon the lower moraines, while those higher up, nearer the glacier, have only comparatively small trees, and the more recent ones are almost bare of vegetation. Moreover, we do not lose the track of the great glacier of the Rhone even when we have followed its ancient boundaries to the shores of the Lake of Geneva; for along its northern and southern shores we can follow the lateral moraines marking the limits of the glacier which once occupied that crescent-shaped depression now filled by the blue waters of the lake.

M. de Charpentier was the first geologist who attempted to draw the outlines of the glacier of the Rhone during its greatest extension, when it not only filled the basin of the Lake of Geneva, but stretched across the hilly plain to the north, reached the foot of the Jura, and even rose to a considerable height along the southern slope of that chain of mountains. At that time the colossal glacier spread at its extremity like a fan, extending westward in the direction of Geneva and eastward towards Soleure.[51] The very minute and extensive investigations of Professor A. Guyot upon the erratic boulders of Switzerland have not only confirmed the statements of M. de Charpentier, but even shown that the northeastern boundary of the ancient glacier of the Rhone was more extensive than was at first supposed. Other researches upon the ancient moraines along the shores of the Lake of Geneva, and in other parts of Switzerland, in which most geologists of the day took an active part, have made us as fully conversant with the successive outlines and varying extent of the principal glaciers ranging from the Alpine summits to the surrounding lowlands as we are with the glaciers in their present circumscription. But no one has done as much as Professor Guyot to add precision to these investigations. The number of localities, the level of which he has determined barometrically, with the view of fixing the ancient levels of all these vanished glaciers, is almost incredible. The result of all these surveys has been a distinct recognition of not less than seven gigantic glaciers descending from the northern and western slopes of the Alps to the adjoining hilly plains of Switzerland and France. It is most interesting to trace their outlines upon a recent map of those countries, but it requires that kind of intellectual effort of the imagination without which the most brilliant results of modern science remain an unmeaning record to us. Let us, nevertheless, try to follow.

The glacier of the Rhone, occupying the whole space between the Bernese and Valesian Alps, filled to overflowing the valley of the Rhone; at Martigny it was met by a large tributary from Mont Blanc, by the side of which it advanced into the plain beyond, filling the whole Lake of Geneva, and covering the beautiful Canton de Vaud and parts of Fribourg, Neuchâtel, Berne, and Soleure, rising to the crest of the Jura, and in many points penetrating even beyond its outer range.

To the east of this, the largest of all the ancient glaciers of Switzerland, we find the ancient glacier of the Aar, descending from the northern slope of the whole range of the Bernese Oberland. The glaciers that once filled the valley of Hasli, from the Grimsel to Meyringen, and those that came down from the Wetterhörner, the Schreckhörner, the Finster-Aarhorn, and the Jungfrau, through the valleys of Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen, united in a common bed, the bottom of which was the present basin of the Lakes of Brientz and Thun. These were joined by the glaciers emptying their burden through the valley of the Kander. To these combined glaciers the formation of the terminal moraine of Thun must be ascribed. But before this had been formed, the glacier of the Aar, in its amplest extension, had also reached the foot of the Jura, without, however, spreading so widely as the glacier of the Rhone. Farther to the east Professor Guyot has traced the boundaries of three other colossal glaciers, one of which derived its chief supplies from the Alps of Uri, bringing with it all the tributaries which the main glacier coming down from the St. Gothard received right and left, in its course through the valley of the Reuss and the basins of the Lakes of Lucerne and Zug. The second, born in the Canton of Glaris, followed mainly the present course of the Linth and the basin of the Lake of Zurich. Professor Escher von der Linth has shown that the lovely city of Zurich is built upon a moraine, like Berne. The imagination shrinks from the thought that all the beautiful scenery of those countries should once have been hidden under masses of ice, like those now covering Greenland. The easternmost ancient glacier of Switzerland is that of the Rhine, arising from all the valleys from which now descend the many tributaries of that stream, spreading over the northeastern Cantons, filling the Lake of Constance, and terminating at the foot of the Suabian Alp. Next to the glacier of the Rhone, this was once the largest of those descending from the range of the Alps.

West of Mont Blanc Professor Guyot has traced the boundaries of two other distinct ancient glaciers; one of which, the glacier of the Arve, followed chiefly the course of the Arve, and, though discharging the icy accumulations from the western slope of Mont Blanc, was, as it were, only a lateral affluent of the great glacier of the Rhone. The other, the glacier of the Isère, occupied, to the south and west of the preceding, the large triangular space intervening between the Alps and the Jura, in that part of Savoy where the two mountain-chains converge and become united.

It would lead me too far, were I to describe also the course of the great ancient glaciers which descended from the southern slopes of the Alps into the plain of Northern Italy. Moreover, these boundaries are not yet ascertained with the same degree of accuracy as those of the northern and western slopes; though very accurate descriptions of some of them have been published, with illustrations on a large scale, by MM. Martins and Gastaldi, and of others by Professor Ramsey. I have myself examined only the upper part of that of the valley of Aosta.

The evidence concerning the ancient glaciers of the Alps, especially within the limits of Switzerland, is already so full that it affords ample means for a comprehensive general view of the subject. It is frequently the case, that, when a stretch of time or space lies between us and a matter we have once studied more closely, it presents itself to us as a whole more vividly than when our nearness to it forced all its details upon our observation. In my present position, now that the lapse of many years separates me from my personal investigations of the ancient and modern glaciers, and I look back upon them from another continent, it seems to me that I have, as it were, a bird's-eye view of their whole extent; and I confess that this distant retrospect of the subject has been to me almost as fascinating as were the researches of my earlier years in the same direction. I wish that I could present it to the minds of my readers with something of the attraction it possesses for me. I trust, however, that I have made it plain to them that the great mountain-chain of the Alps has been a central axis from which immense glaciers at one time descended in every direction, not only to its base, beyond which the lowlands extend in flat undulations, but to a greater or less distance over the adjoining plains; while at present they are confined to the higher valleys. So far, then, notwithstanding the extraordinary difference in their dimensions, at the time they reached the Jura and the plain of Northern Italy, when compared with what they are now, they seem directly connected with the Alps, and the mountains appear as their birthplace; so much so that the first attempts at a generalization concerning their origin started from the assumption that they must have been formed between the high ridges from which they seem to flow down. These facts, then the only ones known concerning a greater extension of the glaciers, naturally led to the views advocated by M. de Charpentier. My own theory was also at first, that the upheaval of the Alps must, in some way or other, have been connected with these phenomena. But it soon became evident to me that these views were inadequate to account for the former presence of extensive glaciers in other parts of Europe; and even within the range of the Alps there were insuperable objections to their final admission. If the ancient glaciers had been first formed among the highest mountains, and extended downwards into the plains, the largest and highest moraines ought to be the most distant, and to be formed of the most rounded masses; whereas the actual condition of the detrital accumulations is the reverse, the distant materials being widely spread, and true moraines being found only in valleys connected with great chains of lofty mountains.

Again, all these moraines are within one another,--the most distant from the glacier to which they owe their origin encircling all those which are nearer and nearer to it within the same glacial basin. And as no glacier could reach to its farthest moraine without pushing forward all the intervening loose materials, it is self-evident that the outer moraines were first formed, and those nearer the glacier subsequently, in the order in which they follow one another from the lower valleys to the higher levels at which alone glaciers exist at present. Translating these facts into words, we see that the glaciers to which these ancient moraines owe their origin must have been retreating gradually while the moraines were accumulating. But a glacier while uniformly retreating forms no high walls of loose materials around its edges and at its lower extremity; as it melts away, it only drops the burden of angular rocky fragments which it carries upon its back over the loose fragments above which it moves, and which it grinds to powder, or to sand, or to rounded pebbles, in its progress. It is only where the glacier remains stationary for a longer or shorter period that large terminal moraines can accumulate; and they are generally found in such places in the valleys of the Alps as would naturally determine the lower limit of a glacier for the time being. There is no possibility of escaping the conclusion that the ancient glaciers must have begun that series of oscillations to which the accumulation of the moraines is to be ascribed, at a time when ice-fields already occupied the whole area which they have covered during their greatest extension. After we shall have seen how many centres of dispersion of erratic boulders existed in the northern hemisphere, similar to that of the Alps, we may perhaps be able to form some idea of the manner in which these ice-fields originated and gradually vanished.

Some investigators have been inclined to explain the presence of boulders, moraines, drift, and the like phenomena, by the action of water. But even if we could believe that rivers had brought along with them such masses of rock, and deposited them where they are now found, the regularity in the distribution of the materials disproves any such theory. In the lateral moraines of the Lake of Geneva we have a striking illustration of this apparently systematic division of the loose materials; for the northeastern moraines of that glacial basin contain rocks belonging exclusively to the northern side of the valley of the Rhone, while the moraines on the southern shore of the lake consist of rocks belonging to its southern side. Indeed, rivers, so far from building up moraines, have often partially destroyed them. We find various instances of moraines through which a river runs, having worn for itself a passage, on either side of which the form of the moraine remains unbroken. In the valley of the Rhone there are villages built on such moraines, as, for instance, Viesch, with the river running through their centre.

But if we need further confirmation of the fact that these accumulations on either side of this and other Swiss lakes are ancient lateral moraines, we have it in their connection with walls of a like nature at their lower end, where we find again transverse moraines barring their outlet, and also in the continuity of long trains of fragments of similar rocks extending side by side across wide plains for great distances without mixture. From the beginning of my investigations upon the glaciers, I have urged these two points as most directly proving their greater extension in former times, and more recent researches constantly recur to this kind of evidence. All our lakes would be filled with loose materials, had their basins not been sheltered by ice against the encroachments of river-deposits during the transportation of the erratic boulders to the farthest limits of their respective areas; and all the continuous trails of rocks derived from the same locality would have been scattered over wide areas, had they not been carried along, in unyielding tracks, like moraines. On a small scale the waters of the Rhone and of the Arve recall to this day such a picture. There are few travellers in Switzerland who have not seen these two rivers, where they flow side by side, meeting, but not mingling, at the southern extremity of the lake, the different color of their water marking the two parallel currents. In old times, when the glaciers filled all the valleys at the base of Mont Blanc, and to the east of it, uniting in the valley through which now runs the River Rhone, the glacier of the Arve came down to meet the ice from the valley of the Rhone, in the same manner as the River Arve now comes to meet the waters of the Rhone where they rush out from the southern end of the lake.

This would be the proper place to consider the formation of the lakes of Switzerland, as well as their preservation by the agency of glaciers. But this subject is so intricate, and has already given rise to so many controversies which could not be overlooked in this connection, that I prefer to pass it over altogether in silence. Suffice it to say that not only are most of the lakes of Switzerland hemmed in by transverse moraines at their lower extremity, but the lakes of Upper Italy, at the foot of the Alps, are barred in the same way, as are also the lakes of Norway and Sweden, and some of our own ponds and lakes. Strange as it may seem to the traveller who sails under an Italian sky over the lovely waters of Como, Maggiore, and Lugano, it is, nevertheless, true, that these depressions were once filled by solid masses of ice, and that the walls built by the old glaciers still block their southern outlets. Indeed, were it not for these moraines, there would be comparatively few lakes either in Northern Italy or in Switzerland. The greater part of them have such a wall built across one end; and but for this masonry of the glacier, there would have been nothing to prevent their waters from flowing out into the plain at the breaking up of the ice-period. We should then have had open valleys in place of all these sheets of water which give such diversity and beauty to the scenery of Northern Italy and Switzerland, or, at least, the lakes would be much fewer and occupy only the deeper depressions in the hard rocks.

Such being the evidences of the former extent of the glaciers in the plains, what do the mountain-summits tell us of their height and depth? for here, also, they have left their handwriting on the wall. Every mountain-side in the Alps is inscribed with these ancient characters, recording the level of the ice in past times. Here and there a ledge or terrace on the wall of the valley has afforded support for the lateral moraines, and wherever such an accumulation is left, it marks the limit of the ice at some former period. These indications are, however, uncertain and fragmentary, depending upon projections of the rocky walls. But thousands of feet above the present level of the glacier, far up toward their summits, we find the sides of the mountains furrowed, scratched, and polished in exactly the same manner as the surfaces over which the glaciers pass at present. These marks are as legible and clear to one who is familiar with glacial traces as are hieroglyphics to the Egyptian scholar; indeed, more so,--for he not only recognizes their presence, but reads their meaning at a glance. Above the line at which these indications cease, the edges of the rocks are sharp and angular, the surface of the mountain rough, unpolished, and absolutely devoid of all those marks resulting from glacial action. On the Alps these traces are visible to a height of nine thousand feet, and across the whole plain of Switzerland, as I have stated, one may trace the glaciers by their moraines, by the masses of rock they have let fall here and there, by the drift they have deposited, to the very foot of the opposite chain, where they have dropped their boulders along the base of the Jura. Ascending that chain, one finds the grooved, polished, and scratched surfaces to its summit, on the very crest of which boulders entirely foreign to the locality are perched. Follow the range down upon the other side and you find the same indications extending into the plains of Burgundy and France beyond.

With a chain of evidence so complete, it seems to me impossible to deny that the whole space between the opposite chains of the Alps and the Jura was once filled with ice; that this mass of ice completely covered the Jura, with the exception of a few high crests, perhaps, rising island-like above it, and mounted to a height of some nine thousand feet upon the Alps, while it extended on the one side into the northern plain of Italy, filling all its depressions, and on the other down to the plains of Central Europe. The only natural inference from these facts is, that the climatic conditions leading to their existence could not have been local; they must have been cosmic. When Switzerland was bridged across from range to range by a mass of ice stretching southward into Lombardy and Tuscany, northward into France and Burgundy, the rest of Europe could not have remained unaffected by the causes which induced this state of things.

It was this conviction which led me to seek for the traces of glaciers in Great Britain. I had never been in the regions I intended to visit, but I knew the forms of the valleys in the lake-country of England, in the Highlands of Scotland, and in the mountains of Wales and Ireland, and I was as confident that I should find them crossed by terminal moraines and bordered by lateral ones, as if I had already seen them.

The reader must not suppose, when I describe these walls, formed of the _débris_ of the glacier, as consisting of boulders, stones, pebbles, sand, and gravel, a rough accumulation of loose materials indiscriminately thrown together, that we find the ancient moraines presenting any such appearance. Time, which mellows and softens all the wrecks of the past, has clothed them with turf, grassed them over, planted them with trees, sown his seed and gathered in his harvests upon them, until at last they make a part of the undulating surface of the country. Were it not for anticipating my story, I could point out many a green billow, rising out of the fields and meadows immediately about us, that had its origin in the old ice-time. Thus disguised, they are not so evident to the casual observer; but, nevertheless, when once familiar with the peculiar form, character, and position of these rounded ridges scattered over the face of the country, they are easily recognized.

Of course, the ancient glaciers of Great Britain were far more difficult to trace than those of Switzerland, where the present glaciers are guides to the old ones. But, nevertheless, my expectations were more than answered. The first valley I entered in the glacial regions of Scotland was barred by a terminal moraine; and throughout the North of England, as well as in Scotland and Ireland, I found the hill-sides covered with traces of glacial action, as distinct and unmistakable as those I had left in my native land. And not only was the surface of the country polished, grooved, and scratched, as in the region of existing glaciers, and presenting an appearance corresponding exactly to that described elsewhere, but we could track the path of the boulders where they had come down from the hills above and been carried from the mouth of each valley far down into the plains below. In Scotland and Ireland the phenomena were especially interesting. I had intended to give in this article some account of the "parallel roads" of Glenroy, marking the ancient levels of glacier-lakes, so much discussed in this connection. But the reminiscences of old friends, and the many associations revived in my mind by recurring to a subject which I have long looked upon as a closed chapter, so far as my own researches are concerned, have constantly led me beyond the limits I had prescribed to myself in these papers upon glaciers; and as the story of Glenroy and the phenomena connected with it is a long one, I shall reserve it for a subsequent number.

* * * * *

BRYANT.

The literary life of Bryant begins with the publication of "Thanatopsis" in the "North American Review," in 1816; for we need take no account of those earlier blossoms, plucked untimely from the tree, as they had been prematurely expanded by the heat of party politics. The strain of that song was of a higher mood. In those days, when American literature spoke with faint and feeble voice, like the chirp of half-awakened birds in the morning twilight, we need not say what cordial welcome was extended to a poem which embodied in blank verse worthy of anybody since Milton thoughts of the highest reach and noblest power, or what wonder was mingled with the praise when it was announced that this grand and majestic moral teaching and this rich and sustained music were the work of a boy of eighteen. Not that Bryant was no more than eighteen when "Thanatopsis" was printed, for he must pay one of the tributes of eminence in having all the world know that he was born in 1794; but he was no more than eighteen when it was written, and surely never was there riper fruit plucked from so young a tree. And now we have before us, with the imprint of 1864, his latest volume, entitled "Thirty Poems." Between this date and that of the publication of "Thanatopsis" there sweeps an arch of forty-eight years. With Bryant these have been years of manly toil, of resolute sacrifice, of faithful discharge of all the duties of life. The cultivation of the poetical faculty is not always favorable to the growth of the character, but Bryant is no less estimable as a man than admirable as a poet. It has been his lot to earn his bread by the exercise of the prose part of his mind,--by those qualities which he has in common with other men,--and his poetry has been written in the intervals and breathing-spaces of a life of regular industry. This necessity for ungenial toil may have added something to the shyness and gravity of the poet's manners; but it has doubtless given earnestness, concentration, depth, and a strong flavor of life to his verse. Had he been a man of leisure, he might have written more, but he could hardly have written better. And nothing tends more to prolong to old age the freshness of feeling and the sensibility to impressions which are characteristic of the poetical temperament than the dedication of a portion of every day to some kind of task-work. The sweetest flowers are those which grow upon the rocks of renunciation. Byron at thirty-seven was a burnt-out volcano: Bryant at threescore and ten is as sensitive to the touch of beauty as at twenty.

The poetry of Bryant is not great in amount, but it represents a great deal of work, as few men are more finished artists than he, or more patient in shaping and polishing their productions. No piece of verse ever leaves his hands till it has received the last touch demanded by the most correct judgment and the most fastidious taste. Thus the style of his poetry is always admirable. Nowhere can one find in what he has written a careless or slovenly expression, an awkward phrase, or an ill-chosen word. He never puts in an epithet to fill out a line, and never uses one which could be improved by substituting another. The range within which he moves is not wide. He has not written narrative or dramatic poems: he has not painted poetical portraits: he has not aspired to the honors of satire, of wit, or of humor: he has made no contributions to the poetry of passion. His poems may be divided into two great classes,--those which express the moral aspects of humanity, and those which interpret the language of Nature; though it may be added that in not a few of his productions these two elements are combined. Those of the former class are not so remarkable for originality of treatment as for the beauty and truth with which they express the reflections of the general mind and the emotions of the general heart. In these poems we see our own experience returned to us, touched with the lights and colored with the hues of the most exquisite poetry. Their tone is grave and high, but not gloomy or morbid: the edges of the cloud of life are turned to gold by faith and hope. Of the poems of this class, "Thanatopsis," of which we have already spoken, is one of the best known. Others are the "Hymn to Death," "The Old Man's Funeral," "A Forest Hymn," "The Lapse of Time," "An Evening Reverie," "The Old Man's Counsel," and "The Past." This last is one of the noblest of his productions, full of solemn beauty and melancholy music, and we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting a few of its stanzas.

"Thou unrelenting Past! Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain, And fetters, sure and fast, Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign.

"Far in thy realm withdrawn, Old empires sit in sullenness and gloom, And glorious ages gone Lie deep within the shadow of thy womb.

"Childhood, with all its mirth, Youth, Manhood, Age, that draws us to the ground, And last, Man's Life on earth, Glide to thy dim dominions, and are bound.

* * * * *

"In thy abysses hide Beauty and excellence unknown,--to thee Earth's wonder and her pride Are gathered, as the waters to the sea;

"Labors of good to man, Unpublished charity, unbroken faith,-- Love, that 'midst grief began, And grew with years, and faltered not in death.

"Full many a mighty name Lurks in thy depths, unuttered, unrevered; With thee are silent fame. Forgotten arts, and wisdom disappeared.

"Thine for a space are they,-- Yet shalt thou yield thy treasures up at last; Thy gates shall yet give way, Thy bolts shall fall, inexorable Past!

"All that of good and fair Has gone into thy womb from earliest time Shall then come forth to wear The glory and the beauty of its prime."

Here is nothing new. It is the old, sad strain, of coeval birth with poetry itself. It may be read in the Hebrew of the Book of Job and in the Greek of Homer: but with what dignity of sentiment, what majestic music, what beauty of language, the oft-repeated lesson of humanity is enforced! Every word is chosen with unerring judgment, and no needless dilution of language weakens the force of the conceptions and pictures. Bryant is one of the few poets who will bear the test of the well-nigh obsolete art of verbal criticism: observe the expressions, "_silent_ fame," "_forgotten_ arts," "wisdom _disappeared_": how exactly these epithets satisfy the ear and the mind! how impossible to change any one of them for the better!

In Bryant's descriptive poems there is the same finished execution and the same beauty of style as in his reflective and didactic poems, with more originality of treatment. It was his fortune to be born and reared in the western part of Massachusetts, and to become familiar with some of the most beautiful inland scenery of New England in youth and early manhood, when the mind takes impressions which the attrition of life never wears out. In his study of Nature he combines the faculty and the vision, the eye of the naturalist and the imagination of the poet. No man observes the outward shows of earth and sky more accurately; no man feels them more vividly; no man describes them more beautifully. He was the first of our poets who, deserting the conventional paths in which imitators move, studied and delineated Nature as it exists in New England, modified by the elements of a comparatively low latitude, a brilliant sky, uncertain springs, short and hot summers, richly colored autumns, and winters of pure and crystal cold. The merit and the popularity of Bryant's descriptive poetry prove how intimate is the relation between imagination and truth, and how the poet who is faithful to the highest requisitions of his art must obey laws as rigid as those of science itself. Here, at the risk of making our readers read again what they may have read before, we transcribe a passage from a memorandum of Mr. Morritt's, containing an account of Scott's proceedings while studying the localities of "Rokeby":--

"I observed him noting down even the peculiar little wild flowers and herbs that accidentally grew round and on the side of a bold crag near his intended Cave of Grey Denzil, and could not help saying, that, as he was not to be upon oath in his work, daisies, violets, and primroses would be as poetical as any of the humble plants he was examining. I laughed, in short, at his scrupulousness; but I understood him when he replied, 'that in Nature no two scenes were exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes would possess the same variety in his descriptions, and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of Nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas, whoever trusted to his imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth.'"

This is excellent good sense, and the descriptive poetry of Bryant shows how carefully he has observed the rules which Scott has laid down. He never has a conventional image, and never resorts to the second-hand frippery of a poetical commonplace-book to tag his verses with. Every season of our American year has been delineated by him, and the drawing and coloring of his pictures are always correct. Our American springs, for instance, are not at all the ideal or poetical springs, and Bryant does not pretend that they are; and yet he can find a poetical side to them, as witness his poem entitled "March":--

"The stormy March is come at last, With wind, and cloud, and changing skies: I hear the rushing of the blast That through the snowy valley flies.

"Ah, passing few are they who speak, Wild, stormy month! in praise of thee; Yet, though thy winds are loud and bleak, Thou art a welcome month to me.

"For thou to northern lands again The glad and glorious sun dost bring; And them hast joined the gentle train, And wear'st the gentle name of Spring.

"And in thy reign of blast and storm Smiles many a long, bright, sunny day, When the changed winds are soft and warm, And heaven puts on the blue of May."

This is all as strictly true as if it were drawn up for an affidavit. March, as we all know, is the eldest daughter of Winter, and bitterly like her grim sire. The snow which has melted from the uplands lingers in the valleys; the storms, and the cloudy skies, and the rushing blasts mark the sullen retreat of winter; but the days are growing longer, the sun mounts higher, and sometimes a soft and vernal air flows from the blue sky, like Burns's daisy "glinting forth" amid the storm.

March and April come and go, and May succeeds. Hers is not quite the "blue, voluptuous eye" she wears in the portraits which poets paint of her, and those who court her smiles are sometimes chilled by decidedly wintry glances. Bryant gives us her best aspect:--

"The sun of May was bright in middle heaven, And steeped the sprouting forests, the green hills, And emerald wheat-fields, in his yellow light. Upon the apple-tree, where rosy buds Stood clustered, ready to burst forth in bloom, The robin warbled forth his full clear note For hours, and wearied not. Within the woods, Where young and half-transparent leaves scarce cast A shade, gay circles of anemones Danced on their stalks; the shad-bush, white with flowers, Brightened the glens; the new-leaved butternut And quivering poplar to the roving breeze Gave a balsamic fragrance."

How admirable this is! And with what truth, we had almost said courage, the poet makes his report. The emerald wheat-fields, the rosy buds of the apple-tree, the half-transparent leaves of the trees, the anemones on their restless stalks, the shad-bush (_Amelanchier Botryapium_), the quivering poplars, and the peculiar balsamic odor which one perceives in the woods at that season are so exactly what we find in our New-England May! How much better these distinct statements are than a tissue of generalities about flowery wreaths, and fragrant zephyrs, and genial rays, and fresh verdure, and vernal airs, and ambrosial dews!

But the year goes on. Our fitful and capricious spring passes by, and summer takes its place. But our New-England summer is not like the summer of Thomson and Cowper, and images drawn from English poetry and transplanted here would be out of place; and our faithful interpreter of American Nature takes nothing at second-hand. How correctly he delineates the characteristic features of our glorious month of June!

"There, through the long, long summer hours, The golden light should lie, And thick young herbs and groups of flowers Stand in their beauty by. The oriole should build and tell His love-tale close beside my cell; The idle butterfly Should rest him here, and there be heard The housewife-bee and humming-bird."

The _housewife_-bee is an expressive epithet. Does it involve a double meaning, and insinuate that as a bee carries a sting, so women who are stirring, notable, and good housekeepers have something sharp in their natures?

Next comes midsummer with its fervid and overpowering heats, which find in our poet also an accurate delineator.

"It is a sultry day: the sun has drunk The dew that lay upon the morning grass; There is no rustling in the lofty elm That canopies my dwelling, and its shade Scarce cools me. All is silent, save the faint And interrupted murmur of the bee, Settling on the sick flowers, and then again Instantly on the wing. The plants around Feel the too potent fervors: the tall maize Rolls up its long green leaves; the clover droops Its tender foliage, and declines its blooms. But far in the fierce sunshine tower the hills With all their growth of woods, silent and stern, As if the scorching heat and dazzling light Were but an element they loved."

But our radiant and many-colored autumn is Bryant's favorite season, and some of his most beautiful and characteristic passages are those which paint its hues of crimson and purple, and the vaporous gold of its atmosphere. Such is the number of these passages that it is difficult to make a selection of one or two for quotation. Here is one from "Autumn Woods."

"Let in through all the trees, Come the strange rays; the forest-depths are bright; Their sunny-colored foliage, in the breeze, Twinkles like beams of light.

"The rivulet, late unseen, Where bickering through the shrubs its waters run, Shines with the image of its golden screen And glimmerings of the sun.

"But, 'neath yon crimson tree, Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame, Nor mark, within its roseate canopy, Her blush of maiden shame."

Here is nothing imitative or borrowed, and here are no unmeaning generalities. Everything is exact and local,--drawn from an American autumn, and no other. And how lovely an image is that in the third stanza, and what an added charm it gives to an object in itself most beautiful!

But our renders must indulge us with one more quotation under this head, although we take it from one of the most popular--perhaps the most popular--of his poems, "The Death of the Flowers."

"The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago, And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow; But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood, And the yellow sunflower by the brook in autumn beauty stood, Till fell the frost from the clear, cold heaven, as falls the plague on men, And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen. And now, when comes the calm mid-day, as still such days will come, To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home, _When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still, And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill_, The south-wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore, And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more."

Of the poetry of these exquisite lines, the melancholy sweetness of the sentiment, the delicate beauty of the versification, we need not say one word, but we claim a moment's attention to their fidelity to truth, and the accuracy of observation which they evince. The golden-rod and the aster are the characteristic autumn flowers in that zone of our continent in which New England is embraced, and the sunflower is a very common flower at that season. That lovely child of the declining year, the fringed gentian, would doubtless have been brought in with her fair sisters, had it not been for her somewhat unmanageable name. Bryant has written some beautiful stanzas to this flower, but in them he only calls it a "blossom." And how fine a landscape is condensed into the two delicious hues which we have Italicized! and yet no one ever walked into a New-England wood on a late day in autumn without hearing the nuts drop upon the withered leaves, and seeing the streams flash through the smoke-like haze which hangs over the landscape.

But winter, especially our clear and sparkling New-England winter, has its scenes of splendor and aspects of beauty; and the poet would not be true to his calling, if he failed to recognize them.

"Come when the rains Have glazed the snow, and clothed the trees with ice, While the slant sun of February pours Into the bowers a flood of light. Approach! The incrusted surface shall upbear thy steps, And the broad arching portals of the grove Welcome thy entering. Look! the massy Trunks are cased in the pure crystal; each light spray, Nodding and tinkling in the breath of heaven, Is studded with its trembling water-drops That glimmer with an amethystine light; But round the parent stem the long, low boughs Bend, in a glittering ring, and arbors hide The glassy floor."

There are many more lines equally good, but we have not space for them. This is a description of winter as we have it here, compounded of the elements of extreme cold, a transparent atmosphere, and brilliant sunshine. No English poet can see such a scene, at least in his own country: Ambrose Phillips did see something like it in Sweden, and described it in a poetical epistle to the Earl of Dorset, which is much the best thing he ever wrote, and has a pulse of truth and life in it, from the simple fact that he saw something new, and told his noble correspondent what he saw.

But Bryant's claims to the honors of a truly national poet do not rest solely upon the fidelity with which he has described the peculiar scenery of his native land, for no poet has expressed with more earnestness of conviction and more beauty of language the great ideas which have moulded our political institutions and our social life. Before the breaking out of the Civil War he was a member of that great political party of which Jefferson was the head, and he is still a Democrat in the primitive sense of the word; that is to say, he believes in man's capacity for self-government, and in his right to govern himself. He has full trust in human progress; age has not lessened the faith with which he looks forward to the future; his sympathies are with the many, and not with the few. Though he has travelled much in Europe, his imagination has been but little affected by the forms of beauty and grandeur which past ages have bequeathed to the present. He has not found inspiration in the palace, the cathedral, the ruined castle, the ivy-covered church, the rose-embowered cottage. Indeed, it is only by incidental and occasional touches that one would learn from his poetry that he had ever been out of his own country at all: his inspiration and his themes are alike drawn from the scenery, the institutions, the history of his native land. His imagination, as was the case with Milton, rests upon a basis of gravity deepening into sternness; and we have little doubt that not a few of the things in Europe, which move to pleasure the lightly stirred fancy of many American travellers, aroused in him a different feeling, as either memorials of an age or expressions of a system in which the many were sacrificed to the few. In his mental frame there is a pulse of indignation which is easily stirred against any form of injustice or oppression. His later poems, as might naturally be expected, are those in which the sentiments and aspirations of a patriotic and hopeful American are most distinctly expressed; among them are "The Battle-Field," "The Winds," "The Antiquity of Freedom," and that which is called, from its first line, "O Mother of a Mighty Race." It would be well to read these poems in connection with the seventeenth chapter of the second volume of De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," which treats of the sources of poetry among democratic nations; and the comparison will furnish fresh cause for admiring the prophetic sagacity of that great philosophical thinker, who, at the time he wrote, predicted all our future, because he comprehended all our past.

And here we pray the indulgence of our readers to a rather liberal citation from one of these later poems, because it enables us to illustrate from his own lips what we have just been saying. It is also one of those passages, not uncommon in modern poetry, in which the poet admits us to his confidence, and lets us see the working of the machinery as well as its product. It is from "The Painted Cup," a poem so called from a scarlet flower of that name found upon the Western prairies,

"Now, if thou art a poet, tell me not That these bright chalices were tinted thus To hold the dew for fairies, when they meet On moonlight evenings in the hazel-bowers, And dance till they are thirsty. Call not up, Amid this fresh and virgin solitude, The faded fancies of an elder world; But leave these scarlet cups to spotted moths Of June, and glistening flies, and hummingbirds, To drink from, when on all these boundless lawns The morning sun looks hot. Or let the wind O'erturn in sport their ruddy brims, and pour A sudden shower upon the strawberry-plant, To swell the reddening fruit that even now Breathes a slight fragrance from the sunny slope.

"But thou art of a gayer fancy. Well, Let, then, the gentle Manitou of flowers, Lingering amid the bloomy waste he loves, Though all his swarthy worshippers are gone, Slender and small, his rounded cheek all brown And ruddy with the sunshine,--let him come On summer mornings, when the blossoms wake, And part with little hands the spiky grass, And, touching with his cherry lips the edge Of these bright beakers, drain the gathered dew."

What a lovely picture is this of the Manitou of flowers, and what a subject for an artist to embody in forms and colors! The whole passage is very beautiful, and its beauty is in part derived from its truth. It meets the requisitions of the philosophical understanding, as well as of the shaping and aggregating fancy. The poetry is manly, masculine, and simple. The ornaments are of pure gold, such as will bear the test of open daylight.

It is the function of the critic to discriminate and divide, and we have attempted to deal thus with the poems of Bryant; but some of the best of his productions cannot be classified and arranged under any particular head. They breathe the spirit of universal humanity, and speak a language intelligible to every human heart. Among these are "The Evening Wind," "The Conqueror's Grave," and "The Future Life." All of these are exquisite alike in conception and execution. We suppose that most persons have in regard to poetry certain fancies, whims, preferences, founded on reasons too delicate to be revealed or too airy to be expressed. As Mrs. Battles in a moment of confidence confessed to "Elia" that hearts was her favorite suit, so we breathe in the ear of the public an acknowledgment, that, of all Bryant's poems, "The Future Life" is that which we read the most frequently, and with the deepest feeling. We say read, but we have known it by heart for years. We will not affirm that it is the best of his poems, but it is that which moves us most, and which we feel most grateful to him for having written. The grace and charm of this poem come from regions beyond the range of literary criticism, and the heart shrinks from making a revelation of the emotions which it awakens.

We have left ourselves but little room to speak of the new volume, called "Thirty Poems," which lies before us. While nothing in it was needed for the poet's well-established and enduring fame, it will be welcomed by all his admirers as an accession to that stock of finished poetry which the world will not let die. Here we find the same dignity of sentiment, the same fine observation, the same grace of expression, as in the productions of his youth and manhood. The tone of thought is grave, earnest, sometimes pensive, but never querulous or desponding. Declining years have not abated in him a jot of heart or hope. His is the Indian-summer of the mind, made genial by soft airs and golden sunshine, by green meadows and lingering flowers; and still far distant is the time,--to borrow a noble image from this very volume,--

"When, upon the hill-side, all hardened into iron, Howling, like a wolf, flies the famished northern blast."

All honor to the strong-hearted singer who, in the late autumn of life, retains his love of Nature, his hatred of injustice and oppression, his sympathy with humanity, his intellectual activity, his faith in progress, his trust in God!

* * * * *

ANNESLEY HALL AND NEWSTEAD ABBEY.

The picturesque region of Matlock, with its cliffs and streams, its deep woods and romantic walks, is full of attraction. There we not only see the outward graces of Nature, but catch glimpses of her subtler elements. Springs, dripping from hidden sources, transform the fruit, or the bird's-nest with its fragile eggs, into stone with a Medusa touch; while in deep caverns are found beautiful spars, exquisitely tinted, as if prepared by the genii of the rock for the palace of their king.

Varied and wonderful are the workings of earth, air, fire, and water in the Derbyshire valley, where a sensitive nature recognizes more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of many a passing traveller. To this region of beauty and mystery Byron often came in his youth. These cliffs and streams and woods were familiar to the young poet, and his retentive memory must have received here many of Nature's deep and marvellous lessons. Perhaps among these scenes there came to him those

"noble aspirations in his youth To make his mind the mind of other men, The enlightener of nations, and to rise He know not whither, it might be to fall, But fall, even as the mountain-cataract, Which, having leapt from its more dazzling height, Lies low, but mighty still."

In Byron's day, Matlock was a fashionable watering-place; and the drawing-room of the "Old Bath," with cut-glass chandeliers, old engravings, and cushioned window-seats, looks much the same as when it witnessed many a gay assembly. In this room the wayward and sensitive youth, secretly writhing with mortification at being prevented by lameness from leading Mary Chaworth to the dance, watched, her more fortunate partners with moody envy. The young Lady of Annesley little imagined that the lame boy, with his handsome face and troublesome temper, would link her name to deathless song.

On a fair, sunny morning, towards the close of October, we left Matlock for Annesley Hall and Newstead Abbey. The day was in harmony with the poetical associations of our excursion: a gentle mist hung like a veil over hills and groves, giving a dreamy aspect to Nature, and rendering the places we intended to visit creations of fancy rather than actual facts. Very unromantic personages, however, answered our inquiries for Annesley, which reassured us of its reality. Byron's "Dream" had rendered the scenery familiar to our memory.

"The hill Green and of mild declivity, the last, As 't were the cape, of a long ridge of such, Save that there was no sea to lave its base, But a most living landscape."

Our approach led us beside those gentle slopes, and we seemed to see the maiden and the youth standing on the mild declivity, with its crowning circlet of trees.

"And both were young, but not alike in youth: As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge, The maid was on the eve of womanhood; The boy had fewer summers.

"... She was his life, The ocean to the river of his thoughts. Her sighs were not for him; to her he was Even as a brother, but no more; 'twas much, For brotherless she was, save in the name Her infant friendship had bestowed on him, Herself the solitary scion left Of a time-honored race.

"Even now she loved another, And on the summit of that hill she stood Looking afar, if yet her lover's steed Kept pace with her expectancy and flew."

That lover, soon after, became the husband of Mary Chaworth. It is not for us to speculate wherefore Destiny entangled the threads in that web of existence which originally seemed to have woven the fates of Byron and Mary Chaworth together. We are ignorant of spiritual laws, and know little of the origin whence come those strange attractions, mind to mind, heart to heart, which make or mar the life-experiences of us all.

Had events been ordered otherwise, Byron might have been a better and happier man, but the world would never have received the gift of "Childe Harold." Alas, that the soul must be ploughed and harrowed, and the precious seed trodden in, before it can give forth its fairest-flowers or its immortal fruit!

When we had last heard of Annesley Hall, it was ruinous and desolate, and we knew not in what condition it might now be found. Passing through an avenue of ancient oaks, the road winds down to an old picturesque gate-house, and, leaving the carriage, we walked onward. Looking through the arch of entrance, we saw as in a picture, nay, as in the poet's dream, "the venerable mansion," sitting quietly in autumn sunshine on its old terrace. To gray walls and peaks clung a climbing plant, its leaves red with touch of frost, contrasting deliciously with green ivy, and putting a bit of color into darker hues of stone-work. As we passed beyond the gate, we saw that the mansion had been, restored and repaired by careful hands guided by tasteful eyes and loving hearts. Above the hall-door was a bay-window, which instinct told us belonged to the "antique oratory," but we walked onward to the terrace, with its stone balustrade, inclosing a bright flower-garden. On the other side of the house stretches the lawn and park, with deer feeding quietly in the distance. No human form appeared; all was silent and peaceful. We walked thoughtfully on the old terrace, recalling the images of the poet and the Lady of Annesley; but looking up at the ancient sun-dial on one of the gables, we perceived that its shadow fell deeper and deeper with the declining day, telling us, as it had told many before, how time waited not, and reminding us that we, also were travellers. Passing again round the mansion, and casting a wistful look within, we saw a woman sitting at a low window, sorting fruit. We approached, and asked if strangers were permitted to see the Hall. She replied gently, that it was not "a show-house." We pleaded our cause successfully, however, when we told her how the thought of Mary Chaworth had led us here from a distant land. If the owners of Annesley knew that once an exception was made to a general rule, we trust they also believed that the visitors were not actuated by an idle curiosity.

Our request being granted, our guide laid aside her plums, and with a kind hand admitted us into the entrance-hall. It was low and venerable, with family-portraits on the walls, among them that of the Mr. Chaworth whom the "wicked Lord Byron" of other days shot in a duel. From the hall we entered the modern part of the house, harmoniously blended with the older portion of the building. In the drawing-room, two noble portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds arrested our attention. The lady (as Miss Burney tells us in her journal) was a beauty and a belle of Sir Joshua's time, and the painter has done justice to his subject, who is drawn at full length, feeding an eagle,--a spirited, splendid woman, who looks down from the canvas with bright, triumphant eyes. In the next apartment we were shown a portrait which touched deeper chords in our heart. It was a likeness of Mary Chaworth in miniature, representing a mature and beautiful woman.

"Upon her face there was a tint of grief, The settled shadow of an inward strife, And an unquiet drooping of the eye, As if its lids were charged with unshed tears."

The truth of this description startled us, and revealed instantly how deeply impressed upon the mind of her youthful lover must have been that face which was the starlight of his boyhood. Tears had passed since they parted, and chasms of time and gulfs yet deeper and wider than time ever knows had separated Byron from Annesley and England, and yet, when he wrote those lines, her face rose before him so clearly, wearing on its loveliness the impress of care and sorrow which he knew must be there, that no words but his can truly describe the expression of her features. Turning to our conductress, we asked if she had ever seen the Lady of Annesley. "Yes, I knew and loved her well, for I was her maid many years"; and, with a faltering tone, she added, "she died in my arms." Genius has immortalized Mary Chaworth; yet the tender and heartfelt tribute of one who had been the humble, but daily witness of the beauty of her life, was worth a thousand homilies.

We were conducted through the library, which had been in other days the drawing-room, out of which opens a small apartment, known to the readers of the "Dream" as the "antique oratory." Leading from the old entrance-hall is the favorite sitting-room of Mary Chaworth in her happy childhood and youth; and here, in his boyish days, Byron often sat beside her while she played for him his favorite airs on the piano-forte. Beneath the window is a little garden, where she cultivated the flowers she loved best, and which are still cherished for her memory. Our guide gathered a few of these, and gave them to our young companion: they now lie before us, carefully preserved, with some of their gay tints yet unfaded,--memorials, not only of Mary Chaworth, who lived and loved and suffered through all the varied experience of woman's life, but also of her to whom the blossoms were given, the fair, young girl, "who lived long enough on earth to learn its better lessons, but passed from it upwards and onwards without a knowledge of sin except the shadow it casts on the world."

Taking leave of our kind guide, to whom we were indebted for a visit of deep interest, we paused a moment on the terrace ere we "passed the massy gate of that old hall," to receive once more into our memory

"the old mansion and the accustomed hall And the remembered chambers, and the place, The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade."

A holy stillness pervaded the venerable house and its surrounding scenery, a peace which breathed of a purer sphere, where what is best on earth finds its correspondence.

We wondered not, that, when the deep waters of the poet's soul, too often ruffled by passion, polluted by vice, or made turbid by selfishness, were calm and pure enough to mirror heaven, they ever reflected the bright and morning star of Annesley.

The transition from Annesley Hall to Newstead Abbey is inevitable in thought and rapid in fact,--the road, over which the young poet so often passed, between the two estates, being only three miles in length. We had lingered so long at Annesley that the day was nearly spent before we reached the Abbey. How did the venerable pile, with its mysterious memories, fateful histories, and poetical associations, flash out into light and darken into shadow as the October sun sank behind the distant hills!

The Abbey church is now only a ruin, but the airy span of its rich Gothic window remains, as evidence of its original beauty. Through the now vacant space, once the wide door of entrance, we saw the floor of green grass, and in the centre the monument to Byron's favorite dog, Bowswain. All was silent about the ruin, except the cawing of a thousand rooks, who were settling themselves for the night with a vast amount of noise and bustle on the high branches of the old trees which sweep down on one side of the Abbey.

The residence which adjoins the church, once a monastery, was inherited by Lord Byron, with the title: to part with it was a dire necessity. Colonel Wildman, the school-fellow of Byron at Harrow, purchased the estate from the unhappy poet in the most liberal and generous manner, and blessed it into a home. On entering the house, we were shown through long corridors and vaulted passages, in which the monastic character of the building was preserved. When Byron came to Newstead from college, the Abbey was in a most dilapidated condition, and he had only means enough to make a few rooms habitable for himself and his mother. A gloomy and desolate abode it must have been. The furniture of Byron's bedroom remains as it stood when removed from Cambridge. On the walls are prints of his school at Harrow, and Trinity College, with various relics and boyish treasures. The window commands a view of the sheet of water which stretches before the Abbey, with its wooded banks,--a scene which he loves and remembers even when "Lake Leman wooes him with her crystal face," for he writes to his sister,--

"It doth remind me of our own dear lake By the old hall, which shall be mine no more."

Adjoining Byron's room is a suite of apartments, ruinous and roofless in his day, but which Colonel Wildman has restored, and furnished most appropriately with old tapestry and antique tables and chairs. These rooms wear a ghostly aspect, and we were not surprised to learn that one, at least, had the reputation of being haunted. The great drawing-room, once the dormitory of the monks, is now a splendid apartment richly decorated; above the chimney is a fine portrait of Lord Byron, and in an ancient cabinet was shown the cup made from a skull found in one of the stone coffins near the Abbey church. It is mounted in silver, and the well-known lines, written by Byron, are engraved on the rim. "Having it made" was, as he said himself, "one of his foolish freaks, of which he was ashamed." The cup, however, bears little resemblance to a skull. Colonel Wildman preserved the furniture of Byron's dining-room, and other apartments, (very simple it is,) without alteration, in the hope that he might return from Greece and revisit the halls of his fathers. Had Fate so willed, he would have found how kindly and faithfully his early friend had associated him with Newstead, and preserved every memorial of past history connected with the place. Yet thoughts of bitterness would even then have mingled with these familiar scenes, for it was not the heir of the Byrons who had restored Newstead Abbey to beauty and order.

Quitting the Abbey, and passing into the gardens, we followed the gardener through the deepening gloom to the wood, where, in former days, an ancestor of the Byrons set up leaden statues of satyrs, which the country-people called "the old lord's devils"; and very much like demons they looked. The tree was pointed out upon which Byron cut the names of "Augusta" and "Byron," with the date, during a last walk the brother and sister took together at Newstead. It is a double tree, springing from one root, which he chose as emblematical of themselves. The dim light barely enabled us to discern letters deeply carved, but growing less visible with the expanding bark. One of the trees has withered under that spell which seems to have blasted all connected with the name, and is cut off just above the inscription. The oak planted by Byron in his youth in a different part of the grounds was also shown to us. It is yet strong and vigorous. We picked up a yellow leaf, which the wind bore to our feet, as a fitting memorial of the place and the hour.

Passing again through the old Abbey church, the chill of the evening met us, cold and damp,--fit atmosphere for the place. The rooks were all asleep in their high nests; silence, darkness, and mist were fast casting their mantle over old Newstead; and the only cheerful sign came from the distant window of the Colonel's library, whence shot out a generous gleam of household fire,--emblem of that warm heart which had shed light upon the once desolate abode of its early friend.

Since our visit to Newstead, (seven years ago,) the Abbey has passed into other hands, and even a royal owner is now reported to possess the poet's ancestral home. We shall ever deem ourselves fortunate that our destiny led us to make this pilgrimage during the lifetime of Colonel Wildman and while the place was under his enlightened and generous ownership.

A few miles from Newstead Abbey is Hucknall, a poor, desolate-looking village, at the end of whose street stands an old church, beneath which is the burial-place of the Byrons. The building is ancient and gray, but dreary rather than venerable. Standing in its comfortless interior, we remembered that Byron once asked to be buried under the green, grassy floor of the roofless church at Newstead Abbey, with his faithful dog at his feet. The poet, whose rapid glance seized every glory and beauty of Nature, whose memory, wax to receive, and marble to retain, transferred the vision through the medium of his rare command of language, should have had a grave over which winds sweep, birds sing, and stars watch. Not so. A white marble tablet let into the wall above the family-vault was erected to Byron's memory by his sister. Perhaps the simplicity of the monument was suggested by these lines, written at the early age of nineteen years:--

"When to his airy hall my father's voice Shall call my spirit, happy in the choice, When poised upon the gale my form shall ride, Or dark in mist descend the mountain-side, Oh, may my shade behold no sculptured urns To mark the spot where dust to dust returns, No lengthened scroll, no praise-encumbered stone! My epitaph shall be my name alone. If that with honor fail to crown my clay, Oh, may no other fame my deeds repay! That, only that, shall single out the spot By that remembered, or by that forgot."

The inscription upon the tablet, after his name and title, designates him as the Author of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," who died while aiding the cause of Liberty in Greece: thus striking the noblest notes in a powerful, eccentric, blotted score, as the fundamental chord of Byron's requiem.

* * * * *

THE LAST CHARGE.

Now, men of the North! will you join in the strife For country, for freedom, for honor, for life? The giant grows blind in his fury and spite,-- One blow on his forehead will settle the fight!

Flash full in his eyes the blue lightning of steel, And stun him with cannon-bolts, peal upon peal! Mount, troopers, and follow your game to its lair, As the hound tracks the wolf and the beagle the hare!

Blow, trumpets, your summons, till sluggards awake! Beat, drums, till the roofs of the faint-hearted shake! Yet, yet, ere the signet is stamped on the scroll, Their names may be traced on the blood-sprinkled roll!

Trust not the false herald that painted your shield: True honor _to-day_ must be sought on the field! Her scutcheon shows white with a blazon of red,-- The life-drops of crimson for liberty shed!

The hour is at hand, and the moment draws nigh! The dog-star of treason grows dim in the sky! Shine forth from the battle-cloud, light of the morn, Call back the bright hour when the Nation was born!

The rivers of peace through our valleys shall run, As the glaciers of tyranny melt in the sun; Smite, smite the proud parricide down from his throne,-- His sceptre once broken, the world is our own!

* * * * *

NORTHERN INVASIONS.

Northern Invasions, when successful, advance the civilization of the world.

It would not be difficult to present from all history a mass of illustrations of this thesis wellnigh sufficient in themselves to establish it. And there is no doubt that the principles of human nature, which appear in those illustrations, can be set in such order as to prove the thesis beyond a question. The softness of Southern climates produces, in the long run, gentleness, effeminacy, and indolence, or passionate rather than persevering effort. It produces, again, the palliatives or disguises of these traits which are found in formal religions, and in institutions of caste or slavery. The rigor of Northern climates produces, on the other hand, in the long run, hardy physical constitutions among men, with determined individuality of character. It produces, therefore, freedom even to democracy in politics, protestantism even to rationalism in religion, and grim perseverance even to the bitter end in war. A certain stern morality, often amounting to asceticism, is imposed on Northern constitutions. So superficial is it, so much a creature of circumstance, that Norman, Scandinavian, Goth, or Icelander, deserves no sort of credit for it. All history shows that it vanishes before the temptations of any Vinland which the frozen barbarians stumble upon. None the less does it give them vigor of muscle, and power to endure hardship, which, in the end, tells, over the accomplishments of the most warlike Romans, Greeks, Persians, or other Southrons. "Fight us, if you like," said Ariovistus to Cæsar; "but remember that none of us have slept under a roof for fourteen years." That sort of people are apt to succeed in the long run.

When they succeed, as we have said, they advance civilization. To begin with the farthest East, all such strength as the Chinese Empire has to-day is due to the Tartar cross in its blood; that is, it results from the conquest of imbecile China by Northern Tartar tribes. One or two more such invasions, followed by colonization of Northern emigrants, would have made China a much stronger power this day than she is, and a nation of higher grade. The history of Indian civilization, again, is a history of Northern conquests. They tell us, indeed, that the Indian castes may be resolved into so many beach-marks of the waves of successive invasions from the North, the highest caste representing the last innovation. When Abraham crossed from Ur of the Chaldees into Canaan, when Cambyses broke open the secrets of Egyptian civilization, when Alexander first opened to the world Egyptian science, these were illustrations of the same thing,--Canaan, Egypt, and the world were all improved by those processes. Greece died out, and has never yet reëstablished herself, because she never had a complete infusion of Gothic blood in her worn-out system. Italy, on the other hand, had a new birth, and at this moment has a magnificent future, because Goths and Lombards did sweep in upon her with their up-country virtues and wilderness moralities. What the Ostrogoths did for Spain, what the Franks did for Gaul, what the Northmen did for England, are so many more illustrations. What Gustavus Adolphus would have done for Germany, if he had succeeded, would have been another.

What we are to do in the South, when we succeed, will be another. It makes the subject of this paper.

* * * * *

Nobody pretends, of course, that War itself does anything final in the advance of civilization. War itself is, what the poets call it, a terrible piece of ploughing. With us, just now, it is subsoil-ploughing, very deep at that. Stumps and stones have to be heaved out, which had on them the moss and lichens and superficial soil of centuries, and which had fancied, in that heavy semi-consciousness which belongs to stumps and stones, that they were fixed forever. As the teams and the ploughshares pass over the ground which has lain fallow so long, they leave, God knows, and millions of bleeding hearts know, a very desolate prospect in the upheaved furrows behind them. It is very black, very rough, very desert to the eye, and in spots it is very bloody. This is what war does. So desolate the prospect, that we of the Northern States have certainly a right to thank God that it was not we who called out the ploughmen.

War, in itself, does nothing but plough,--but immediately on the end of the war, in any locality, he who succeeds begins on the harrowing and the planting. And because God is, and directs all such affairs, it is wonderful to see how short is the June which in His world covers all such furrows as His ploughmen make with new beauty. It is to the methods of that new harvest that the President has boldly led our attention in his admirable Proclamation of Amnesty. It is to the details of it that each loyal man has to look already. It is but a few weeks since we heard a sentimental grumbler, at a public meeting, lamenting over the discomforts of the freed slaves in the Southwest, as he compared them with their lost paradise. Men of his type, to whom the present is always worse than the past, succeed in persuading themselves that the incidental hardships of transition are to be taken as the type of a whole future. And so this apostle of discontent really believed that the condition of the fifty thousand freed slaves of the Mississippi, in the hands of such men as Grant, and Eliot, and Yeatman, and Wheelock, and Forman, and Fiske, and Howard, was really going to be worse than it was under the lashes of Legree, or at the auction-block of New Orleans. The more manly, as the more philosophical way of looking at the transition, is to discover the shortest path leading to that future, which, without such a transition, cannot come.

The President, with courage which does him infinite honor, leads the way to this future. His Proclamation is really a rallying-cry to all true men and women, whether they are living at the North or at the South, to take hold and work for its accomplishment. With an army posted in each of the revolted States, with more than one of them completely under National control, he considers that the time for planting has come. He is no such idealist or sentimentalist as to leave these new-made furrows, so terribly torn up in three years of war, to renew their own verdure by any mere spontaneous vegetation.

Practical as the President always is, he is sublimely practical in the Proclamation. "Let us make good out of this evil as quickly as we can," he says; "let peace bring in plenty as quickly as she can." To bring this about, he promises the strong arm of the nation to protect anything which shall show itself worth protecting, in the way of social institutions of republican liberty. He does not ask, like a conqueror, for the keys of a capital. He does not ask, like a Girondist, for the vote of a majority. He knows, it is true, as all the world knows, that, if the vote of all the men of the South could ever be obtained, the majority would utterly overshadow the handful of gentry who have been lording it over white trash and black slaves together. But the President has no wish to prolong martial law to that indefinite future when this handful of gentlemen shall let the majority of their own people pronounce upon their claims to rule them. Waiving the requisitions of the theorists, and at the same time relieving himself from the necessity of employing military power a moment longer than is necessary, he announces, in advance, what will be his policy in extending protection to loyal governments formed in Rebel States. If there can be found in any State enough righteous men willing to take the oath of allegiance and to sustain the nation in its determination for emancipation,--if there can be found only enough to be counted up as the tenth part of those who voted in the election of 1860, though their State should have sinned like Gomorrah, even though its name should be South Carolina, they shall be permitted to reconstruct its government, and that government shall be recognized by the government of the nation.

It is true that this gift is vastly more than any of the Rebel States has any right to claim. When the King of Oude rebels against England, he does not find, at the end of the war, that, because he is utterly defeated, things are to go on upon their old agreeable footing. Rebellion is not, in its nature, one of those pretty plays of little children, which can stop when either party is tired, because he asks for it to stop, so gently that both parties shall walk on hand in hand till either has got breath enough to begin the game again. If the nation were contending against real and permanent enemies, in reducing to order the States of the Confederacy, or if the national feeling towards the people of those States were the bitter feeling which their leaders profess towards our people, the nation would, of course, offer no such easy terms. The nation would say, "When you threw off the Constitution, you did it for better for worse. It guarantied to you your State governments. You spurned the guaranty. Let it be so. Let the guaranty be withdrawn. You cannot sustain them. Let them go, then. You have destroyed them. And the nation governs you by proconsuls." But the nation has no such desire to deal harshly with these people. The nation knows that more than half of them were never regarded as people at home,--that they had no more to do with the Rebellion than had the oxen with which they labored. The nation knows that of the rest of the Southern people literally only a handful professed power in the State. The nation knows, therefore, that what pretended to be a union of republics was, really, to take Gouverneur Morris's phrase, a union of republics with oligarchies,--seventeen republics united to fourteen oligarchies, when this thing began. The nation knows that the fourteen will be happier, stronger, more prosperous than ever, when their people have the rights of which they are partly conscious,--when they also become republics. The nation means to carry out the constitutional guaranty, and give them the republican government which under the Constitution belongs to every State in the Union. The nation looks forward to prosperous centuries, in which these States, with these people and the descendants of these people, shall be united in one nation with the republics which have been true to the nation. For all these reasons the nation has no thought of insisting on its rights as against Rebel States. It has no thunders of vengeance except for those who have led in these iniquities. For the people who have been misled it has pardon, protection, encouragement, and hope. It can afford to be generous. And at the President's hands it makes the offer which will be received.

* * * * *

We say this offer will be received. We know very well the difficulty with which an opinion long branded with ignominy makes head in countries where there is no press, where there is no free speech, where there are no large cities. Excepting Louisiana, the Southern States have none of these. And the "peculiar institutions" throw the control of what is called opinion more completely into the hands of a very small class of men, we might almost say a very small knot of men, than in any other oligarchy which we remember in modern history. It is in considering this very difficulty that we recognize the wisdom of the President's Proclamation. He is conscious of the difficulty, and has placed his minimum of loyal inhabitants at a very low point, that, even in the hardest cases, there may be a possibility of meeting his requisition.

It is not true, on the other hand, that he has placed his minimum so low as to involve the government in any difficulty in sustaining the State governments which will be framed at his call. It must be remembered that this "tenth part" of righteous men will have very strong allies in every Southern State. It is confessed, on all hands, that they will be supported by all the negroes in every State. Just in proportion to what was the strength of the planting interest is its weakness in the new order of things. Given such physical force, given the moral and physical strength which comes with national protection, and given the immense power which belongs to the wish for peace, and the "tenth part" will soon find its fraction becoming larger and more respectable by accretions at home and by emigration from other States. We shall soon learn that there is next to nobody who really favored this thing in the beginning. They will tell us that they all stood for their old State flag, and that they will be glad to stand for it in its new hands.

It will be only the first step that will cost. Everybody sees this. The President sees it. Mr. Davis sees it. He hopes nobody will take it. We hope a good many people will. The merit of the President's plan is that this step can be promptly taken. And so many are the openings by which national feeling now addresses the people of the States in revolt, and national men can call on them to express their real opinions and to act in their real interest, that we hope to see it taken in many places at the same time.

When Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, he supposed that one-thirteenth part of his people were Christians. He was statesman enough to know that a minority of one-thirteenth, united together because they had one cause, would be omnipotent over a majority of twelve-thirteenths, without a cause and disunited. So, if any one asks for an example in our history,--the Territory of Kansas was thrown open to emigration with every facility given to the Southern emigrant, and every discouragement offered to the Northerner. But forty men, organized together by a cause, settled Lawrence, and it was rumored that there was to be some organization of the other Northern settlers, and at that word the Northern hive emptied itself into Kansas, and the Atchisons and Bufords and Stringfellows abandoned their new territory, badly stung. These are illustrations, one of them on the largest scale, and the other belonging wholly to our own time and country, of the worth even of a very small minority, in such an initiative as is demanded now. What was done in Kansas can be done again in Florida, in Texas, if Texas do not take care for herself, in either Carolina, in any Southern State where the "righteous men" do not themselves appear to take this first step on which the President relies.

Take, for instance, this magnificent Florida, our own Italy,--if one can conceive of an Italy where till now men have been content to live a half-civilized life, only because the oranges grew to their hands, and there was no necessity for toil. The vote of Florida in 1860 was 14,347. So soon as in Florida one-tenth part of this number, or 1,435 men, take the oath of allegiance to the National Government, so soon, if they have the qualifications of electors under Florida law, shall we have a loyal State in Florida. It will be a Free State, offering the privileges of a Free State to the eager eyes of the North and of Europe. That valley of the St. John's, with its wealth of lumber,--the even climate of the western shore,--the navy-yard to be reëstablished at Pensacola,--the commerce to be resumed at Jacksonville,--the Nice which we will build up for our invalids at St. Augustine,--the orange-groves which are wasting their sweetness at this moment, on the plantations and the islands,--will all be so many temptations to the emigrant, as soon as work is honorable in Florida. If the people who gave 5,437 votes for Bell and 367 for Douglas cannot furnish 1,435 men to establish this new State government, we here know who can.

"Armies composed of freemen conquer for themselves, not for their leaders." This is the happy phrase of Robertson, as he describes the reëstablishment of society in Europe after the great Northern invasions, which gave new life to Roman effeminacy, and new strength to Roman corruption. The phrase is perfectly true. It is as true of the armies of freemen who have been called to the South now to keep the peace as it was of the armies of freemen who were called South then by the imbecility of Roman emperors or their mutual contentions. The lumbermen from Maine and New Hampshire who have seen the virgin riches of the St. John's, like the Massachusetts volunteers who have picked out their farms in the valley of the Shenandoah or established in prospect their forges on the falls of the Potomac, or like the Illinois regiments who have been introduced to the valleys of Tennessee or of Arkansas, will furnish men enough, well skilled in political systems, to start the new republics, in regions which have never known what a true republic was till now.

To carry out the President's plan, and to give us once more working State governments in the States which have rebelled,--to give them, indeed, the first true republican governments they have ever known,--would require for Virginia about 12,000 voters. They can be counted, we suppose, at this moment, in the counties under our military control. Indeed, the loyal State government of Virginia is at this moment organized. In North Carolina it would require 9,500 voters. The loyal North Carolina regiments are an evidence that that number of home-grown men will readily appear. In South Carolina, to give a generous estimate, we need 5,000 voters. It is the only State which we never heard my man wish to emigrate to. It is the hardest region, therefore, of any to redeem. At the worst, till the 5,000 appear, the new Georgia will be glad to govern all the country south of the Santee, and the new North Carolina what is north thereof. Georgia will need 10,000 loyal voters. There are more than that number now encamped upon her soil, willing to stay there. Of Florida we have spoken. Alabama requires 9,000. They have been hiding away from conscription; they have been fleeing into Kentucky and Ohio: they will not be unwilling to reappear when the inevitable "first step" is taken. For Mississippi we want 7,000. Mr. Reverdy Johnson has told us where they are. For Louisiana, one tenth is 5,000. More than that number voted in the elections which returned the sitting members to Congress. For Texas, the proportion is 6,200; for Arkansas, 5,400. Those States are already giving account of themselves. In Tennessee the fraction required is 14,500. And as the people of Knoxville said, "They could do that in the mountains alone."

We have no suspicion of a want of latent Southern loyalty. But we have brought together these figures to show how inevitable is a reconstruction on the President's plan, even if Southern loyalty were as abject and timid as some men try to persuade us. These figures show us, that, if, of the million Northern men who have "prospected" the Southern country, in the march of victorious armies, only seventy-three thousand determine to take up their future lot there, and to establish there free institutions, they would be enough, without the help of one native, to establish these republican institutions in all the Rebel States. The deserted plantations, the farms offered for sale, almost for nothing, all the attractions of a softer climate, and all the just pride which makes the American fond of founding empires, are so many incentives to the undertaking of the great initiative proposed. In the cases of Virginia and Tennessee, and, as we suppose, of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, the beginning has already been made at home. In Florida a recent meeting at Fernandina gave promise for a like beginning. If it do not begin there, the Emigrant Aid Company must act at once to give the beginning.[52] There will remain the Carolinas and three of the Gulf States. The ploughing is not over there, and it is not time therefore to speak of the harvest. For the rest, we hope we have said enough to indicate to the ready and active men of the nation where their great present duty lies.

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Principles of Political Economy, with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy._ By JOHN STUART MILL. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

If works upon Political Economy, representing the orthodox European doctrine, are to be written, John Stuart Mill is certainly the man to write them. Able, candid, judicial, indefatigable, powerfully poised,--characterized by remarkable mental amplitude, by a rare steadiness of brain, by an admirable sense of logical relation, by a singular ease of command over his intellectual forces, by a clear and discriminating eye that does not wink when a hand is shaken before it,--of a humane and widely related nature, whose heats lie deep, so deep that many may think him cold,--of an understanding as dry as John Locke's, wanting imagination in all its degrees, from rhetorical imagination, which is the lowest, to epic imagination, which is the highest, and therefore destitute of the sovereign insights which go only with this faculty in its higher degrees, while, on the other hand, freed from the enticements and attractions that are inseparable from it,--Mr. Mill has qualifications unsurpassed, perhaps, by those of any man living for considerate and serviceable thinking upon matters of immediate practical interest and of a somewhat tangible nature. His mental structure exhibits combinations which are by no means frequent. Seldom is seen a conjunction of such cold purity of thinking with such generosity of nature; seldom such considerateness, such industry, patience, and carefulness of deliberation, with a boldness so entire; seldom such ducal self-possession and self-sufficingness, with equal openness to social and sympathetic impression; nor less rare, perhaps, is the union of a reflective power so large and dominating with an observation so active.

These mental qualities fit him in a peculiar degree for service in the field of Political Economy as now commonly defined,--a branch of literature which, more, perhaps, than any other, represents at once the genius and the limitation of our time.

Political Economy is a half-science, not total or integral; and if it pretend to spherical completeness, as it often does, it becomes open to grave accusation. The charges against it, considered as a strict and complete science, are two.

Of these the first has been cogently urged by Mr. Ruskin, while virtual admissions to a like effect were made by Mr. Buckle in his spirited account of Adam Smith. It is this: as a science, Political Economy must assume the perfect selfishness of every human being. Every science requires necessary, and therefore invariable, conditions, which, when expounded, are named laws. Such in Astronomy is gravitation, with the law of its diminution by distance; such in Chemistry is chemical attraction, with the law of definite proportions. The natural and perpetual condition assumed by Political Economy is the absolute supremacy in man of pecuniary interest. Absolute: it can admit no modification of this; it can make no room within its province for generosity, or for any action of man's soul, without forfeiting, so far, its claim to the character of a science. Put a dollar, with all honor, liberal justice, and humane attraction, on the one hand; put a dollar and one cent, with mere legal right and consequent safety, on the other hand; and Political Economy must assume that every man will gravitate to the latter by the same necessity which makes the balance incline toward the heavier weight. Or, conceding the contrary, it yields also its claim to the character of a perfect science, and takes rank among those half-sciences which partly expound necessary laws and partly contingent effects.

Now this assumed sovereignty of pecuniary interest seems to us _not_ a final account of human beings. There is honor among thieves; is there none among merchants? Does not every man put some generous consideration for others into his business-transactions? Has an honorable publisher _no_ aim but to print that which will sell best? Has he _no_ regard to the character of his house? Has he _no_ desire to furnish a nourishing pabulum and a healthful inspiration to the mind of his country? In the employment of labor and the giving of wages do men generally quite forget the work_man_, and think only of the work and its profit? This does not happen to accord with our observation of human nature. We think there is a large element of honorable human feeling incessantly playing into the economies of the world; and we think it might be yet larger without any injurious perturbation of these economies.

Again, as a science, Political Economy considers wealth only as related to wealth, to itself, not to man. It assumes wealth, as absolute, and regards man as an instrument for its production and distribution. But this attitude must be reversed. Wealth cannot be treated of in a wholly healthful way until it is considered simply as instrumental toward the higher riches which are contained in man himself.

And here we reach the peculiar virtue of Mr. Mill's book.

In the first place, he accepts the science as such, accepts it cordially and almost with enthusiasm,--in fact, has a degree of faith in its completeness and of confidence in its uses, greater, perhaps, than our own final thought will justify; for the reader will already have perceived that we incline in some measure to the opposition, with Carlyle, Ruskin, and others. Proceeding upon this basis, Mr. Mill expounds the orthodox theories with that definiteness of thought, with that precision of statement, and that calmness and breadth of survey, which never fail to characterize his literary labor. Any one who assumes, and wishes to study the science, will find in this writer a guide through its intricacies, whom it were hardly an exaggeration to name as perfect. Always sound-hearted, always clear, candid, and logical, always maintaining a certain judicial superiority, he is a thinker in whose company one likes to go on his mental travels, and whose thought one will be inclined to trust rather too much than too little. In the second place, Mr. Mill discerns the limitations of the science more clearly, and acknowledges them more frankly, than, to the extent of our somewhat narrow conversance with such writers, has ever been done before by any one who regarded it with equal affection and reposed in its theories a like faith. This, too, is thoroughly characteristic of him. He is one of the sanest and sincerest of men.

Thirdly, his inspiring and generative purpose is to lift the science into serviceable relation to the broad interests of man. Here we come to the real soul of the book. He accepts its customary limits chiefly that he may transcend them. He treats of wealth with a philosophical and cordial perception of its uses; but beyond and above this he is thinking of man, always of man,--and of man not merely as an eater and drinker, but as an intelligence and a candidate for moral or personal upbuilding. A reader would regard the work with a dull eye, who should miss this commanding feature. Sometimes by special discussions, as in his defence of peasant-properties in land,--sometimes only by an aroma pervading his pages, or bypassing expressions,--and always by the general ordering and culminating tendency of his thought,--one reads this perpetual question, the true and final question of all politics and economies:--How shall we secure the greatest number of intelligent and worthy men and women?

But while Mr. Mill's sympathy is with the people, the many, the whole of humanity, and while his desire for men is that they may attain the mental elevation which shall make them really _human_ beings, yet a marked feature of his book is the mild Malthusian element which pervades it. Let no stigma be therefore fixed upon him. Let honor be rendered to the courage which steadily inquires, not what representation of the facts will win applause, but simply what the facts _are_. And undoubtedly it is true that all considerate men in England have been compelled to contemplate the _possibility_ of over-population, of an insupportable pauperism, of a burden of helpless numbers which shall sink the whole nation into abysses of starvation with all its horrible accompaniments. It is but a few years since Ireland escaped unexampled death by famine only by an unexampled exodus. The New World opened its arms to the misery of the Old, and fed its famine to fatness,--and has got few thanks. But this rescue cannot be repeated without limit. And therefore forelooking men in England find the problem of their future one not too easy to solve. Mr. Carlyle, among others, has grappled with it. His brow has long been beaded with the sweat of this great wrestling; and if he seem to some of us a little abrupt and peculiar in his movements, we must at least do him the justice to remember that he, after the manner of ancient Jacob, is struggling with the angel of England's destiny. Mr. Mill, too, with an earnestness less passionate indeed, but perhaps not less real, is toiling at the same work.

And, by the way, an instructive comparison might be drawn between these two writers. Mr. Mill, not highly vitalized by belief, not nourished by any grand spiritual imaginations, hampered by a hard and poor philosophy, and with limited access to absolute truth, nevertheless, not only belongs fully to the opening modern epoch, but through a certain entireness of moral health and sanity is leading the time steadily forward into its great believing and builded future; though it may follow from his limitations that into this future he cannot accompany it _very_ far. Mr. Carlyle, with a poetic profundity of nature and a force of insight which entitle him not merely to a high place among the men of our time, but to a name among the men of all time, standing face to face with the divine reality and wonder of existence, conversing with the heights and depths of being, and appreciating the significance of personality, as Mr. Mill never can, will accompany our epoch into its future farther than one can foresee, but to its present must render a mixed and imperfect service; for a sickness runs in his veins, and he is trying to force the age into a half-way house, which is built equally by his hope and his despair.

Were this not merely a general characterization, but a review, of Mr. Mill's powerful work, we should venture to take issue on some matters both general and special,--as an example of the latter, on the possible utility of protective duties. The reasoning by which he, in common with his class, proves these to be necessarily futile for good, is indeed faultless so far as it goes, but, in our clear judgment, fails to cover the whole case; so that the question, whether as one of general polity or of industrial economy, is still open to consideration. Especially it may be urged, that the infancy of human industries, like the infancy of human beings, may require protection, even though their adult vigor could be safely left to take care of itself. Suppose it conceded that this protection is at first costly. So are the cradle and the nursery. Yet it may be that they "pay" in the end. Nay, as the cradle may enrich the household through the new incentives to labor and frugality which it supplies, so protections of industry may evoke new industrial powers, and thus at once begin to enrich the _nation_, though the capital which supports these fresh industries could not at first hold its own, as against other capital, without the motherly cares it receives.

But enough. Here is a book on a matter of large and immediate importance, put forth by one of the amplest and soundest minds of our time,--a man so long-headed and clear-hearted, so able and intrepid to think, to speak, and to hear correction, so intent upon high ends and so calmly patient upon the way, that the public can neglect his thought only by a criminal neglect of its own interests.

_A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life. With a Complete Bibliography of the Subject._ By WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER. Philadelphia: Geo. W. Childs.

Few "signs of the times" are more significant than the disposition shown on all sides to scrutinize and interpret the spiritual history of mankind. Lessing, Schlegel, Herder, Hegel, Guizot, Buckle, and others, endeavor, with various degrees of ambition and success, to estimate history considered as a progress; Carlyle in his "Heroes" and Emerson in the "Representative Men" regard it rather as a permanence, and seek to present its value in typical forms; meanwhile the Bibles and mythologies of the old world are collected, translated, subjected to interpretative study; and the critical scholarship of our time is almost wholly engaged in an endeavor either to arrive at the exact text or at the precise value of all the ancient literatures.

All men have at length discovered that the history of mankind _means_ something, and are naturally intent on learning _what_ it means. No one now regards it as a mere Devil's phantasmagoria, significant of nothing but Adam's sin in the Garden. However differing on other points, we all now perceive that the history of the mind of man is a more interior history of the universe,--that it must be studied, in the most earnest and reverential spirit of science,--that what Astronomy seeks to do in the heavens and Geology on the earth must be done in the realms of the mind itself,--and that, till we have found our Copernicus and our Newton of the human soul, modern science lingers in the porch, and does not find access to the temple. We all see that this history, not indeed as to the succession of its outward events, but as to its interior reality, must be grounded in the eternal truth and necessity of the universe. What wonder, that, having been so fully penetrated by the scientific spirit, modern minds should look with great longing toward these earths and skies of human history, coveting some knowledge of the law by which the thoughts and faiths of man perform their courses?

Nor any longer can "negative criticism" enlist the utmost interest. It is construction that is now desired; and he who studies history only that he may vanquish belief in the interest of knowledge cannot command the attention of those whose attention is best worth having. That fable is fable and mythus mythus no one need now plume himself on informing us, provided he has nothing further to say. Of course, we raise no childish and sentimental objection to what is called "negative criticism." It may not be the best possible policy to build the new house in the form of certain stories superimposed upon the old one, which, perhaps, is even now hardly strong enough to sustain its own weight. Let there be due clearing away; let us find foundations.

But the essence of the new point of view in the contemplation of history consists in this, that we no longer seek these foundations in the mere outward and literal history of man; we look, on the contrary, to his inward history, to perennial hopes and imaginations, to the evidence of his spiritual impulses and attractions, and just here find not only his _real_ history, but also the basis for theoretical construction.

We see, indeed, as clearly as any Niebuhr or Strauss of them all, that the imagination so pours itself into history as to supersede, or to disguise by transfiguration, the literal facts. The incessant domination of man's inward over his outward history is apparent enough. What then? Does that make history worthless? Nay, it infinitely enhances the value of history. Who are more deserving of pity than the distracted critics that discriminate the imaginative element in the story of man's existence only to cast it away? "Facts" do they desire? These _are_ the facts. What is the use of always mousing about for coprolites? Give us in the present form the product of man's spirit, and this to us shall constitute his history. Let us know what pictures he painted on the skies over his head, and he who desires shall be welcome to the relics which he left in the dust under his feet.

In our own country some worthy efforts have been made to set forth certain grand provinces in the spiritual history of the human race. Such was Mrs. Child's most readable book,--does she ever write anything which is not readable?--"The Progress of Religious Ideas." We have seen also some fine lectures on "Eastern Religions,"[53] which ought to go into print. And now Mr. Alger comes forward with his large and laborious work, seeking to contribute his portion to these new and precious constructions.

Mr. Alger's book is a real _work_. It is the result of no light nor trivial labor, of no timid nor indolent essay of thought. His aim has been to pass in _judicial_ review the thoughts and imaginations of mankind concerning the destiny of the human soul. It is an instruction to the jury from the bench, summing up and passing continuous judgment upon the evidence on this subject contributed by the consciousness of the human race.

Mr. Alger is a brave man. He does not hesitate to grapple with the greatest thinkers, nor to measure the subtlest imaginations of all time. In the opening chapter, for example, which is appropriately devoted to a consideration of theories of the soul's origin, he lays hold of the boldest speculative imaginations to which the world has given birth, with no hesitating nor trembling hand. Occasionally the reader may, perhaps, be more inclined to tremble for him than he for himself. One remembers Goldsmith's line,--

"The dog it was that died";

but our author comes forth from the trial in ruddy health, and does not seem at all out of breath. And all through the book he delivers his sentence like a man who has earned the right to speak.

And has he not earned it? For some years Mr. Alger has been known to scholars and others as a most indefatigable and heroic worker. This book justifies that reputation. The amount of reading that has gone to it is almost portentous. To us, who can hardly manage twelve books, big and little, in as many months, this mountainous reading furnishes matter for wonder.

Neither has this reading been chiefly a work of memorizing, nor has it been expended chiefly upon works of history commonly so called. A product of man's spiritual consciousness being under consideration, it is works of thought and imagination, rather than works of narration, which claim our author's critical attention; and his reading has been reflective and deliberative, involving a judgment upon speculative more than upon historical data. And it may fairly be said, though it be much to say, that he has shrunk from nothing which a perfect performance of his task required. Whether we consider the formation or the expression of his judgments, it may still be affirmed that he has met his great theme fairly, and given to its exposition the utmost exercise of his powers and the unstinted devotion of his labor.

We can accordingly pass upon his work this rare commendation, that it is thoroughly _honest_. This may, indeed, seem to many no very high approval. But it is one of the very highest. For we mean by it not merely that he has refrained from conscious misrepresentation of fact,--that he has not lied, as Kingsley did about Hypatia in the novel wherein he borrowed, only to befoul, the name of that spotless woman, knowing all the while that his representation was contrary to the recorded facts of history. To say so much only of this book would be not to attribute to it a positive merit, but only to acquit it of damning demerit. But what we affirm is that Mr. Alger has fairly looked his facts in the face, and come to some understanding with himself about them. When he speaks, therefore, it is about facts, about realities, not merely about words; and what he offers is the result of genuine processes of production which have gone on in his own mind. If he speak of life, it is not life in the dictionary, but in the universe. If he profess to offer thoughts, he really gives the results of his thinking. He does not cant; he does not merely recite verbal formulas; he does not play the part of attorney, first determining what to advocate, and then seeking plausible reasons: everywhere one perceives that he has really brought his _mind_ to bear upon _facts_, and so has come to real mental fruit. And it is this verity, this reality and genuineness, to which we give the name of _intellectual_ honesty. It is a rare quality; and always the rarer in proportion to the depth of the matters treated of, on the one hand, and to their expression in customs and institutions, on the other. Institutions are masks. The thinker must have both earnestness and penetration, if he is to get behind them. And just in proportion as any element of man's spiritual consciousness has come to institutional expression, it is the easier to talk about it and the harder to think upon it,--to talk _about_ it without talking _of_ it. But our author has made the distinction, and to the extent of his power looks facts in the face.

Having come to an understanding with himself, he honestly tries, again, to come to an understanding with the reader. He honestly imparts his mind. We find the book in this respect worthy of especial admiration.

Mr. Alger always writes well when he is not overmuch _trying_ to write well. If he forbear to covet striking effect, his style has perspicuity, directness, and vigor,--the essentials of all excellent writing,--and to these adds verbal affluence and occasional felicity. But if he be tempted of the Devil to become eloquent, and the father of all rhetorical evil strives hard to bring the soul of his style to perdition, then he begins to write badly. Let him, since he is capable of heroic things, imitate Luther, and fling his ink-pot. Even though it light upon the page, let him not be inconsolable, but remember that no blots are so bad as those made by ambitious inflation. We have not that horror of "fine writing" which leads The Saturday Review and Company to such obstreperous exclamation, and can endure the worst that Americans are guilty of in this matter quite as well as that affectation of off-hand ease and _nonchalance_ which enhances the native clumsiness of many among the later English writers, and, to our mind, mars extremely the poetry of Browning. But if a writer has some propensity to rhetorical Babel-building, it were well for _him_ to make an effort in the opposite direction, and try to build his sentences underground, like the houses of the Esquimaux.

Mr. Alger's book has minor faults and major excellences. But let him be content. He has faithfully performed a great labor, and we give him cordial approval. To a great theme he has brought great industry, a just appreciation, a fine spirit, and much of intellectual courage and activity.

Add that he is a man whose soul is in sympathy with the best thought, hope, and heart of the time. Brave, just, and humane, he is always on the right side, and always as direct and unflinching in the utterance of his faith as he is intrepid and right-natured in its adoption. Opinions are expressed in his work which do not accord with those of ecclesiastical majorities; nevertheless we think that those will thank him who least agree with him. It were, indeed, a shame that the people which sets the highest price upon political liberty should be the last to welcome the higher freedoms of thought; but it is a shame, we trust, which will not befall our country. We ourselves have, it is true, as little affection as most men for that sort of "free thinking" which consists in pouring out upon the public the mere wash and cerebral excretion of unclean spirits; but when any man has brought to a consideration of the greatest facts a pure and reverent spirit, he is entitled to present the results of his meditations with manly directness and vigor, as Mr. Alger has done in the work before us.

The "Complete Bibliography of the Subject" is an admirable piece of work. We present our respects to Mr. Ezra Abbot, Jr., and wish that many an earnest literary laborer had such a "friend."

_Dream Children._ By the Author of "Seven Little People and their Friends." Cambridge: Seaver & Francis.

The children seem to have found their Dickens at last. But, of course, it was to be expected that the child's Dickens would be different, in some important respects, from the Dickens of grown-up men and women. And so he is. Children do with the world in their thoughts pretty much as they will; and the genuine artist, working for children, must recognize this, or he will utterly fail. The author of "Dream Children," who made his introduction to the reading public as the author of "Seven Little People and their Friends," has the rare faculty of realizing for himself the exact position and attitude of the child. This position he takes so earnestly that he has nowhere the air of assumption or arbitrary fiction. The child lives so much in pictures! But the pictures must not betray one single feature of unreality, or the whole effect is spoiled; a moral may be pointed or a tale adorned, but the child has lost his natural food. We need such works as that under present notice to keep children from starving,--works that are not mechanically adapted to children, but which come to them as their own fresh, pure thoughts come, bringing them pictures like those which their own untrammelled fancy paints for them.

We have no space to enter into any details here. The children must do that for themselves; but not the children alone. For, as now and then we come upon a piece of Art, a painting or a statue, which from its subject would seem to belong peculiarly to the child's world, but which, because it is genuine Art, as to its manner and execution, rises out of this confinement to a single class, becoming universal, so it is with books of a similar character. This is true of the present work more emphatically than of the former work by the same author. The more external features of the work--its exquisite getting-up, in paper, binding, and especially in illustration--are only fitting to the inherent gracefulness of the writer's thought.

The subject is inviting, but we can only add that these short stories exhibit the rarest freshness and purity of imagination, the richest humor, and the most striking suggestion of an exhaustless fertility of invention which we remember ever to have seen in any child's book before. There is nowhere a careless execution; and the reason of this is probably that the characters have had a leisurely growth in the author's own mind. Generally it is supposed, that, to suit a subject to children, it is only necessary to go through some outward manifestations and to give the thing an air of novelty; but in this treatment there is no freshness, and no very great or very permanent moral expression. The writer of "Dream Children" will have a select audience, but he will have it pretty much to himself, and, as the best of all rewards which he could have, he will educate the thoughts of his juvenile readers imperceptibly into a greater love and reverence for the very heart of truth and beauty.

_Remains in Verse and Prose of Arthur Henry Hallam; with a Preface and Memoir._ Boston. Ticknor & Fields.

A permanent, though modest, place in the literature of the English language will be accorded to this little volume. Judged upon their intrinsic merits as compositions, the "Remains in Verse and Prose of Arthur Henry Hallam" would, nevertheless, hold no abiding position among the many pleasing poems, clever dissertations, and brilliant essays annually given to the press in Great Britain and America. Were they brought to us as the writings of a young man dying at thirty-two, instead of ten years earlier, we might hastily say, that, sacred as they must be to the personal friends of the author, there was in them no excellency sufficiently marked or marketable to warrant republication. But there gather other interests about them when we are told that these compositions came from the son of a very eminent man, and were written at an age at which we congratulate ourselves, if our college-boys are not oppressively foolish. For the rare instances of hereditary transmission of distinguished mental power are well worth attention, and the maturity of thought and the subtile trains of reflection in this youth now afford that large promise of genius which may not be confounded with those specious precocities of talent the world never lacks. Yet it is not probable that even these attractions could give to the literary remains of young Hallam that permanent place in letters which we have made bold to promise them. Only the inspirations of a great poet could wake the noblest sympathies of noblest hearts in perennial tribute to this friend so early called from life.

The student of Shakspeare's sonnets--poems having much in common with those written in memory of Arthur Hallam--is never tired of conjecturing the person to whom they were addressed. Who was the "only begetter" of these passionate offerings of the poet's love? Might he be recognized as he walked, a man among men? or was he the splendid idealization of genius and friendship? There are but faint answers to these questions. After the claims of Mr. Hart, Mr. Hughes, and the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke have been duly examined, there comes the conclusion that we may not know who and what he was towards whom the august soul of Shakspeare yearned with such exceeding love. Future readers of the "In Memoriam" of Tennyson will be more favored in their knowledge of the young man there given to fame. It will be known that he was worthy of the deep sorrow breathed into exquisite verse,--worthy also of those noble half-lights flashing above the sombre atmosphere, to show the instruction, the blessedness, the beauty, which grow from human grief. We are compelled to confess that those keen poetic glimpses into the high regions of philosophy and science, with which the memories of his friend inspired Tennyson, seem just dues to the brilliant auguries of a future which this world was not permitted to see.

An outline of Arthur's life has already been given to the American public. Little can be added to it from his father's touching preface to the unpublished edition of these writings in 1834, which is now reprinted. The childhood of young Hallam exhibits facility in the acquisition of knowledge, sweetness of temper, and scrupulous adherence to a sense of duty. At the age of nine he reads Latin and Greek with tolerable facility, and achieves dramatic compositions which excite the admiration of the father,--a thoroughly competent, unless partial, critic. This luxuriance of fancy is judiciously received; no display is made of it, and Arthur is sent to school at Putney, where he remains for two years. The common routine of English education is more than once broken by tours upon the Continent. When the boy leaves Eton in 1827, his father pronounces him "a good, though not, perhaps, first-rate scholar in the Latin and Greek languages." As certain Latin verses referred to are, for some inscrutable reason, omitted in this American edition, the reader has no means of deciding whether it is the modest reserve of the parent which pronounces them "good, without being excellent," or the fond partiality of the father which discovers them to be "good" at all. In any case, we must consider Arthur's "comparative deficiency in classical learning," for which the eminent historian seems almost to apologize, as one of his especial felicities. The liberalizing effect of travel, and a varied contact with men and things, prevented his powers from contracting themselves to a merely academical reputation. When at Cambridge, he renounces all competition in the niceties of classical learning, and does not attempt Latin or Greek composition during his stay at Trinity. Thus he escapes the fate of many quick minds, which, running easily upon college grooves, that end in the indorsement of a corporation, never make out to accept their own individuality for better and for worse. Arthur enters upon legal studies with acuteness, and not without interest. A few anonymous writings occupy his leisure. He is now just rising upon the world,--a brilliant orb, as yet seen only by a few watchers, who congratulate each other upon the light to be. A fatal tour to Germany, and all ends in darkness and mystery.

Judging from the writings before us, we should say that this young man was destined to a greater eminence in philosophy than in poetry. His father's opinion, in reverse of this, was perhaps based upon average tendencies of character, instead of selected specimens of production. The best prose papers here printed, the "Essay on the Philosophical Writings of Cicero," and the "Review of Professor Rossetti," are far more remarkable for the ease with which accurate information is subjected to original, and even profound thought, than are the poems for brilliancy of imagination or mastery over the capacities of language. Still, it must be confessed, that the sonnets are full of melody and refinement,--indeed, we can recall no poet who has written much better at the same age. In all Arthur's compositions we recognize an exquisite delicacy of feeling, without any of the daintiness of mind commonly found in intellectual youths. He seems to have acquired much of his father's command of reading, and to have inherited those rarer faculties of selection and generalization which give to learning its coherence and significance. In contrast to the precise and somewhat hard literary style of the elder Hallam, the diction of the son glows with the sensitiveness of a highly artistic nature. Arthur's attainments in the modern languages appear to have been considerable. He is said to have spoken French readily, and to have ranged its literature as familiarly as that of England. His Italian sonnets are pronounced by competent authority to be very remarkable for a foreigner. They are certainly marvellous for a boy of seventeen after an eight months' visit to Italy. In fine, upon the testimony presented in this volume, we think that no considerate reader will hesitate to credit Arthur Hallam with a rich and generous character, a wide sweep of thought rising from the groundwork of solid knowledge, and the delicate aërial perceptions of high imaginative genius.

Surely the life whose untimely end called forth "In Memoriam" was not lost to the world. Perhaps it was by dying that the moral and intellectual gifts of this youth could most effectively reach the hearts of men. He was not unworthy his noble monument. As we turn to the familiar lyrics, they swell and deepen with a new harmony. Again, the genius of Tennyson bears us onward through tenderest allegory and subtlest analogy, until, breaking from cares and questionings so melodiously uttered, his soul soars upward through thin philosophies of the schools, and at length, in grandest spiritual repose, rests beside the friend "who lives with God." It is good to know that the "A.H.H." forever encircled by the halo of that matchless verse does not live only as the idealization of the poet.

_History of West Point, and its Military Importance during the American Revolution, and the Origin and Progress of the United States Military Academy._ By Captain EDWARD C. BOYNTON, A.M., Adjutant of the Military Academy. New York: D. Van Nostrand.

In every country there must be localities the names of which are particularly associated with the national history. But in the United States there are few such places that are not portions of some one of the States; and if they have been the scene of incidents sufficient in number and importance to furnish material for an historical monograph, or so-called _local_ history, it will probably derive its special interest and coloring mainly from events of the Colonial period and the development of the material prosperity of the particular State or section. The associations of West Point, the seat of the United States Military Academy, are in this respect remarkable, that they derive their interest exclusively from circumstances incidental to the birth and progress of the nation. The history of the place is an important part of the nation's history. Compared with more comprehensive annals, wherein minute description of places and persons is impossible from the breadth of view, local histories leave on the reader more vivid impressions by affording a more microscopic and personal inspection. Where the minor history, as we may call it, is thus connected with the greater story of the body politic, it always enables the mind to combine, in the sequence of cause and effect, a certain series of events in the course of the nation's life, leaving a more distinct apprehension of the reality of that life in the past, by giving a rapid glance, under strong light, over a part, than usually remains after the perusal of larger works which attempt the survey of the whole.

From the beginning of the history of the United States, the administrative power of the National Government has been continuously exercised at West Point, to the exclusion of all other authority. It was occupied by the Continental forces at the commencement of the Revolutionary contest, as a place of the greatest strategic importance. It was the objective point in that drama of Arnold's treason, which, by involving the fate of André, is remembered as one of the most romantic incidents in the story of the war. In Captain Boynton's new "History of West Point," the aspect of the place, in connection with the events of that time, is given by that method of description which always leaves the sense of historic verity. The maps, plans, reports, letters, and accounts, with the spelling and types, though by no means with the printing or the paper of past days, are reproduced; and the actors on the scene, not only those of high position, whose names are household words, but those also whose part was humbler and whose memory is obscure, are allowed to present themselves to us as they appeared before the public of their own day. The first part of the volume gives the history of the place as it has been occupied for strategic purposes. The second part is devoted to its history as the seat of the Military Academy, a history which succeeds immediately to the former, and is intimately connected with the history of our internal government from its first organization under the Constitution to the present hour; so that the history of the locality presents itself as a brilliantly colored thread running through the warp of the national history. In the composition of this portion, as of the other, the author has presented his subject, not so much in his own narrative, as by a judicious combination of extracts from documents and papers of original authority; although his own observations, by way of connection and explanation, are given in good taste, and indicate a candid judgment, founded upon a manifestly loving, but still essentially impartial, observation. It should be no wonder, if the graduates of the Academy, who continue their connection with the army in mature years, should always regard the place through a vista of memory and affection, shedding over it a brilliancy to which others might be insensible. To most of them it has been as a home,--to many, probably, the only home of their youth; and, in the unsettled life of the soldier, we can conceive that to no other spot would their recollections recur with like feeling. We believe, that, in the society which gathers more or less permanently around the Academy, the feeling of a home-circle towards its absent members follows the graduates during their military service; and that they, on the other hand, are always conscious of a peculiar observation exercised from the place over their conduct; so that each one, during an honorable career, may look forward to revisiting it, from time to time, as a place associated by family-ties. This influence upon the individual graduate must be a very powerful incentive. It must, in the nature of the case, be unperceived by the public, but its value to the public will be enhanced by the observation which they may extend to the Academy; and it is eminently proper that such observation should be courted by the Government, and by those who represent it on the spot; the opportunity should be given to all, irrespectively of civil or military place, to become acquainted with its general management, the principles on which it is established, and the terms which the cadet makes with the country on entering, and to see, from time to time, a general _résumé_ of its working and success. A book which tells this, in its natural association with the narrative of all that gives the locality its name in our history, promotes a national interest and supplies a public want. Captain Boynton's book should command the interest of those who know most of West Point, and of those who know nothing about it. To some it will be a grateful source of reminiscence, and to others of entertainment combined with information which has acquired an increased interest for the citizen.

Not the least inviting portion of the book is that which relates to the topography and scenery of the Point. It is one of the singularities of our frame of government, that the nation is the lord of so little soil in the inhabited portion of its own dominion: though it is well to remember that territorial sovereignty is not, as many persons imagine, the only kind of sovereignty, nor, indeed, the most important kind; for there is sovereignty over persons, which may be held without eminent domain over the soil. Allegiance is personal. It is not based on the feudal doctrine of tenures. The notion of many persons respecting the right of the people of a State to carry themselves out of the nation is connected with false conceptions on this subject. It is pleasant to think that one of the places in which the nation is the land-owner and exclusive sovereign is celebrated for historic events, and also preëminently distinguished for beauty of situation. This circumstance undoubtedly contributes to the hold which the place has on the minds of those who have passed a portion of their youth on the spot, and it has evidently been a source of inspiration to the author, and, we may say, to the publisher, too, who have combined in making this a book of luxury as well as of useful reference, a parlor-book. The pictorial illustrations they have given add greatly to its value; and in this matter they might safely have gone even farther. This book is intended to make the spot familiar to the minds of many in various parts of the national domain. Most persons of any leisure, in this section of the country, have either themselves visited the banks of the Hudson or are familiar with scenery somewhat similar in some part of the Eastern or Middle States. But there are multitudes in the South and West of our conlinental empire who have hardly ever seen a rock bigger than a man's body, and who can, except by the aid of pictures, have no idea of a river hemmed in by mountains. The view given in this book of the localities in 1780, after a drawing made at the time by a French officer, is more valuable in this respect, we think, than for the historical purpose; and we should have preferred a similar view of the place as it now appears.

In common with all institutions which are the means of power and influence, the Academy has been regarded with jealousy. It has occasionally been assailed by an hostility which must always exist, and which its friends should always be prepared to meet. Captain Boynton has fairly stated and answered the objections commonly advanced. Among those recently put forth is the complaint that no great military genius has been produced from the Academy. The question might be asked, Does ever any school produce the genius? It is contrary to the definition of genius to be produced by such instrumentality. If no such military phenomenon has been seen, the only inference is, that the genius was not in the country, or that the circumstances of the country gave no opportunity for its development; and the question is, Should we, in the absence of genius, have done better without such an academy to educate the available talent of the country to military service? Goethe has said, that, to figure as a great genius in the world's history, one must have some great heritage in the consequences of antecedent events,--that Napoleon inherited the French Revolution. Though Napoleon developed military art beyond his predecessors, there is no reason to suppose that a soldier with natural endowments equal to his could now become the inspirer of a similar degree of progress. The ordinary method of appointment of cadets is described and vindicated by the author. While it does not appear, _a priori_, to be the best possible, it must be said that it is hard to devise any better one. It is always to be borne in mind that appointment does not by any means involve graduation. Enough have graduated to supply the wants of the army in ordinary times, and these have been selected from about three times the number of appointees. It is often said that equally competent persons would offer themselves from civil life. To maintain this, it must be held, either that the education given by the Academy is not of important benefit, or that the same benefit may be attained without it. But no one pretends to say that the education is not of the utmost importance; and, as Captain Boynton shows conclusively, we think, it is impossible for any one to attain it by unassisted study, either before or after entering the army, while it is utterly out of the power of any private institution to give a similar training.

Among the treasons incident to the Rebellion, none struck loyal minds more painfully than the desertion of the national right by Southern cadets and graduates of West Point. Some supposed that the diligent inculcation of State-Sovereignty doctrine by every organ of Southern opinion could not alone have caused this breach of plighted faith, and it was charged against the education given at the Academy, that it was based on "principles which permitted no discrimination between acts morally wrong in themselves, and acts which, destitute of immorality, are, nevertheless, criminal, because prohibited by the regulations of the institution." The charge indicated a gross misconception of the subject. The conduct-roll, which is to determine the standing of the cadet according to a total of demerit-marks, must include in one list delinquencies against all rules, whatever may be their source. But besides this scale for classification, the military law, to which cadets, as part of the army, are amenable, refers all immoralities and criminalities to a military tribunal. It would be well, if our collegians would try to estimate the effect, moral, intellectual, and physical, of the training of the Academy, as contrasted with that which they are receiving, and, in comparing a collegiate with a West-Point graduation, to remember that the cadet has been on service, and would have been discharged by his paymaster, if he had not done his duty, while in the colleges the professors serve for the pay, and would lose their bread and butter, if there were no degrees given.

_Roundabout Papers_. By W.M. THACKERAY. New York: Harper & Brothers.

We had scarcely finished reading this admirable volume of essays when news of the author's death was transmitted across the sea. And now we are to look no longer at our shelf which holds "Vanity Fair," "Fendennis," "The Newcomes," and "Henry Esmond," and think of the writer's busy brain as still actively engaged over new and delightful books destined some day to claim their places beside the companion-volumes we have so many times taken down for pure enjoyment during the last twenty years. Do you remember, who read this brief notice of the man so recently passed away, a passage in one of these same "Roundabout Papers," where this sentence holds the eye half-way down the page,--"I like Hood's life even better than his books, and I wish with all my heart, _Monsieur et cher confrère_, the same could be said for both of us when the ink-stream of our life hath ceased to run"? Only they who knew Thackeray out of his books can believe that this desire came earnestly from his heart to his readers. He was a man to be misunderstood continually; but his record will be found a noble one, when the true story of his career is told. His greatness as an author, his striking merit as an artist in the delineation of character, can never fail to be rightly estimated; but few will ever know the thousandth part of the good his generous deeds have accomplished in the world,--deeds done in secret, and forever hidden from the eye of public-charity hunters. His life had struggles, many and crushing; but with a noble fortitude he pursued his calling when sorrow held down his heart and wellnigh had the power to palsy his hand. This is no place for his eulogy; but we could not notice the publication of his latest volume without thus briefly recording our tribute to the author's memory. Since the death of Macaulay, England has sustained no greater loss in the ranks of her literary men.

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Was He Successful? A Novel. By Richard B. Kimball, Author of "St. Leger," etc. New York. G.W. Carleton. 12mo. pp. 407. $1.50.

The Days of Shoddy. A Novel of the Great Rebellion in 1861. By Henry Morford. Philadelphia. T.B. Peterson & Brothers. 12mo. pp. 478. $1.50.

Outlines of Universal History. In Three Parts. With a Copious Index to each Part, showing the Correct Mode of Pronouncing every Name in it.