CHAPTER I.

Having always had a great fondness for reading, I have gone through every book to which my very limited circle of acquaintance gave me access. Even this small literary experience was sufficient to impress upon my mind the superior value of personal memoirs. Of all my reading, they most interested me; and I have learned from others that such books have most interested them. Indeed, biography, and personal narrative of all kinds, seem to command a general popularity. Moreover, we like to know from the person himself what he does, how he thinks and feels, what fortunes or vicissitudes he encounters, how he begins his career, and how it ends. All biography gives us most of these particulars, but they are never so vividly recited as by the subject of the narrative himself. Accordingly what was once a kind of diary of the most unimportant events I have transformed into a personal history. I know the transformation will not give them any importance they did not originally possess, but it gives me at least one chance of making my recital interesting.

All who have any knowledge of the city of Philadelphia will remember that on its southern boundary there is a large district known as the township of Moyamensing. Much of it is now incorporated with the recently enlarged city, but the old name still clings to it. There are many thousand acres in this district, which stretches from the Delaware to the Schuylkill. The junction of the two rivers at its lower end makes it a peninsula, which has long been known as "The Neck." When the city was founded by William Penn, much of this and the adjoining land was in possession of the Swedes, who came first to Pennsylvania. They had settled on tracts of different sizes, some very large, and some very small, according to their ability to purchase. It was then covered by a dense forest, which required great labor to clear it.

My ancestors were among these early Swedes. They were so poor in this world's goods as to be able to purchase only forty acres of this extremely cheap land. Even that was not paid for in money, but in labor. In time they cleared it up, built a small brick house after the quaint fashion of those early days, the material for which was furnished from a superior kind of clay underlying the land all around them, and thenceforward maintained themselves from the products of the soil, then, as now, proverbial for its fruitfulness. It descended to their children, most of whom were equally plodding and unambitious with themselves. All continued the old occupation of looking to the soil for subsistence; and so long as the forty acres were kept together, they lived well. But as descendants multiplied, and one generation succeeded to another, so the little farm became subdivided among numerous heirs, all of whom sold to strangers, except my father, who considered himself happy in being able to secure, as his portion, the quaint old homestead, with its then well-stocked garden, and a lot large enough to make his whole domain an acre and a half.

I have many times heard him relate the particulars of this acquisition, and say how lucky it was for all of us that he secured it. The other heirs, who had turned their acres into money, went into trade or speculation and came out poor. With the homestead of the first settler my father seemed to have inherited all his unambitious and plodding character. His whole habit was quiet, domestic, and home-loving. He was content to cultivate his land with the spade, raising many kinds of fruits and vegetables for the family and for market, and working likewise in the fields and gardens of his neighbors; while in winter he employed himself in making nets for the fishermen.

But much of this work for others was done for gentlemen who had fine old houses, built at least a hundred years ago. The land in Moyamensing is so beautifully level, and is so very rich by nature, that at an early day in the settlement of the country a great many remarkably fine dwellings were built upon it, to which extensive gardens were attached. Father had been in and all over many of these mansions, and was fond of describing their wonders to us. They were finished inside with great expense. Some had curiously carved door-frames and mantels, with parlors wainscoted clear up to the ceiling, and heavy mouldings wherever they could be put in. These old-time mansions were scattered thickly over this beautiful piece of land. Such of them as were built nearest the city have long since been swept away by the extension of streets and long rows of new houses; but all through the remoter portion of the district there are many still left, with their fine gardens filled with the best fruits that modern horticulture has enabled the wealthy to gather around them.

I remember many of those that have been torn down. One or two of them were famous in Revolutionary history. The owners of such as remained in my father's time were glad to have him take charge of their gardens. He knew how to bud or graft a tree, to trim grapevines, and to raise the best and earliest vegetables. In all that was to be done in a gentleman's garden he was so neat, so successful, so quiet and industrious, that whatever time he had to spare from his own was always in demand, and at the highest wages.

When not otherwise occupied, my mother also worked at the art of net-making. At times she was employed in making up clothing for what some years ago were popularly called the slop-shops, mostly situated in the lower section of the city. These were shops which kept supplies of ready-made clothing for sailors and other transient people who harbored along the wharves. It was coarse work, and was made up as cheaply as possible. At that time the shipping of the port was much of it congregated in the lower part of the city, not far from our house.

When a little girl, I have often gone with my mother when she went on her errands to these shops, doing what I could to help her in carrying her heavy bundles to and fro; and more than once I heard her rudely spoken to by the pert young tailor who received her work, and who examined it as carefully as if the material had been silk or cambric, instead of the coarse fabric which constitutes the staple of such establishments. I thus learned, at a very early age, to know something of the duties of needle-women, as well as of the mortifications and impositions to which their vocation frequently subjects them.

My mother was a beautiful sewer, and I am sure she never turned in a garment that had in any way been slighted. She knew how rude and exacting this class of employers were, and was nice and careful in consequence, so as to be sure of giving satisfaction. But all this care availed nothing, in many cases, to prevent rudeness, and sometimes a refusal to pay the pitiful price she had been promised. Her disposition was too gentle and yielding for her to resent these impositions; she was unable to contend and argue with the rough creatures behind the counter; she therefore submitted in silence, sometimes even in tears. Twice, I can distinctly remember, when these heartless men compelled her to leave her work at less than the low price stipulated, I have seen her tears fall in big drops as she took up the mite thus grudgingly thrown down to her, and leave the shop, leading me by the hand. I could feel, young as I was, the hard nature of this treatment. I heard the rough language, though unable to know how harshly it must have grated on the soft feelings of the best mother that child was ever blessed with.

But I comprehended nothing beyond what I saw and heard,--nothing of the merits of the case,--nothing of the nature and bearings of the business,--nothing of the severe laws of trade which govern the conduct of buyer and seller. I did not know that in a large city there are always hundreds of sewing-women begging from these hard employers the privilege of toiling all day, and half-way into the night, in an occupation which never brings even a reasonable compensation, while many times the severity of their labors, the confinement and privation, break down the most robust constitutions, and hurry the weaker into a premature grave.

I was too young to reason on these subjects, though quick enough to feel for my dear mother. When I saw her full heart overflow in tears, I cried from sympathy. When we got into the street, and her tears dried up, and her habitual cheerfulness returned, I also ceased weeping, and soon forgot the cause. The memory of a child is blissfully fugitive. Indeed, among the blessings that lie everywhere scattered along our pathway, is the readiness with which we all forget sorrows that nearly broke down the spirit when first they fell upon us. For if the griefs of an entire life were to be remembered, all that we suffer from childhood to mature age, the accumulation would be greater than we could bear.

On one occasion, when with my mother at the slop-shop, we found a sewing-woman standing at the counter, awaiting payment for the making of a dozen summer vests. We came up to the counter and stood beside her,--for there were no chairs on which a sewing-woman might rest herself, however fatigued from carrying a heavy bundle for a mile or two in a hot day. And even had there been such grateful conveniences, we should not have been invited to sit down; and unless invited, no sewing-woman would risk a provocation of the wrath of an ill-mannered shopman by presuming to occupy one. Few employers bestow even a thought upon the comfort of their sewing-women. They seldom think how tired they become with overwork at home, before leaving it with a heavy load for the shop, nor that the bundle grows heavier and heavier with every step that it is carried, or that the weak and over-strained body of the exhausted woman needs rest the moment she sets foot within the door.

The woman whom we found at the counter was in the prime of life, plainly, but neatly dressed,--no doubt in her best attire, as she was to be seen in public, and she knew that her whole capital lay in her appearance. I judged her to be an educated lady. Though a stranger to my mother, yet she accosted her so politely, and in a voice so musical, that the gracefulness of her manner and the softness of her tones still linger in my memory. Looking down to me, then less than ten years old, and addressing my mother, she asked,--

"How many of them have you?"

"Only three, Ma'am," was the reply.

"I have six of them to struggle for," she said,--adding, after a moment's pause, "and it is hard to be obliged to do it all."

I saw that she was dressed in newly made mourning. I knew what mourning was,--but not then what it was to be a widow. My mother afterwards told me she was such, and was therefore in black. Other conversation passed between the two, during which I looked up into the widow's face with the unreflecting intensity of childish interest. Her voice was so remarkable, so kind, so gentle, so full of conciliation, that it won my heart. There was a sadness in her face which struck me most forcibly and painfully. There was an expression of care, of overwork, and great privation. Yet, for all this, the lines of her countenance were beautiful even in their painfulness.

While I thus stood gazing up into the widow's face, the shopkeeper came forward from a distant window, by whose light he had been examining the vests, threw them roughly down upon the counter in front of her, and exclaimed in a sharp voice,--

"Can't pay for such work as this,--don't want it in the shop,--never had the like of it,--look at that!"

He tossed a vest toward my mother, who took it up, and examined it. One end of it hung down low enough for me to catch, and I also undertook the business of inspection. I scanned it closely, and was a sufficient judge of sewing to see that it was made up with a stitch as neat and regular as that of my mother. She must have thought so, too; for, on returning it to the man, she said to him,--

"The work is equal to anything of _mine_."

Hearing a new voice, he then discovered, that, instead of tossing the vest to the poor widow, he had inadvertently thrown it to my mother. Then, addressing the former, he said, in the same sharp tone,--

"Can't pay but half price for this kind of work; don't want any more like it. There's your money; do you want more work?"

He threw down the silver on the counter. The whole price, or even double, would have been a mere pittance, the widow's mite indeed; but here was robbery of even that. What, in such a case, was this poor creature to do? She had six young and helpless children at home,--no husband to defend her,--no friend to stand between her and the man who thus robbed her. A resort to law were futile. What had she wherewith to pay either lawyer or magistrate? and was not continued employment a necessity? All these thoughts must have flashed across her mind. But in the terrible silence which she kept for some minutes, still standing at the counter, how many others must have succeeded them! What happy images of former comfort came knocking at her heart! what an agonizing sense of present destitution! what a contrast between the brightness of the one and the gloom of the other! and then the cries of hungry children ringing importunately in her ears! I noticed her all the time, and, child that I was, did so merely because she stood still and made no reply,--utterly unconscious that emotions of any kind were racking her grief-smitten heart. I felt no such emotions myself,--how should I suppose that they had even an existence?

She made no answer to the man who had thus wantonly outraged her, but, turning to my mother, looked up into her face as if for pity and advice. Were they not equally helpless victims on the altar of a like domestic necessity, and should not common trials knit them together in the bonds of a common sympathy? A new sadness came over her yet beautiful countenance; but no tear gushed gratefully to relieve her swelling heart. She took up the money,--I saw that her hand was trembling,--placed it in her purse, lifted from the counter a bundle containing a second dozen of vests, and, bidding my mother a graceful farewell, left the scene of this cruel imposition on one utterly powerless either to prevent it or to obtain redress. I have never forgotten the incident.

These labors of my mother were at no time necessary to the support of the family; but, though quiet and retiring in her habits, she had ambitious aspirations for supplying herself with pocket-money by the work of her own hands. As I said before, she was a beautiful sewer on the finest kinds of work, such as, if obtained from the families in which it is worn, would have yielded her remunerative wages. But we lived away beyond the thickly settled portion of the city, had no influential acquaintances from whom it could be procured, and hence my mother, with thousands who were really necessitous, resorted to the tailors, to the meanest as well as to the honorable. When my father heard of the indignities they practised on us, and of the shamefully low prices they paid us, he forbade my mother ever going to them again. He said their whole business was to grow rich by defrauding of their just dues the poor women who were thus competing with each other for work, and that we should do no more for any of them, until we could find an honest man and a gentleman to deal with.

But my father, always busy in his garden or in that of some wealthy neighbor, knew nothing even of the little outside world into which we had penetrated. His generous, unsuspecting nature thus led him to feel sure that the honest and the gentlemanly were to be found in abundance; but he overlooked the fact that it was only his quiet wife upon whom was devolved the task of discovering them, as well as that her explorations had never yet been rewarded with success.

Notwithstanding these discouragements, my mother was firmly of opinion that the needle was a woman's only sure dependence against all the vicissitudes of life. She believed, in a general way, that a good needlewoman would never come to want. The idea of diversifying employment for the sex had never crossed her mind; the vocation of woman was to sew. All must not only do it, but they must depend on it. She considered it of little use to think of anything beyond the needle. She could not see, that, if all the women of the country did the same thing, there must inevitably be more laborers than could find employment,--that the competition would be so great among them as to depress prices to a point so low that many women could not live on them,--and that those who did would drag out only a miserable existence.

Though a woman of excellent sense, with a tolerable education, and fond of all the reading she could find time to do, still she continued to plead for this supremacy of the needle, even after her humiliating experience at the slop-shops. She was the most industrious sewer I have ever known,--and not only industrious, but neat, conscientious, and rapid. Machines, with iron frames and wheels, had not then been invented; but since they have, I have never seen a better one than my mother. Her frame, if not of iron, seemed quite as indestructible, even if it did turn out fewer stitches. Times without number has she sat up till midnight, plying her needle by the dull light of a common candle: for there was no gas in our suburban district. While we children were sound asleep, there she sat, not from necessity, but from pure love of work. Yet she was up early, long before any of the dull sleepers of the household had stirred, and had more trouble to get us down to breakfast than to get up the meal itself. I scarcely thought of these things during the young years of my life, when they were occurring; but as I am writing this, they all come thronging before my memory with the freshness of yesterday. They will no doubt seem dull to others; but the recollection is very precious to me.

With this conviction of its being almost the sole mission of a woman to sew, she made the needle a vital point in my education, as well as in that of my sister. There were two girls of us, and a brother. I was the eldest, and my sister the youngest of the three. Thus, when I was quite a child, I learned to use the needle; and as I grew older, the utmost pains were taken to teach me every branch of sewing, from the commonest to the most difficult. My sister went through the same course of instruction.

At a very early age we were able to make and dress our own dolls, hem our handkerchiefs and aprons, and in due time were promoted to the darning of father's stockings and the patching of his working-clothes. We thought the being able to do these things for him a very great affair, and mother praised us for our work. But when sister Jane once put a patch over a hole in the knee of father's pantaloons, without covering all the rent,--she had let the patch slip down a little,--mother required her to rip it off and put it in the right place: but there was not a word of scolding for Jane; it was all softness, all kindness; she knew that Jane was a child. I think father, however, would never have noticed that the patch was a little out of place; and, indeed, I think it very likely he didn't care about having a patch of any kind put on, for his mind was on work, and not on appearances. But then it was my dear mother's way. We were taught that the needle was to be the staff of our future lives. Whatever we undertook must be done right; and then she had a just pride in making father always look respectable.

Thus in time we came to feel as much pride in being good seamstresses as did our mother. It was natural we should, for we believed all she taught us, and there was no one to controvert her positions,--except sometimes, when father heard her impressing her favorite dogma on our minds, he put in a word of doubt, saying, that, before the needle could be made so sure a dependence for poor women, there must be found a better market for female labor than the slop-shops, and a more honorable race of employers. To this questioning of her doctrine she made no reply, knowing that she had us all to herself, and that a doubt from father, only now and then uttered, would make no impression. But I remember it all now.

I can remember, too, how proud I felt when mother called me to her, one day, and gave me a piece of cotton cloth, of which she said I was to make father a shirt. It was of unbleached stuff, heavy and strong, but still nice and smooth. Father wore only one kind; and as it was to serve for best as well as for common wear, I was to make it as nicely as I could.

That afternoon all of us children were to go on a little fishing-excursion to the meadows on the Delaware, among the ditches which run all round the inside of the great embankment that has been thrown up to keep out the river. There was a vast expanse of beautiful green meadow inclosed by this embankment, on which great numbers of cattle were annually fatted. As viewed from the bank, it was luxuriant in the extreme; in fact, it was a prairie containing hundreds of acres, trimmed up and cared for with the utmost skill and watchfulness, and intersected with clean, open ditches, to secure drainage. Into these ditches the tide flowed through sluices in the bank, and thus they were always full of fish.

These beautiful meadows were the resort of thousands who resided in the lower section of the city, for picnics and excursions. The roads through them were as level as could possibly be, and upon them were continual trotting-matches. In summer, the wide flats outside the embankment were over-grown with reeds, among which gunners congregated in numbers dangerous to themselves, shooting rail and reed-birds. On Sundays and other holidays, the wide footpath on the high embankment was a moving procession of people, who came out of the city to enjoy the fresh breeze from the river. All who lived near resorted to these favorite grounds.

Several other little boys and girls were to come to our house and go with us. We had long been in the habit of going to the meadows to fish and play, where we had the merriest and happiest of times. Sometimes, though the meadows were only half a mile from us, we took a slice or two of bread-and-butter in a little basket, to serve for dinner, so that we could stay all day; for the meadows and ditches extended several miles below the city, and we wandered and played all the way down to the Point House. On these trips we caught sun-fish, roach, cat-fish, and sometimes perch, and always brought them home. We generally got prodigiously hungry from the exercise we took, and sat down on the thick grass under a tree to eat our scanty dinners. These dinner-times came very early in the day; and long before it was time to go home in the afternoon, we became even more hungry than we had been in the morning,--but our baskets had been emptied.

I think these young days, with these innocent sports and recreations, were among the happiest of my life. I do not think the fish we caught were of much account, though father was always glad to see them; and I remember how he took each one of our baskets, as we came into the kitchen, looked into it, and turned over and counted the fishes it contained. My brother Fred generally had the most, and I had the fewest: but it seems that even for other things than fishes I never had a taking way about me. Father was very fond of them, for mother had a way of frying their little thin bodies into a nice brown crisp, which made us all a good breakfast. So father had made us lines, with corks and hooks, tied them to nice little poles, and showed us how to use them and keep them in order, and had a corner in the shed in which he taught us to set them up out of harm's way. Occasionally he even went with us to the meadows himself.

But while I am speaking of these dear times, I must say that we always came home happy, though tired and dirty. Sometimes we got into great mud-holes along the ditch-bank, so deep as to leave a shoe sticking fast, compelling us to trudge home with only one. Then, when we found a place where the fish bit sharply, all of us rushed to the spot, and pushed into the wild rose-bushes that grew in clumps upon the bank: for I generally noticed, that, where the bushes overhung the water and made a little shade, the fish were most abundant. In the scramble to secure a good foothold, the briers tore our clothes and bonnets, sometimes so as to make us fairly ragged, besides scratching our hands and faces terribly. Occasionally one of us slipped into the ditch, and was helped out dripping wet; but we never mentioned such an incident at home. Then more than once we were caught in a heavy shower, with nothing but a rose-bush or a willow-tree for shelter; and there were often so many of us that it was like a hen with an unreasonably large brood of chickens,--some must stay out in the wet, and all such surplusage got soaked to the skin.

But we cared nothing for any of these things. Indeed, I am inclined to think that we were happy in proportion as we got tired, hungry, wet, and dirty. Mother never scolded us when we came home in this condition. Though we smelt terribly of mud and fish, and were often smeared over with the dried slime of a great slippery eel which had swallowed the hook, and coiled himself in knots all over our lines, and required three or four of the boys to cut off his head and get the hook out, yet all she did was to make us wash ourselves clean, after which she gave us a supper that tasted better than all the suppers we get now, and then put us to bed. We were tired enough to go right to sleep; but it was the fatigue of absolute happiness,--light hearts, light consciences, no care, nothing but the perfect enjoyment of childhood, such as never comes to us but once.

This is a long digression, but it could not be avoided. I said, that, when mother told me I was to make a shirt for father, we were that very afternoon to go down among these dear old meadows and dirty ditches to fish and play. Our lines were all in order, and a new hook had been put on mine, as on the last excursion the old one had caught in what the boys call a "blind eel," that is, a sunken log,--and there it probably remains to this day. Fred had dug worms for us, and they had coiled themselves up into a huge ball in the shell of an old cocoa-nut, ready to be impaled on our hooks. Everything was prepared for a start, and we were only waiting for dinner to be over: though I can remember, that, whenever we had such an afternoon before us, we had very little appetite to satisfy. The anticipation and glee were such that the pervading desire was not to eat, but to be off.

But when mother gave me the shirt to make, I felt so proud of the trust, that all desire to go to the meadows left me. I felt a new sensation, a new ambition, a new pride. It was very strange that I should thus suddenly give up the ditches, the fishing, the scratching, and the dirt; for none of us loved them more dearly than myself. But they were old and familiar, and father's shirt was a novelty; and novelty is one of the great attractions for the young. So they went without me, and after dinner I sat down to make my first shirt.

It was to be made in the plainest way; for father had no pride about his dress. I cut it out myself, basted it together, then sewed it with my utmost care. There was to be no nice work about collar or wristband,--no troublesome plaits or gussets,--no machine-made bosom to set in,--only a few gathers,--and all plain work throughout. My mother looked at me occasionally as the shirt progressed, but found no fault. She did not once stop me to examine it; but I feel sure she must have scrutinized it carefully after I had gone to bed. I was so particular in this, my first grand effort to secure the honors of a needlewoman, that quite two days were occupied in doing it.

When all done, I took it to mother, proud of my achievement, telling her, that, if she had more cotton, I was ready to begin another. She looked over it with a slowness that I am sure was intentional, and not at all necessary. The wristbands were all right, the buttons in the proper places, the hemming she said was done well. Then, taking it up by the collar, and holding the garment at full length before her, so that I could see it all, she asked me if I saw anything wrong. I looked closely, but could see no mistake. At last she exclaimed,--

"Why, my dear Lizzie, this is only a bag with arms to it! How is your father to get into it?"

She turned it all round before me, and showed me that I had left no opening at the bosom and neck,--father could never get it over his head! I cannot tell how astonished and mortified I felt. I cried as only such a child could cry. I sobbed and begged her not to show it to father, and promised to alter it immediately, if she would only tell me how. But, oh, how kind my dear mother was in soothing my excited feelings! There was not a word of blame. She made me comparatively calm by immediately opening the bosom as it should have been done, and showing me how to finish it. I hurried up to my chamber to be alone and out of sight. They called me to dinner, but my appetite had gone. Though my little heart was full, and my hand trembled, yet long before night the work was done.

Oh, how the burden rose from my spirits when my dear mother took me in her arms, kissed me tenderly, and said that my mistake was nothing but a trifle that I would be sure to remember, and that the shirt was far better made than she had expected! When father came in to supper, I took it to him and told him that _I_ had made it. He looked both surprised and pleased, kissed me with even more than his usual kindness,--I think mother must have privately told him of my blunder,--and said that he would surely remember me at Christmas.

I know that incidents like these can be of little interest to any but myself. But what more exciting ones are to be expected in such a history as mine? If they are related here, it is because I am requested to record them. Still, every poor sewing-girl will consider that the making of her first shirt is an event in her career, a difficulty to be surmounted,--and that, even when successfully accomplished, it is in reality only the beginning of a long career of toil.

MEMORIES OF AUTHORS.

A SERIES OF PORTRAITS FROM PERSONAL ACQUAINTANCE.

THOMAS MOORE.

More than forty years have passed since I first conversed with the poet Thomas Moore. Afterwards it was my privilege to know him intimately. He seldom, of late years, visited London without spending an evening at our house; and in 1845 we passed a happy week at his cottage, Sloperton, in the county of Wilts:--

"In my calendar There are no whiter days!"

The poet has himself noted the time in his diary (November, 1845).

It was in the year 1822 I made his acquaintance in Dublin. He was in the full ripeness of middle age,--then, as ever, "the poet of all circles, and the idol of his own." As his visits to his native city were few and far between, the power to see him, and especially to _hear_ him, was a boon of magnitude. It was, indeed, a treat, when, seated at the piano, he gave voice to the glorious "Melodies" that are justly regarded as the most valuable of his legacies to mankind. I can recall that evening as vividly as if it were not a sennight old: the graceful man, small and slim in figure, his upturned eyes and eloquent features giving force to the music that accompanied the songs, or rather to the songs that accompanied the music.

Dublin was then the home of much of the native talent that afterwards found its way to England; and there were some, Lady Morgan especially, whose "evenings" drew together the wit and genius for which that city has always been famous. To such an evening I make reference. It was at the house of a Mr. Steele, then High Sheriff of the County of Dublin, and I was introduced there by the Rev. Charles Maturin. The name is not widely known, yet Maturin was famous in his day--and for a day--as the author of two successful tragedies, "Bertram" and "Manuel," (in which the elder Kean sustained the leading parts,) and of several popular novels. Moreover, he was an eloquent preacher, although probably he mistook his calling when he entered the Church. Among his many eccentricities I remember one: it was his habit to compose while walking about his large and scantily furnished house; and always on such occasions he placed a wafer on his forehead,--a sign that none of his family or servants were to address him then, to endanger the loss of a thought that might enlighten a world. He was always in "difficulties." In Lady Morgan's Memoirs it is stated that Sir Charles Morgan raised a subscription for Maturin, and supplied him with fifty pounds. "The first use he made of the money was to give a grand party. There was little furniture in the reception-room, but at one end of it there had been erected an old theatrical-property throne, and under a canopy of crimson velvet sat Mr. and Mrs. Maturin!"

Among the guests at Mr. Steele's were the poet's father, mother, and sister,--the sister to whom he was so fervently attached. The father was a plain, homely man,--nothing more, and assuming to be nothing more, than a Dublin tradesman.[F] The mother evidently possessed a far higher mind. She, too, was retiring and unpretending,--like her son in features,--with the same gentle, yet sparkling eye, flexible and smiling mouth, and kindly and conciliating manners. It was to be learned long afterwards how deep was the affection that existed in the poet's heart for these humble relatives,--how fervid the love he bore them,--how earnest the respect with which he invariably treated them,--nay, how elevated was the pride with which he regarded them from first to last.

The sister, Ellen, was, I believe, slightly deformed; at least, the memory to me is that of a small, delicate woman, with one shoulder "out." The expression of her countenance betokened suffering, having that peculiar "sharpness" which usually accompanies severe and continuous bodily ailment.[G] I saw more of her some years afterwards, and knew that her mind and disposition were essentially lovable.

To the mother--Anastasia Moore, _nee_ Codd, a humbly descended, homely, and almost uneducated woman[H]--Moore gave intense respect and devoted affection, from the time that reason dawned upon him to the hour of her death. To her he wrote his first letter, (in 1793,) ending with these lines--

"Your absence all but ill endure, And none so ill as--THOMAS MOORE."

And in the zenith of his fame, when society drew largely on his time, and the highest and best of the land coveted a portion of his leisure, with her he corresponded so regularly that at her death she possessed (it has been so told me by Mrs. Moore) four thousand of his letters. Never, according to the statement of Earl Russell, did he pass a week without writing to her _twice_, except during his absence in Bermuda, when franks were not to be obtained, and postages were costly.

When a world had tendered to him its homage, still the homely woman was his "darling mother," to whom he transmitted a record of his cares and his triumphs, his anxieties and his hopes, as if he considered--as I verily believe he did consider--that to give her pleasure was the chief enjoyment of his life. His sister--"excellent Nell"--occupied only a second place in his heart; while his father received as much of his respect as if he had been the hereditary representative of a line of kings.

All his life long, "he continued," according to one of the most valued of his correspondents, "amidst the pleasures of the world, to preserve his home fireside affections true and genuine, as they were when a boy."

To his mother he writes of all his facts and fancies; to her he opens his heart in its natural and innocent fulness; tells her of each thing, great or small, that, interesting him, must interest her,--from his introduction to the Prince, and his visit to Niagara, to the acquisition of a pencil-case, and the purchase of a new pocket-handkerchief. "You, my sweet mother," he writes, "can see neither frivolity nor egotism in these details."

In 1806, Moore's father received, through the interest of Lord Moira, the post of Barrack-Master in Dublin, and thus became independent. In 1815, "Retrenchment" deprived him of this office, and he was placed on half-pay. The family had to seek aid from the son, who entreated them not to despond, but rather to thank Providence for having permitted them to enjoy the fruits of office so long, till he (the son) was "in a situation to keep them in comfort without it." "Thank Heaven," he writes afterwards of his father, "I have been able to make his latter days tranquil and comfortable." When sitting beside his death-bed, (in 1825,) he was relieved by a burst of tears and prayers, and by "a sort of confidence that the Great and Pure Spirit above us could not be otherwise than pleased at what He saw passing in my mind."

When Lord Wellesley, (Lord-Lieutenant,) after the death of the father, proposed to continue the half-pay to the sister, Moore declined the offer, although, he adds,--"God knows how useful such aid would be to me, as God alone knows how I am to support all the burdens now heaped upon me"; and his wife at home was planning how "they might be able to do with one servant," in order that they might be the better able to assist his mother.

The poet was born at the corner of Aungier Street, Dublin, on the 28th of May, 1779, and died at Sloperton, on the 25th of February,[I] 1852, at the age of seventy-two. What a full life it was! Industry a fellow-worker with Genius for nearly sixty years!

He was a sort of "show-child" almost from his birth, and could barely walk when it was jestingly said of him, he passed all his nights with fairies on the hills. Almost his earliest memory was having been crowned king of a castle by some of his playfellows. At his first school he was the show-boy of the schoolmaster: at thirteen years old he had written poetry that attracted and justified admiration. In 1797 he was "a man of mark"; at the University,[J] in 1798, at the age of nineteen, he had made "considerable progress" in translating the Odes of Anacreon; and in 1800 he was "patronized" and flattered by the Prince of Wales, who was "happy to know a man of his abilities," and "hoped they might have many opportunities of enjoying each other's society."

His earliest printed work, "Poems by Thomas Little," has been the subject of much, and perhaps merited, condemnation. Of Moore's own feeling in reference to these compositions of his mere, and thoughtless, boyhood, it may be right to quote two of the dearest of his friends. Thus writes Lisle Bowles of Thomas Moore, in allusion to these early poems:--

"'----Like Israel's incense laid Upon unholy earthly shrines':--

Who, if, in the unthinking gayety of premature genius, he joined the sirens, has made ample amends by a life of the strictest virtuous propriety, equally exemplary as the husband, the father, and the man,--and as far as the muse is concerned, _more_ ample amends, by melodies as sweet as Scriptural and sacred, and by weaving a tale of the richest Oriental colors, which faithful affection and pity's tear have consecrated to all ages." This is the statement of his friend Rogers:--"So heartily has Moore repented of having published 'Little's Poems,' that I have seen him shed tears,--tears of deep contrition,--when we were talking of them."

I allude to his early triumphs only to show, that, while they would have spoiled nine men out of ten, they failed to taint the character of Moore. His modest estimate of himself was from first to last a leading feature in his character. Success never engendered egotism; honors never seemed to him only the recompense of desert; he largely magnified the favors he received, and seemed to consider as mere "nothings" the services he rendered and the benefits he conferred. That was his great characteristic, all his life. We have ourselves ample evidence to adduce on this head. I copy the following letter from Mr. Moore. It is dated "Sloperton, November 29, 1843."

"MY DEAR MR. HALL,--

"I am really and truly ashamed of myself for having let so many acts of kindness on your part remain unnoticed and unacknowledged on mine. But the world seems determined to make me a man of letters in more senses than one, and almost every day brings me such an influx of epistles from mere strangers that friends hardly ever get a line from me. My friend Washington Irving used to say, 'It is much easier to get a book from Moore than a letter.' But this has not been the case, I am sorry to say, of late; for the penny-post has become the sole channel of my inspirations. How _am_ I to thank you sufficiently for all your and Mrs. Hall's kindness to me? She must come down here, when the summer arrives, and be thanked _a quattr' occhi_,--far better way of thanking than at such a cold distance. Your letter to the mad Repealers was far too good and wise and gentle to have much effect on such rantipoles."[K]

The house in Aungier Street I visited so recently as 1864. It was then, and still is, as it was in 1779, the dwelling of a grocer,--altered only so far as that a bust of the poet is placed over the door, and the fact that he was born there is recorded at the side. May no modern "improvement" ever touch it!

"The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground."

This humble dwelling of the humble tradesman is the house of which the poet speaks in so many of his early letters and memoranda. Here, when a child in years, he arranged a debating society, consisting of himself and his father's two "clerks." Here he picked up a little Italian from a kindly old priest who had passed some time in Italy, and obtained a "smattering of French" from an intelligent _emigre_, named La Frosse. Here his tender mother watched over his boyhood, proud of his opening promise, and hopeful, yet apprehensive, of his future. Here he and his sister, "excellent Nell," acquired music, first upon an old harpsichord, obtained by his father in discharge of a debt, and afterwards on a piano, to buy which his loving mother had saved up all superfluous pence. Hence he issued to lake country walks with unhappy Robert Emmet. Hither he came--not less proudly, yet as fondly as ever--when college magnates had given him honor, and the King's Viceroy had received him as a guest.

In 1835 he records "a visit to No. 12, Aungier Street, where I was born." "Visited every part of the house; the small old yard and its appurtenances; the small, dark kitchen, where I used to have my bread and milk; the front and back drawing-rooms; the bedrooms and garrets,--murmuring, 'Only think, a grocer's still!'" "The many thoughts that came rushing upon me, while thus visiting the house where the first nineteen or twenty years of my life were passed, may be more easily conceived than told." He records, with greater unction than he did his visit to the Prince, his sitting with the grocer and his wife at their table, and drinking in a glass of their wine her and her husband's "good health." Thence he went, with all his "recollections of the old shop about him," to a grand dinner at the Viceregal Lodge!

I spring with a single line from the year 1822, when I knew him first, to the year 1845, when circumstances enabled us to enjoy the long-looked-for happiness of visiting Moore and his beloved wife in their home at Sloperton.

The poet was then in his sixty-fifth year, and had in a great measure retired from actual labor; indeed, it soon became evident to us that the faculty for enduring and continuous toil no longer existed. Happily, it was not absolutely needed; for, with very limited wants, there was a sufficiency,--a bare sufficiency, however, for there were no means to procure either the elegances or the luxuries which so frequently become the necessities of man, and a longing for which might have been excused in one who had been the friend of peers and the associate of princes.

The forests and fields that surround Bowood, the mansion of the Marquis of Lansdowne, neighbor the poet's humble dwelling. The spire of the village church, beside the portals of which the poet now sleeps, is seen above adjacent trees. Laborers' cottages are scattered all about. They are a heavy and unimaginative race, those peasants of Wiltshire; and, knowing their neighbor had written books, they could by no means get rid of the idea that he was the writer of _Moore's Almanac_, and perpetually, greeted him with a salutation, in hopes to receive in return some prognostic of the weather, which might guide them in arrangements for seedtime and harvest. Once, when he had lost his way,--wandering till midnight,--he roused up the inmates of a cottage, in search of a guide to Sloperton, and, to his astonishment, found he was close to his own gate. "Ah, Sir," said the peasant, "that comes of yer skyscraping!"

He was fond of telling of himself such simple anecdotes as this; indeed, I remember his saying that no applause he ever obtained gave him so much pleasure as a compliment from a half-wild countryman, who stood right in his path on a quay in Dublin, and exclaimed, slightly altering the words of Byron,--"Three cheers for Tommy Moore, the pote of all circles, and the _darlint_ of his own!"

I recall him at this moment,--his small form and intellectual face, rich in expression, and that expression the sweetest, the most gentle, and the kindliest. He had still in age the same bright and clear eye, the same gracious smile, the same suave and winning manner I had noticed as the attributes of his comparative youth; a forehead not remarkably broad or high, but singularly impressive, firm, and full,--with the organ of gayety large, and those of benevolence and veneration greatly preponderating. Ternerani, when making his bust, praised the form of his ears. The nose, as observed in all his portraits, was somewhat upturned. Standing or sitting, his head was invariably upraised, owing, perhaps, mainly to his shortness of stature, with so much bodily activity as to give him the character of restlessness; and no doubt that usual accompaniment of genius was eminently his. His hair, at the time I speak of, was thin and very gray; and he wore his hat with the jaunty air that has been often remarked as a peculiarity of the Irish. In dress, although far from slovenly, he was by no means particular. Leigh Hunt, speaking of him in the prime of life, says,--"His forehead is bony and full of character, with 'bumps' of wit large and radiant enough to transport a phrenologist. His eyes are as dark and fine as you would wish to see under a set of vine-leaves; his mouth generous and good-humored, with dimples." He adds,--"He was lively, polite, bustling, full of amenities and acquiescences, into which he contrived to throw a sort of roughening cordiality, like the crust of old Port. It seemed a happiness to him to say 'Yes.'" Jeffrey, in one of his letters, says of him,--"He is the sweetest-blooded, warmest-hearted, happiest, hopefullest creature that ever set Fortune at defiance"; he speaks also of "the buoyancy of his spirits and the inward light of his mind"; and adds,--"There is nothing gloomy or bitter in his ordinary talk, but, rather, a wild, rough, boyish pleasantry, much more like Nature than his poetry."

"The light that surrounds him is all from within."

He had but little voice; yet he sang with a depth of sweetness that charmed all hearers: it was true melody, and told upon the heart as well as the ear. No doubt much of this charm was derived from association; for it was only his own "Melodies" he sang. It would be difficult to describe the effect of his singing. I remember some one saying to me, it conveyed an idea of what a mermaid's song might be. Thrice I heard him sing, "As a beam o'er the face of the waters may glow,"--once in 1822, once at Lady Blessington's, and once in my own house. Those who can recall the touching words of that song, and unite them with the deep, yet tender pathos of the music, will be at no loss to conceive the intense delight of his auditors.

I occasionally met Moore in public, and once or twice at public dinners. One of the most agreeable evenings I ever passed was in 1830, at a dinner given to him by the members of "The Literary Union." This club was founded in 1829 by the poet Campbell. I shall have to speak of it when I write a "Memory" of him. Moore was in strong health at that time, and in the zenith of his fame. There were many men of mark about him,--leading wits and men of letters of the age. He was full of life, sparkling and brilliant in all he said, rising every now and then to say something that gave the hearers delight, and looking as if "dull care" had been ever powerless to check the overflowing of his soul. But although no bard of any age knew better how to

"Wreathe the bowl with flowers of the soul,"

he had acquired the power of self-restraint, and could stop when the glass was circulating too freely. At the memorable dinner of the Literary Fund, at which the good Prince Albert presided, (on the 11th of May, 1842,) the two poets, Campbell and Moore, had to make speeches. The author of the "Pleasures of Hope," heedless of the duty that devolved upon him, had "confused his brain." Moore came in the evening of that day to our house; and I well remember the terms of true sorrow and bitter reproach in which he spoke of the lamentable impression that one of the great authors of the age and country must have left on the mind of the royal chairman, then new among us.

It is gratifying to record, that the temptations to which the great lyric poet, Thomas Moore, was so often and so peculiarly exposed, were ever powerless for wrong.

Moore sat for his portrait to Shee, Lawrence, Newton, Maclise, Mulvany, and Richmond, and to the sculptors Ternerani, Chantrey, Kirk, and Moore. On one occasion of his sitting, he says,--"Having nothing in my round potato face but what painters cannot catch,--mobility of character,--the consequence is, that a portrait of me can be only one or other of two disagreeable things,--_caput mortuum_, or a caricature." Richmond's portrait was taken in 1843. Moore says of it,--"The artist has worked wonders with unmanageable faces such as mine." Of all his portraits, this is the one that pleases me best, and most forcibly recalls him to my remembrance.

I soon learned to love the man. It was easy to do so; for Nature had endowed him with that rare, but happy gift,--to have pleasure in giving pleasure, and pain in giving pain; while his life was, or at all events seemed to be, a practical comment on his own lines:--

"They may rail at this life; from the hour I began it, I've found it a life full of kindness and bliss."

I had daily walks with him at Sloperton,--along his "terrace-walk,"--during our brief visit; I listening, he talking; he now and then asking questions, but rarely speaking of himself or his books. Indeed, the only one of his poems to which he made any special reference was his "Lines on the Death of Sheridan," of which he said,--"That is one of the few things I have written of which I am really proud." And I remember startling him one evening by quoting several of his poems in which he had said "hard things" of women,--then, suddenly changing, repeating passages of an opposite character, and his saying, "You know far more of my poems than I do myself."

The anecdotes he told me were all of the class of those I have related,--simple, unostentatious. He has been frequently charged with the weakness of undue respect for the aristocracy. I never heard him, during the whole of our intercourse, speak of great people with whom he had been intimate, never a word of the honors accorded to him; and, certainly, he never uttered a sentence of satire or censure or harshness concerning any one of his contemporaries. I cannot recall any conversation with him in which he spoke of intimacy with the great, and certainly no anecdote of his familiarity with men or women of the upper orders; although he conversed with me often of those who are called the lower classes. I remember his describing with proud warmth his visit to his friend Boyse, at Bannow, in the County of Wexford: the delight he enjoyed at receiving the homage of bands of the peasantry, gathered to greet him; the arches of green leaves under which he passed; and the dances with the pretty peasant-girls,--one in particular, with whom he led off a country-dance.[L] Would that those who fancied him a tuft-hunter could have heard him! They would have seen how really humble was his heart. Indeed, a reference to his Journal will show that of all his contemporaries, whenever he spoke of them, he had ever something kindly to say. There is no evidence of ill-nature in any case,--not a shadow of envy or jealousy. The sturdiest Scottish grazier could not have been better pleased than he was to see the elegant home at Abbotsford, or have felt prouder to know that a poet had been created a baronet. When speaking of Wordsworth's absorption of all the talk at a dinner-table, Moore says,--"But I was well pleased to be a listener." And he records, that General Peachey, "who is a neighbor of Southey, mentions some amiable traits of him."

The house at Sloperton is a small, neat, but comparatively poor cottage, for which Moore paid originally the princely sum of forty pounds a year, "furnished." Subsequently, however, he became its tenant under a repairing-lease at eighteen pounds annual rent. He took possession of it in November, 1817. Bessy was "not only satisfied, but delighted with it, which shows the humility of her taste," writes Moore to his mother; "for it is a small thatched cottage, and we get it furnished for forty pounds a year." "It has a small garden and lawn in front, and a kitchen-garden behind. Along two of the sides of this kitchen-garden is a raised bank,"--the poet's "terrace-walk," so he loved to call it. Here a small deal table stood through all weathers; for it was his custom to compose as he walked, and at this table to pause and write down his thoughts. Hence he had always a view of the setting sun; and I believe nothing on earth gave him more intense pleasure than practically to realize the line,--

"How glorious the sun looked in sinking!"--

for, as Mrs. Moore has since told us, he very rarely missed this sight.

In 1811, the year of his marriage, he lived at York Terrace, Queen's Elm, Brompton. Mrs. Moore tells me it was a pretty house: the Terrace was then isolated, and opposite nursery-gardens. Long afterwards (in 1824) he went to Brompton to "indulge himself with a sight of that house." In 1812 he was settled at Kegworth; and in 1813, at Mayfield Cottage, near Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. Of Mayfield, one of his friends, who twenty years afterwards accompanied him there to see it, remarks on the small, solitary, and now wretched-looking cottage, where all the fine "orientalism" and "sentimentalism" had been engendered. Of this cottage he himself writes,--"It was a poor place, little better than a barn; but we at once took it and set about making it habitable."

As Burns was made a gauger because he was partial to whiskey, Moore was made Colonial Secretary at Bermuda, where his principal duty was to "overhaul the accounts of skippers and their mates." Being called to England, his affairs were placed in charge of a superintendent, who betrayed him, and left him answerable for a heavy debt, which rendered necessary a temporary residence in Paris. That debt, however, was paid, not by the aid of friends, some of whom would have gladly relieved him of it, but literally by "the sweat of his brow." Exactly so it was when the MS. "Life of Byron" was burned: it was by Moore, and not by the relatives of Byron, (neither was it by aid of friends,) the money he had received was returned to the publisher who had advanced it. "The glorious privilege of being independent" was, indeed, essentially his,--in his boyhood, throughout his manhood, and in advanced age,--always!

In 1799 he came to London to enter at the Middle Temple. (His first lodging was at 44, George Street, Portman Square.) Very soon afterwards we find him declining a loan of money proffered him by Lady Donegal. He thanked God for the many sweet things of this kind God threw in his way, yet at that moment he was "terribly puzzled how to pay his tailor." In 1811, his friend Douglas, who had just received a large legacy, handed him a blank check, that he might fill it up for any sum he needed. "I did not accept the offer," writes Moore to his mother; "but you may guess my feelings." Yet just then he had been compelled to draw on his publisher, Power, for a sum of thirty pounds, "to be repaid partly in songs," and was sending his mother a second-day paper, which he was enabled "to purchase at rather a cheap rate." Even in 1842 he was "haunted worryingly," not knowing how to meet his son Russell's draft for one hundred pounds; and a year afterwards he utterly drained his banker to send fifty pounds to his son Tom. Once, being anxious that Bessy should have some money for the poor at Bromham, he sent a friend five pounds, requesting him to forward it to Bessy as from himself; and when urged by some thoughtless person to make a larger allowance to his son Tom, in order that he might "live like a gentleman," he writes,--"If _I_ had thought but of living like a gentleman, what would have become of my dear father and mother, of my sweet sister Nell, of my admirable Bessy's mother?" He declined to represent Limerick in Parliament, on the ground that his "circumstances were not such as to justify coming into Parliament at all, because to the labor of the day I am indebted for my daily support." His must be a miserable soul who could sneer at the poet studying how he could manage to recompense the doctor who would "take no fees," and at his amusement when Bessy was "calculating whether they could afford the expense of a fly to Devizes."

As with his mother, so with his wife. From the year 1811, the year of his marriage,[M] to that of his death, in 1852, she received from him the continual homage of a lover; away from her, no matter what were his allurements, he was ever longing to be at home. Those who love as he did wife, children, and friends will appreciate, although the worldling cannot, such commonplace sentences as these:--"Pulled some heath on Ronan's Island (Killarney) to send to my dear Bessy"; when in Italy, "got letters from my sweet Bessy, more precious to me than all the wonders I can see"; while in Paris, "sending for Bessy and my little ones; wherever they are will be home, and a happy home to me." When absent, (which was rarely for more than a week,) no matter where or in what company, seldom a day passed that he did not write a letter to Bessy. The home enjoyments, reading to her, making her the depositary of all his thoughts and hopes,--they were his deep delights, compensations for time spent amid scenes and with people who had no space in his heart. Even when in "terrible request," his thoughts and his heart were there,--in

"That dear Home, that saving Ark, Where love's true light at last I've found, Cheering within, when all grows dark And comfortless and stormy round."

This is the tribute of Earl Russell to the wife of the poet Moore:--"The excellence of his wife's moral character, her energy and courage, her persevering economy, made her a better and even a richer partner to Moore than an heiress of ten thousand a year would have been, with less devotion to her duty, and less steadiness of conduct." Moore speaks of his wife's "democratic pride." It was the pride that was ever above a mean action, and which sustained him in the proud independence that marked his character from birth to death.

In March, 1846, his diary contains this sad passage:--"The last of my five children is gone, and we are left desolate and alone. Not a single relation have I in this world." His father had died in 1825; his sweet mother in 1832; "excellent Nell" in 1846; and his children one after another, three of them in youth, and two grown up to manhood,--his two boys, Tom and Russell, the first-named of whom died in Africa in 1846, an officer in the French service; the other at Sloperton in 1842, soon after his return from India, having been compelled by ill-health to resign his commission as a lieutenant in the Twenty-Fifth Regiment.

In 1835 the influence of Lord Lansdowne obtained for Moore a pension of three hundred pounds a year from Lord Melbourne's government,--"as due from any government, but much more from one some of the members of which are proud to think themselves your friends." The "wolf, poverty," therefore, in his latter years, did not prowl so continually about his door. But there was no fund for luxuries, none for the extra comforts that old age requires. Mrs. Moore now lives on a crown pension of one hundred pounds a year, and the interest of the sum of three thousand pounds,--the sum advanced by the ever-liberal friends of the poet, the Longmans, for the Memoirs and Journal edited by Lord John, now Earl, Russell,--a lord whom the poet dearly loved.

When his diary was published, as from time to time volumes of it appeared, slander was busy with the fame of one of the best and most upright of all the men that God ennobled by the gift of genius.[N] For my own part, I seek in vain through the eight thick volumes of that diary for any evidence that can lessen the poet in this high estimate. I find, perhaps, too many passages fitted only for the eye of love or the ear of sympathy; but I read _no one_ that shows the poet other than the devoted and loving husband, the thoughtful and affectionate parent, the considerate and generous friend.

It was said of him by Leigh Hunt, that Lord Byron summed up his character in a sentence,--"Tommy loves a lord!" Perhaps he did; but if he did, only such lords as Lansdowne and Russell were his friends. He loved also those who are "lords of humankind" in a far other sense; and, as I have shown, there is nothing in his character that stands out in higher relief than his entire _freedom from dependence_. To which of the great did he apply during seasons of difficulty approaching poverty? Which of them did he use for selfish purposes? Whose patronage among them all was profitable? To what Baael did the poet Moore ever bend the knee?

He had a large share of domestic sorrows; one after another, his five beloved children died; I have quoted his words, "We are left--alone." His admirable and devoted wife survives him. I visited, a short time ago, the home that is now desolate. If ever man was adored where adoration, so far as earth is concerned, is most to be hoped for and valued, it is in the cottage where the poet's widow lives, and will die.

Let it be inscribed on his tomb, that ever, amid privations and temptations, the allurements of grandeur and the suggestions of poverty, he preserved his self-respect; bequeathing no property, but leaving no debts; having had no "testimonial" of acknowledgment or reward,--seeking none, nay, avoiding any; making millions his debtors for intense delight, and acknowledging himself paid by the poet's meed, "the tribute of a smile"; never truckling to power; laboring ardently and honestly for his political faith, but never lending to party that which was meant for mankind; proud, and rightly proud, of his self-obtained position, but neither scorning nor slighting the humble root from which he sprang.

He was born and bred a Roman Catholic; but his creed was entirely and purely catholic. Charity was the outpouring of his heart; its pervading essence was that which he expressed in one of his Melodies,--

"Shall I ask the brave soldier who fights by my side, In the cause of mankind, if our creeds agree? Shall I give up the friend I have valued and tried, If he kneel not before the same altar with me?"

His children were all baptized and educated members of the Church of England. He attended the parish church, and according to the ritual of the Church of England he was buried.

It was not any outward change of religion, but homage to a purer and holier faith, that induced him to have his children baptized and brought up as members of the English Church. "For myself," he says, "my having married a Protestant wife gave me opportunity of choosing a religion, at least for my children; and if my marriage had no other advantage, I should think this quite sufficient to be grateful for."

Moore was the eloquent advocate of his country, when it was oppressed, goaded, and socially enthralled; but when time and enlightened policy removed all distinctions between the Irishman and the Englishman, between the Protestant and the Roman Catholic, his muse was silent, because content; nay, he protested in impressive verse against a continued agitation that retarded her progress, when her claims were admitted, her rights acknowledged, and her wrongs redressed.

Reference to the genius of Moore is needless. My object in this "Memory" is to offer homage to his moral and social worth. The world that obtains intense delight from his poems, and willingly acknowledges its debt to the poet, has been less ready to estimate the high and estimable character, the loving and faithful nature of the man. There are, however, many--may this humble tribute augment the number!--by whom the memory of Thomas Moore is cherished in the heart of hearts; to whom the cottage at Sloperton will be a shrine while they live,--that grave beside the village church a monument better loved than that of any other of the men of genius by whom the world is delighted, enlightened, and refined.

"That God is love," writes his friend and biographer, Earl Russell, "was the summary of his belief; that a man should love his neighbor as himself seems to have been the rule of his life." The Earl of Carlisle, inaugurating the statue of the poet,[O] bore testimony to his moral and social worth "in all the holy relations of life,--as son, as brother, as husband, as father, as friend"; and on the same occasion, Mr. O'Hagan, Q.C., thus expressed himself:--"He was faithful to all the sacred obligations and all the dear charities of domestic life,--he was the idol of a household."

Perhaps a better, though a far briefer, summary of the character of Thomas Moore than any of these may be given in the words of Dr. Parr, who bequeathed to him a ring:--

"To one who stands high in my estimation for original genius, for his exquisite sensibility, for his independent spirit, and incorruptible integrity."

FOOTNOTES:

[F] Mrs. Moore--writing to me in May, 1864--tells me I have a wrong impression as to Moore's father; that he was "handsome, full of fun, and with good manners." Moore himself calls him "one of Nature's gentlemen."

[G] Mrs. Moore write me, that I am here also wrong in my impression. "She was only a little grown out in one shoulder, but with good health; her expression was feeling, not suffering." "Dear Ellen," she adds, "was the delight of every one that knew her,--sang sweetly,--her voice very like her brother's. She died suddenly, to the grief of my loving heart."

[H] She was born in Wexford, where her father kept a "general shop." Moore used to say playfully, that he was called, in order to dignify his occupation, "a provision merchant." When on his way to Bannow in 1835 to spend a few days with his friend Thomas Boyse,--a genuine gentleman of the good old school,--he records his visit to the house of his maternal grandfather. "Nothing," he says, "could be more humble and mean than the little low house that remains to tell of his whereabouts."

I visited this house in the summer of 1864. It is still a small "general shop," situate in the old corn-market of Wexford. The rooms are more than usually quaint. Here Mrs. Moore lived until within a few weeks of the birth of her illustrious son. We are gratified to record, that, at our suggestion, a tablet has been placed over the entrance-door, stating in few words the fact that there the mother was born and lived, and that to this house the poet came, on the 26th of August, 1835, when in the zenith of his fame, to render homage to her memory. He thus writes of her and her birthplace in his "Notes" of that year:--"One of the noblest-minded, as well as most warm-hearted, of all God's creatures was born under that lowly roof."

[I] I find in Earl Russell's memoir the date given as the 26th of February; but Mrs. Moore altered it in my MSS. to February 25.

[J] Trinity College, Dublin.--Thomas Moore, son of John Moore, merchant, of Dublin, aged 14, pensioner, entered 2d June, 1794. Tutor, Dr. Burrows.

[K] Alluding to a pamphlet-letter I had printed, addressed to Repealers, when the insanity of Repeal (now happily dead) was at fever-heat.

[L] "One of them (my chief muse) was a remarkably pretty girl; when I turned round to her, as she accompanied my triumphal ear, and said, 'This is a long journey for you,' she answered, with a smile that would have done your heart good, 'Oh, I only wish, Sir, it was three hundred miles!' There's for you! What was Petrarch in the Capitol to that?"--_Journal_, &c.--This "pretty girl's" name is ----, and, strange to say, she still keeps it.

[M] Moore was married to Miss Elizabeth Dyke, at St. Martin's Church, on the 25th of March, 1811.

[N] There were two who sought to throw filth upon the poet's grave, and they were his own countrymen,--Charles Phillips and John Wilson Croker. The former had written a wretched and unmeaning pamphlet, which he suppressed when a few copies only were issued; and I am proud to believe it was in consequence of some remarks upon it written by me, for which he commenced, but subsequently abandoned, proceedings against me for libel. The atrocious attack on Moore in the "Quarterly Review" was written by John Wilson Croker. It was the old illustration of the dead lion and the living dog. Yet Croker could at that time be scarcely described as living; it was from his death-bed he shot the poisoned arrow. And what brought out the venom? Merely a few careless words of Moore's, in which he described Croker "as a scribbler of all work," words that Earl Russell would have erased, if it had occurred to him to do so. Another countryman, Thomas Crofton Croker, assailed after his death the man whose shoe-latchets he would have been proud to unloose during his life. Moreover, his earliest slanderer was also of his own country,--an author named Quin. Of a truth it has been well said, A prophet is never without honor save in his own country. The proverb is especially true as regards Irish prophets. Assuredly, Moore was, and is, more popular in every part of the world than he was or is in Ireland. The reason is plain: he was, so to speak, of two parties, yet of neither: the one could not forgive his early aspirations for liberty, uttered in imperishable verse; the other could not pardon what they called his desertion of their cause, when he saw that England was willing to do, and was doing, justice to Ireland.

[O] A bronze statue of Moore has been erected in College Street, Dublin. It is a poor affair, the production of his namesake, the sculptor. Bad as it is, it is made worse by contrast with its neighbor, Goldsmith,--a work by the great Irish artist, Foley,--a work rarely surpassed by the art of the sculptor at any period in any country.

ON BOARD THE SEVENTY-SIX

[Written for Bryant's Seventieth Birthday.]

Our ship lay tumbling in an angry sea, Her rudder gone, her mainmast o'er the side; Her scuppers, from the waves' clutch staggering free, Trailed threads of priceless crimson through the tide; Sails, shrouds, and spars with pirate cannon torn, We lay, awaiting morn.

Awaiting morn, such morn as mocks despair; And she that bore the promise of the world Within her sides, now hopeless, helmless, bare, At random o'er the wildering waters hurled; The reek of battle drifting slow a-lee Not sullener than we.

Morn came at last to peer into our woe, When lo, a sail! Now surely help is nigh; The red cross flames aloft, Christ's pledge; but no, Her black guns grinning hate, she rushes by And hails us:--"Gains the leak? Ah, so we thought! Sink, then, with curses fraught!"

I leaned against my gun still angry-hot, And my lids tingled with the tears held back; This scorn methought was crueller than shot; The manly death-grip in the battle-wrack, Yard-arm to yard-arm, were more friendly far Than such fear-smothered war.

There our foe wallowed like a wounded brute, The fiercer for his hurt. What now were best? Once more tug bravely at the peril's root. Though death come with it? Or evade the test If right or wrong in this God's world of ours Be leagued with higher powers?

Some, faintly loyal, felt their pulses lag With the slow beat that doubts and then despairs; Some, caitiff, would have struck the starry flag That knits us with our past, and makes us heirs Of deeds high-hearted as were ever done 'Neath the all-seeing sun.

But one there was, the Singer of our crew, Upon whose head Age waved his peaceful sign, But whose red heart's-blood no surrender knew; And couchant under brows of massive line, The eyes, like guns beneath a parapet, Watched, charged with lightnings yet.

The voices of the hills did his obey; The torrents flashed and tumbled in his song; He brought our native fields from far away, Or set us 'mid the innumerable throng Of dateless woods, or where we heard the calm Old homestead's evening psalm.

But now he sang of faith to things unseen, Of freedom's birthright given to us in trust; And words of doughty cheer he spoke between, That made all earthly fortune seem as dust, Matched with that duty, old as time and new, Of being brave and true.

We, listening, learned what makes the might of words,-- Manhood to back them, constant as a star; His voice rammed home our cannon, edged our swords, And sent our boarders shouting; shroud and spar Heard him and stiffened; the sails heard and wooed The winds with loftier mood.

In our dark hour he manned our guns again; Remanned ourselves from his own manhood's store; Pride, honor, country throbbed through all his strain; And shall we praise? God's praise was his before; And on our futile laurels he looks down; Himself our bravest crown.

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER.

I.

Here comes the First of January, Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-Five, and we are all settled comfortably into our winter places, with our winter surroundings and belongings; all cracks and openings are calked and listed, the double windows are in, the furnace dragon in the cellar is ruddy and in good liking, sending up his warming respirations through every pipe and register in the house; and yet, though an artificial summer reigns everywhere, like bees, we have our swarming-place,--in my library. There is my chimney-corner, and my table permanently established on one side of the hearth; and each of the female genus has, so to speak, pitched her own winter-tent within sight of the blaze of my camp-fire. I discerned to-day that Jennie had surreptitiously appropriated one of the drawers of my study-table to knitting-needles and worsted; and wicker work-baskets and stands of various heights and sizes seem to be planted here and there for permanence among the bookcases. The canary-bird has a sunny window, and the plants spread out their leaves and unfold their blossoms as if there were no ice and snow in the street, and Rover makes a hearth-rug of himself in winking satisfaction in front of my fire, except when Jennie is taken with a fit of discipline, when he beats a retreat, and secretes himself under my table.

Peaceable, ah, how peaceable, home and quiet and warmth in winter! And how, when we hear the wind whistle, we think of you, O our brave brothers, our saviours and defenders, who for our sake have no home but the muddy camp, the hard pillow of the barrack, the weary march, the uncertain fare,--you, the rank and file, the thousand unnoticed ones, who have left warm fires, dear wives, loving little children, without even the hope of glory or fame,--without even the hope of doing anything remarkable or perceptible for the cause you love,--resigned only to fill the ditch or bridge the chasm over which your country shall walk to peace and joy! Good men and true, brave unknown hearts, we salute you, and feel that we, in our soft peace and security, are not worthy of you! When we think of you, our simple comforts seem luxuries all too good for us, who give so little when you give all!

But there are others to whom from our bright homes, our cheerful firesides, we would fain say a word, if we dared.

Think of a mother receiving a letter with such a passage as this in it! It is extracted from one we have just seen, written by a private in the army of Sheridan, describing the death of a private. "He fell instantly, gave a peculiar smile and look, and then closed his eyes. We laid him down gently at the foot of a large tree. I crossed his hands over his breast, closed his eyelids down, but the smile was still on his face. I wrapped him in his tent, spread my pocket-handkerchief over his face, wrote his name on a piece of paper, and pinned it on his breast, and there we left him: we could not find pick or shovel to dig a grave." There it is!--a history that is multiplying itself by hundreds daily, the substance of what has come to so many homes, and must come to so many more before the great price of our ransom is paid!

What can we say to you, in those many, many homes where the light has gone out forever?--you, O fathers, mothers, wives, sisters, haunted by a name that has ceased to be spoken on earth,--you, for whom there is no more news from the camp, no more reading of lists, no more tracing of maps, no more letters, but only a blank, dead silence! The battle-cry goes on, but for you it is passed by! the victory comes, but, oh, never more to bring him back to you! your offering to this great cause has been made, and been taken; you have thrown into it _all_ your living, even all that you had, and from henceforth your house is left unto you desolate! O ye watchers of the cross, ye waiters by the sepulchre, what can be said to you? We could almost extinguish our own home-fires, that seem too bright when we think of your darkness; the laugh dies on our lip, the lamp burns dim through our tears, and we seem scarcely worthy to speak words of comfort, lest we seem as those who mock a grief they cannot know.

But is there no consolation? Is it nothing to have had such a treasure to give, and to have given it freely for the noblest cause for which ever battle was set,--for the salvation of your country, for the freedom of all mankind? Had he died a fruitless death, in the track of common life, blasted by fever, smitten or rent by crushing accident, then might his most precious life seem to be as water spilled upon the ground; but now it has been given for a cause and a purpose worthy even the anguish of your loss and sacrifice. He has been counted worthy to be numbered with those who stood with precious incense between the living and the dead, that the plague which was consuming us might be stayed. The blood of these young martyrs shall be the seed of the future church of liberty, and from every drop shall spring up flowers of healing. O widow! O mother! blessed among bereaved women! there remains to you a treasure that belongs not to those who have lost in any other wise,--the power to say, "He died for his country." In all the good that comes of this anguish you shall have a right and share by virtue of this sacrifice. The joy of freedmen bursting from chains, the glory of a nation new-born, the assurance of a triumphant future for your country and the world,--all these become yours by the purchase-money of that precious blood.

Besides this, there are other treasures that come through sorrow, and sorrow alone. There are celestial plants of root so long and so deep that the land must be torn and furrowed, ploughed up from the very foundation, before they can strike and flourish; and when we see how God's plough is driving backward and forward and across this nation, rending, tearing up tender shoots, and burying soft wild-flowers, we ask ourselves, What is He going to plant?

Not the first year, nor the second, after the ground has been broken up, does the purpose of the husbandman appear. At first we see only what is uprooted and ploughed in,--the daisy drabbled, and the violet crushed,--and the first trees planted amid the unsightly furrows stand dumb and disconsolate, irresolute in leaf, and without flower or fruit. Their work is under the ground. In darkness and silence they are putting forth long fibres, searching hither and thither under the black soil for the strength that years hence shall burst into bloom and bearing.

What is true of nations is true of individuals. It may seem now winter and desolation with you. Your hearts have been ploughed and harrowed and are now frozen up. There is not a flower left, not a blade of grass, not a bird to sing,--and it is hard to believe that any brighter flowers, any greener herbage, shall spring up, than those which have been torn away: and yet there will. Nature herself teaches you to-day. Out-doors nothing but bare branches and shrouding snow; and yet you know that there is not a tree that is not patiently holding out at the end of its boughs next year's buds, frozen indeed, but unkilled. The rhododendron and the lilac have their blossoms all ready, wrapped in cere-cloth, waiting in patient faith. Under the frozen ground the crocus and the hyacinth and the tulip hide in their hearts the perfect forms of future flowers. And it is even so with you: your leaf-buds of the future are frozen, but not killed; the soil of your heart has many flowers under it cold and still now, but they will yet come up and bloom.

The dear old book of comfort tells of no present healing for sorrow. _No_ chastening for the present seemeth joyous, but grievous, but _afterwards_ it yieldeth peaceable fruits of righteousness. We, as individuals, as a nation, need to have faith in that AFTERWARDS. It is sure to come,--sure as spring and summer to follow winter.

There is a certain amount of suffering which must follow the rending of the great chords of life, suffering which is natural and inevitable; it cannot be argued down; it cannot be stilled; it can no more be soothed by any effort of faith and reason than the pain of a fractured limb, or the agony of fire on the living flesh. All that we can do is to brace ourselves to bear it, calling on God, as the martyrs did in the fire, and resigning ourselves to let it burn on. We must be willing to suffer, since God so wills. There are just so many waves to go over us, just so many arrows of stinging thought to be shot into our soul, just so many faintings and sinkings and revivings only to suffer again, belonging to and inherent in our portion of sorrow; and there is a work of healing that God has placed in the hands of Time alone.

Time heals all things at last; yet it depends much on us in our suffering, whether time shall send us forth healed, indeed, but maimed and crippled and callous, or whether, looking to the great Physician of sorrows, and coworking with him, we come forth stronger and fairer even for our wounds.

We call ourselves a Christian people, and the peculiarity of Christianity is that it is a worship and doctrine of sorrow. The five wounds of Jesus, the instruments of the passion, the cross, the sepulchre,--these are its emblems and watchwords. In thousands of churches, amid gold and gems and altars fragrant with perfume, are seen the crown of thorns, the nails, the spear, the cup of vinegar mingled with gall, the sponge that could not slake that burning death-thirst; and in a voice choked with anguish the Church in many lands and divers tongues prays from age to age,--"By thine agony and bloody sweat, by thy cross and passion, by thy precious death and burial!"--mighty words of comfort, whose meaning reveals itself only to souls fainting in the cold death-sweat of mortal anguish! They tell all Christians that by uttermost distress alone was the Captain of their salvation made perfect as a Saviour.

Sorrow brings us into the true unity of the Church,--that unity which underlies all external creeds, and unites all hearts that have suffered deeply enough to know that when sorrow is at its utmost there is but one kind of sorrow, and but one remedy. What matter, _in extremis_, whether we be called Romanist, or Protestant, or Greek, or Calvinist?

We suffer, and Christ suffered; we die, and Christ died; he conquered suffering and death, he rose and lives and reigns,--and we shall conquer, rise, live, and reign; the hours on the cross were long, the thirst was bitter, the darkness and horror real,--_but they ended_. After the wail, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" came the calm, "It is finished"; pledge to us all that our "It is finished" shall come also.

Christ arose, fresh, joyous, no more to die; and it is written, that, when the disciples were gathered together in fear and sorrow, he stood in the midst of them, and showed unto them his hands and his side; and then were they glad. Already had the healed wounds of Jesus become pledges of consolation to innumerable thousands; and those who, like Christ, have suffered the weary struggles, the dim horrors of the cross,--who have lain, like him, cold and chilled in the hopeless sepulchre,--if his spirit wakes them to life, shall come forth with healing power for others who have suffered and are suffering.

Count the good and beautiful ministrations that have been wrought in this world of need and labor, and how many of them have been wrought by hands wounded and scarred, by hearts that had scarcely ceased to bleed!

How many priests of consolation is God now ordaining by the fiery imposition of sorrow! how many Sisters of the Bleeding Heart, Daughters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity, are receiving their first vocation in tears and blood!

The report of every battle strikes into some home; and heads fall low, and hearts are shattered, and only God sees the joy that is set before them, and that shall come out of their sorrow. He sees our morning at the same moment that He sees our night,--sees us comforted, healed, risen to a higher life, at the same moment that He sees us crushed and broken in the dust; and so, though tenderer than we, He bears our great sorrows for the joy that is set before us.

After the Napoleonic wars had desolated Europe, the country was, like all countries after war, full of shattered households, of widows and orphans and homeless wanderers. A nobleman of Silesia, the Baron von Kottwitz, who had lost his wife and all his family in the reverses and sorrows of the times, found himself alone in the world, which looked more dreary and miserable through the multiplying lenses of his own tears. But he was one of those whose heart had been quickened in its death anguish by the resurrection voice of Christ; and he came forth to life and comfort. He bravely resolved to do all that one man could to lessen the great sum of misery. He sold his estates in Silesia, bought in Berlin a large building that had been used as barracks for the soldiers, and, fitting it up in plain commodious apartments, formed there a great family-establishment, into which he received the wrecks and fragments of families that had been broken up by the war,--orphan children, widowed and helpless women, decrepit old people, disabled soldiers. These he mad his family, and constituted himself their father and chief. He above with them, and cared for them as a parent. He had schools for the children; the more advanced he put to trades and employments; he set up a hospital for the sick; and for all he had the priestly ministrations of his own Christ-like heart. The celebrated Professor Tholuck, one of the most learned men of modern Germany, was an early _protege_ of the old Baron's, who, discerning his talents, put him in the way of a liberal education. In his earlier years, like many others of the young who play with life, ignorant of its needs, Tholuck piqued himself on a lordly skepticism with regard to the commonly received Christianity, and even wrote an essay to prove the superiority of the Mohammedan to the Christian religion. In speaking of his conversion, he says,--"What moved me was no argument, nor any spoken reproof, but simply that divine image of the old Baron walking before my soul. That life was an argument always present to me, and which I never could answer; and so I became a Christian." In the life of this man we see the victory over sorrow. How many with means like his, when desolated by like bereavements, have lain coldly and idly gazing on the miseries of life, and weaving around themselves icy tissues of doubt and despair,--doubting the being of a God, doubting the reality of a Providence, doubting the divine love, embittered and rebellious against the power which they could not resist, yet to which they would not submit! In such a chill heart-freeze lies the danger of sorrow. And it is a mortal danger. It is a torpor that must be resisted, as the man in the whirling snows must bestir himself, or he will perish. The apathy of melancholy must be broken by an effort of religion and duty. The stagnant blood must be made to flow by active work, and the cold hand warmed by clasping the hands outstretched towards it in sympathy or supplication. One orphan child taken in, to be fed, clothed, and nurtured, may save a heart from freezing to death: and God knows this war is making but too many orphans!

It is easy to subscribe to an orphan asylum, and go on in one's despair and loneliness. Such ministries may do good to the children who are thereby saved from the street, but they impart little warmth and comfort to the giver. One destitute child housed, taught, cared for, and tended personally, will bring more solace to a suffering heart than a dozen maintained in an asylum. Not that the child will probably prove an angel, or even an uncommonly interesting mortal. It is a prosaic work, this bringing-up of children, and there can be little rosewater in it. The child may not appreciate what is done for him, may not be particularly grateful, may have disagreeable faults, and continue to have them after much pains on your part to eradicate them,--and yet it is a fact, that to redeem one human being from destitution and ruin, even in some homely every-day course of ministrations, is one of the best possible tonics and alteratives to a sick and wounded spirit.

But this is not the only avenue to beneficence which the war opens. We need but name the service of hospitals, the care and education of the freedmen,--for these are charities that have long been before the eyes of the community, and have employed thousands of busy hands: thousands of sick and dying beds to tend, a race to be educated, civilized, and Christianized, surely were work enough for one age; and yet this is not all. War shatters everything, and it is hard to say what in society will not need rebuilding and binding up and strengthening anew. Not the least of the evils of war are the vices which a great army engenders wherever it moves,--vices peculiar to military life, as others are peculiar to peace. The poor soldier perils for us not merely his body, but his soul. He leads a life of harassing and exhausting toil and privation, of violent strain on the nervous energies, alternating with sudden collapse, creating a craving for stimulants, and endangering the formation of fatal habits. What furies and harpies are those that follow the army, and that seek out the soldier in his tent, far from home, mother, wife, and sister, tired, disheartened, and tempt him to forget his troubles in a momentary exhilaration, that burns only to chill and to destroy! Evil angels are always active and indefatigable, and there must be good angels enlisted to face them; and here is employment for the slack hand of grief. Ah, we have known mothers bereft of sons in this war, who have seemed at once to open wide their hearts, and to become mothers to every brave soldier in the field. They have lived only to work,--and in place of one lost, their sons have been counted by thousands.

And not least of all the fields for exertion and Christian charity opened by this war is that presented by womanhood. The war is abstracting from the community its protecting and sheltering elements, and leaving the helpless and dependent in vast disproportion. For years to come, the average of lone women will be largely increased; and the demand, always great, for some means by which they may provide for themselves, in the rude jostle of the world, will become more urgent and imperative.

Will any one sit pining away in inert grief, when two streets off are the midnight dance-houses, where girls of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen are being lured into the way of swift destruction? How many of these are daughters of soldiers who have given their hearts' blood for us and our liberties!

Two noble women of the Society of Friends have lately been taking the gauge of suffering and misery in our land, visiting the hospitals at every accessible point, pausing in our great cities, and going in their purity to those midnight orgies where mere children are being trained for a life of vice and infamy. They have talked with these poor bewildered souls, entangled in toils as terrible and inexorable as those of the slave-market, and many of whom are frightened and distressed at the life they are beginning to lead, and earnestly looking for the means of escape. In the judgment of these holy women, at least one third of those with whom they have talked are children so recently entrapped, and so capable of reformation, that there would be the greatest hope in efforts for their salvation. While such things are to be done in our land, is there any reason why any one should die of grief? One soul redeemed will do more to lift the burden of sorrow than all the blandishments and diversions of art, all the alleviations of luxury, all the sympathy of friends.

In the Roman Catholic Church there is an order of women called the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, who have renounced the world to devote themselves, their talents and property, entirely to the work of seeking out and saving the fallen of their own sex; and the wonders worked by their self-denying love on the hearts and lives of even the most depraved are credible only to those who know that the Good Shepherd Himself ever lives and works with such spirits engaged in such a work. A similar order of women exists in New York, under the direction of the Episcopal Church, in connection with St. Luke's Hospital; and another in England, who tend the "House of Mercy" of Clewer.

Such benevolent associations offer objects of interest to that class which most needs something to fill the void made by bereavement. The wounds of grief are less apt to find a cure in that rank of life where the sufferer has wealth and leisure. The _poor_ widow, whose husband was her all, _must_ break the paralysis of grief. The hard necessities of life are her physicians; they send her out to unwelcome, yet friendly toil, which, hard as it seems, has yet its healing power. But the sufferer surrounded by the appliances of wealth and luxury may long indulge the baleful apathy, and remain in the damp shadows of the valley of death till strength and health are irrecoverably lost. How Christ-like is the thought of a woman, graceful, elegant, cultivated, refined, whose voice has been trained to melody, whose fingers can make sweet harmony with every touch, whose pencil and whose needle can awake the beautiful creations of art, devoting all these powers to the work of charming back to the sheepfold those wandering and bewildered lambs whom the Good Shepherd still calls his own! Jenny Lind, once, when she sang at a concert for destitute children, exclaimed in her enthusiasm, "Is it not beautiful that I can sing so?" And so may not every woman feel, when her graces and accomplishments draw the wanderer, and charm away evil demons, and soothe the sore and sickened spirit, and make the Christian fold more attractive than the dizzy gardens of false pleasure?

In such associations, and others of kindred nature, how many of the stricken and bereaved women of our country might find at once a home and an object in life! Motherless hearts might be made glad in a better and higher motherhood; and the stock of earthly life that seemed cut off at the root, and dead past recovery, may be grafted upon with a shoot from the tree of life which is in the Paradise of God.

So the beginning of this eventful 1865, which finds us still treading the wine-press of our great conflict, should bring with it a serene and solemn hope, a joy such as those had with whom in the midst of the fiery furnace there walked one like unto the Son of God.

The great affliction that has come upon our country is so evidently the purifying chastening of a Father, rather than the avenging anger of a Destroyer, that all hearts may submit themselves in a solemn and holy calm still to bear the burning that shall make us clean from dross and bring us forth to a higher national life. Never, in the whole course of our history, have such teachings of the pure abstract Right been so commended and forced upon us by Providence. Never have public men been so constrained to humble themselves before God, and to acknowledge that there is a Judge that ruleth in the earth. Verily His inquisition for blood has been strict and awful; and for every stricken household of the poor and lowly, hundreds of households of the oppressor have been scattered. The land where the family of the slave was first annihilated, and the negro, with all the loves and hopes of a man, was proclaimed to be a beast to be bred and sold in market with the horse and the swine,--that land, with its fair name, Virginia, has been made a desolation so signal, so wonderful, that the blindest passer-by cannot but ask for what sin so awful a doom has been meted out. The prophetic visions of Nat Turner, who saw the leaves drop blood and the land darkened, have been fulfilled. The work of justice which he predicted is being executed to the uttermost.

But when this strange work of judgment and justice is consummated, when our country, through a thousand battles and ten thousands of precious deaths, shall have come forth from this long agony, redeemed and regenerated, then God Himself shall return and dwell with us, and the Lord God shall wipe away all tears from all faces, and the rebuke of His people shall He utterly take away.

GOD SAVE THE FLAG!

Washed in the blood of the brave and the blooming, Snatched from the altars of insolent foes, Burning with star-fires, but never consuming, Flash its broad ribands of lily and rose.

Vainly the prophets of Baael would rend it, Vainly his worshippers pray for its fall; Thousands have died for it, millions defend it, Emblem of justice and mercy to all:

Justice that reddens the sky with her terrors, Mercy that comes with her white-handed train, Soothing all passions, redeeming all errors, Sheathing the sabre and breaking the chain.

Borne on the deluge of old usurpations, Drifted our Ark o'er the desolate seas; This was the rainbow of hope to the nations, Torn from the storm-cloud and flung to the breeze!

God bless the Flag and its loyal defenders. While its broad folds o'er the battle-field wave, Till the dim star-wreath rekindle its splendors, Washed from its stains in the blood of the brave!

ANNO DOMINI.

It is right and fitting that this nation should enter upon the new year with peculiar gratitude and thanksgiving to the Most High. Through all its existence it has rejoiced in the sunshine of divine favor; but never has that favor been so benignly and bountifully bestowed as in these latter days. For the unexampled material prosperity which has waited upon our steps,--for blessings in city and field, in basket and store, in all that we have set our hand unto, it is meet that we should render thanks to the Good Giver; but for the especial blessings of these last four years,--for the sudden uprising of manhood,--for the great revival of justice and truth and love, without which material prosperity is but a second death,--for the wisdom to do, the courage to dare, the patience to endure, and the godlike strength to sacrifice all in a righteous cause, let us give thanks to-day; for in these consists a people's life.

To every nation there comes an hour whereon hang trembling the issues of its fate. Has it vitality to withstand the shock of conflict and the turmoil of surprise? Will it slowly gather itself up for victorious onset? or will it sink unresisting into darkness and the grave?

To this nation, as to all, the question came: Ease or honor, death or life? Subtle and savage, with a bribe in his hand, and a threat on his tongue, the tempter stood. Let it be remembered with lasting gratitude that there was neither pause nor parley when once his purpose was revealed. The answer came,--the voice of millions like the voice of one. From city and village, from mountain and prairie, from the granite coast of the Atlantic to the golden gate of the Pacific, the answer came. It roared from a thousand cannon, it flashed from a million muskets. The sudden gleam of uplifted swords revealed it, the quiver of bristling bayonets wrote it in blood. A knell to the despot, a paean to the slave, it thundered round the world.

Then the thing which we had greatly feared came upon us, and that spectre which we had been afraid of came unto us, and, behold, length of days was in its right hand, and in its left hand riches and honor. What the lion-hearted warrior of England was to the children of the Saracens, that had the gaunt mystery of Secession been to the little ones of this generation, an evening phantom and a morning fear, at the mere mention of whose name many had been but too ready to fall at the feet of opposition and cry imploringly, "Take any form but that!" The phantom approached, put off its shadowy outlines, assumed a definite purpose, loomed up in horrid proportions,--to come to perpetual end. In its actual presence all fear vanished. The contest waxed hot, but it wanes forever. Shadow and substance drag slowly down their bloody path to disappear in eternal infamy. The war rolls on to its close; and when it closes, the foul blot of secession stains our historic page no more. Another book shall be opened.

Remembering all the way which these battling years have led us, we can only say, "It is the Lord's, doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes." Who dreamed of the grand, stately patience, the heroic strength, that lay dormant in the hearts of this impulsive, mercurial people? It was always capable of magnanimity. Who suspected its sublime self-poise? Rioting in a reckless, childish freedom, who would have dared to prophesy that calm, clear foresight by which it voluntarily assumed the yoke, voiced all its strong individual wills in one central controlling will, and bent with haughty humility to every restraint that looked to the rescue of its endangered liberty? The cannon that smote the walls of Sumter did a wild work. Its voice of insult and of sacrilege roused the fire of a blood too brave to know its courage, too proud to boast its source. All the heroism inherited from an honored ancestry, all the inborn wrath of justice against iniquity, all that was true to truth sprang up instinctively to wrest our Holy Land from the clutch of its worse than infidels.

But that was not the final test. The final test came afterwards. The passion of indignation flamed out as passion must. The war that had been welcomed as a relief bore down upon the land with an ever-increasing weight, became an ever-darkening shadow. Its romance and poetry did not fade out, but their colors were lost under the sable hues of reality. The cloud hung over every hamlet; it darkened every doorway. Even success must have been accompanied with sharpest sorrow; and we had not success to soften sorrow. Disaster followed close upon delay, and delay upon disaster, and still the nation's heart was strong. The cloud became a pall, but there was no faltering. Men said to one another, anxiously,--"This cannot last. We must have victory. The people will not stand these delays. The summer must achieve results, or all is lost." The summer came and went, results were not achieved, and still the patient country waited,--waited not supinely, not indifferently, but with a still determination, with a painful longing, with an eager endeavor, with a resolute will, less demonstrative, but no less definite, than that which Sumter roused. Moments of sadness, of gloom, of bitter disappointment and deep indignation there have been; but never from the first moment of the Rebellion to this its dying hour has there been a time when the purpose of the people to crush out treason and save the nation has for a single instant wavered. And never has their power lagged behind their purpose. Never have they withheld men or money, but always they have pressed on, more eager, more generous, more forward to give than their leaders have been to ask. Truly, it is not in man that walketh thus to direct his steps!

And side by side, with no unequal step, the great charities have attended the great conflict. Out of the strong has come forth sweetness. From the helmeted brow of War has sprung a fairer than Minerva, panoplied not for battle, but for the tenderest ministrations of Peace. Wherever the red hand of War has been raised to strike, there the white hand of Pity has been stretched forth to solace. Wherever else there may have been division, here there has been no division. Love, the essence of Christianity, self-sacrifice, the life of God, have forgotten their names, have left the beaten ways, have embodied themselves in institutions, and lifted the whole nation to the heights of a divine beneficence. Old and young, rich and poor, bond and free, have joined in offering an offering to the Lord in the persons of his wounded brethren. The woman that was tender and very delicate has brought her finest handiwork; the slave, whose just unmanacled hands were hardly yet deft enough to fashion a freedman's device, has proffered his painful hoards; the criminal in his cell has felt the mysterious brotherhood stirring in his heart, and has pressed his skill and cunning into the service of his countrymen. Hands trembling with age have steadied themselves to new effort; little fingers that had hardly learned their uses have bent with unwonted patience to the novelty of tasks. The fashion and elegance of great cities, the thrift and industry of rural villages, have combined to relieve the suffering and comfort the sorrowful. Science has wrought her mysteries, art has spread her beauties, and learning and eloquence and poetry have lavished their free-will offerings. The ancient blood of Massachusetts and the youthful vigor of California have throbbed high with one desire to give deserved meed to those heroic men who wear their badge of honor in scarred brow and maimed limb. The wonders of the Old World, the treasures of tropical seas, the boundless wealth of our own fertile inland, all that the present has of marvellous, all that the past has bequeathed most precious,--all has been poured into the lap of this sweet charity, and blesseth alike him that gives and him that takes. It is the old convocation of the Jews, when they brought the Lord's offering to the work of the tabernacle of the congregation: "And they came, both men and women, and brought bracelets, and ear-rings, and rings, and tablets, all jewels of gold; and every man that offered offered an offering of gold unto the Lord. And every man with whom was found blue and purple and scarlet and fine linen and goats' hair and red skins of rams and badgers' skins brought them. And all the women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands, and brought that which they had spun, both of blue and of purple and of scarlet and of fine linen. And the rulers brought onyx-stones, and stones to be set, and spice, and oil for the light. The children of Israel brought a willing offering unto the Lord, every man and woman."

Truly, not the least of the compensations of this war is the new spirit which it has set astir in human life, this acknowledged brotherhood which makes all things common, which moves health and wealth and leisure and learning to brave the dangers of the battle-field and the horrors of the hospital for the comfort of its needy comrade. And inasmuch as he who hath done it unto one of the least of these his brethren has done it unto the Master, is not this, in very deed and truth, Anno Domini, the Year of our Lord?

And let all devout hearts render praises to God for the hope we are enabled to cherish that He will speedily save this people from their national sin. From the days of our fathers, the land groaned under its weight of woe and crime; but none saw from what quarter deliverance should come. Apostles and prophets arose in North and South, prophesying the wrath of God against a nation that dared to hold its great truth of human brotherhood in unrighteousness, and the smile of God only on him who should do justly and love mercy and walk humbly before Him; but they died in faith, not having obtained the promises. That faith in God, and consequently in the ultimate triumph of right over wrong, never failed; but few, even of the most sanguine, dared to hope that their eyes should see the salvation of the Lord. Upright men spent their lives in unyielding and indignant protest, not so much for any immediate result as because they could do no otherwise,--because the constant violation of sacred right, the constant defilement and degradation of country, wrought so fiercely and painfully in their hearts that they could not hold their peace. Though they expected no sudden reform, they believed in the indestructibility of truth, and knew, therefore, that their word should not return unto them void, but waited for some far future day when happier harvesters should come bringing their sheaves with them. How looks the promise now? A beneficent Providence has outstripped our laggard hopes. The work which we had so summarily given over to the wiser generations behind us is rapidly approaching completion beneath the strokes of a few sharp, short years of our own. Slavery, which was apologized for by the South, tolerated by the North, half recognized as an evil, half accepted as a compromise, but with every conscientious concession and every cowardly expedient sinking ever deeper and deeper into the nation's life, stands forth at last in its real character, and meets its righteous doom. Public opinion, rapidly sublimed in the white heat of this fierce war, is everywhere crystallizing. Men are learning to know precisely what they believe, and, knowing, dare maintain. There is no more speaking with bated breath, no more counselling of forbearance and non-intervention. It is no longer a chosen few who dare openly to denounce the sum of all villainies; but loud and long and deep goes up the execration of a people,--the tenfold hate and horror of men who have seen the foul fiend's work, who have felt his fangs fastened in their own flesh, his poison working in their own hearts' blood. Hundreds of thousands of thinking men have gone down into his loathsome prison-house, have looked upon his obscene features, have grappled, shuddering, with his slimy strength; and thousands of thousands, watching them from far-off Northern homes, have felt the chill of disgust that crept through their souls. The inmost abhorrence of slavery that fills the heart of this people it is impossible for language to exaggerate. It is so strong, so wide-spread, so uncompromising, so fixed in its determination to destroy, root and branch, the accursed thing, that even the forces of evil and self-seeking, awed and overpowered, are swept into the line of its procession. Good men and bad men, lovers of country and lovers only of lucre, men who will fight to the death for a grand idea and men who fight only for some low ambition, worshippers of God and worshippers of Mammon, are alike putting their hands to the plough which is to overturn and overturn till the ancient evil is uprooted. The very father of lies is, perforce, become the servant of truth. That old enemy which is the Devil, the malignant messenger of all evil, finds himself,--somewhat amazed and enraged, we must believe, at his unexpected situation,--with all his executive ability undiminished, all his spiritual strength unimpaired, finds himself harnessed to the chariot of human freedom and human progress, and working in his own despite the beneficent will of God. So He maketh the wrath of men and devils to praise Him, and the remainder of wrath He will restrain.

Unspeakably cheering, both as a sign of the sincerity of our leaders in this great day and as a pledge of what the nation means to do when its hands are free, are the little Christian colonies planted in the rear of our victorious armies. In the heart of woods are often seen large tracts of open country gay with a brilliant purple bloom which the people call "fire-weed," because it springs up on spots that have been stripped by fire. So, where the old plantations of sloth and servitude have been consumed by the desolating flames of war, spring up the tender growths of Christian civilization. The filthy hovel is replaced by the decent cottage. The squalor of slavery is succeeded by the little adornments of ownership. The thrift of self-possession supplants the recklessness of irresponsibility. For the slave-pen we have the school-house. Where the lash labored to reduce men to the level of brutes, the Bible leads them up to the heights of angels. We are as yet but in the beginning, but we have begun right. With his staff the slave passes over the Jordan of his deliverance; but through the manly nurture and Christian training which we owe him, and which we shall pay, he shall become two bands. The people did not set themselves to combat prejudices with words alone, when the time was ripe for deeds; but while the Government was yet hesitating whether to put the musket into his hand for war, Christian men and women hastened to give him the primer for peace. Not waiting for legislative enactments, they took the freedman as he came all panting from the house of bondage; they ministered to his wants, strengthened his heart, and set him rejoicing on his way to manhood. The Proclamation of Emancipation may or may not be revoked; but whom knowledge has made a man, and discipline a soldier, no edict can make again a slave.

While the people have been working in their individual capacity to right the wrongs of generations, our constituted authorities have been moving on steadfastly to the same end. Military necessity has emancipated thousands of slaves, and civil power has pressed ever nearer and nearer to the abolition of slavery. In all the confusion of war, the trumpet-tones of justice have rung through our national halls with no uncertain sound. With a pertinacity most exasperating to tyrants and infidels, but most welcome to the friends of human rights, Northern Senators and Representatives have presented the claims of the African race. With many a momentary recession, the tide has swept irresistibly onward. Hopes have been baffled only to be strengthened. Measures have been defeated only to be renewed. Defeat has been accepted but as the stepping-stone to new endeavor. Cautiously, warily, Freedom has lain in wait to rescue her wronged children. Her watchful eyes have fastened upon every weakness in her foe: her ready hand has been upraised wherever there was a chance to strike. Quietly, almost unheard amid the loud-resounding clash of arms, her decrees have gone forth, instinct with the enfranchisement of a race. The war began with old customs and prejudices under full headway, but the new necessities soon met them with fierce collision. The first shock was felt when the escaping slaves of Rebel masters were pronounced free, and our soldiers were forbidden to return them. Then the blows came fast and furious, and the whole edifice, reared on that crumbling corner-stone of Slavery, reeled through all its heaven-defying heights. The gates of Liberty opened to the slave, on golden hinges turning. The voice of promise rang through Rebel encampments, and penetrated to the very fastnesses of Rebellion. The ranks of the army called the freedman to the rescue of his race. The courts of justice received him in witness of his manhood. Before every foreign court he was acknowledged as a citizen of his country, and as entitled to her protection. The capital of our nation was purged of the foul stain that dishonored her in the eyes of the nations, and that gave the lie direct to our most solemn Declaration. The fugitive-slave acts that disfigured our statute-book were blotted out, and fugitive-slave-stealer acts filled their vacant places. The seal of freedom, unconditional, perpetual, and immediate, was set upon the broad outlying lands of the republic, and from the present Congress we confidently await the crowning act which shall make slavery forever impossible, and liberty the one supreme, universal, unchangeable law in every part of our domains.

What we have done is an earnest of what we mean to do. After nearly four years of war, and war on such a scale as the world has never before seen, the people have once more, and in terms too emphatic to be misunderstood, proclaimed their undying purpose. With a unanimity rarely equalled, a people that had fought eight years against a tax of threepence on the pound, and that was rapidly advancing to the front rank of nations through the victories of peace,--a people jealous of its liberties and proud of its prosperity, has reelected to the chief magistracy a man under whose administration burdensome taxes have been levied, immense armies marshalled, imperative drafts ordered, and fearful sufferings endured. They have done this because, in spite of possible mistakes and short-comings, they have seen his grasp ever tightening around the throat of Slavery, his weapons ever seeking the vital point of the Rebellion. They have beheld him standing always at his post, calm in the midst of peril, hopeful when all was dark, patient under every obloquy, courteous to his bitterest foes, conciliatory where conciliation was possible, inflexible where to yield was dishonor. Never have the passions of civil war betrayed him into cruelty or hurried him into revenge; nor has any hope of personal benefit or any fear of personal detriment stayed him when occasion beckoned. If he has erred, it has been on the side of leniency. If he has hesitated, it has been to assure himself of the right. Where there was censure, he claimed it for himself; where there was praise, he has lavished it on his subordinates. The strong he has braved, and the weak sheltered. He has rejected the counsels of his friends when they were inspired by partisanship, and adopted the suggestions of opponents when they were founded on wisdom. His ear has always been open to the people's voice, yet he has never suffered himself to be blindly driven by the storm of popular fury. He has consulted public opinion, as the public servant should; but he has not pandered to public prejudice, as only demagogues do. Not weakly impatient to secure the approval of the country, he has not scorned to explain his measures to the understanding of the common people. Never bewildered by the solicitations of party, nor terrified by the menace of opposition, he has controlled with moderation, and yielded with dignity, as the exigencies of the time demanded. Entering upon office with his full share of the common incredulity, perceiving no more than his fellow-citizens the magnitude of the crisis, he has steadily risen to the height of the great argument. No suspicion of self-seeking stains his fair fame; but ever mindful of his solemn oath, he seeks with clean hands and a pure heart the welfare of the whole country. Future generations alone can do justice to his ability; his integrity is firmly established in the convictions of the present age. His reward is with him, though his work lies still before him.

Only less significant than the fact is the manner of his reflection. All sections of a continental country, with interests as diverse as latitude and longitude can make them, came up to secure, not any man's continuance in power, but the rule of law. The East called with her thousands, and the West answered with her tens of thousands. Baltimore that day washed out the blood-stains from her pavement, and free Maryland girded herself for a new career. Men who had voted for Washington came forward with the snows of a hundred winters on their brows, and amid the silence and tears of assembled throngs deposited their ballot for Abraham Lincoln. Daughters led their infirm fathers to the polls to be sure that no deception should mock their failing sight. Armless men dropped their votes from between their teeth. Sick men and wounded men, wounded on the battle-fields of their country, were borne on litters to give their dying testimony to the righteous cause. Dilettanteism, that would not soil its dainty hands with politics, dared no longer stand aloof, but gave its voice for national honor and national existence. Old party ties snapped asunder, and local prejudices shrivelled in the fire of newly kindled patriotism. Turbulence and violence, awed by the supreme majesty of a resolute nation, slunk away and hid their shame from the indignant day. Calmly, in the midst of raging war, in despite of threats and cajolery, with a lofty, unspoken contempt for those false men who would urge to anarchy and infamy, this great people went up to the ballot-box, and gave in its adhesion to human equality, civil liberty, and universal freedom. And as the good tidings of great joy flashed over the wires from every quarter, men recognized the finger of God, and, laying aside all lower exultation, gathered in the public places, and, standing reverently with uncovered heads, poured forth their rapturous thanksgiving in that sublime doxology which has voiced for centuries the adoration of the human soul:--

"Praise God, from whom all blessings flow! Praise Him, all creatures here below! Praise Him above, ye heavenly host! Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!"

So America to the world gives greeting. So a free people meets and masters the obstacles that bar its progress. So this young republic speaks warning to the old despotisms, and hope to the struggling peoples. Thus with the sword she seeks peace under liberty. Striking off the shackles that fettered her own limbs, emerging from the thick of her deadly conflict, with many a dint on her armor, but with no shame on her brow, she starts on her victorious career, and bids the suffering nations take heart. With the old lie torn from her banner, the old life shall come back to her symbols. Her children shall no longer blush at the taunts of foreign tyrannies, but shall boldly proclaim her to be indeed the land of the free, as she has always been the home of the brave. Men's minds shall no longer be confused by distinctions between higher and lower law, to the infinite detriment of moral character, but all her laws shall be emanations from the infinite source of justice. Marshalling thus all her forces on the Lord's side, she may inscribe, without mockery, on her silver and gold, "In God we trust." She may hope for purity in her homes, and honesty in her councils. She may front her growing grandeur without misgiving, knowing that it comes not by earthly might or power, but by the Spirit of the Lord of Hosts; and the only voice of her victory, the song of her thanksgiving, and her watchword to the nations shall be, "Glory to God in the highest; and on earth peace, good-will toward men."

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_America and her Commentators:_ With a Critical Sketch of Travel in the United States. By HENRY T. TUCKERMAN. New York: Charles Scribner. 8vo. pp. 460.

If a little late, we are none the less sincere in extending to this timely and excellent work a hearty welcome. It is full of varied interest and valuable instruction. It is equally adapted to attract and edify our own citizens, and to guide and inform those foreigners who wish to know the history and facts of American society. The object of the work is to present a general view of the traits and transitions of our country, as they are reflected in the records made at different periods by writers of various nationalities, and to discuss, in connection with this exhibition, the temper and value of the principal critics of our civilization, emphasizing and indorsing their correct observations, pointing out and rectifying their erroneous ones. There are obviously many great advantages in thus reverting to the past and examining the present of American institutions and life by the help of the literature of travel in America,--a literature so richly suggestive, because so constantly modified by the national peculiarities and personal points of view of the writers. Mr. Tuckerman has improved these advantages with care and tact. In the preface and introduction, characterized by an ample command of the resources of the subject, easy discursiveness and lively criticism, he puts the reader in possession of such preliminary information as he will like or need to have. The body of the work begins with a portrayal of America as it appeared to its earliest discoverers and explorers. The second chapter is devoted to the Jesuit missionaries, who, reviving the spirit of the Crusades, plunged into the wilderness to convert the aborigines to Christianity, and, inspired by the wonders of the virgin solitude, became the pioneer writers of American travels. Chapters third and fourth deal with the French travellers who have visited and written on our country, from Chastellux to Laboulaye. The similar list of British travellers and writers is presented and discussed in the fifth and sixth chapters. Chapter seventh is taken up with "English Abuse of America"; and the subject has rarely been treated so fitly and firmly, with such a blending of just severity and moderation. "Cockneyism," Mr. Tuckerman says, "may seem not worthy of analysis, far less of refutation; but, as Sydney Smith remarked, 'In a country surrounded by dikes, a rat may inundate a province'; and it is the long-continued gnawing of the tooth of detraction, that, at a momentous crisis, let in the cold flood at last upon the nation's heart, and quenched its traditional love." The eighth chapter depicts the views and characterizes the qualities of the Northern European authors who have travelled in America and written concerning us. In the ninth chapter our Italian visitors and critics are treated in like manner. And in the tenth chapter the same task is performed for the Americans themselves who have journeyed through and written on their own country. Then follows the conclusion, recapitulating and applying the results of the whole survey. And the work properly closes with an index, furnishing the reader facilities for immediate reference to any passage, topic, or name he wishes to find.

For the task he has here undertaken Mr. Tuckerman is well qualified by the varied and comprehensive range of his knowledge and culture, the devotion of his life to travel, art, and study. His pages not only illustrate, they also vindicate, the character and claims of American nationality. He shows that "there never was a populous land about which the truth has been more generalized and less discriminated." His descriptions of local scenery and historic incidents recognize all that is lovely and sublime in our national landscapes, all that is romantic or distinctive in our national life. His humane and ethical sympathies are ready, discriminating, and generous; his approbations and rebukes, vivid and generally rightly applied. These and other associated qualities lend interest and value to the biographic sketches he presents of the numerous travellers and authors whose works pass in review. The pictures of many of these persons--such as Marquette, Volney, D'Allessandro, Bartram--are psychological studies of much freshness and force.

_Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution:_ With an Historical Essay. By LORENZO SABINE. Two Volumes. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 8vo. pp. 608, 600.

Mr. Sabine has attempted in these volumes to present in a judicial spirit a chapter of our Revolutionary history which usually bears the most of passion in its recital,--believing, as he does, that impartiality is identical with charity, in dealing with his theme. The first edition of his work, in a single volume, has been before the public seventeen years. The zeal and fidelity of his labor have been well appreciated. So far as his purpose has involved a plea or an apology for the Loyalists of the American Revolution, his critics who have at all abated their commendation of him have challenged him on the side where he might most willingly have been supposed to err, that of an excess of leniency. As to the class of men with whom he deals generally in his introductory essay, and individually in the elaborate biographical sketches which follow, the same difficulty presents itself which is encountered in all attempts to canvass the faults or the characteristics of any body of men who bear a common party-name or share a common opinion, while in the staple of real virtue or vice, of honor or baseness, of sincerity or hypocrisy, they may represent the poles of difference. The contemporary estimate of the Tories, and in large part the treatment of them which was thought to be just, were, in the main, adjusted with reference to the meanest and most malignant portion. Mr. Sabine, while by no means espousing the championship even of the best of them, would have the whole body judged with the candor which comes of looking at their general fellowship in the light of its natural prejudices, prepossessions, and embarrassments. It is to be considered also that the best of the class were a sort of warrant for the worst.

Those who are tolerably well read in the biographies and histories of our Revolutionary period are aware that Dr. Franklin, who, about most exciting and passion-stirring subjects, was a man of remarkably moderate and tolerant spirit, was eminently a hater of the Tories, unrelenting in his animosity towards them, and sternly set against all the measures proposed at the Peace for their relief, either by the British Government to enforce our remuneration of their losses, or by our own General or State Governments to soften the penalties visited upon them. The origin and the explanation of this intense feeling of animosity toward the Loyalists in the breast of that philosopher of moderation are easily traced to one of the most interesting incidents in his residence near the British Court as agent for Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. The incident is connected with the still unexplained mystery of his getting possession of the famous letters of Hutchinson, Oliver, etc. Franklin was living and directing all his practical efforts for enlightening and influencing those whom he supposed to be simply the ignorant plotters of mischief against the Colonists, under the full and most confident belief that those plotters were merely the stupid and conceited members of the British Cabinet. He never had dreamed that he was to look either above them to the King, or behind them to any unknown instigators of their mischief. With perfect good faith on his own part, he gave them the benefit of their own supposed ignorance, wrong-headedness, wilfulness, and ingenuity, such as it was, in inventing irritating and oppressive measures which, he warned them, would inevitably alienate the hearts and the allegiance of the Colonists. He records, that, while he had never had a thought but such as this imagined state of the facts had favored, a Liberal member of Parliament, an intimate friend of his, coming to him for a private interview, had told him that the Ministry were not the prime movers in this mischief, but were instigated to it by parties whom Franklin little suspected of such an agency. When the Doctor expressed his incredulity, the friend promised to give him decisive evidence of the full truth of his assertion. It came to Franklin in a form which astounded him, while it opened his eyes and fixed his indignation upon a class of men who from that moment onward were to him the exponents of all malignity and baseness. The evidence came in the shape of the originals, the autographs, of the above-named letters, written by natives of the American soil, office-holders under the Crown, who, while pampered and trusted by their constituents on this side of the water, were actually dictating, advising, and inspiriting the measures of the British Ministry most hateful to the Colonists. Franklin never overcame the impression from that shock. When he was negotiating the treaty of peace, he set his face and heart most resolutely against all the efforts and propositions made by the representatives of the Crown to secure to the Tories redress or compensation. He insisted that Britain, in espousing their alleged wrongs, indicated that she herself ought to remunerate their losses; that they, in fact, had been her agents and instruments, as truly as were her Crown officials and troops. Their malignant hostility toward their fellow-Colonists, and the sufferings and losses entailed on America by their open assertion of the rights of the Crown, and by the direct or indirect help which oppressive measures had received from them, had deprived them of all claim even on the pity of those who had triumphed in spite of them. At any rate, Franklin insisted, and it was the utmost to which he would assent,--his irony and sarcasm in making the offer showing the depth of his bitterness on the subject,--that a balance should be struck between the losses of the Loyalists and those of the Colonists in the conflagration of their sea-ports and the outrages on the property of individual patriots.

The views and feelings of Franklin have been essentially those which have since prevailed popularly among us regarding the old Tories. Of course, when hard-pressed, he was willing to recognize a difference in the motives which prompted individuals and in the degrees of their turpitude. Mr. Sabine gives us in his introductory essay a most admirable analysis of the whole subject-matter, with an accurate and instructive array of all the facts bearing upon it. No man has given more thorough or patient inquiry to it, or has had better opportunities for gathering materials of prime authority and perfect authenticity for the treatment of it. In the biographical sketches which crowd his volumes will be found matter of varied and profound interest, alternately engaging the tender sympathy and firing the indignation of the reader. One can hardly fail of bethinking himself that the moral and judicial reflections which come from perusing this work will by and by, under some slight modifications, attach to the review of the characters and course of some men who are in antagonism to their country's cause in these days.

_Broken Lights: An Inquiry into the Present Condition and Future Prospects of Religious Faith._ By FRANCES POWER COBBE. Boston: J. E. Tilton & Co.

Among the countless errors of faith which have misled mankind, there is none more dangerous, or more common, than that of confounding the forms of religion with religion itself. Too often, alike to believer and unbeliever, this has proved the one fatal mistake. Many an honest and earnest soul, feeling the deep needs of a spiritual life, but unable to separate those things which the heart would accept from those against which the reason revolts, has rejected all together, and turned away sorrowful, if not scoffing. On the other hand, the state of that man, who, because his mind has settled down upon certain externals of religion, deems that he has secured its essentials also, is worse than that of the skeptic. The freezing traveller, who is driven by the rocks (of hard doctrine) and the thorns (of doubt) to keep his limbs in motion, stands a far better chance of finding his way out of the wilderness than he who lies down on the softest bed of snow, flatters himself that all is well, and dreams of home, whilst the deadly torpor creeps over him.

If help and guidance and good cheer for all such be not found in this little volume, it is certainly no fault of the writer's intention. She brings to her task the power of profound conviction, inspiring a devout wish to lead others into the way of truth. Beneath the multiform systems of theology she finds generally the same firm foundations of faith,--"faith in the existence of a righteous God, faith in the eternal Law of Morality, faith in an Immortal Life." None enjoys a monopoly of truth, although all are based upon it. Each is a lighthouse, more or less lofty, and more or less illumined by the glory that burns within; yet their purest rays are only "broken lights." The glory itself is infinite: it is only through human narrowness and imperfection that it appears narrow and imperfect. The lighthouse is good in its place: it beckons home, with its "wheeling arms of dark and bright," many a benighted voyager; but we must remember that it is a structure made with hands, and not confound the stone and iron of human contrivance with the great Source and Fountain of Light.

The writer does not grope with uncertain purpose among these imperfect rays, and she is never confused by them. To each she freely gives credit for what it is or has been; but all fade at last before the unspeakable brightness of the rising sun. She discerns the dawn of that day when all our little candles may be safely extinguished: for it is not in any church, nor in any creed, nor yet in any book, that all of God's law is contained; but the light of His countenance shines primarily on the souls of men, out of which all religions have proceeded, and into which we must look for the ever new and ever vital faith, which is to the unclouded conscience what the sunshine is to sight.

Such is the conclusion the author arrives at through an array of arguments of which we shall not attempt a summary. It is not necessary to admit what these are designed to prove, in order to derive refreshment and benefit from the pure tone of morality, the fervent piety, and the noble views of practical religion which animate her pages. It is not a book to be afraid of. No violent hand is here laid upon the temple; but only the scaffoldings, which, as she perceives, obscure the beauty of the temple, are taken away. Not only those who have rejected religion because they could not receive its dogmas, but all who have struggled with their doubts and mastered them, or thought they mastered them, nay, any sincere seeker for the truth, will find Miss Cobbe's unpretending treatise exceedingly valuable and suggestive; while to any one interested in modern theological discussions we would recommend it as containing the latest, and perhaps the clearest and most condensed, statement of the questions at issue which these discussions have called out.

The spirit of the book is admirable. Both the skeptic who sneers and the bigot who denounces might learn a beautiful lesson from its calm, yet earnest pages. It is free from the brilliant shallowness of Renan, and the bitterness which sometimes marred the teachings of Parker. It is a generous, tender, noble book,--enjoying, indeed, over most works of its class a peculiar advantage; for, while its logic has everywhere a masculine strength and clearness, there glows through all an element too long wanting to our hard systems of theology,--an element which only woman's heart can supply.

Yet, notwithstanding the lofty reason, the fine intuition, the philanthropy and hope, which inspire its pages, we close the book with a sense of something wanting. The author points out the danger there always is of a faith which is intellectually demonstrable becoming, with many, a faith of the intellect merely,--and frankly avows that "there is a cause why Theism, even in warmer and better natures, too often fails to draw out that fervent piety" which is characteristic of narrower and intenser beliefs. This cause she traces to the neglect of prayer, and the consequent removal afar off, to vague confines of consciousness, of the Personality and Fatherhood of God. Her observations on this important subject are worthy of serious consideration, from those rationalists especially whose cold theories do not admit anything so "unphilosophical" as prayer. Yet we find in the book itself a want. The author--like nearly all writers from her point of view--ignores the power of miracle. Because physical impossibilities, or what seem such, have been so readily accepted as facts owing their origin to divine interposition, they fall to the opposite extreme of denying the occurrence of any events out of the common course of Nature's operations. Of the positive and powerful ministration of angels in human affairs they make no account whatever, or accept it as a pleasing dream; and they forget that what we call a miracle may be as truly an offspring of immutable law as the dew and the sunshine,--failing to learn of the loadstone, which attracts to itself splinters of steel contrary to all the commonly observed laws of gravitation, the simple truth that man also may become a magnet, and, by the power of the divine currents passing through him, do many things astonishing to every-day experience. The feats of a vulgar thaumaturgy, designed to make the ignorant stare, may well be dispensed with. But the fact that "spiritualism," with all its crudities of doctrine and errors of practice, has spread over Christendom with a rapidity to which the history of religious beliefs affords no parallel, shows that the realization of supernatural influences is an absolute need of the human heart. The soul of the earlier forms of worship dies out of them, as this faith dies out, or becomes merely traditional; and no new system can look to fill their places without it.

_Letters of_ FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY _from 1833 to 1847._ Two Volumes. Philadelphia: F. Leypoldt.

There are many people who make very little discrimination between one musician and another,--who discern no great gulf between Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, between Rossini and Romberg, between Spohr and Spontini: not in respect of music, but of character; of character in itself, and not as it may develop itself in chaste or florid, sentimental, gay, devotional or dramatic musical forms. And as yet we have very little help in our efforts to gain insight into the inner nature of our great musical artists. Of Meyerbeer the world knows that he was vain, proud, and fond of money,--but whether he had soul or not we do not know; the profound religiousness of Handel, who spent his best years on second-rate operas, and devoted his declining energies to oratorio, we have to guess at rather than reach by direct disclosure; and till Mr. Thayer shall take away the mantle which yet covers his Beethoven, we shall know but little of the interior nature of that wonderful man. But Mendelssohn now stands before us, disclosed by the most searching of all processes, his own letters to his own friends. And how graceful, how winning, how true, tender, noble is the man! We have not dared to write a notice of these two volumes while we were fresh from their perusal, lest the fascination of that genial, Christian presence should lead us into the same frame which prompted not only the rhapsodies of "Charles Auchester," but the same passionate admiration which all England felt, while Mendelssohn lived, and which Elizabeth Sheppard shared, not led. We lay down these volumes after the third perusal, blessing God for the rich gift of such a life,--a life, sweet, gentle, calm, nowise intense nor passionate, yet swift, stirring, and laborious even to the point of morbidness. A Christian without cant; a friend, not clinging to a few and rejecting the many, nor diffusing his love over the many with no dominating affection for a few near ones, but loving his own with a tenacity almost unparalleled, yet reaching out a free, generous sympathy and kindly devotion even to the hundreds who could give him nothing but their love. It is thought that his grief over his sister Fanny was the occasion of the rupture of a blood-vessel in his head, and that it was the proximate cause of his own death; and yet he who loved with this idolatrous affection gave his hand to many whose names he hardly knew. The reader will not overlook, in the second series of letters, the plea in behalf of an old Swiss guide for remembrance in "Murray," nor that long letter to Mr. Simrock, the music-publisher, enjoining the utmost secrecy, and then urging the claims of a man whom he was most desirous to help.

The letters from Italy and Switzerland were written during the two years with which he prefaced his quarter-century of labor as composer, director, and virtuoso. They relate much to Italian painting, the music of Passion Week, Swiss scenery, his stay with Goethe, and his brilliant reception in England on his return. They disclose a youth of glorious promise.

The second series does not disappoint that promise. The man is the youth a little less exuberant, a little more mature, but no less buoyant, tender, and loving. The letters are as varied as the claims of one's family differ from those of the outside world, but are always Mendelssohnian,--free, pure, unworldly, yet deep and wise. They continue down to the very close of his life. They are edited by his brother Paul, and another near relative. Yet unauthorized publications of other letters will follow, for Mendelssohn was a prolific letter-writer; and Lampadius, a warm admirer of the composer, has recently announced such a volume. The public may rejoice in this; for Mendelssohn was not only purity, but good sense itself; he needs no critical editing; and if we may yet have more strictly musical letters from his pen, the influence of the two volumes now under notice will be largely increased.

It is not enough to say of these volumes that they are bright, piquant, genial, affectionate; nor is it enough to speak of their artistic worth, the subtile appreciation of painting in the first series, and of music in the second; it is not enough to refer to the glimpses which they give of eminent artists,--Chopin, Rossini, Donizetti, Hiller, and Moscheles,--nor the side-glances at Thorwaldsen, Bunsen, the late scholarly and art-loving King of Prussia, Schadow, Overbeck, Cornelius, and the Duesseldorf painters; nor is it enough to dwell upon that delightful homage to father and mother, that confiding trust in brother and sisters, that loyalty to friends. The salient feature of these charming books is the unswerving devotion to a great purpose; the careless disregard, nay, the abrupt refusal, of fame, unless it came in an honest channel; the naive modesty that made him wonder, even in the very last years of his life, that _he_ could be the man whose entrance into the crowded halls of London and Birmingham should be the signal of ten minutes' protracted cheering; the refusal to set art over against money; the unwillingness to undertake the mandates of a king, unless with the cordial acquiescence of his artistic conscience; and the immaculate purity, not alone of his life, but of his thought. How he castigates Donizetti's love of money and his sloth! how his whip scourges the immorality of the French opera, and his whole soul abhors the sensuality of that stage! how steadfastly he refuses to undertake the composition of an opera till the faultless libretto for which he patiently waited year after year could be prepared! We wish our religious societies would call out a few of the letters of this man and scatter them broadcast over the land: they would indeed be "leaves for the healing of the nations."

There is one lesson which may be learned from Mendelssohn's career, which is exceptionably rare: it is that Providence does _sometimes_ bless a man every way,--giving him all good and no evil. Where shall we look in actual or historic experience to find a parallel to Mendelssohn in this? He had beauty: Chorley says he never looked upon a handsomer face. He had grace and elegance. He spoke four languages with perfect ease, read Greek and Latin with facility, drew skilfully, was familiar with the sciences, and never found himself at a loss with professed naturalists. He was a member of one of the most distinguished families of Germany: his grandfather being Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher; his father, a leading banker; his uncle Bartholdy, a great patron of art in Rome, while he was Prussian minister there; his brother-in-law Hensel, Court painter; both his sisters and his brother Paul occupying leading social positions. He was heir-apparent to a great estate. He was greeted with the applause of England from the outset of his career; "awoke famous," after the production of the "Midsummer Overture," while almost a boy; never had a piece fall short of triumphant success; in fact, so commanding prestige that he could find not one who would rationally blame or criticize him,--a "most wearying" thing, he writes, that every piece he brought out was always "wonderfully fine." He was loved by all, and envied by none; the pet and joy of Goethe, who lived to see his expectation of Mendelssohn on the road to ample fulfilment; blessed entirely in his family, "the course of true love" running "smooth" from beginning to end; well, agile, strong; and more than all this, having a childlike religious faith in Christ, and as happy as a child in his piety. His life was cloudless; those checks and compensations with which Providence breaks up others' lot were wanting to his. We never knew any one like him in this, but the childlike, sunny Carl Ritter.

We still lack a biography of Mendelssohn which shall portray him from without, as these volumes do from within. We learn that one is in preparation; and when that is given to the public, one more rich life will be embalmed in the memories of all good men.

We ought not to overlook the unique elegance of these two volumes. Like all the publications of Mr. Leypoldt, they are printed in small, round letter; and the whole appearance is creditable to the publisher's taste. The American edition entirely eclipses the English in this regard. Though not advertised profusely, the merit of these Letters has already given them entrance and welcome into our most cultivated circles: but we bespeak for them a larger audience still; for they are books which our young men, our young women, our pastors, our whole thoughtful and aspiring community, ought to read and circulate.

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