CHAPTER III.

BIRDS AND BOY'S PLAY.

Our schooner sailed once up and down the coast of Labrador, skirting it for a distance of five hundred miles; but in these papers I sail back and forth as many times as I please. Having, therefore, followed up the ice, I am again at Sleupe Harbor, our first port, and invite thee to go with us in a day's pursuit of Eider-Duck; for among these innumerable islands the eider breeds, and not elsewhere in considerable numbers, so far as we could learn, short of--somewhere in the remote North. Bradford, this morning, June 15th, has hired the two Canadians to take him to the bird-haunts in their own boat, and to shoot for him,--kindly offering a place to the Judge and myself.

The word _Eider_ had long been to me a name to conjure with. At some far-away period in childhood it got imbedded in my fancy, and in process of time had acquired that subtilest, indefinable fascination which belongs only to imaginative reminiscence. In the future, I suppose, all this existence will have become such a childhood, its earth changed to sky, its dulness sharpened to a tender, delicious poignancy of allurement and suggestion. And were it not bliss enough for an immortality, this boundless deepening and refining of experience through memory and imagination? Only to feel thrilling in one's being chords of connection with times immeasurably bygone! only to be fed with ethereal remembrance out of a youth scarcely less ancient than the stars! Pity Tithonus no more; or pity him only because in him age had become the enemy of itself, and spilled the wine from its own cup.

The wind was ahead, and blew freshly down through the wilderness of islands, sweeping between granite shores along many and many a winding channel; the boat careened almost to her gunwale, yielding easily at first, but holding hard when well down, as good boats will; the waves beat saucily against her, now and then also catching up a handful of spray, and flinging it full in our faces, not forbearing once or twice to dash it between the open lips of a talker, salting his speech somewhat too much for his comfort, though not too much for the entertainment of his interlocutors; while overhead the rifted gray was traversed by whited seams, making another wilderness of islands in the clouds. We had gone a mile, and were now sailing smoothly in the lee of an island, when Bradford exclaimed, "See there! What's that? Why, that's a 'sea-goose.' Can you get him for me?" (to the elder Canadian). I had snuggled down in the bottom of the boat, and sprang up, expecting, from the word "goose," to see a large and not handsome bird, when instead appeared the tiniest tid-bit of swimming elegance that eye ever beheld. Reddish about neck and breast, graceful as a swan in form and motion, while not larger than a swallow, light as the lightest feather on the water, turning its curving neck and dainty head to look,--it seemed more like an embodied fancy than a creature inured to the chill of Arctic seas and the savagery of Arctic storms. What goose first gave it the name "sea-goose" passes conjecture. "Sea-fairy" were more appropriate.

This was the Hyperborean Phalarope,--a big name for so tiny a creature. Nuttall says that in 1833 great numbers of them appeared about Chelsea Beach. Ruddy, airy, fairy, feathered Graces, they must seem in our practical Yankee land like a mythology on wings, a flock of exquisite old Grecian fancies, flitting, light, and sweetly strange, and almost impossible, through the atmosphere of modern industries.

Soon a new attraction. It was a bird in the water quite near, about the size of a pigeon, though slenderer, glossy black, save a patch of pure white on the wing, and with an eye that glittered like a black jewel.

"Sea-pigeon," said the artist, and desired his skilful Canadian to secure the prize. The other arose and took deliberate aim. The bird, now not more than ten yards distant, did not offer to fly, and made no attempt to swim away, but kept its paddles well under it, with its head turned from us, while it swung lightly from side to side, glancing backward with its keen, audacious eye, now over this shoulder, now over that. The gun flashed; the shot spattered over the spot where a bird had been; but _quicker_ than a flash that creature was under water and well out of harm's way! The shot could have been scarcely out of the muzzle before he had disappeared. To see such inconceivable celerity reminded one that the wings of gnats, which vibrate fifteen thousand times in a second, and light, that makes (_vide_ Tyndale) twenty and odd millions of undulations in going an inch, are not without their fellow-wonders in Nature. Meanwhile the whole performance was so cool and neat that I could not afterwards help thinking of this creature as a humorist, and picturing it as quietly chuckling to itself under water. With reason, too; for above water was such a prolonged and ludicrous stare of amazement from at least three pairs of eyes as might satisfy the most immoderate appetite for the laughable.

This artful dodger was the Black Guillemot. It cannot be shot, if its eye is on the fowler. Eager for "specimens," I tried my long, powerful ducking-gun upon it an hour or two later, sufficiently to prove this. The birds would wait and watch, all the while glancing from side to side, and dip, dip, dipping their bills in the water with infinite wary quickness of movement, and yet with an air of audacious unconcern; but the pull at the trigger seemed to touch some nerve in them, and by the same act you fired your shot at them and fired them under water.

The curious dipping of the bill just alluded to is mentioned as characteristic of the Phalaropes, though I did not observe it, and is thought to be a snapping-up of minute Crustacea. But in the case of the Black Guillemot, I question if this be its true explanation. The bird makes this movement only when on the alert. Several of them are frolicking together; you show yourself, and instantly their bills begin to dip,--each movement being quick as lightning, but with a second of space between. I thought it partly an escape-valve for their nervous excitement, and partly a keeping in practice of their readiness to dive. To suppose them taking food under such circumstances,--one would fain think himself more formidable in their eyes than that coolness would imply.

In the afternoon, however, of this day--to anticipate a little--my specimen was obtained. While the boat waited at the shore of a low island, the Judge and I sauntered up the smooth, bare granite slope to the ridge, and, looking over a breast-high wall of solid rock, saw a flock of these birds in a cove on the opposite side.

"Shall I fire?" I said.

"You couldn't hit them; they are more than two gun-shots off. However," added the Judge, presently, "your Long Tom will _reach_ one gunshot, and fire one and a half more; it will do no harm to try."

I fired at the farthest; they went under, but when they returned to the surface one had come to grief. I walked leisurely towards them, and stood on the shore, reloading; but they gave me no heed; they were intent on their stricken comrade. Gathering around him, they began pulling at him with their bills, trying to replace him in an upright position. The poor fellow strove to comply, for he was not yet quite dead; but quickly fell over again on the side. They renewed their efforts, assiduously playing Good Samaritan to this brother who had fallen among human thieves. At last they got impatient, and pecked at him sharply, evidently looking on him as wanting in pluck. They had seemed very human before; but when they began to be vexed at him because he would not gratify their benevolence with the sense of success, I really could see no reason why they should be masquerading there in feathers, being as human as anybody!

It was an elegant bird, with its fine shape, its plumage of glossy jet and snow, and its legs of bright scarlet, bright as name. Use it has, too, for its flame-legs in the frigid seas it frequents; for it is found in the uttermost North, and dares all the severities of Polar cold.

But we have got into the afternoon too quickly, and now return to our morning pursuit of eider-duck. It was not long after the above spectacle of magic disappearance that the elder Canadian rose, went forward, and fired his piece. Two large birds, one black and white, the other brown, sprang up from the water and flew briskly away,--flew, as I thought, out of sight; the man meanwhile returning to his seat and the helm, with the same composed silence, and the same attractive, inscrutable face as before. But three hundred yards farther on we came to the male bird, quite dead. I was near firing upon it, being led by its motion on the waves to think it alive, and not in the least connecting it with the bird. I had but just now seen flying off in all apparent health,--when the Canadian, touching Bradford, and pointing, said quietly, "Dead," and the latter shouted to me accordingly. Presently, as the boat swept past, I stooped and drew it in,--a beautiful creature, with velvety violet black accompanied by dark olive-green about the head, while the neck, breast, and back were white as snow, and all the rest a glistening black.

"An eider! King eider!" cried the Artist, joyfully. Then, "Isn't it a king eider?" he said to the Canadian, holding it up.

The other nodded.

"Really a king eider!" murmured the Artist, as he now bent over it with bright eyes.

It was not, but the male of the other species, though I knew no better at the time. The king duck is one of the most Arctic of all Arctic birds, and condescends to Lower Labrador only in winter, nor then frequently. A temperature at the freezing-point is to him a mere oven, which one should be a salamander to live in; with the thermometer thirty or forty degrees lower, he is still sweltered; while his custom of growing his own coat, though it saves him from shoddy, expense, and Paris fashions, has the disadvantage that he cannot strip it off at pleasure, not even when away from the ladies and the dinner-table. He is fain, therefore, to keep well away toward the Polar North, where the climate is more temperate and pleasing, leaving Newfoundlanders and Labradorians to roast themselves, if they _will_ do so.

While the boat sailed on, still seeking the eider-island,--which at first, so the Artist said, was "half a mile off," then "a piece farther," then "right up here," then "just ahead," and now threatened to keep ahead,--I nested myself again in the bottom, and renewed an old boy-custom by studying the elder Canadian's physiognomy. It was strangely attractive, and yet strangely impenetrable, a rare out-door face, clean and firm as naked granite after a rain, healthful as balsam-firs, and so honestly weather-beaten that one could not help regarding it as a feature of natural scenery. All out-of-doors was implied in it, and it belonged as much to the horizon as to the nearest objects. The eye, with its unceasing, imperturbable search, never an instant relaxing its intentness, and never seeming to make an effort any more than the sky in looking blue, asserted this relationship, for by the same glance it seemed to take in equally the farthest and the nearest; only over us in the boat it passed always as over vacant space. Yet any question was answered at once with quiet, willing brevity, not as if he had been interrupted in his thoughts, or was recalled to a recognition of our existence, but just as he would turn the tiller in steering his boat,--while the eye still continued its conversation with that impersonal, elemental company which he seemed to keep. I found it out of my power to relate myself to him as an individual. In most faces you study special character; but in him it was somewhat older and more primitive,--somewhat which seemed to be rather existence itself than any special form of it. One felt in him that same world-old secret which haunts ancient woods, and would have asked him to utter it, were not its presence the only utterance it can have. Alas, he that speaks must use English, French, or some language which is partly conventional; and that pre-Adamite or Saturnian vernacular in which we are all _trying_ to speak has no verbal sign. Poets, indeed, contrive to catch it, one knows not how, in the meshes of ordinary language, and only therefore are poets; but to frame in it any question or answer suited to the wants of the understanding is a feat beyond man's power. It is true that Mr. Herbert Spencer, having, by diligent, heroic self-desiccation, got his mind into the purely adult, dried-beef condition, well freed from all boy-juices of imagination, has discovered that all Fact in this universe, which cannot be verbally formulated and made a scientific dogma, is without significance to man's spirit, however it may be negatively implied as a vacant somewhat by his logic. For which discovery the incomparable man will please accept my profoundest ingratitude.

After "positive philosophy," the croak of ravens, the hoot of owls, anything that has the touch, the charm, and infinite suggestion of Nature and life, will be more than welcome; and in good time we have reached the desired island.

Not to find eiders, though, but only Saddle-Back Gulls, a crowd of which arose on our approach, and hovered about at safe, yet tantalizing distance, keeping up their monotonous, piping scream. The saddle-back, a large, powerful white bird, with a patch of black crossing it like a saddle, is the great enemy of the eider, pillaging its nest and devouring its young at every opportunity, and had probably driven the ducks from this place. It is a pirate of pirates, a Semmes in the air, cowardly toward equals, relentless toward the weak and unweaponed; and the chief care of the mother duck is to protect her little brood from these greedy confederates. One of the coolest, yet wariest rascals in the world, it can scarcely be surprised, but lingers about, just beyond gun-shot range, screaming, as if it said, "Why don't you fire? Fire!--who cares?" I came at length to cherish toward them no little animosity, and would willingly have played Kearsarge upon them, could any challenge have drawn them from port. But during the whole cruise not one of them consoled us with so much as a feather.

The flight of this bird meanwhile is magnificent,--so full of powerful grace, of achieving leisure and ease. Nothing can be more striking than its contrast with the labored propulsion of the duck. A few slow waves of the wing, and there it is high in the air; then a droop, a decline, but so light and soft, so exquisitely graduated, that the downward drift of a feather seems lumpish and leaden in the comparison; then again up it goes with such an ease as if it rose by specific levity, like smoke from a chimney in a day of calm; and aloft it wheels, circles, floats, and at length sails on its broad vans away, passing in a few minutes over wide spaces, and yet, with its leisurely stroke, seeming engaged only in airing its pinions. One might fancy it the very spirit of motion imaged in a picturesque symbol.

In that delightful book, "Out-Door Papers," the author celebrates charmingly the charm of birds; but I, who am more humanist than naturalist, would say rather, What exhaustless fascination in their flight!--for this appears to touch by some subtile suggestion upon the hope or dream of man. I am, indeed, now--though always, please God, a boy--not so young a boy as once, when I could be unhappy for the want of wings, and deem, for a moment, that life is little worth without them; yet never does a bird fly in my view, especially if its flight be lofty and sustained, but it seems to carry some deep, immemorial secret of my existence, as if my immortal life flew with it. Sweet fugitive, when will it fly with me? Whenever it does,--and something assures me that one day it will,--then the new heavens and new earth! Meanwhile the intimation of it puts to the lip some unseen cup, out of which, in a soft ecstasy of pain that is better than pleasure, I quaff peace, peace. It is not always nor often that one is open to this supreme charm; but it comes at times, and then to hope all and believe all is easy as to breathe.

This mood also carries me farther than almost anything else into childhood; for, in the height of it, I can go back by link after link of remembrance, and see myself ... there ... and there ... and there again ... and at last deep into the rosy suffusion of dawn,--still looking up, and intent on that airy motion. To this day I know birds better by their flight than by their forms, unless it be the form of the wing.

I tried to see what it is which gives to the flight of some birds that look of majestic ease. Partly it is due to the slow stroke, but more, I thought, to the flexibility of the wing, and to the fact that this is less directly up-and-down in its action than that of the duck, for example. The chief effort of the duck is to sustain its weight. Consequently the wing must lie flat (comparatively) upon the air, and be kept straight out, economizing its vertical pressure; and hence the noticeable stiffness and toilsomeness of its progression. The gull, less concerned to sustain itself, uses the wing more flexibly, bending it slightly at the elbow, and pressing back the outer portion with each stroke. So a heavy swimmer must keep his hands flat, pressing down upon the water to hold up his head; while one who swims very lightly handles them more freely and flexibly, using them at pleasure to assist his progress. Yet the matter refuses to be wholly explained, and remains partly a mystery. Darwin, when in Patagonia, observed condors circling in the air, and saw them sail half an hour by the watch without any smallest vibration of the wings and without the smallest perceptible descent. I used in boyhood to see bald eagles do the same for a considerable period, though I never timed them exactly, and wonder at it now as I did then.

Away now to another island, still seeking ducks. Arrived, the Canadians land, in order, in Bradford's behalf, to have the first chance; while the Judge and I, who pretend to no skill with the gun, remain awhile behind. The island had the shape described in our first paper: a gentle slope and rock-beach on one side,--a steep, broken, half-precipitous descent on the other. Landing presently, I went slowly along the slope,--slowly, for one's feet sank deep at every step in the elastic moss, so that it was like walking on a feather-bed. Some patches of shrubbery, two and a half or three feet high,--the first approach to woody growth I had seen,--drew my attention; and it is curious now to think what importance they had in my eyes, as if here were the promise of a new world. I hastened towards them, forgetting the coveted ducks; and the Canadian's gun, which sounded in the distance, did not reawaken my ambition. Forgetting or remembering were probably much the same; for I had scarcely fired a gun in twenty and odd years, never had taken a bird on the wing, and, besides, must now fire from the left shoulder,--the right eye being like Goldsmith's tea-cups, "wisely kept for show." But as I touched the shrubbery there was a stir, a rustle, a whirr, and away went a large brown bird, scurrying off toward the sea. Upon the impulse of the moment, I up gun, and blazed after. To my amazement, the bird fell. I stumped off for my prize, actually achieving a sort of run, the first for years,--pretty sure, however, that the creature was making game of me rather than I of it, and would rise and flirt its tail in my face when I should be near enough to make the mockery poignant. No, the poor thing's game was up. It was a large bird, of an orange-brown hue, mottled with faint white and shadings of black. A powerful relenting came over me, and I could have sat down and cried like a baby, had that been suitable for a "boy" of my years.

"Do you know that was pretty well done?" cried a voice.

It was Bradford, who was hurrying up. I had no heart to answer; I was not jolly.

"Why, it's a female eider," he said, when near; "you've shot an eider on the wing!"

_O tempora! O mores!_ then the Elder was glad!--all his compunction drowned in the pleasure of connecting himself, even through the gates of death, with a youthful fascination.

It now occurred to me--and the conjecture proved correct--that these plats of shrubbery must serve as hiding-places for the duck. The Canadians, whose behavior was all along mysterious, had forborne to give us any hint. I was vexed at them then, but had no reason perhaps. This was their larder, which they could not wish to impoverish. Besides, fishermen and visitors on this coast are so sweeping and ruthless in their destructions, that one might reasonably desire to protect the birds against them. It is not so much by shooting the birds as by destroying their eggs that the mischief is done. A party will take possession of an island at night, carry off every egg that can be found, and throw it into the sea,--then, returning next forenoon, take the fresh eggs laid in the mean time for food. On the whole, I feel less like blaming our guides than like returning to make apologies. Yet to us also the ducks are necessary, for we have no fresh meat but such as our guns obtain; and to one seeking health, this was a matter of some serious moment.

The elder Canadian has also shot a duck, and, besides, a red-breasted diver, a noble bird; and with these prizes we set sail for another island, frequented by "Tinkers." The day meanwhile had cleared, the sun shone richly, and we began to see somewhat of the glory, as well as grimness, of Labrador. Away to the southwest, eminent over the lesser islands, rose Mecatina, all tossed into wild billows of blue, with purple in the hollows; while to the north the hills of the mainland lifted themselves up to hold fellowship with it in height and hue.

"Tinker," we found, meant Murre and Razor-Billed Auk. These are finely shaped birds, black above and white below, twice the size of a pigeon, and closely resembling each other, save in the bill. That of the murre is not noticeable; but the other's is singularly shaped, and marked with delicate, finely cut grooves, the central one being nicely touched with a line of white, while a similar thread of white runs from the bill to the eye.

I notice it thus, because it suggested to me a reflection. Looking at this bill, I asked myself how Darwin's theory comported with it. "The struggle for life,"--are all the forms of organic existence due to that? But how did the struggle for life cut these grooves, paint these ornamental lines? "Beauty is its own excuse for being"; and that Nature respects beauty is, to my mind, nothing less than fatal to the Darwinian hypothesis. That his law exists as a _modifying_ influence I freely admit, and accredit him with an important addition to our thought upon such matters; that it is the sole formative influence I shall be better prepared to believe when I see that beauty is not regarded in Nature, but is a mere casual attendant upon use. The artist Greenough did, indeed, strenuously maintain this last. But the sloth and the bird-of-paradise are equally useful to themselves; if beauty were but an aspect of use, these should be equally comely in our eyes. No; "the struggle for life" has not grooved the bill of the auk, and painted the tail of the peacock, any more, so far as I can see, than it has given to evening and morning their scarlet and gold. And so my auk said to me, "Any attempt to string existence upon a single thread has failed and will fail, unless it be that thread which man can never formulate, never stretch out into a straight line,--the Eternal Unity, God."

These birds have a catlike instinct of fidelity to old haunts, and, having once chosen a habitat, adhere to it, despite many a year of persecution. They prefer inaccessible cliffs, on every projecting shelf and jut of which the eggs are laid, but also inhabit islands where are many clefts, fissures, and holes made by tumbled masses of rock. This at which we had arrived was not much more than a hundred feet high; and the cliffs in which it terminated on one side were scarcely to be named inaccessible. The number of birds upon it seemed to our novice-eyes immense, but at a later period would have seemed trivial. They are always flying about the shores, and have also a laudable curiosity, which leads them to investigate when any strange form appears or any strange noise is made in the neighborhood of their homes.

On landing, the Judge made off to the left, and was soon heard from,--as it afterwards appeared, with immediate success. The Canadian and myself took our station upon a broad platform some forty feet above the sea, with steep rocks behind, and were soon busily engaged in--missing! It was nothing but _bang! pish! bang! pshaw!_ for half an hour. It could not be said that the birds were indifferent to the prospect of being immortalized as specimens. On the contrary, they showed an appreciation of the honor, and an open zeal to obtain it, which were worthy of the highest commendation. But they very properly declined to be _bungled_ even into a taxidermist paradise. Nothing could be more admirably orthodox than their resolution to be immortalized _secundum artem_; and considering how many are ready to sneak, without the smallest regard to desert or self-respect, into any attainable _post mortem_ felicity, this honorable cut direct to all mere _auk_ward and heterodox inductions into happiness begot in me toward these creatures sentiments of the highest consideration. All the while they kept flying past, often near, but always going through the air like a dart, as if they would say, "Take, but earn!"

At first the effect of this superior behavior on their part was to produce humiliation, and, along with this, a weak, nervous excitement, and an attempt to reach my ends by mere determination. I accordingly got to pulling upon them with a vehemence which probably disturbed my aim, as if I had been drawing at a halibut rather than at a trigger. But the gates which are appointed to fly open before a high behavior are but as the barred gates of Destiny toward mere low strength. The gods and birds were immitigable. I must do better, not merely do more.

Meditating on these matters, and moved by the lofty demeanor of my challengers, I at length proceeded seriously to self-amendment. Exchanging my large duck-shot for some of smaller size, I no longer blurted at my auk when he was just abreast; but, deferentially allowing him to pass, and then, aiming after him, as if I accepted his lead, I gently suggested to him my desires; whereupon, in the most becoming manner, he descended and plumped into the sea, without so much as flapping a wing, or being guilty of the faintest impropriety. It was beautiful. Continuing this behavior, I found my attentions uniformly reciprocated. Once, indeed, when I fell into a shade of _brusquerie_, the individual whom I had complimented stood upon his self-respect, and, as I thought, flew away; but Bradford, who had courteously come up just as I began to succeed, was so kind as to see him fall punctiliously into the water, when he had gone far enough to suggest a reprimand of my slight unseemliness. And now, when the Artist was Christian enough to exclaim, "Why, Blank, I did not know you were such a shot!" I thought it high time to rest on my (back and) laurels. Reposing, therefore, upon the round leathern pillow which was my inseparable and invaluable companion, I enjoyed my spine-ache _cum dignitate_ till the others were ready to return.

On the way to the ship an eider sprang up from a steep ridge we were passing, and fell in a second, Bradford exclaiming, "That's the best shot to-day!" The yawl soon followed us. Ph---- had taken two eiders on the wing; we had six in all. Others brought auks and murres; but the Judge still led the van. Next morning the Colonel and Judge brought in four eiders,--the last for the entire voyage. Others were afterward seen, but only seen. The Parson, some weeks later, closed our intrusive intimacy with them by an attempt to capture some of their young in the water. It couldn't be done. They were only a few days old, but, rich in pre-natal instruction, they always waited until the hand was just upon them,--not to waste any part of their stay beneath water,--and then--under in a moment. One saw that pirate saddle-back must needs bestir himself in order to catch them, and one could appreciate the sagacity of the mother duck in hurrying her brood, almost as soon as they are born, into the water.

And so farewell, eiders! If all goes to my wish, you shall yet have a place on other-world islands and seas, where saddle-backs shall not pillage your nests, nor coat-backs point at you any Long Tom!

* * * * *

We give account only of what was characteristic, and therefore will now jump five weeks of time and a hundred leagues of space. But since this is a long leap, a few stepping-stones will be convenient. The Parson, then, has brought in on the way a nice batch of velvet duck, noticeable for their extremely large, oval, elevated, scarlet nostrils; we have shot at seals, and _almost_ hit them in the most admirable manner; we have hunted for an indubitable polar bear,--and found a dog and a midnight mystification; we have played at chess, euchre, backgammon, whist, debating-club, story-telling, nightmare,--one of our number developing an incomparable genius for the last; we have played at getting tolerable cooking out of two slovens, one of whom knows nothing, and the other everything but his business,--and have lost the game; we have played at catching trout, and found this the best joke of all. There are beautiful brook-trout on the coast of Labrador. They say so; it is so. Beautiful trout,--mostly visible to the naked eye! Not many of them, but enough to gratify an elegant curiosity.

But here we are, July 21, lat. 54° 30'. Bradford has hooked an iceberg, and will "play him" for the afternoon. Half a mile off is an island of the character common to most of the innumerable islands strown all along from Cape Charles to Cape Chudleigh,--an alp submerged to within three hundred feet of the summit. Such islands, and such a coast! But this is a notable "bird-island." So three of us are set ashore there with our guns, the indefatigable Professor coming along also with his perpetual net.

The island--which is rather two islands than one, for straight through it, toward the eastern extremity, goes the narrowest possible chasm--proved precipitous and inaccessible, save in a bit of inlet at the hither opening of this chasm and on three rods of sloping rock to the right. Like almost all its fellows, however, it raises one side higher than the other; and conjecturing that the farther and higher face would be the favorite haunt of these cliff-loving birds,--murres and auks again,--I left my companions busily shooting near the landing, and made my way up and across. It was no easy task, for the wild rock was tossed and tilted, broken and heaped and saw-toothed, as if it represented some savage spasm or fit of madness in Nature. But clambering, sliding, creeping, zigzagging, turning back to find new openings, and in every manner persisting, I slowly got on; while deep down in the chasm on my left,--a hundred feet deep, and in the middle not more than a foot wide, though champered away a little at the top,--the water surged in and out with a thunderous, muffled sough and moan, like a Titan under the earth, pinned down eternally in pain. It was awfully impressive,--so impressive that I reflected neither upon it nor on myself. With this immitigable, adamantine wildness about me, and that abysmal, booming stifle of plaint, to which all the air trembled, sounding from below, I became another being, and the very universe was no longer itself; past and future were not, and I was a dumb atomy creeping over the bare peaks of existence, while out of the blind heart of the world issued an everlasting prayer,--a prayer without hope! And this, too, if not boy's play, was a true piece of boy-experience. I can recall--and better now by the aid of this half-hour--moments in childhood when existence became thus awful, when it overpowered, overwhelmed me, and when time, instead of melting in golden ripeness into the fruitful eternity that lies before, seemed to fall back, doomed forever, into the naked eternity behind. Goethe's "Erl-King," almost alone in modern literature, touches truly, and on its shadowed side, the immeasurable secret which haunts and dominates the heart of a child; while Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in Childhood" is our noblest suggestion of its illuminated obverse side.

At length I issued upon the opposite face of the island, and found myself on a shelf of rock about three feet wide, with one hundred and fifty feet, more or less, of vertical cliff beneath, and about the same height of half-cliff behind and above. It was a pretty perch, and gave one a feeling of consequence; for what pigmy perched on Alps ever failed to consider his elevation one of stature strictly, and not at all of position? The outer edge of the shelf rose, inclosing me as in a box, so that I was safe as the owner of an annuity based upon United States securities. Away to my right the perpendicular cliff rose higher still, and, being there covered with clefts, cavelets, and narrow shelves, was the peculiar home of the birds, who had taken possession of this island on a long lease.

Their numbers were inconceivable. Two hundred yards off in the water was an _island_ of them, an acre of feathery black. To the right I could see them now and then ascending in literal clouds; and the sober Ph----, who rowed along here beyond my view, saw the cliffs, as he looked up, white for a half-mile with their snowy breasts, and could find no words to express his sense of their multitude.

But so far as I was concerned,--for my comrades did better,--it was the birds themselves that did the sporting that afternoon. They came streaming by, never crowding together so that more than one could be included in the chances of shot, but incessantly trailing along, and scurrying past with the speed of an arrow. I peppered away, with little result but that of spicing their afternoon's enjoyment for them; for the wicked creatures took it all in the jolliest way, flinging themselves past with a flirt and a wink, just as if I had been no lord of creation at all. I had disdained to shoot them when at rest; for there seemed to be some ancient compact between us, by which they were to have their chance and I mine. But when one came and planted himself on a little jut thirty yards to my right, and mocked me with a look of patronage, seeming to regard me as the weaker party and to incline to my side, I broke the pact, and, masking my hurt conceit under some virtuous indignation against him as a deserter and traitor, turned and smote him under the fifth rib.

And now it came upon me that I _must_ secure that bird. To shoot without obtaining were mere wantonness. Yes, I would have him, and justify myself to myself. To do it was difficult, even in Labradorian boy-eyes. Between me and the auk the upper half of the cliff made a deep recess, terminating in a right angle, with a platform of granite some seventy-five feet below. Along both faces of this recess, nearly on a level with myself, ran a shelf not more than six inches wide, with vertical wall above and beneath; and on this I must go. I began, therefore, working along this, proceeding with care, observing my footing, and clutching with my hands whatever knob or crevice I could find. But when near the angle, I found that the shelf terminated some two feet short of its apex, and began again at about the same distance beyond. Seeking about cautiously for finger-hold, I reached out my left foot, and planted it on the opposite side, but could not stretch far enough to make a place for the right foot when I should withdraw it. I began debating with myself, whether, in case I should swing across and rest on the left foot alone, I could work this along and make room for the right. I knew that the process would have to be repeated on my return; so I must estimate two chances at once.

And now for the first time, as I stood thus, some faint misgiving arose in me, some faint question whether I was not doing one unjustifiable thing to avoid doing another. It occurred to me that there was another personage,--not a bird-seeking boy, like this one here, but a grave man,--with whom I had an important connection, and who cherished serious purposes and had many hopes of worthy labor yet to fulfil. Was I doing the fair thing by _him_? He was not here, to be sure; I had left him somewhere between Worcester and Labrador, with due pledge of reunion; but even in his absence he was to be considered. Besides, he was my master, and though he had permitted me to go gambolling off by myself, on my promise to bring him back a more serviceable spine, yet his claim remained, and I should be dishonorable to ignore it.

At first, indeed, these considerations seemed vague, far-fetched, little better than affectations. The clear thing to be done was to get that bird. This done, I could consider the rest. To admit any other thought militated in some way against the singleness and compactness of my being. Wise or unwise, what had I to do with far-off matters of that sort? My business was to succeed in a certain task, not to be sage and so forth. I actually felt a kind of shame to be debating any other than the all-important question, Can I get my right foot over here beside the left? Nor was it till certain faces pictured themselves to my mind, that the heart took part with reason, and the tangential left foot returned, rounding itself once more into the proper orbit of my life. I had been standing there perhaps a minute.

It was an invaluable experience. It carried me farther into the heart of the boy-world than I had gone for twenty-five years and more. And as the boy-world is the big world, the life of too many being but another and less attractive phase of boyhood, it supplied a gloss to the book of daily observation, which I could on no account part with. The inconceivable indifference of most men to considerations of speculative truth became conceivable. The way in which the axioms of sages slip off from multitudes, as mere vague "glittering generalities," good enough for cherishers of the "intuitions" to lisp of by moonlight, but sheer fiddle-dee-dee to firmly built men,--the commentary of the able lawyer upon Emerson's lecture, "I don't understand it, but my girls do!"--all this appears in a new light. Are not most men working along some cliff, financial or other, after a bird? And do they not honestly regard it as mere nonsense to be thinking about being sage and so forth, when the real question is how to get the right foot across here beside the left?

I had gone back to my perch, where a rueful, puerile remorse tugged now and then at my elbow, and said, "But that bird! You haven't given up that bird?" when the Professor appeared on the apex of the island above, shouting, "Here's a"--hawk, I thought he said, and caught up my gun. But what? Fox? Yes,--"blue fox."

Now, then, up the cliff! Creep, crawl, wriggle, slide, clamber, scramble, clutch, climb, here jumping--actually jumping, I!--over a crevice, then drawing myself round an insuperable jut by two honest sturdy weeds--many thanks to them!--which had the consideration to be there and to plant themselves firmly in the rock; at last I reached the height, puffing like a high-pressure steam-engine.

"H-h-h-where--ff! ff!--h-is-ee?"

"Right over here. I've been chasing him this last half-hour. Finally, the audacious little rascal would stick up his head over a rock, and bark at me."

I soon had him; and was again struck with the vivacity which may be exhibited by a creature whose life is really ended. As I fired, the animal gave a loud "whish!" and sped away like the wind, disappearing behind a jut of rock five or six rods farther away; but five feet from that point I found it dead. This _post mortem_ activity, they told me, was made possible by the small size of the shot. Perhaps, then, a creature slain with a missile sufficiently subtile might go an indefinite time without finding it out, supposing itself alive and well. Institutions and politicians, we have all known, possess this power of ignoring their own decease. Judaism has been dead these eighteen hundred years; yet here are Jew synagogues in New York and Boston. Were the like true of individuals, it might explain to us some lives which seem inexplicable on any other hypothesis. I think, for example, of some editors, who are evidently post-dating their decease; and when these go on writing leading articles, and being sweet upon "our brethren of the South," one does not say, "Disloyal," but only, "So long in learning what has happened!"

My prize was the white fox, a year old, and not quite in adult costume. How it got upon this island were matter for conjecture. Probably on the ice.

Another skip,--and here we are upon another of these summits surrounded by sea. The home of Puffins this is. The puffin is an odd little fellow, smaller than the auk, but of the same general hue, with a short neck and a queer bill. This is very thin from side to side, twice as wide up and down as it is long, strongly marked with concentric scarlet ridges, and altogether agrees so little with this plain-looking bird, that one can scarcely regard it as belonging naturally to him, and fancies that he must lay it aside at night, as people do false teeth. It is an easy bird to take flying; for, on seeing you, it peaks its wings downward in a manner indescribably prim and prudish, and scales past, turning its stubby neck, and inspecting you with an air of comical, muddy gravity and curiosity. My comrade, Ph----, got two dozen to my eight; but I was consoled with a large Arctic falcon, which had been dining at fashionable hours on a full-grown puffin, having set its table in a deep gorge between vertical walls. It was of the kind called by Audubon _Falco Labradora_, concerning which Professor Baird, of the Smithsonian Institute, who has had the kindness to write to me, doubts whether it may not be an immature stage of _Falco Candicans_, one of the two undoubted species of Arctic falcons. Captain Handy, however, a very observant and intelligent man, was sure, from the feeling of the bones, that it must be an old bird.

Once more only I will ask the reader to accompany me. We had gone ashore in a place called Stag Bay, not to hunt stags, but to seek a bear, to whose acquaintance we seemed to have obtained a preliminary introduction by trustworthy informations. Bruin, however, positively declined the smallest approach to intimacy, refusing even to look at our cards, and sending out the most hopeless "Not at home." Separating, therefore, we strolled on the beach,--for a beach there actually was at this place,--and observing some Piping Plovers, tiny waders, I made for them. One of them stood as sentinel on a rock, and, thinking the ornithologist might like him for a specimen, I fired. The large shot scattered around him, the distance being considerable, without injury; but I insisted on his being dead, and searched as if enough of searching would in some way cause him to be so. It wouldn't, however; and I was about turning away, when, a rod or two off, I saw him evidently desperately wounded. "Ah! there is my bird, after all," I muttered, and started with a leisurely step to pick it up. Terrified at my approach, the little wretch began to hobble and flutter away, keeping about his original distance. I quickened my pace; he exerted his broken strength still more, and made out to mend his. I walked as rapidly as I could; but new terror lent the poor thing new wings, and it contrived--I could not for my life conjecture how--to keep a little beyond my reach. It would not do to leave him suffering thus; and I coaxed myself into a quick run, when up the little hypocrite sprang, and scudded away like a bee! Not the faintest suspicion of its being otherwise than at death's door had entered my mind until that moment, though I had seen this trick less skilfully performed before.

Returning, I went to the top of the beach and began examining the coarse grass which grew there, thinking that the nests must be hereabout, and desirous of a peep at the eggs. I had hardly pushed my foot in this grass a few times, when another wounded bird appeared but a few feet off. The emergency being uncommon, it put forth all its histrionic power, and never Booth or Siddons did so well. With breast ploughing in the sand, head falling helplessly from side to side, feet kicking out spasmodically and yet feebly behind, and wings fluttering and beating brokenly on the beach, it seemed the very symbol of fear, pain, and weakness, I made a sudden spring forward,--off it went, but immediately returned when I pushed my foot again toward the grass, renewing its speaking pantomime. I could not represent suffering so well, if I really felt it. With a convulsive kick, its poor little helpless head went under, and it tumbled over on the side; then it swooned, was dying; the wings flattened out on the sand, quivering, but quivering less and less; it gasped with open mouth and closing eye, but the gasps grew fainter and fainter; at last it lay still, dead; but when I poked once more in the grass, it revived to endure another spasm of agony, and die again. "Dear, witty little Garrick," I said, "had you a thousand lives and ten thousand eggs, I would not for a kingdom touch one of them!" and I wished he could show me some enemy to his peace, that I might make war upon the felon forthwith.

And in this becoming frame of mind I ended my chapter of "Boy's Play in Labrador."

THE OLD HOUSE.

My little birds, with backs as brown As sand, and throats as white as frost, I've searched the summer up and down, And think the other birds have lost The tunes you sang, so sweet, so low, About the old house, long ago.

My little flowers, that with your bloom So hid the grass you grew upon, A child's foot scarce had any room Between you,--are you dead and gone? I've searched through fields and gardens rare, Nor found your likeness anywhere.

My little hearts, that beat so high With love to God, and trust in men, Oh, come to me, and say if I But dream, or was I dreaming then, What time we sat within the glow Of the old-house hearth, long ago?

My little hearts, so fond, so true, I searched the world all far and wide, And never found the like of you: God grant we meet the other side The darkness 'twixt us now that stands, In that new house not made with hands!

MEMORIES OF AUTHORS.

A SERIES OF PORTRAITS FROM PERSONAL ACQUAINTANCE.

COLERIDGE.

In 1816 the wandering and unsettled ways of the poet were calmed and harmonized in the home of the Gillmans at Highgate, where the remainder of his days, nearly twenty years, were passed in entire quiet and comparative happiness. Mr. Gillman was a surgeon; and it is understood that Coleridge went to reside with him chiefly to be under his surveillance, to break himself of the fearful habit he had contracted of opium-eating,--a habit that grievously impaired his mind, engendered self-reproach, and embittered the best years of his life.[D] He was the guest and the beloved friend as well as the patient of Mr. Gillman; and the devoted attachment of that excellent man and his estimable wife supplied the calm contentment and seraphic peace, such as might have been the dream of the poet and the hope of the man. Honored be the name and reverenced the memory of this true friend! He died on the 1st of June, 1837, having arranged to publish a life of Coleridge, of which he produced but the first volume.[E]

Coleridge's habit of taking opium was no secret. In 1816 it must have reached a fearful pitch. It had produced "during many years an accumulation of bodily suffering that wasted the frame, poisoned the sources of enjoyment, and entailed an intolerable mental load that scarcely knew cessation"; the poet himself called it "the accursed drug." In 1814 Cottle wrote him a strong protest against this terrible and ruinous habit, entreating him to renounce it. Coleridge said in reply, "You have poured oil into the raw and festering wound of an old friend, Cottle, but it is oil of vitriol!" He accounts for the "accursed habit" by stating that he had taken to it first to obtain relief from intense bodily suffering; and he seriously contemplated entering a private insane asylum as the surest means of its removal. His remorse was terrible and perpetual; he was "rolling rudderless," "the wreck of what he once was," "wretched, helpless, and hopeless."

He revealed this "dominion" to De Quincey "with a deep expression of horror at the hideous bondage." It was this "conspiracy of himself against himself" that was the poison of his life. He describes it with frantic pathos as "the scourge, the curse, the one almighty blight, which had desolated his life," the thief

"to steal From my own nature all the natural man."

The habit was, it would seem, commenced in 1802; and if Mr. Cottle is to be credited, in 1814 he had been long accustomed to take "from two quarts of laudanum in a week to a pint a day." He did, however, ultimately conquer it.

It was during his residence with Mr. Gillman that I knew Coleridge. He had arranged to write for "The Amulet"; and circumstances warranted my often seeing him,--a privilege of which I gladly availed myself. In this home at Highgate, where all even of his whims were studied with affectionate and attentive care, he preferred the quiet of home influences to the excitements of society; and although I more than once met there his friend Charles Lamb, and other noteworthy men, I usually found him, to my delight, alone. There he cultivated flowers, fed his pensioners, the birds, and wooed the little children who gambolled on the heath, where he took his daily walks.

It is a beautiful view,--such as can be rarely seen out of England,--that which the poet had from the window of his bed-chamber. Underneath, a valley, rich in "Patrician trees," divides the hill of Highgate from that of Hampstead; the tower of the old church at Hampstead rises above a thick wood,--a dense forest it seems, although here and there a graceful villa stands out from among the dark green drapery that infolds it. It was easy to imagine the poet often contrasting this scene with that of "Brockan's sov'ran height," where no "finer influence of friend or child" had greeted him, and exclaiming,--

"O thou Queen! Thou delegated Deity of Earth, O dear, dear England!"

And what a wonderful change there is in the scene, when the pilgrim to this shrine at Highgate leaves the garden and walks a few steps beyond the elm avenue that still fronts the house!

Forty years have brought houses all about the heath, and shut in the prospect; but from any ascent you may see regal Windsor on one side and Gravesend on the other,--twenty miles of view, look which way you will. But when the poet dwelt there, all London was within ken, a few yards from his door.

The house has undergone some changes, but the garden is much as it was when I used to find the poet feeding his birds there: it has the same wall--moss-covered now--that overhangs the dell; a shady tree-walk shelters it from sun and rain,--it was the poet's walk at midday; a venerable climber, the Glycenas, was no doubt planted by the poet's hand: it was new to England when the poet was old, and what more likely than that his friends would have bidden him plant it where it has since flourished forty years or more?

I was fortunate in sharing some of the regard of Mr. and Mrs. Gillman; after the poet's death, they gave me his inkstand, (a plain inkstand of wood,) which is before me as I write, and a myrtle on which his eyes were fixed as he died. It is now an aged and gnarled tree in our conservatory.[F]

One of the very few letters of Coleridge I have preserved I transcribe, as it illustrates his goodness of heart and willingness to put himself to inconvenience for others.

"DEAR SIR,"--it runs,--"I received some five days ago a letter depicting the distress and urgent want of a widow and a sister, with whom, during the husband's lifetime, I was for two or three years a housemate; and yesterday the poor lady came up herself, almost clamorously soliciting me, not, indeed, to assist her from my own purse,--for she was previously assured that there was nothing therein,--but to exert myself to collect the sum of twenty pounds, which would save her from God knows what. On this hopeless task,--for perhaps never man whose name had been so often in print for praise or reprobation had so few intimates as myself,--when I recollected that before I left Highgate for the seaside you had been so kind as to intimate that you considered some trifle due to me,--whatever it be, it will go some way to eke out the sum which I have with a sick heart been all this day trotting about to make up, guinea by guinea. You will do me a real service, (for my health perceptibly sinks under this unaccustomed flurry of my spirits,) if you could make it convenient to inclose to me, however small the sum may be, if it amount to a bank-note of any denomination, directed 'Grove, Highgate,' where I am, and expect to be any time for the next eight months. In the mean time, believe me

"Yours obliged,

"S. T. COLERIDGE.

"4th December, 1828."

I find also, at the back of one of his manuscripts, the following poem, which I believe to be unpublished; for I cannot trace it in any edition of his collected works.

LOVE'S BURIAL-PLACE.--A MADRIGAL.

_Lady._ If _Love_ be dead.

_Poet._ And I aver it.

_Lady._ Tell me, Bard, where Love lies buried.

_Poet._ Love lies buried where 'twas born: O gentle Dame, think it no scorn, If in my fancy I presume To call thy bosom poor Love's tomb,-- And on that tomb to read the line, "Here lies a Love that once seemed mine, But caught a cold, as I divine, And died at length of a decline!"

I here copy his autograph lines, as he wrote them in Mrs. Hall's album. They will be found, too, as a note, in the "Biographia Literaria."

"ON THE PORTRAIT OF THE BUTTERFLY ON THE SECOND LEAF OF THIS ALBUM.

"The butterfly the ancient Grecians made The soul's fair emblem, and its only name: But of the soul escaped the slavish trade Of earthly life! For in this mortal frame Ours is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame, Manifold motions, making little speed, And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed!

"S. T. COLERIDGE.

"30th April, 1830."

All who had the honor of the poet's friendship or acquaintance speak of the marvellous gift which gave to this illustrious man almost a character of inspiration. The wonderful eloquence of his conversation can be comprehended only by those who have heard him speak. It was sparkling at times, and at times profound; but the melody of his voice, the impressive solemnity of his manner, the radiant glories of his intellectual countenance, bore off, as it were, the thoughts of the listener from his discourse; and it was rarely that he carried away from the poet any of the gems that fell from his lips.

Montgomery describes the poetry of Coleridge as like electricity, "flashing at rapid intervals with the utmost intensity of effect,"--and contrasts it with that of Wordsworth, like galvanism, "not less powerful, but rather continuous than sudden in its wonderful influence." But of his poems it is needless for me to speak; some of them are familiar to all readers of the English tongue throughout the world. Wilson, in the "Noctes," says, "Wind him up, and away he goes,--discoursing most excellent music, without a discord, full, ample, inexhaustible, serious, and divine"; and in another place, "He becomes inspired by his own silver voice, and pours out wisdom like a sea." Wordsworth speaks of him "as quite an epicure in sound." The painter Haydon speaks of his eloquence and "lazy luxury of poetical outpouring"; and Rogers ("Table-Talk") is reported to have said, "One morning, breakfasting with me, he talked for three hours without intermission, so admirably that I wish every word he uttered had been written down": but he does not quote a single sentence of all the poet said;[G] and a writer in the "Quarterly Review" expresses his belief that "nothing is too high for the grasp of his conversation, nothing too low: it glanced from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, with a speed and a splendor, an ease and a power, that almost seemed inspired." (Nor did I ever find him incoherent, as some have pretended; but I agree with De Quincey, that he had the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtilest and the most comprehensive that has yet existed among men.) Of Coleridge, Shelley writes,--

"All things he seemed to understand, Of old or new, at sea or land, Save his own soul, which was a mist."

I have listened to him more than once for above an hour, of course without putting in a single word: I would as soon have bellowed a loose song while a nightingale was singing. There was rarely much change of countenance; his face was at that time (it is said from his habit of opium-eating) overladen with flesh, and its expression impaired; yet to me it was so tender and gentle and gracious and loving, that I could have knelt at the old man's feet almost in adoration. My own hair is white now; yet I have much the same feeling as I had then, whenever the form of the venerable man rises in memory before me. I cannot recall now, and I believe could not recall at the time, so as to preserve, as a cherished thing in my remembrance, a single sentence of the many sentences I heard him utter; yet in his "Table-Talk" there is a world of wisdom,--and that is only a collection of scraps, chance-gathered. If any left his presence unsatisfied, it resulted rather from the superabundance than the paucity of the feast.[H]

I can recall many evening rambles with him over the high lands that look down on London; but the memory I cherish most is linked with a crowded street, where the clumsy and the coarse jostled the old man eloquent, as if he had been earthly, of the earth. It was in the Strand: he pointed out to me the window of a room in the office of the "Morning Post," where he had consumed much midnight oil; and then for half an hour he talked of the sorrowful joy he had often felt, when, leaving the office as day was dawning, he heard the song of a caged lark that sang his orisons from the lattice of an artisan, who was rising to begin his labor as the poet was pacing homewards to rest after his work all night. Thirty years had passed; but that unforgotten melody, that dear bird's song, gave him then as much true pleasure as when, to his wearied head and heart, it was the matin hymn of Nature.

I remember once meeting him in Paternoster Row. He was inquiring his way to Bread Street, Cheapside; and of course I endeavored to explain to him, that, if he walked straight on for about two hundred yards and took the fourth turning to the right, it would be the street he wanted. I perceived him gazing so vague and unenlightened, that I could not help expressing my surprise, as I looked earnestly at his forehead and saw the organ of locality unusually prominent above the eyebrows. He took my meaning, laughed, and said, "I see what you are looking at. Why, at school my head was beaten into a mass of bumps, because I could not point out Paris in a map of France." It is said that Spurzheim pronounced him to be a mathematician, and affirmed that he could not be a poet. Such opinion the great phrenologist could not have expressed; for undoubtedly he had a large organ of ideality, although at first it was not perceptible, in consequence of the great breadth and height of his profound forehead.

More than once I met there that most remarkable man,--"martyr and saint," as Mrs. Oliphant styles him, and as perhaps he was,--the Rev. Edward Irving. The two, he and Coleridge, were singular contrasts,--in appearance, that is to say, for their minds and souls were in harmony.[I] The Scotch minister was tall, powerful in frame, and of great physical vigor, "a gaunt and gigantic figure," his long, black, curly hair hanging partially over his shoulders. His features were large and strongly marked; but the expression was grievously marred, like that of Whitefield, by a squint that deduced much from his "apostolic" character, and must have operated prejudicially as regarded his mission. His mouth was exquisitely cut. It might have been a model for a sculptor who desired to portray strong will combined with generous sympathy. Yet he looked what he was,--a brave man, a man whom no abuse could humble, no injuries subdue, no oppression crush. To me he realized the idea of the Baptist St. John; and I imagine the comparison must have been made often.

In the pulpit, where, I lament to say, I heard Irving but once, and then not under the peculiar influences that so often swayed and guided him, he was undoubtedly an orator, thoroughly earnest in his work, and, beyond all question, deeply and solemnly impressed with the truths of the mission to which he was devoted. At times, no doubt, his manner, action, and appearance bordered on the grotesque; but it was impossible to listen without being carried away by the intense fervor and fiery zeal with which he dwelt on the promises or annunciated the threats of the Prophets, "his predecessors." His vehemence was often startling, sometimes appalling. Leigh Hunt called him, with much truth, "the Boanerges of the Temple." He was a soldier, as well as a servant, of the cross. Few men of his age aroused more bitter or more unjust and unchristian hostility. He was in advance of his time; perhaps, if he were living now, he would still be so; for the spirituality of his nature cannot yet be understood. There were not wanting those who decried him as a pretender, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Those who knew him best depose to the honesty of his heart, the depth of his convictions, the fervor of his faith; and many yet live who will indorse this eloquent tribute of his biographer:--"To him, mean thoughts and unbelieving hearts were the only things miraculous and out of Nature"; he "desired to know nothing in heaven or earth, neither comfort nor peace nor any consolation, but the will and work of the Master he loved." Irving died comparatively young: there were but forty-two years between his birth and death. More than thirty years have passed since he was called from earth; and to this generation the name of Edward Irving is little more than a sound, "signifying nothing." Yet it was a power in his day; and the seed he scattered cannot all have fallen among thorns. His love for Coleridge was devoted, a mingling of admiration, affection, and respect.

They were made acquainted by a mutual friend, Basil Montagu, who himself occupied no humble station in intellectual society. His "evenings" were often rare mental treats. He presented the most refined picture of a gentleman, tall, slight, courteous, seemingly ever smiling, yet without an approach to insincerity. He had the esteem of his contemporaries, and the homage of the finer spirits of his time. They were earned and merited. Those who knew him knew also his wife. Mrs. Montagu was one of the most admirable women I have ever known: she was likened to Mrs. Siddons, and forcibly recalled the portraits of that admirably gifted woman. Tall and stately, and with evidence, which Time had by no means obliterated, of great beauty in youth, her expression somewhat severe, yet gracious in manner and generous in words. She had been the honored associate of many of the most intellectual men and women of the age; and not a few of them were her familiar friends.[J]

Whenever it was my privilege to be admitted to the evening meetings at Highgate, I met some of the men who were then famous, and have since become parts of the literature of England.

I attended one of the lectures delivered by Coleridge at the Royal Institution, and I strive to recall him as he stood before his audience. There was but little animation; his theme did not seem to stir him into life; even the usual repose of his countenance was rarely broken up; he used little or no action; and his voice, though mellifluous, was monotonous: he lacked, indeed, that earnestness without which no man is truly eloquent.

At the time I speak of, he was growing corpulent and heavy: being seldom free from pain, he moved apparently with difficulty, yet liked to walk up and down and about the room as he talked, pausing now and then as if oppressed by suffering.

I need not say that I was a silent listener during the evenings at Highgate to which I have referred, when there were present some of those who now "rule us from their urns"; but I was free to gaze on the venerable man,--one of the humblest, but one of the most fervid, perhaps, of the worshippers by whom he was surrounded,--and to treasure in memory the poet's gracious and loving looks, the "thick, waving, silver hair," the still, clear, blue eye; and on such occasions I used to leave him as if I were in a waking dream, trying to recall, here and there, a sentence of the many weighty and mellifluous sentences I had heard,--seldom with success,--and feeling at the moment as if I had been surfeited with honey.

The portrait of Coleridge is best drawn by his friend Wordsworth, and it sufficiently pictures him:--

"A noticeable man, with large, gray eyes, And a _pale_ face, that seemed undoubtedly As if a _blooming_ face it ought to be; Heavy his low-hung lip did oft appear, Depressed by weight of moving phantasy; Profound his forehead was, though not severe."

Wordsworth elsewhere speaks of him as "the brooding poet with the heavenly eyes," and as, "often too much in love with his own dejection." The earliest word-portrait we have of him was drawn by Wordsworth's sister in 1797:--"At first I thought him very plain,--that is, for about three minutes. He is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, longish, loose-growing, half-curling, rough, black hair. His eye is large and full, and not dark, but gray;--such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression, but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind. He has fine, dark eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead."

This is De Quincey's sketch of him in 1807:--"In height he seemed about five feet eight inches, in reality he was an inch and a half taller.[K] His person was broad and full, and tended even to corpulence; his complexion was fair, though not what painters technically call fair, because it was associated with black hair; his eyes were soft and large in their expression, and it was by a peculiar appearance of haze or dimness which mixed with their light." "A lady of Bristol," writes De Quincey, "assured me she had not seen a young man so engaging in his exterior as Coleridge when young, in 1796. He had then a blooming and healthy complexion, beautiful and luxuriant hair, falling in natural curls over his shoulders."

Lockhart says,--"Coleridge has a grand head, but very ill-balanced, and the features of the face are coarse; although, to be sure, nothing can surpass the depth of meaning in his eyes, and the unutterable dreamy luxury of his lips."

Hazlitt describes him in early manhood as "with a complexion clear and even light, a forehead broad and high, as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with darkened lustre. His mouth was rather open, his chin good-humored and round, and his nose small. His hair, black and glossy as the raven's wing, fell in smooth masses over his forehead,--long, liberal hair, peculiar to enthusiasts."

Sir Humphry Davy, writing of Coleridge in 1808, says,--"His mind is a wilderness, in which the cedar and the oak, which might aspire to the skies, are stunted in their growth by underwood, thorns, briers, and parasitical plants; with the most exalted genius, enlarged views, sensitive heart, and enlightened mind, he will be the victim of want of order, precision, and regularity."

Leigh Hunt speaks of his open, indolent, good-natured mouth, and of his forehead as "prodigious,--a great piece of placid marble."

Wordsworth again:--

"Noisy he was, and gamesome as a boy, Tossing his limbs about him in delight."

In the autumn of 1833, Emerson, on his second visit to England, called on Coleridge. He found him "to appearance a short, thick, old man, with bright blue eyes, and fine clear complexion."

A minute and certainly a true picture is that which Carlyle formed of him, in words, some years later, and probably not long before his removal from earth:--"Brow and head were round, and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute,--expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent and stooping attitude; in walking he rather shuffled than decisively stepped; and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which side of the garden-walk would suit him best, but continually shifted in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and sing-song; he spoke as if preaching,--you would have said preaching earnestly, and also hopelessly, the weightiest things."

Such, according to these high authorities, was the outer man Coleridge,--he who

"in bewitching words, with happy heart, Did chant the vision of that ancient man, That bright-eyed mariner."

There are several portraits painted of him. The best would appear to be that which was made by Allston, at Rome, in 1806. Wordsworth speaks of it as "the only likeness of the great original that ever gave me the least pleasure." That by Northcote strongly recalls him to my remembrance: the dreamy eyes; the full, round, yet pale face,--

"that seemed undoubtedly As if a blooming face it ought to be";

the pleasant mouth; the "low-hung" lip; the broad and lofty forehead,--

"Profound, though not severe."

In his later days he took snuff largely, "Whatever he may have been in youth," writes Mr. Gillman, "in manhood he was scrupulously clean in his person, and especially took great care of his hands by frequent ablutions."

Although in his youth and earlier manhood Coleridge had been

"through life Chasing chance-started friendships,"

not long before his death he is described as "thankful for the deep, calm peace of mind he then enjoyed,--a peace such as he had never before experienced, nor scarcely hoped for." All things were then looked at by him through an atmosphere by which all were reconciled and harmonized.

It is true, he did but little of the promised and purposed much. His friend, Justice Talfourd, while testifying to the benignity of his nature, describes his life as "one splendid and sad prospectus,"--and, according to Wordsworth, "his mental power was frozen at its marvellous source";[L] yet what a world of wealth he has bequeathed to us, although the whole produce of his pen, in poetry, is compressed within one single small volume!

Thus writes Talfourd, in his "Memorials of Charles Lamb":--"After a long and painful illness, borne with heroic patience, which concealed the intensity of his sufferings from the by-standers, Coleridge died,"--if that can be called death which removes the soul from its impediment of clay, extends immeasurably its sphere of usefulness, and perpetuates the power to benefit mankind so long as earth endures.

Within a few months past I again drove to Highgate, and visited the house in which the poet passed so many happy years of calm contentment and seraphic peace,--again repeated those lines which, next to his higher faith, were the faith by which his life was ruled and guided:--

"He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all!"

His remains lie in a vault in the graveyard of the old church at Highgate. He was a stranger in the parish where he died, notwithstanding his long residence there, and was therefore interred alone; not long afterwards, however, the vault was built to receive the body of his wife: there they rest together. It is inclosed by a thick iron grating, and the interior is lined with white marble. When I visited the tomb in 1864, one of the marble slabs had accidentally given way, and the coffin was partially exposed. I laid my hand upon it in solemn reverence, and gratefully recalled to memory him who, in his own emphatic words, had

"Here found life in death."

FOOTNOTES:

[D] De Quincey more than insinuates that, instead of Gillman persuading Coleridge to relinquish opium, Coleridge seduced Gillman into taking it.

[E] Gillman published but one volume of a Life of Coleridge. The volume he gave me contains his corrections for another edition. De Quincey says of it that "it is a thing deader than a door-nail,--which is waiting vainly, and for thousands of years is doomed to wait, for its sister volume, namely, Volume Second." It must be ever regretted, that of the poet's later life, of which he knew so much, he wrote nothing; but the world was justified in expecting in the details of his earlier pilgrimage something which it did not get.

[F] Mrs. Gillman gave me also the following sonnet. I believe it never to have been published; but although she requested I "would not have copies of it made to give away," I presume the prohibition cannot now be binding, after a lapse of thirty years since I received it. The poet, he who wrote the sonnet, and the admirable woman to whom it was addressed, have long since met.

"SONNET ON THE LATE SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

"And thou art gone, most loved, most honored friend! No, never more thy gentle voice shall blend With air of Earth its pure, ideal tones,-- Binding in one, as with harmonious zones, The heart and intellect. And I no more Shall with thee gaze on that unfathomed deep, The Human Soul: as when, pushed off the shore, Thy mystic bark would through the darkness sweep, Itself the while so bright! For oft we seemed As on some starless sea,--all dark above, All dark below,--yet, onward as we drove, To plough up light that ever round us streamed But he who mourns is not as one bereft Of all he loved: thy living Truths are left.

"WASHINGTON ALLSTON.

"_Cambridge Port, Massachusetts, America._

"For my _still_ dear friend, Mrs. Gillman, of the Grove, Highgate."

[G] Madame de Staël is reported to have said that Coleridge was "rich in a monologue, but poor in a dialogue."

[H] It may not be forgotten that the Rev. Edward Irving, in dedicating to Coleridge one of his books, acknowledges obligations to the venerable sage for many valuable teachings, "as a spiritual man and as a Christian pastor": lessons derived from his "_conversations_" concerning the revelations of the Christian faith,--"helps in the way of truth,"--"from listening to his discourses." Coleridge has said, "he never found the smallest hitch or impediment in the fullest utterance of his most subtile fancies by word of mouth."

[I] Their friendship lasted for years, and was full of kindness on the part of the philosopher, and of reverential respect on that of Irving, who, following the natural instinct of his own ingenuous nature, changed in an instant in such a presence from the orator, who, speaking in God's name, assumed a certain austere pomp of position,--more like an authoritative priest than a simple presbyter,--into the simple and candid listener, more ready to learn than he was to teach.

[J] "Barry Cornwall" is the husband of her daughter by a prior marriage; and Adelaide Procter, during her brief life, made a name that will live with the best poets of our day.

[K] De Quincey elsewhere states his height to be five feet ten,--exactly the height of Wordsworth: both having been measured in the studio of Haydon.

[L] Very early in his life, Lord Egmont said of him, "he talks very much like an angel, and does nothing at all." De Quincey speaks of his indolence as "inconceivable;" and Joseph Cottle relates some amusing instances of his forgetfulness, even of the hour at which he had arranged to deliver a lecture to an assembled audience.

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER.

II.

LITTLE FOXES.

"Papa, what are you going to give us this winter for our evening readings?" said Jennie.

"I am thinking, for one thing," I replied, "of preaching a course of household sermons from a very odd text prefixed to a discourse which I found at the bottom of the pamphlet-barrel in the garret."

"Don't say sermon, papa,--it has such a dreadful sound; and on winter evenings one wants something entertaining."

"Well, treatise, then," said I, "or discourse, or essay, or prelection; I'm not particular as to words."

"But what is the queer text that you found at the bottom of the pamphlet-barrel?"

"It was one preached upon by your mother's great-great-grandfather, the very savory and much-respected Simeon Shuttleworth, 'on the occasion of the melancholy defections and divisions among the godly in the town of West Dofield'; and it runs thus,--'_Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes._'"

"It's a curious text enough; but I can't imagine what you are going to make of it."

"Simply an essay on Little Foxes," said I; "by which I mean those unsuspected, unwatched, insignificant _little_ causes that nibble away domestic happiness, and make home less than so noble an institution should be. You may build beautiful, convenient, attractive houses,--you may hang the walls with lovely pictures and stud them with gems of Art; and there may be living there together persons bound by blood and affection in one common interest, leading a life common to themselves and apart from others; and these persons may each one of them be possessed of good and noble traits; there may be a common basis of affection, of generosity, of good principle, of religion; and yet, through the influence of some of these perverse, nibbling, insignificant little foxes, half the clusters of happiness on these so promising vines may fail to come to maturity. A little community of people, all of whom would be willing to die for each other, may not be able to live happily together; that is, they may have far less happiness than their circumstances, their fine and excellent traits, entitle them to expect.

"The reason for this in general is that home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserves; it is life's undress rehearsal, its back-room, its dressing-room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much _débris_ of cast-off and every-day clothing. Hence has arisen the common proverb, 'No man is a hero to his _valet-de-chambre_'; and the common warning, 'If you wish to keep your friend, don't go and live with him.'"

"Which is only another way of saying," said my wife, "that we are all human and imperfect; and the nearer you get to any human being, the more defects you see. The characters that can stand the test of daily intimacy are about as numerous as four-leaved clovers in a meadow; in general, those who do not annoy you with positive faults bore you with their insipidity.' The evenness and beauty of a strong, well-defined nature, perfectly governed and balanced, is about the last thing one is likely to meet with in one's researches into life."

"But what I have to say," replied I, "is this,--that, family-life being a state of unreserve, a state in which there are few of those barriers and veils that keep people in the world from seeing each other's defects and mutually jarring and grating upon each other, it is remarkable that it is entered upon and maintained generally with less reflection, less care and forethought, than pertain to most kinds of business which men and women set their hands to. A man does not undertake to run an engine or manage a piece of machinery without some careful examination of its parts and capabilities, and some inquiry whether he have the necessary knowledge, skill, and strength to make it do itself and him justice. A man does not try to play on the violin without seeing if his fingers are long and flexible enough to bring out the harmonies and raise his performance above the grade of dismal scraping to that of divine music. What should we think of a man who should set a whole orchestra of instruments upon playing together without the least provision or forethought as to their chording, and then howl and tear his hair at the result? It is not the fault of the instruments that they grate harsh thunders together; they may each be noble and of celestial temper; but united without regard to their nature, dire confusion is the result. Still worse were it, if a man were supposed so stupid as to expect of each instrument a _rôle_ opposed to its nature,--if he asked of the octave-flute a bass solo, and condemned the trombone because it could not do the work of the many-voiced violin.

"Yet just so carelessly is the work of forming a family often performed. A man and woman come together from some affinity, some partial accord of their nature which has inspired mutual affection. There is generally very little careful consideration of who and what they are,--no thought of the reciprocal influence of mutual traits,--no previous chording and testing of the instruments which are to make lifelong harmony or discord,--and after a short period of engagement, in which all their mutual relations are made as opposite as possible to those which must follow marriage, these two furnish their house and begin life together. Ten to one, the domestic roof is supposed at once the proper refuge for relations and friends on both sides, who also are introduced into the interior concert without any special consideration of what is likely to be the operation of character on character, the play of instrument with instrument; then follow children, each of whom is a separate entity, a separate will, a separate force in the family; and thus, with the lesser forces of servants and dependants, a family is made up. And there is no wonder if all these chance-assorted instruments, playing together, sometimes make quite as much discord, as harmony. For if the husband and wife chord, the wife's sister or husband's mother may introduce a discord; and then again, each child of marked character introduces another possibility of confusion. The conservative forces of human nature are so strong and so various, that with all these drawbacks the family state is after all the best and purest happiness that earth affords. But then, with cultivation and care, it might be a great deal happier. Very fair pears have been raised by dropping a seed into a good soil and letting it alone for years; but finer and choicer are raised by the watchings, tendings, prunings of the gardener. Wild grape-vines bore very fine grapes, and an abundance of them, before our friend Dr. Grant took up his abode at Iona, and, studying the laws of Nature, conjured up new species of rarer fruit and flavor out of the old. And so, if all the little foxes that infest our domestic vine and fig-tree were once hunted out and killed, we might have fairer clusters and fruit all winter."

"But, papa," said Jennie, "to come to the foxes; let's know what they are."

"Well, as the text says, _little_ foxes, the pet foxes of good people, unsuspected little animals,--on the whole, often thought to be really creditable little beasts, that may do good, and at all events cannot do much harm. And as I have taken to the Puritanic order in my discourse, I shall set them in sevens, as Noah did his clean beasts in the ark. Now my seven little foxes are these:--Fault-finding, Intolerance, Reticence, Irritability; Exactingness, Discourtesy, Self-Will. And here," turning to my sermon, "is what I have to say about the first of them."

* * * * *

Fault-finding,--a most respectable little animal, that many people let run freely among their domestic vines, under the notion that he helps the growth of the grapes, and is the principal means of keeping them in order.

Now it may safely be set down as a maxim, that nobody likes to be found fault with, but everybody likes to find fault when things do not suit him.

Let my courteous reader ask him- or herself if he or she does not experience a relief and pleasure in finding fault with or about whatever troubles them.

This appears at first sight an anomaly in the provisions of Nature. Generally we are so constituted that what it is a pleasure to us to do it is a pleasure to our neighbor to have us do. It is a pleasure to give, and a pleasure to receive. It is a pleasure to love, and a pleasure to be loved; a pleasure to admire, a pleasure to be admired. It is a pleasure also to find fault, but _not_ a pleasure to be found fault with. Furthermore, those people whose sensitiveness of temperament leads them to find the most fault are precisely those who can least bear to be found fault with; they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on other men's shoulders, but they themselves cannot bear the weight of a finger.

Now the difficulty in the case is this: There are things in life that need to be altered; and that things may be altered, they must be spoken of to the people whose business it is to make the change. This opens wide the door of fault-finding to well-disposed people, and gives them latitude of conscience to impose on their fellows all the annoyances which they themselves feel. The father and mother of a family are fault-finders, _ex officio_; and to them flows back the tide of every separate individual's complaints in the domestic circle, till often the whole air of the house is chilled and darkened by a drizzling Scotch mist of querulousness. Very bad are these mists for grape-vines, and produce mildew in many a fair cluster.

Enthusius falls in love with Hermione, because she looks like a moonbeam,--because she is ethereal as a summer cloud, _spirituelle_. He commences forthwith the perpetual adoration system that precedes marriage. He assures her that she is too good for this world, too delicate and fair for any of the uses of poor mortality,--that she ought to tread on roses, sleep on the clouds,--that she ought never to shed a tear, know a fatigue, or make an exertion, but live apart in some bright, ethereal sphere worthy of her charms. All which is duly chanted in her ear in moonlight walks or sails, and so often repeated that a sensible girl may be excused for believing that a little of it may be true.

Now comes marriage,--and it turns out that Enthusius is very particular as to his coffee, that he is excessively disturbed, if his meals are at all irregular, and that he cannot be comfortable with any table arrangements which do not resemble those of his notable mother, lately deceased in the odor of sanctity; he also wants his house in perfect order at all hours. Still he does not propose to provide a trained housekeeper; it is all to be effected by means of certain raw Irish girls, under the superintendence of this angel who was to tread on roses, sleep on clouds, and never know an earthly care. Neither has Enthusius ever considered it a part of a husband's duty to bear personal inconveniences in silence. He would freely shed his blood for Hermione,--nay, has often frantically proposed the same in the hours of courtship, when of course nobody wanted it done, and it could answer no manner of use; and thus to the idyllic dialogues of that period succeed such as these:--

"My dear, this tea is smoked: can't you get Jane into the way of making it better?"

"My dear, I have tried; but she will not do as I tell her."

"Well, all I know is, other people can have good tea, and I should think we might."

And again at dinner:--

"My dear, this mutton is overdone again; it is _always_ overdone."

"Not always, dear, because you recollect on Monday you said it was just right."

"Well, _almost_ always."

"Well, my dear, the reason to-day was, I had company in the parlor, and could not go out to caution Bridget, as I generally do. It's very difficult to get things done with such a girl."

"My mother's things were always well done, no matter what her girl was."

Again: "My dear, you must speak to the servants about wasting the coal. I never saw such a consumption of fuel in a family of our size"; or, "My dear, how can you let Maggie tear the morning paper?" or, "My dear, I shall actually have to give up coming to dinner, if my dinners cannot be regular"; or, "My dear, I wish you would look at the way my shirts are ironed,--it is perfectly scandalous"; or, "My dear, you must not let Johnnie finger the mirror in the parlor"; or, "My dear, you must stop the children from playing in the garret"; or, "My dear, you must see that Maggie doesn't leave the mat out on the railing when she sweeps the front hall"; and so on, up-stairs and down-stairs, in the lady's chamber, in attic, garret, and cellar, "my dear" is to see that nothing goes wrong, and she is found fault with when anything does.

Yet Enthusius, when occasionally he finds his sometime angel in tears, and she tells him he does not love her as he once did, repudiates the charge with all his heart, and declares he loves her more than ever,--and perhaps he does. The only thing is that she has passed out of the plane of moonshine and poetry into that of actualities. While she was considered an angel, a star, a bird, an evening cloud, of course there was nothing to be found fault with in her; but now that the angel has become chief business-partner in an earthly working firm, relations are different. Enthusius could say the same things over again under the same circumstances, but unfortunately now they never are in the same circumstances. Enthusius is simply a man who is in the habit of speaking from impulse, and saying a thing merely and only because he feels it. Before marriage he worshipped and adored his wife as an ideal being dwelling in the land of dreams and poetries, and did his very best to make her unpractical and unfitted to enjoy the life to which he was to introduce her after marriage. After marriage he still yields unreflectingly to present impulses, which are no longer to praise, but to criticize and condemn. The very sensibility to beauty and love of elegance, which made him admire her before marriage, now transferred to the arrangement of the domestic _ménage_, lead him daily to perceive a hundred defects and find a hundred annoyances.

Thus far we suppose an amiable, submissive wife, who is only grieved, not provoked,--who has no sense of injustice, and meekly strives to make good the hard conditions of her lot. Such poor, little, faded women have we seen, looking for all the world like plants that have been nursed and forced into bloom in the steam-heat of the conservatory, and are now sickly and yellow, dropping leaf by leaf, in the dry, dusty parlor.

But there is another side of the picture,--where the wife, provoked and indignant, takes up the fault-finding trade in return, and with the keen arrows of her woman's wit searches and penetrates every joint of the husband's armor, showing herself full as unjust and far more culpable in this sort of conflict.

Saddest of all sad things is it to see two once very dear friends employing all that peculiar knowledge of each other which love had given them only to harass and provoke,--thrusting and piercing with a certainty of aim that only past habits of confidence and affection could have put in their power, wounding their own hearts with every deadly thrust they make at one another, and all for such inexpressibly miserable trifles as usually form the openings of fault-finding dramas.

For the contentions that loosen the very foundations of love, that crumble away all its fine traceries and carved work, about what miserable, worthless things do they commonly begin!--a dinner underdone, too much oil consumed, a newspaper torn, a waste of coal or soap, a dish broken!--and for this miserable sort of trash, very good, very generous, very religious people will sometimes waste and throw away by double-handfuls the very thing for which houses are built, and coal burned, and all the paraphernalia of a home established,--_their happiness_. Better cold coffee, smoky tea, burnt meat, better any inconvenience, any loss, than a loss of _love_; and nothing so surely burns away love as constant fault-finding.

For fault-finding once allowed as a habit between two near and dear friends comes in time to establish a chronic soreness, so that the mildest, the most reasonable suggestion, the gentlest implied reproof, occasions burning irritation; and when this morbid stage has once set in, the restoration of love seems wellnigh impossible.

For example: Enthusius, having got up this morning in the best of humors, in the most playful tones begs Hermione not to make the tails of her _g_s quite so long; and Hermione fires up with--

"And, pray, what else wouldn't you wish me to do? Perhaps you would be so good, when you have leisure, as to make out an alphabetical list of the things in me that need correcting."

"My dear, you are unreasonable."

"I don't think so. I should like to get to the end of the requirements of my lord and master sometimes."

"Now, my dear, you really are very silly."

"Please say something original, my dear. I have heard that till it has lost the charm of novelty."

"Come now, Hermione, don't let's quarrel."

"My dear Sir, who thinks of quarrelling? Not I; I'm sure I was only asking to be directed. I trust some time, if I live to be ninety, to suit your fastidious taste. I trust the coffee is right this morning, _and_ the tea, _and_ the toast, _and_ the steak, _and_ the servants, _and_ the front-hall mat, _and_ the upper-story hall-door, _and_ the basement premises; and now I suppose I am to be trained in respect to my general education. I shall set about the tails of my _g_s at once, but trust you will prepare a list of any other little things that need emendation."

Enthusius pushes away his coffee, and drums on the table.

"If I might be allowed one small criticism, my dear, I should observe that it is not good manners to drum on the table," said his fair opposite.

"Hermione, you are enough to drive a man frantic!" exclaims Enthusius, rushing out with bitterness in his soul, and a determination to take his dinner at Delmonico's.

Enthusius feels himself an abused man, and thinks there never was such a sprite of a woman,--the most utterly unreasonable, provoking human being he ever met with. What he does not think of is, that it is his own inconsiderate, constant fault-finding that has made every nerve so sensitive and sore, that the mildest suggestion of advice or reproof on the most indifferent subject is impossible. He has not, to be sure, been the guilty partner in this morning's encounter; he has said only what is fair and proper, and she has been unreasonable and cross; but, after all, the fault is remotely his.

When Enthusius awoke, after marriage, to find in his Hermione in very deed only a bird, a star, a flower, but no housekeeper, why did he not face the matter like an honest man? Why did he not remember all the fine things about dependence and uselessness with which he had been filling her head for a year or two, and in common honesty exact no more from her than he had bargained for? Can a bird make a good business-manager? Can a flower oversee Biddy and Mike, and impart to their uncircumcised ears the high crafts and mysteries of elegant housekeeping?

If his little wife has to learn her domestic _rôle_ of household duty, as most girls do, by a thousand mortifications, a thousand perplexities, a thousand failures, let him, in ordinary fairness, make it as easy to her as possible. Let him remember with what admiring smiles, before marriage, he received her pretty professions of utter helplessness and incapacity in domestic matters, finding only poetry and grace in what, after marriage, proved an annoyance.

And if a man finds that he has a wife ill adapted to wifely duties, does it follow that the best thing he can do is to blurt out, without form or ceremony, all the criticisms and corrections which may occur to him in the many details of household life? He would not dare to speak with as little preface, apology, or circumlocution, to his business-manager, to his butcher, or his baker. When Enthusius was a bachelor, he never criticized the table at his boarding-house without some reflection, and studying to take unto himself acceptable words whereby to soften the asperity of the criticism. The laws of society require that a man should qualify, soften, and wisely time his admonitions to those he meets in the outer world, or they will turn again and rend him. But to his own wife, in his own house and home, he can find fault without ceremony or softening. So he can; and he can awake, in the course of a year or two, to find his wife a changed woman, and his home unendurable. He may find, too, that unceremonious fault-finding is a game that two can play at, and that a woman can shoot her arrows with far more precision and skill than a man.

But the fault lies not always on the side of the husband. Quite as often is a devoted, patient, good-tempered man harassed and hunted and baited by the inconsiderate fault-finding of a wife whose principal talent seems to lie in the ability at first glance to discover and make manifest the weak point in everything.

We have seen the most generous, the most warm-hearted and obliging of mortals, under this sort of training, made the most morose and disobliging of husbands. Sure to be found fault with, whatever they do, they have at last ceased doing. The disappointment of not pleasing they have abated by not trying to please.

We once knew a man who married a spoiled beauty, whose murmurs, exactions, and caprices were infinite. He had at last, as a refuge to his wearied nerves, settled down into a habit of utter disregard and neglect; he treated her wishes and her complaints with equal indifference, and went on with his life as nearly as possible as if she did not exist. He silently provided for her what he thought proper, without troubling himself to notice her requests or listen to her grievances. Sickness came, but the heart of her husband was cold and gone; there was no sympathy left to warm her. Death came, and he breathed freely as a man released. He married again,--a woman with no beauty, but much love and goodness,--a woman who asked little, blamed seldom, and then with all the tact and address which the utmost thoughtfulness could devise; and the passive, negligent husband became the attentive, devoted slave of her will. He was in her hands as clay in the hands of the potter; the least breath or suggestion of criticism from her lips, who criticized so little and so thoughtfully, weighed more with him than many outspoken words. So different is the same human being, according to the touch of the hand which plays upon him!

I have spoken hitherto of fault-finding as between husband and wife: its consequences are even worse as respects children. The habit once suffered to grow up between the two that constitute the head of the family descends and runs through all the branches. Children are more hurt by indiscriminate, thoughtless fault-finding than by any other one thing. Often a child has all the sensitiveness and all the susceptibility of a grown person, added to the faults of childhood. Nothing about him is right as yet; he is immature and faulty at all points, and everybody feels at perfect liberty to criticize him to right and left, above, below, and around, till he takes refuge either in callous hardness or irritable moroseness.

A bright, noisy boy rushes in from school, eager to tell his mother something he has on his heart, and Number One cries out,--

"Oh, you've left the door open! I do wish you wouldn't always leave the door open! And do look at the mud on your shoes! How many times must I tell you to wipe your feet?"

"Now there you've thrown your cap on the sofa again. When will you learn to hang it up?"

"Don't put your slate there; that isn't the place for it."

"How dirty your hands are! what have you been doing?"

"Don't sit in that chair; you break the springs, jouncing."

"Mercy! how your hair looks! Do go up-stairs and comb it."

"There, if you haven't torn the braid all off your coat! Dear me, what a boy!"

"Don't speak so loud; your voice goes through my head."

"I want to know, Jim, if it was you that broke up that barrel that I have been saving for brown flour."

"I believe it was you, Jim, that hacked the edge of my razor."

"Jim's been writing at my desk, and blotted three sheets of the best paper."

Now the question is, if any of the grown people of the family had to run the gantlet of a string of criticisms on themselves equally true as those that salute unlucky Jim, would they be any better-natured about it than he is?

No; but they are grown-up people; they have rights that others are bound to respect. Everybody cannot tell them exactly what he thinks about everything they do. If every one could and did, would there not be terrible reactions?

Servants in general are only grown-up children, and the same considerations apply to them. A raw, untrained Irish girl introduced into an elegant house has her head bewildered in every direction. There are the gas-pipes, the water-pipes, the whole paraphernalia of elegant and delicate conveniences, about which a thousand little details are to be learned, the neglect of any one of which may flood the house, or poison it with foul air, or bring innumerable inconveniences. The setting of a genteel table and the waiting upon it involve fifty possibilities of mistake, each one of which will grate on the nerves of a whole family. There is no wonder, then, that the occasions of fault-finding in families are so constant and harassing; and there is no wonder that mistress and maid often meet each other on the terms of the bear and the man who fell together fifty feet down from the limb of a high tree, and lay at the bottom of it, looking each other in the face in helpless, growling despair. The mistress is rasped, irritated, despairing, and with good reason: the maid is the same, and with equally good reason. Yet let the mistress be suddenly introduced into a printing-office, and required, with what little teaching could be given her in a few rapid directions, to set up the editorial of a morning paper, and it is probable she would be as stupid and bewildered as Biddy in her beautifully arranged house.

There are elegant houses which, from causes like these, are ever vexed like the troubled sea that cannot rest. Literally, their table has become a snare before them, and that which should have been for their welfare a trap. Their gas and their water and their fire and their elegancies and ornaments, all in unskilled, blundering hands, seem only so many guns in the hands of Satan, through which he fires at their Christian graces day and night,--so that, if their house is kept in order, their temper and religion are not.

I am speaking now to the consciousness of thousands of women who are in will and purpose real saints. Their souls go up to heaven--its love, its purity, its rest--with every hymn and prayer and sacrament in church; and they come home to be mortified, disgraced, and made to despise themselves, for the unlovely tempers, the hasty words, the cross looks, the universal nervous irritability, that result from this constant jarring of finely toned chords under unskilled hands.

Talk of hair-cloth shirts, and scourgings, and sleeping on ashes, as means of saintship! there is no need of them in our country. Let a woman once look at her domestic trials as her hair-cloth, her ashes, her scourges,--accept them,--rejoice in them,--smile and be quiet, silent, patient, and loving under them,--and the convent can teach her no more; she is a victorious saint.

When the damper of the furnace is turned the wrong way by Paddy, after the five hundredth time of explanation, and the whole family awakes coughing, sneezing, strangling,--when the gas is blown out in the nursery by Biddy, who has been instructed every day for weeks in the danger of such a proceeding,--when the tumblers on the dinner-table are found dim and streaked, after weeks of training in the simple business of washing and wiping,--when the ivory-handled knives and forks are left soaking in hot dish-water, after incessant explanations of the consequences,--when four or five half-civilized beings, above, below, and all over the house, are constantly forgetting the most important things at the very moment it is most necessary they should remember them,--there is no hope for the mistress morally, unless she can in very deed and truth accept her trials religiously, and conquer by accepting. It is not apostles alone who can take pleasure in necessities and distresses, but mothers and housewives also, if they would learn of the Apostle, might say, "When I am weak, then am I strong."

The burden ceases to gall when we have learned how to carry it. We can suffer patiently, if we see any good come of it, and say, as an old black woman of our acquaintance did of an event that crossed her purpose, "Well, Lord, if it's _you_, send it along."

But that this may be done, that home-life, in our unsettled, changing state of society, may become peaceful and restful, there is one Christian grace, much treated of by mystic writers, that must return to its honor in the Christian Church. I mean--THE GRACE OF SILENCE.

No words can express, no tongue can tell, the value of NOT SPEAKING. "Speech is silvern, but silence is golden," is an old and very precious proverb.

"But," say many voices, "what is to become of us, if we may not speak? Must we not correct our children and our servants and each other? Must we let people go on doing wrong to the end of the chapter?"

No; fault must be found; faults must be told, errors corrected. Reproof and admonition are duties of householders to their families, and of all true friends to one another.

But, gentle reader, let us look over life, our own lives and the lives of others, and ask, How much of the fault-finding which prevails has the least tendency to do any good? How much of it is well-timed, well-pointed, deliberate, and just, so spoken as to be effective?

"A wise reprover upon an obedient ear" is one of the _rare_ things spoken of by Solomon,--the rarest, perhaps, to be met with. How many really religious people put any of their religion into their manner of performing this most difficult office? We find fault with a stove or furnace which creates heat only to go up chimney and not warm the house. We say it is wasteful. Just so wasteful often seem prayer-meetings, church-services, and sacraments; they create and excite lovely, gentle, holy feelings,--but, if these do not pass out into the atmosphere of daily life, and warm and clear the air of our homes, there is a great waste in our religion.

We have been on our knees, confessing humbly that we are as awkward in heavenly things, as unfit for the Heavenly Jerusalem, as Biddy and Mike, and the little beggar-girl on our door-steps, are for our parlors. We have deplored our errors daily, hourly, and confessed that "the remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable," and then we draw near in the sacrament to that Incarnate Divinity whose infinite love covers all our imperfections with the mantle of His perfections. But when we return, do we take our servants and children by the throat because they are as untrained and awkward and careless in earthly things as we have been in heavenly? Does no remembrance of Christ's infinite patience temper our impatience, when we have spoken seventy times seven, and our words have been disregarded? There is no mistake as to the sincerity of the religion which the church excites. What we want is to have it _used_ in common life, instead of going up like hot air in a fireplace to lose itself in the infinite abysses above.

In reproving and fault-finding, we have beautiful examples in Holy Writ. When Saint Paul has a reproof to administer to delinquent Christians, how does he temper it with gentleness and praise! how does he first make honorable note of all the good there is to be spoken of! how does he give assurance of his prayers and love!--and when at last the arrow flies, it goes all the straighter to the mark for this carefulness.

But there was a greater, a purer, a lovelier than Paul, who made His home on earth with twelve plain men, ignorant, prejudiced, slow to learn,--and who to the very day of His death were still contending on a point which He had repeatedly explained, and troubling His last earthly hours with the old contest, "Who should be greatest." When all else failed, on His knees before them as their servant, tenderly performing for love the office of a slave, he said, "If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another's feet."

When parents, employers, and masters learn to reprove in this spirit, reproofs will be more effective than they now are. It was by the exercise of this spirit that Fénelon transformed the proud, petulant, irritable, selfish Duke of Burgundy, making him humble, gentle, tolerant of others, and severe only to himself: it was he who had for his motto, that "Perfection alone can bear with imperfection."

But apart from the fault-finding which has a definite aim, how much is there that does not profess or intend or try to do anything more than give vent to an irritated state of feeling! The nettle stings us, and we toss it with both hands at our neighbor; the fire burns us, and we throw coals and hot ashes at all and sundry of those about us.

There is _fretfulness_, a mizzling, drizzling rain of discomforting remark; there is _grumbling_, a northeast storm that never clears; there is _scolding_, the thunderstorm with lightning and hail. All these are worse than useless; they are positive _sins_, by whomsoever indulged,--sins as great and real as many that are shuddered at in polite society.

All these are for the most part but the venting on our fellow-beings of morbid feelings resulting from dyspepsia, overtaxed nerves, or general ill health.

A minister eats too much mince-pie, goes to his weekly lecture, and, seeing only half a dozen people there, proceeds to grumble at those half-dozen for the sins of such as stay away. "The Church is cold, there is no interest in religion," and so on: a simple outpouring of the blues.

You and I do in one week the work we ought to do in six; we overtax nerve and brain, and then have weeks of darkness in which everything at home seems running to destruction. The servants never were so careless, the children never so noisy, the house never so disorderly, the State never so ill-governed, the Church evidently going over to Antichrist. The only thing, after all, in which the existing condition of affairs differs from that of a week ago is, that we have used up our nervous energy, and are looking at the world through blue spectacles. We ought to resist the devil of fault-finding at this point, and cultivate silence as a grace till our nerves are rested. There are times when no one should trust himself to judge his neighbors, or reprove his children and servants, or find fault with his friends,--for he is so sharp-set that he cannot strike a note without striking too hard. Then is the time to try the grace of silence, and, what is better than silence, the power of prayer.

But it being premised that we are _never_ to fret, never to grumble, never to scold, and yet it being our duty in some way to make known and get rectified the faults of others, it remains to ask how; and on this head we will improvise a parable of two women.

Mrs. Standfast is a woman of high tone, and possessed of a power of moral principle that impresses one even as sublime. All her perceptions of right and wrong are clear, exact, and minute; she is charitable to the poor, kind to the sick and suffering, and devoutly and earnestly religious. In all the minutiæ of woman's life she manifests an inconceivable precision and perfection. Everything she does is perfectly done. She is true to all her promises to the very letter, and so punctual that railroad time might be kept by her instead of a chronometer.

Yet, with all these excellent traits, Mrs. Standfast has not the faculty of making a happy home. She is that most hopeless of fault-finders,--a fault-finder from principle. She has a high, correct standard for everything in the world, from the regulation of the thoughts down to the spreading of a sheet or the hemming of a towel; and to this exact standard she feels it her duty to bring every one in her household. She does not often scold, she is not actually fretful, but she exercises over her household a calm, inflexible severity, rebuking every fault; she overlooks nothing, she excuses nothing, she will accept of nothing in any part of her domain but absolute perfection; and her reproofs are aimed with a true and steady point, and sent with a force that makes them felt by the most obdurate.

Hence, though she is rarely seen out of temper, and seldom or never scolds, yet she drives every one around her to despair by the use of the calmest and most elegant English. Her servants fear, but do not love her. Her husband, an impulsive, generous man, somewhat inconsiderate and careless in his habits, is at times perfectly desperate under the accumulated load of her disapprobation. Her children regard her as inhabiting some high, distant, unapproachable mountain-top of goodness, whence she is always looking down with reproving eyes on naughty boys and girls. They wonder how it is that so excellent a mamma should have children who, let them try to be good as hard as they can, are always sure to do something dreadful every day.

The trouble with Mrs. Standfast is, not that she has a high standard, and not that she purposes and means to bring every one up to it, but that she does not take the right way. She has set it down that to blame a wrong-doer is the only way to cure wrong. She has never learned that it is as much her duty to praise as to blame, and that people are drawn to do right by being praised when they do it, rather than driven by being blamed when they do not.

Right across the way from Mrs. Standfast is Mrs. Easy, a pretty little creature, with not a tithe of her moral worth,--a merry, pleasure-loving woman, of no particular force of principle, whose great object in life is to avoid its disagreeables and to secure its pleasures.

Little Mrs. Easy is adored by her husband, her children, her servants, merely because it is her nature to say pleasant things to every one. It is a mere tact of pleasing, which she uses without knowing it. While Mrs. Standfast, surveying her well-set dining-table, runs her keen eye over everything, and at last brings up with, "Jane, look at that black spot on the salt-spoon! I am astonished at your carelessness!"--Mrs. Easy would say, "Why, Jane, where _did_ you learn to set a table so nicely? All looking beautifully, except--ah! let's see--just give a rub to this salt-spoon;--now all is quite perfect." Mrs. Standfast's servants and children hear only of their failures; these are always before them and her. Mrs. Easy's servants hear of their successes. She praises their good points; tells them they are doing well in this, that, and the other particular; and finally exhorts them, on the strength of having done so many things well, to improve in what is yet lacking. Mrs. Easy's husband feels that he is always a hero in her eyes, and her children feel that they are dear good children, notwithstanding Mrs. Easy sometimes has her little tiffs of displeasure, and scolds roundly when something falls out as it should not.

The two families show how much more may be done by a very ordinary woman, through the mere instinct of praising and pleasing, than by the greatest worth, piety, and principle, seeking to lift human nature by a lever that never was meant to lift it by.

The faults and mistakes of us poor human beings are as often perpetuated by despair as by any other one thing. Have we not all been burdened by a consciousness of faults that we were slow to correct because we felt discouraged? Have we not been sensible of a real help sometimes from the presence of a friend who thought well of us, believed in us, set our virtues in the best light, and put our faults in the background?

Let us depend upon it, that the flesh and blood that are in us--the needs, the wants, the despondencies--are in each of our fellows, in every awkward servant and careless child.

Finally, let us all resolve,--

First, to attain to the grace of SILENCE.

Second, to deem all FAULT-FINDING that does no good a SIN; and to resolve, when we are happy ourselves, not to poison the atmosphere for our neighbors by calling on them to remark every painful and disagreeable feature of their daily life.

Third, to practise the grace and virtue of PRAISE. We have all been taught that it is our duty to praise God, but few of us have reflected on our duty to praise men; and yet for the same reason that we should praise the divine goodness it is our duty to praise human excellence.

We should praise our friends,--our near and dear ones; we should look on and think of their virtues till their faults fade away; and when we love most, and see most to love, then only is the wise time wisely to speak of what should still be altered.

Parents should look out for occasions to commend their children, as carefully as they seek to reprove their faults; and employers should praise the good their servants do as strictly as they blame the evil.

Whoever undertakes to use this weapon will find that praise goes farther in many cases than blame. Watch till a blundering servant does something well, and then praise him for it, and you will see a new fire lighted in the eye, and often you will find that in that one respect at least you have secured excellence thenceforward.

When you blame, which should be seldom, let it be alone with the person, quietly, considerately, and with all the tact you are possessed of. The fashion of reproving children and servants in the presence of others cannot be too much deprecated. Pride, stubbornness, and self-will are aroused by this, while a more private reproof might be received with thankfulness.

As a general rule, I would say, treat children in these respects just as you would grown people; they are grown people in miniature, and need as careful consideration of their feelings as any of us.

Lastly, let us all make a bead-roll, a holy rosary, of all that is good and agreeable in our position, our surroundings, our daily lot, of all that is good and agreeable in our friends, our children, our servants, and charge ourselves to repeat it daily, till the habit of our minds be to praise and to commend; and so doing, we shall catch and kill one _Little Fox_ who hath destroyed many tender grapes.

PRO PATRIA

L. M. S., JUN.,

SEPULT. DEC. 21, 1864.

Drift, snows of winter, o'er the turf That hides in death his cherished form! And roar, ye pine-trees, like the surf That breaks before this eastern storm!

O turbulent December blast! O night tempestuous and grim! Ye cannot chill or overcast The tender thought that dwells on him!

Wilder the tumult he defied, Darker the leaden storm he braved, Where swept the battle's smoking tide, And banners, torn and blackened, waved.

Not scathless he amid the fray: "Shot through the lungs,"--the message went: Now surely Love shall find a way To hold him here at home content.

"Oh, thou hast done enough," Love cried, "For duty, fame,--enough, indeed!" He touched his sabre, and replied,-- "It is our country's hour of need."

Back to the field, from respite brief, Back to the battle's fiery breath, Hurried our young high-hearted chief To lead the charge where waited Death.

Oh, fallen in manhood's fairest noon,-- We will remember, 'mid our sighs, He never yields his life too soon, For country and for right who dies.

A FORTNIGHT WITH THE SANITARY.

For three years I had been a thorough believer in the United States Sanitary Commission. Reading carefully its publications, listening with tearful interest to the narrations of those who had been its immediate workers at the front, following in imagination its campaigns of love and mercy, from Antietam to Gettysburg, from Belle Plain to City Point, and thence to the very smoke and carnage of the actual battle-field, I had come to cherish an unfeigned admiration for it and its work. For three years, too, I had been an earnest laborer at one of its outposts,--striving with others ever to deepen the interest and increase the fidelity of the loyal men and women of a loyal New England town. I was prepared then, both from my hearty respect for the charity and from my general conception of the nature and vastness of its operations, to welcome every opportunity to improve my knowledge of its plans and practical workings. I therefore gladly accepted the invitation which came to me to visit the head-quarters of the Commission at Washington, and to examine for myself the character and amount of the benefits which it confers.

The evening of August 23d found me, after a speedy and pleasant trip southward, safely ensconced in the sanctum of my good friend Mr. Knapp, the head of the Special Relief Department. Starting from that base of operations, I spent two crowded weeks in ceaseless inquiries. Every avenue of information was thrown wide open. Two days I wandered, but not aimlessly, from office to office, from storehouse to storehouse, from soldiers' home to soldiers' home, conversing with the men who have given themselves up unstintedly to this charity, examining the books of the Commission, gathering statistics, seeing, as it were, the hungry soldier fed and the naked soldier clothed, and the sick and wounded soldier cared for with a more than fraternal kindness. I visited the hospitals, and with my own hands distributed the Sanitary delicacies to the suffering men. Steaming down the Chesapeake, and up the James, and along its homeless shores, I came to City Point; was a day and a night on board the Sanitary barges, whence full streams of comfort are flowing with an unbroken current to all our diverging camps; passed a tranquil, beautiful Sabbath in that city of the sick and wounded, whose white tents look down from the bluffs upon the turbid river; rode thirteen miles out almost to the Weldon Road, then in sharp contest between our Fifth Army Corps and the Rebels; from the hills which Baldy Smith stormed in June saw the spires of Petersburg; went from tent to tent and from bedside to bedside in the field hospitals of the Fifth and Ninth Corps, where the luxuries prepared by willing hands at home were bringing life and strength to fevered lips and broken bodies. I came back with my courage re-animated, and with a more perfect faith in the ultimate triumph of the good cause. I came back with a heartier respect for our soldiers, whose patience in hardship and courage in danger are rivalled only by the heroism with which they bear the pains of sickness and wounds. I came back especially with the conviction, that, no matter how much we had contributed to the Sanitary work, we had done only that which it was our duty to do, and that, so long as we could furnish shelter for our families and food for our children, it was our plain obligation to give and to continue giving out of our riches or out of our poverty.

* * * * *

I have felt that in no way could I do better service than by seeking to answer for others the very questions which my fortnight with the Sanitary has answered for me. Most, no doubt, have a general conviction that the charity inaugurated by the Sanitary Commission is at once marvellous in its extent and unique in the history of war. All, perhaps, are prepared to allow that the heart which conceived such an enterprise, and the mind which organized it, and the persistent will which carried it to a successful issue, are entitled to all the praise which we can give them. Few will deny now that this and kindred associations, by decreasing the waste of war, will affect in an important degree our national fortunes. And most, indeed, know something even about the details of Sanitary work. They comprehend, at least, that through its agency many a homely comfort and many a home luxury find their way to the wards of great hospitals. They have seen, too, the Commission step forward in great emergencies, after some terrible battle, when every energy of Government was burdened and overburdened by the gigantic demands of the hour, and from its storehouses send thousands of packages, and from its offices hundreds of relief agents, to help to meet almost unprecedented exigencies.

But what people wish to know, and what, despite all that has been written, they do not know fully and definitely, is how and when and where, and through what channels and by what methods, the Commission works: precisely how the millions which have been poured into its treasury from public contributions and private benefactions have been coined into comfort for the soldier,--how the thousands and hundreds of thousands of garments which have gone forth to unknown destinations have been made warmth for his body and cheer to his soul. The whole height and depth and length and breadth of Sanitary work, what varied activities and what multiform charities are included in the great circumference of its organization,--of that not one in twenty has any adequate conception. And all about that is what everybody wishes to know. The curiosity, moreover, which dictates such queries, is a natural and laudable curiosity. Those who have given at every call, and often from scanty means, and those who have plied the needle summer and winter, early and late, have a right to put such questions. The Commission wishes to answer all proper inquiries fully and unreservedly. It would throw open its operations to the broadest sunlight. It believes that the more entirely it is known, in its successes and its failures alike, the more sure it is to be liberally sustained. To bring the humblest contributor from the most distant branch, as it were, into immediate communication with the front is a work most desirable to be done. I do not wish to glorify the Commission, nor to theorize about it, nor to discuss its relative merit as compared with that of kindred organizations,--but rather to tell just what it is doing, precisely where the money goes, and exactly what kinds of good are attempted.

* * * * *

The work of the Sanitary Commission may be naturally and conveniently classed under five heads.

First, the work undertaken for the prevention of sickness and suffering.

Second, the Special Relief Department.

Third, the Hospital Directory.

Fourth, the assistance given to stationary hospitals.

Fifth, the grand operations in the front, on or near the actual battle-field.

* * * * *

The efforts for the prevention of suffering and sickness are first in order of time, and possibly first in importance. When this war commenced, we had no wounded and we had no sick. What we did have was a crowd of men full of untrained courage, but who knew little or nothing about military discipline, and as little in regard to what was necessary for the preservation of their health. What we did have was hundreds and thousands of officers, taken from every walk of life, who were, for the most part, men of great natural intelligence, but who did not at all comprehend that it was their duty not only to lead their men in battle, but to care for their health and their habits, and who had never dreamed that such homely considerations as what are the best modes of cooking food, what are the most healthy localities in which to pitch tents, what is the right position for drains, had anything to do with the art of war. What we did have was surgeons, many of whom had achieved an honorable reputation in the walks of civil life, but who, on this new field, were alike inexperienced and untried. The manifest danger was, that this mass of living valor and embodied patriotism would simply be squandered,--that, as in the terrible Walcheren Expedition, or in the Crimea, the men whose strength and courage might decide a campaign would only furnish food for the hospital and the grave.

Who should avert this danger? The Government could not. It had no time to sit down and study sanitary science. It was bringing together everything, where it found--nothing. Out of farmers and merchants and students it was organizing the most efficient of armies. It was sending its agents all over the world to buy guns and munitions of war. It was tasking our factories to produce blankets and overcoats, knapsacks and haversacks, wagons and tents, and all that goes to make up the multifarious equipment of an army. It was peering into our dock-yards to find steamers and sailing-vessels out of which to gather makeshift navies, until it could find leisure to build stancher ships. Manifestly the Government had no time for such a work. The existing Medical Bureau was hardly equal to the task. Organized to take charge of an army of ten thousand men, in the twinkling of an eye that army became five hundred thousand. At the beginning of the war the medical staff must have been very busy and very heavily burdened. With great hospitals to build, with troops of willing, but young and inexperienced surgeons to train to a knowledge of their duties and to send east and west and north and south, with every department of medical science to be enlarged at once to the proportions of the war, it had little leisure for excursions into fresh fields of inquiry. That it brought order so quickly out of chaos, that it was able to extemporize a good working system, is a sufficient testimony to its general fidelity and efficiency. It was the Sanitary Commission which undertook this special duty. It undertook to find out some of the laws of health which apply to army life, and then to scatter the knowledge of those laws broadcast.

Prevention, therefore, effort not so much to comfort and cure the sick soldier as to keep him from being sick at all, was, in order of time, properly the first work. And it is doubtful whether at the outset anything more was contemplated. The memorial to the War Department in May, 1861, says explicitly that the object of the Commission "is to bring to bear upon the health, comfort, and _morale_ of our troops the fullest and ripest teachings of sanitary science." How many of the contributors to the funds of the Society are aware what an immense work in this direction has been undertaken, and how much has been accomplished to prevent sickness and the consequent depletion and perhaps defeat of our armies? As I have already indicated, at the commencement of the war we knew little or nothing about what was necessary to keep men in military service well,--what food, what clothing, what tents, what camps, what recreations, what everything, I may say. Now the Sanitary Commission has made searching inquiries touching every point of camp and soldier life,--gathering in facts from all quarters, and seeking to attain to some fixed sanitary principles. It has sent the most eminent medical men on tours of inspection to all our camps, who have put questions and given hints to the very men to whom they were of the most direct importance. As a result, we have a mass of facts, which, in the breadth of the field which they cover, in the number of vital questions which they settle, and in the fulness and accuracy of the testimony by which they are sustained, are worth more than all the sanitary statistics of all other nations put together.

And we are to consider that these inquiries were from the beginning turned to practical use. If you look over your pile of dusty pamphlets, very likely you will find a little Sanitary tract entitled, "Rules for Preserving the Health of the Soldier." This was issued almost before the war had seriously begun. Or you will come across paper containing the last results of the last foreign investigations. So early was the good seed of sanitary knowledge sown. We must remember, too, how many mooted, yet vital questions have now been put to rest. Take an example,--Quinine. Everybody had a general notion that quinine was as valuable as a preventive of disease as a cure. But how definite was our knowledge? How many knew when and in what positions and to what extent it was valuable? As early as 1861 the Commission prepared and published what has been justly termed an exhaustive monograph on the whole subject, collecting into a brief space all the best testimony bearing upon the question. This was the beginning of an investigation which, pursued through a vast number of cases, has demonstrated, that, in peculiar localities and under certain circumstances, quinine in full doses is an almost absolute necessity. And in such localities, and under such circumstances, Government issues now a daily ration to every man, saving who can tell how many valuable lives? One more illustration,--Camps. Suppose you were to lead a thousand men into the Southern country. Would you know where to encamp them? whether with a southern or a northern exposure? on a breezy hill, or in a sheltered valley? beneath the shade of groves, or out in the broad sunshine? Could you tell what kind of soil was healthiest, or how near to each other you could safely pitch your tents, or whether it would be best for your men to sleep on the bare ground or on straw or on pine boughs? Yet, if you inquire, you will find that all these questions and countless others are definitely settled,--thanks in a great measure to the Sanitary Commission, which has gladly given its ounce of prevention, that it may spare its pound of cure.

If you imagine that the need of this work of prevention has ceased, you are greatly mistaken. Only last summer, in the single month of June, the Commission distributed, in the Army of the Potomac alone, over a hundred tons of canned fruits and tomatoes, and not less than five thousand barrels of pickles and fresh vegetables. It is hardly too much to say that what the Commission did in this respect has gone far towards enabling our gallant army to disappoint the hopes of the enemy, and to hold, amid the deadly assaults of malaria, the vantage-ground which it has won before Petersburg and Richmond. All through the spring and summer, too, at Chattanooga, on the very soil which war had ploughed and desolated, invalid soldiers have been cultivating hundreds of acres of vegetables. And on the rugged sides of Missionary Ridge, and along the sunny slopes of Central Tennessee, the same forethought has brought to perfection, in many a deserted vineyard, the purple glory of the grape. And this not merely to cure, but to prevent, to keep up the strength and vigor of the brave men who have marched victoriously from the banks of the Ohio to Atlanta.

Nor is it likely that the value of this office will cease so long as the war lasts. In the future, as in the past, new conditions, new exigencies, and new dangers will arise. And to the end the foresight which guards will be as true a friend to the soldier as the kindness which assuages his pains. Looking back, therefore, upon the whole field, and speaking with a full understanding of the meaning of the language, I am ready to affirm, that, if the Sanitary Commission had undertaken nothing but the work of preventing sickness, and had accomplished nothing in any other direction, the army and the country would have received in that alone an ample return for all the money which has been lavished.

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I come now to the Special Relief Department. I should call this a sort of philanthropic drag-net, differing from that mentioned in the Gospel in that it seems to gather up nothing bad which needs to be thrown away. In other words, it appeared to me as though any and every kind of Sanitary good which ought to be done, and yet was not large enough or distinct enough to constitute a separate branch, was set down as Special Relief. The whole system of homes and lodges to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless comes directly under the head of Special Relief. The immense collection of back pay, bounties, pensions, and prize-money, which is made gratuitously by the Commission, is Special Relief. Visits to the hospitals are under the direction of this same department. And even the Directory and the vast work done at the front perhaps legitimately belong to it. We can readily conceive, therefore, that the Commission has no department which is larger or more important, or which covers so wide and diversified a field of activity. Let us survey that field a little closer.

Sanitary homes and lodges,--what are they? A soldier is discharged, or he has a furlough. He is not well and strong,--and he has no money, certainly none to spare. He ought not to sleep on the ground, and he ought not to go hungry. But what is everybody's business is apt to be nobody's business. Fortunately the Commission has seen and met this want. In Washington, on H Street, there is a block of rough, but comfortable one-story wooden buildings, erected for various purposes of Special Relief, and, amongst others, for the very one which I have mentioned. In the first place, there is a large room containing ninety-six berths, where any soldier, having proper claims, can obtain decent lodging free of expense. In the second place, there is a kitchen, and a neat, cheerful dining-room, with seats for a hundred and fifty. Here plain and substantial meals are furnished to all comers. This table of one hundred and fifty has often, and indeed usually, to be spread three times; so that the Commission feeds daily at this place alone some four hundred soldiers, and lodges ninety to a hundred more. The home which I have now described is simply for transient calls.

Near the depot there is a home of a more permanent character. When a soldier is discharged from the service, the Government has, in the nature of the case, no further charge of him. Suppose now that he is taken sick, with, no money in his purse and no friends, near. Can you imagine a position more forlorn? And forlorn indeed it would, be, were it not for the Commission. The sick home is a large three-story building, with three or four one-story buildings added on each side. Here there is furnished food for all; then one hundred and fifty beds for those who are not really sick, but only ailing and worn-out; then bathing-rooms; and, finally, a reading-room. There is here, too, a hospital ward, with the requisite nurses and medical attendance. In this ward I saw a little boy, apparently not over twelve years of age, who had strayed from his home,--if, alas, he had one!--and followed to the field an Ohio regiment of hundred-days' men, and who had been taken sick and left behind. Who he was or where from nobody knew. Tenderly cared for, but likely to die! A sad sight to look upon! One feature more. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday a physician goes from the home in Washington to New York, taking charge of those who are too sick or too crippled to care for themselves; while the relief agents procure for the sick soldier the half-price ticket to which he is entitled, or else give him one, and such articles of clothing as are needful to send him in comfort to his own home.

I must not fail to speak in this connection of another beautiful ministry,--the home for soldiers' wives and mothers. A soldier is like other human beings. In his sickness he yearns for a sight of the familiar faces, and sends for wife or mother; or wife or mother, unable to bear longer the uncertainty, when she can get no tidings from the absent, starts for Washington. There, searching vainly for husband or son, she spends all or nearly all her money. Or if she finds him, it may well be that he has no funds with which to help her. In the little buildings on one side of the refuge for the sick are rooms where some sixty-five can receive decent lodging and nourishing food; and if actually penniless, the Commission will procure them tickets and send them back to their friends.

We often hear people wondering, almost in a skeptical tone, where all the Commission's money goes. When I was at Washington and City Point, I only asked where it all came from. Consider what it must cost simply to feed and lodge these soldiers and their wives at Washington. And then remember that this is but one of many similar homes scattered everywhere: at Baltimore, Washington, and Alexandria, in the Eastern Department; at Louisville, Nashville, Chattanooga, in the Western; at New Orleans and Baton Rouge, in the Southwestern; and at many another place beside. And, finally, reflect that this whole system of homes is really but one portion of one branch of Sanitary work.

The collection of back pay, bounties, and pensions,--how many have a definite idea of this work? Not many, I suspect. Yet it takes all the time of many persons to accomplish it, and it was the branch of Sanitary work which awakened in my own mind the deepest regard; for it has its foundation in a higher virtue than any mere sentimental charity,--yea, in the highest virtue known in heaven or on earth,--justice. However impossible it may be to prevent such occurrences, certainly it is a cruel and undeserved hardship to a soldier who has served faithfully and fought for his country, and has perhaps been wounded and almost died at the post of honor and duty, that he should be unable to obtain his hard-earned pittance, when, too, he needs it for his own comfort, or when it may be that his family need it to keep them from absolute suffering.

Look at a single class of these collections,--the back pay of sick men. Government, we all allow, must have some system in its disbursements. It should not pay money without a voucher, and the proper voucher of a soldier is the pay-roll of the regiment or company of which he is a member. Now a sick or wounded man drops out of the ranks. He gets into a field hospital to which he does not belong. He is transferred from one hospital to another, from hospital to convalescent camp, and finally, it may be, is put on the list of men to be discharged for physical disability. Meanwhile his commanding officer does not know where he is, cannot trace him thinks it very likely that he is a deserter. On pay-day the man's name is not on the roll, and, having no voucher, he gets no money. You say that there ought to be a remedy. There is none. It would be difficult to devise one. What shall the soldier do? He cannot go from point to point to collect evidence, for he is sick. Besides, he is utterly ignorant of the necessary forms. If he applies to a lawyer, it costs him often from one half to three quarters of all he gets. Very likely the lawyer cannot afford to take care of one or two petty cases for a less price. In this emergency the Commission steps in, and, with its knowledge of routine and its credit in all quarters, obtains for the poor fellow for nothing what he has in vain sought for in other ways. Take one single case, and what they would call at the Relief Office an easy case. Study it attentively, and you will get an idea of all cases,--and you will understand, moreover, how much work has to be done, and how impossible it would be for a sick man to do it.

Charles W. J---- is a member of Company K, One Hundred and Twenty-First New York Regiment, and he has been transferred to this company and regiment from Company F of the Sixteenth New York. He has been thus transferred for the reason that the Sixteenth New York is a two years' regiment, whose time has expired, while he is a three years' recruit, who has a year or two more to serve. Now he claims that pay is due him from November 1, 1863, to August 1, 1864, and that he needs his pay very much to send home to his wife. He represents that he was at Schuyler Hospital from the time he left the ranks until December 17, 1863; that then he was sent to Convalescent Camp, New York Harbor; and on December 29 to Camp of Distribution at Alexandria; whence, February 8, 1864, he was brought to Staunton Hospital, Washington, where he now is. He has never joined his new regiment, has only been transferred with others to its rolls. His new officers have never seen him, and do not know where he is. The relief agent hears the story and then sets about proving all its details: first, that the man was a member of the Sixteenth New York Regiment; second, that he has been transferred to the One Hundred and Twenty-First Regiment; third, that he has never been paid beyond November 1, 1863; fourth, that he has really been in the various hospitals and camps which he mentions. This evidence is procured by writing to agents and surgeons at convalescent and distributing camps, and at Hospital Schuyler, and by examining the rolls of the Sixteenth and One Hundred and Twenty-First Regiments. In a few days or weeks the man's story is proved to be correct, and he is put into a position to receive his pay,--a satisfaction not simply in a pecuniary sense, but also to his soldierly pride, by removing an undeserved charge of desertion.

Now I beg my readers not to imagine that this is a difficult case. At the Relief Rooms they treasure up and mysteriously display, much as I suspect a soldier would flaunt a captured battle-flag, a certain roll of paper, I dare not say how many yards long, covered with certificates from one end to the other, obtained from all parts of the country and from all sorts of persons, and all necessary in order to secure perhaps a three or six months' pay of one sick soldier. The correspondence of the back-pay department is itself a burden. From thirty to forty letters on an average are received daily at one of its offices. They are written in all languages,--English, German, French,--and must be read, translated, and the ideas, conveyed often in the blindest style, ascertained and answered.

A new branch has been recently added,--the collection of pay for the families of those who are prisoners in Rebeldom. But as this involves no new principles or fresh details, I pass it by. Another class of cases should receive a moment's notice. This includes the collection of bounties for discharged soldiers, of pensions for wounded soldiers, of bounty, back pay, and pensions for the families of deceased soldiers, and of prize-money for sailors. These cases are not, as a general rule, as intricate as those which I have already considered, inasmuch as the proper departments have a regular system of investigation, and take up and examine for themselves each case in its turn. All that the Commission does is to put the soldier on the right track, and to make out and present for him the fitting application. It undertook this because Washington was infested with a horde of sharpers, who, by false representations, defrauded the soldiers out of large sums.

I cannot more appropriately close this branch of my subject than by stating the simple fact, that during the months of July and August the relief agents examined and brought to a successful issue 809 cases of back pay and bounty-money, averaging $125,--203 cases of invalid pensions, 378 cases of widows' pensions, and 10 cases of naval pensions, averaging $8 a month,--and 121 cases of prize-money, averaging $80.

I have only to add that the amount of good which can be done in this direction seems to be limited only by the capacity of those who undertake to do it. A relief agent said to me, in conversation, that in one hospital in Philadelphia there were several hundreds who claimed, but were unable to collect their just dues,--and that what was true of this hospital was true to a less extent of all of them.

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The Hospital Directory is a most interesting branch of Sanitary work. Not because it will compare with many other branches in extent of usefulness, but because it shows what a wide-reaching philanthropy is at work, seeking to furnish every possible alleviation to the inevitable hardships of war. Whoever has at any time had a sick or wounded friend in the army knows how difficult it often is to obtain any intelligence about him. I have in mind a poor woman, who exhausted every resource in seeking to ascertain the whereabouts of a sick son, and who never received any tidings of him, until one day, months after, he came home, worn-out and broken, to die. The regiment is in active service and passes on, while the sick man goes back. He has several transfers, too,--first to the corps hospital on the field, then to the army hospital at City Point, then to Washington, and very possibly again to some hospital in Baltimore, Philadelphia, or other city or town farther north, and on that account believed to be more healthy. Meanwhile, amid all these changes, the man may be delirious, or from some other cause unable to communicate with his friends. How shall they get information? The Commission undertakes to keep a correct list of all the sick and wounded men who are in regular hospitals. They obtain their information from the official returns of the surgeons. I do not mean to say that these lists are absolutely correct. They approximate as nearly to correctness as they ever can, until surgeons are perfectly prompt and careful in their reports.

The amount of work done is very great. Seven hundred thousand names have been recorded in this Directory, between October, 1862, and July, 1864. From ten to twenty-five applications for information are made each day by letter, and from one hundred to two hundred and fifty personally or through the various State agencies. Branch offices, working upon a similar plan, have been established at Louisville and elsewhere.

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The subject of assistance to regular hospitals may be despatched in a few words,--not because the gifts are insignificant, but because the method of giving is so regular and easy to explain. Whenever the surgeon of any hospital needs articles which are extras, and so not supplied by the Government, or which, if allowed, the Government is deficient in at the time, he makes a requisition upon the Commission; and if his requisition is deemed to be a reasonable one, it is approved, and the goods delivered on his receipt for the same. As to the amount given, I can only say that something is sent almost every day even to the hospitals near Washington and the great cities, and that the amount bestowed increases just in proportion to the distance of the hospital from the great Government centres of supply. This is a noiseless and unostentatious charity,--sometimes, I am tempted to think, too noiseless and unostentatious. A few weeks ago, a lady friend visited one of the hospitals near Washington, carrying with her for distribution some Sanitary goods. She gave a handkerchief to one of the sick men. He took it, looked at it, read the mark in the corner, paused as if he had received a new idea, and then spoke out his mind thus:--"I have been in this hospital six months, and this is the first thing I ever received from the Sanitary Commission."--"But," she replied, "have you not had this and that?" mentioning several luxuries supplied to this very hospital for extra diet.--"Oh, yes, often!"--"Well, every one of these articles came from the Sanitary Commission."

Just now the Sanitary is seeking to enter into closer relations with the hospitals through the agency of regular visitors. The advantages of such a policy are manifest. The reports of the visitors will enable the directors to see more clearly the real wants of the sick; and the frequent presence and inquiries of such visitors will tend to repress the undue appropriation of hospital stores by attendants. But the highest benefit will be the change and cheer it will introduce into the monotony of hospital life. If you are sick at home, you are glad to have your neighbor step in and bring the healthy bracing air of out-door life into the dimness and languor of your invalid existence. Much more does the sick soldier like it,--for ennui, far more than pain, is his great burden. When I was at Washington, I accepted with great satisfaction an invitation to go with a Sanitary visitor on her round of duty. When we came to the hospital, I asked the ward-master if he would like to have me distribute among his patients the articles I had brought. He said that he should, for he thought it would do the poor fellows good to see me and receive the gifts from my own hands. The moment I entered there was a stir. Those who could hobble about stumped up to me to see what was going on; some others sat up in bed, full of alertness; while the sickest greeted me with a languid smile. As I went from cot to cot, the politeness of _la belle France_, with which a little Frenchman in the corner touched the tassel of his variegated nightcap at me, and the untranslatable gutturals, full of honest satisfaction, with which his German neighbors saluted me, and the "God bless your honor," which a cheery son of Old Erin showered down upon me, and the simple "Thank you, Sir," which came up on all sides from our true-hearted New England boys, were alike refreshing to my soul. No doubt the single peach or two which with hearty good-will were given to them were as good as a feast; and it may be that the little comforts which I left behind me, and which had been borne thither on the wings of this divine charity, perhaps from some village nestling among the rocky hills of New England, or from some hamlet basking in the sunlight on the broad prairies of the West, had magic power to bring to that place of suffering some breath of the atmosphere of home to cheer the sinking heart, or some fragrant memory of far-off home-affection to make it better. I came away with the feeling that visits from sunny-hearted people, and gifts from friendly hands, must be a positive blessing to these sick and wounded people.

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Of course the deepest throb of interest is given to the work at the front of battle. That is natural. It is work done on the very spots where the fortunes of our nation are being decided,--on the spots whither all eyes are turned, and towards which all our hopes and prayers go forth. It is work surrounded by every element of pathos and tragic interest. The wavering fortunes of the fight, the heroic courage which sustains a doubtful conflict, the masterly skill that turns disaster into triumph, the awful carnage, the terrible suffering, the manly patience of the wounded, all combine to fix the attention there and upon everything, which is transacted there. The question is constantly asked,--What is the Sanitary doing at the front? what at City Point? what at Winchester? are natural questions. Let me state first the general plan and method of what I may call a Sanitary campaign, and afterwards add what I saw with my own eyes at City Point and before Petersburg, and what I heard from those who had themselves been actors in the scenes which they described.

When the army moves out from its encampment to the field of active warfare, two or three Sanitary wagons, loaded with hospital stores of all sorts, and accompanied by a sufficient number of relief agents, move with each army corps. These are for the supply of present need, and for use during the march, or after such skirmishes and fights as may occur before the Commission can establish a new base. In this way some of the Commission agents have followed General Grant's army all the way from the Rapidan, through the Wilderness, across the Mattapony, over the James, on to the very last advance towards the Southside Railroad,--refilling their wagons with stores as opportunity has occurred. As soon now as the march commences and the campaign opens, preparations upon an extensive scale are made at Washington for the great probable demand. Steamers are chartered, loaded, and sent with a large force of relief agents to the vicinity of the probable battle-fields; or if the campaign is away from water communication, loaded wagons are held in readiness. The moment the locality of the struggle is determined, then, under the orders of the Provost Marshal, an empty house is seized and made the Sanitary head-quarters or general storehouse; or else some canal-barge is moored at the crazy Virginia wharf, and used for the same purpose. This storehouse is kept constantly full from Washington, or else from Baltimore and New York; and the branch depots which are now established in each army corps are fed from it, while the hospitals in their turn make requisitions for all needful supplies on these branch depots. That is to say, the arrangements, though rougher and less permanent in their character, approximate very nearly to the arrangements at Washington.

A few details need to be added. Where the distance from the battle-field to the base of supplies is great, what are called feeding-stations are established every few miles, and here the wounded on foot or in ambulances can stop and take the refreshments or stimulants necessary to sustain them on their painful journey. At the steamboat-landing the Commission has a lodge and agents, with crackers and beef-tea, coffee and tea, ice-water and stimulants, ready to be administered to such as need. Relief agents go up on the boats to help care for the wounded; and at Washington the same scene of active kindness is often enacted on their arrival as at their departure. This is the general plan of action everywhere, modified to suit circumstances, but always essentially the same. It will apply just as well West as East,--only for the names Baltimore, Washington, and City Point, you must put Louisville, Nashville, and Chattanooga.

When I was at City Point, the base of operations had been established there more than two months; and though there was much sickness, and the wounded were being brought in daily by hundreds from the prolonged struggle for the Weldon Road, everything moved on with the regularity of clock-work. As you neared the landing, coming up the James, you saw, a little farther up the river, the red flag of the Sanitary Commission floating over the three barges which were its office, its storehouse, and its distributing store for the whole Army of the Potomac. Climbing up the steep road to the top of the bluff, and advancing over the undulating plain a mile, you come to a city,--the city of hospitals. The white tents are arranged in lines of almost mathematical accuracy. The camp is intersected by roads broad and clean. Every corps, and every division of every corps, has its allotted square. Somewhere in these larger squares your eye will be sure to catch sight of the Sanitary flag, and beneath it a tent, where is the corps station. You enter, and you find within, if not as great an amount, at least as varied a supply, of hospital stores as you would find anywhere, waiting for surgeons' orders. To a very great extent, the extra diet for all the sick and wounded is furnished from these stores; and very largely the cooking of it is overseen by ladies connected with the Commission. In every corps there are from five to fifteen relief agents, whose duty it is to go through the wards once, twice, three times in each day, to see what the sick need for their comfort, to ascertain that they really get what is ordered, and in every way to alleviate suffering and to promote cheerfulness and health.

I shall never forget a tour which I made with a relief agent through the wards for the blacks, both because it showed me what a watchful supervision a really faithful person can exercise, and because it gave such an opportunity to observe closely the conduct of these people. The demeanor of the colored patients is really beautiful,--so gentle, so polite, so grateful for the least kindness. And then the evidences of a desire for mental improvement and religious life which meet you everywhere are very touching. Go from bed to bed, and you see in their hands primers, spelling-books, and Bibles, and the poor, worn, sick creatures, the moment they feel one throb of returning health, striving to master their alphabet or spell out their Bible. In the evening, or rather in the fading twilight, some two hundred of them crept from the wards, and seated themselves in a circle around a black exhorter. Religion to them was a real thing; and so their worship had the beauty of sincerity, while I ought to add that it was not marked by that grotesque extravagance sometimes attributed to it. One cannot but think better of the whole race after the experience of such a Sabbath. The only drawback to your satisfaction is, that they die quicker and from less cause than the whites. They have not the same stubborn hopefulness and hilarity. Why, indeed, should they have?

Speaking of the white soldiers, everybody who goes into their hospitals is happily disappointed,--you see so much order and cheerfulness, and so little evidence of pain and misery. The soldier is quite as much a hero in the hospital as on the battle-field. Give him anything to be cheerful about, and he will improve the opportunity. You see men who have lost an arm or a leg, or whose heads have been bruised almost out of likeness to humanity, as jolly as they can be over little comforts and pleasures which ordinary eyes can hardly see with a magnifying-glass. So it happens that a camp of six thousand sick and wounded, which seems at a distance a concentration of human misery that you cannot bear to behold, when near does not look half so lugubrious as you expected; and you are tempted to accuse the sick men of having entered into a conspiracy to look unnaturally happy.

If you go back now six or thirteen miles to the field hospitals, you find nothing essentially different. The system and its practical workings are the same. But it is a perpetual astonishment to find that here, near to the banks of a river that has not a respectable village on its shores from Fortress Monroe to Richmond,--here, in a houseless and desolate land which can be reached only by roads which are intersected by gullies, which plunge into sloughs of despond, which lose themselves in the ridges of what were once cornfields, or meander amid stumps of what so lately stood a forest,--that here you have every comfort for the sick: all needed articles of clothing, the shirts and drawers, the socks and slippers; and all the delicacies, too, the farinas, the jellies, the canned meats and fruits, the concentrated milk, the palatable drinks and stimulants, and even fresh fruits and vegetables. And in such profusion, too! I asked the chief agent of the Commission in the Ninth Corps how many orders he filled in a day. "Look for yourself." I took down the orders; and there they were, one hundred and twenty strong, some for little and some for much, some for a single article and some for a dozen articles.

But it is not in camps of long standing that the wounded and sick suffer for want of care or lack of comforts. It is when the base is suddenly changed, when all order is broken up, when there are no tents at hand, when the stores are scattered, nobody knows where, after a great battle perhaps, and the wounded are pouring in upon you like a flood, and when it seems as if no human energy and no mortal capacity of transportation could supply the wants both of the well and the sick, the almost insatiable demands of the battle-field and the equally unfathomable needs of the hospital, it is then that the misery comes, and it is then that the Commission does its grandest work. After the Battles of the Wilderness and Spottsylvania, twenty-five thousand wounded were crowded into Fredericksburg, where but ten thousand were expected. For a time supplies of all kinds seemed to be literally exhausted. There were no beds. There was not even straw. There were not surgeons enough nor attendants enough. There was hardly a supply of food. Some found it difficult to get a drop of cold water. Poor, wounded men, who had wearily trudged from the battle-field and taken refuge in a deserted house, remained hours and a day without care, and without seeing the face of any but their wounded comrades. Then the Sanitary Commission sent its hundred and fifty agents to help the overburdened surgeons. Then every morning it despatched its steamer down the Potomac crowded with necessaries and comforts. Then with ceaseless industry its twenty wagons, groaning under their burden, went to and fro over the wretched road from Belle Plain to Fredericksburg. A credible witness says that for several days nearly all the bandages and a large proportion of the hospital supplies came from its treasury. No mind can discern and no tongue can declare what valuable lives it saved and what sufferings it alleviated. Who shall say that Christian charity has not its triumphs proud as were ever won on battle-field? If the Commission could boast only of its first twenty-four hours at Antietam and Gettysburg and its forty-eight hours at Fredericksburg, it would have earned the everlasting gratitude and praise of all true men.

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But is there not a reverse to this picture? Are there no drawbacks to this success? Is there no chapter of abortive plans, of unfaithful agents, of surgeons and attendants appropriating or squandering charitable gifts? These are questions which are often honestly asked, and the doubts which they express or awaken have cooled the zeal and slackened the industry of many an earnest worker. There is no end to the stories which have been put in circulation. I remember a certain mythical blanket which figured in the early part of the war, and which, though despatched to the soldier, was found a few weeks after by its owner adorning the best bed of a hotel in Washington. To be sure, it seemed to have pursued a wandering life,--for now it was sent from the full stores of a lady in Lexington, and now it was stripped perhaps by a poor widow from the bed of her children, and then it was heard from far off in the West, ever seeking, but never reaching, its true destination. Without heeding any such stories, although they have done infinite mischief, I answer to honest queries, that I have no doubt that sometimes the stores of the Commission are both squandered and misappropriated. I do not positively know it; but I am sure that it would be a miracle, if they were not. It would be the first time in human history that so large and varied a business, and extending over such a breadth of country and such a period of time, was transacted without waste. Look at the facts. Here are thousands of United States surgeons and attendants of all ages and characters through whose hands many of these gifts must necessarily go. What wonder, if here and there one should be found whose principles were weaker than his appetites? Consider also the temptations. These men are hard-worked, often scantily fed. Every nerve is tried by the constant presence of suffering, and every sense by fetid odors. Would it be surprising, if they sometimes craved the luxuries which were so close at hand? Moreover, the Commission mission employs hundreds of men, the very best it can get, but it would be too much to ask that all should be models of prudence, watchfulness, and integrity.

I allow, then, that some misappropriation is not improbable. At the same time I do say, that every department is vigilantly watched, and that the losses are trivial, compared with the immense benefits. I do say, emphatically, that to bring a wholesale charge against whole classes, whose members are generally as high-minded and honorable as any other, to accuse them as a body of wretched peculations, is simply false and slanderous. I maintain that fidelity is the rule, and that its reverse is the petty exception; and that it would be in opposition to all rules by which men conduct their lives to suffer such exceptions to influence our conduct, or diminish our contributions to a good cause. In business how often we are harassed by petty dishonesty or great frauds! Nevertheless, the tide of business sweeps on. Why? Because the good so outweighs the evil. The railroad employee is negligent, and some terrible accident occurs. But the railroad keeps on running all the same; for the public convenience and welfare are the law of its life, and private peril and loss but an occasional episode. By the same rule, we support, without misgiving, the Commission, because the good which it certainly does, and the suffering it relieves, in their immensity cover up and put out of sight mistakes, which are incident to all human enterprise, and which are guarded against with all possible vigilance.

* * * * *

But allow all the good which is claimed, and that the good far transcends any possible evil, and then we are met by these further questions: Is such an organization necessary? Cannot Government do the work? And if so, ought not Government to do it?

I might with propriety answer: Suppose that Government ought to do the work and does not, shall we fold our hands and let our soldiers suffer? But the truth is, Government does do its duty. Some persons foolishly exaggerate the work of the Commission. They talk as though it were the only salvation of the wounded, as though the Government let everything go, and that, if the Commission and kindred societies did not step in, there would not be so much as a wreck of our army left. Such talk is simply preposterous. The Commission, considered as a free, spontaneous offering of a loyal people to the cause of our common country, is a wonderful enterprise. The Commission, standing ready to supply any deficiency, to remedy any defect, and to meet any unforeseen emergency, has done a good work that cannot be forgotten. But, compared with what Government expends upon the sick, its resources are nothing. I have not the figures at hand, though I have seen them; and it is hardly too much to say, that, where the society has doled out a penny, the Government has lavished a pound.

No sane defender, therefore, of this charity supports it on any such ground as that it is the principal benefactor of the soldier. The Commission alone could no more support our hospitals than it could the universe. But the homely adage, "It is best to have two strings to your bow," applies wonderfully to the case. In practical life men act upon this maxim. They like to have an adjunct to the best-working machinery, a sort of reserved power. Every sensible person sees that our mail arrangements furnish to the whole people admirable facilities. Nevertheless, we like to have an express, and occasionally to send letters and packages by it. When the children are sick, there is nothing so good as the advice of the trusted family physician and the unwearied care of the mother. Yet when the physician has done his work and gone his way, and when the mother is worn out by days of anxiety and nights of watching, we deem it a great blessing, if there is a kind neighbor who will come in, not to assume the work, but to help it on a little. The Commission, looking at the hospitals and the armies from a different point of view, sees much that another overlooks, and in an emergency, when all help is too little, brings fresh aid that is a priceless blessing. To the plain, substantial volume of public appropriations it adds the beautiful supplement of private benefactions. That is all that it pretends to do.

There are some special reflections that bear upon the point which we are considering. This war was sprung upon an unwarlike people. The officers of Government, when they entered upon their work, had no thought of the gigantic burdens which have fallen upon their shoulders. Since the war began, Government, like everybody else, has had to learn new duties, and to learn them amid the stress and perplexity of a great conflict. And among other things, it has been obliged, in some respects, to recast its medical regulations to meet the prodigious enlargement of its medical work. Beyond a doubt, much help, which, on account of this imperfection of the medical code itself, or of the inexperience of many who administered it, was needed by our hospitals at the commencement of the war, is not needed now, and much help that is needed now may not, if the war lasts, be needed in the future. But it takes time to move the machinery of a great state. And when any change is to become the permanent law of public action, it ought to take both time and thought to effect it. You do not wish to alter and re-alter the framework of a state or of a state's activity as you would patch up a ruinous old house. If you work at all in any department, you should wish to work on a massive, well-considered plan, so that what you do may last. It is not likely, therefore, that, in the great field of suffering which the war has laid open to us, the public ministries will either be so quickly or so perfectly adjusted as to make private ministries a superfluity.

Neither do we reflect enough upon the limitations of human power. We think sometimes of Government as a great living organism of boundless resources. But, after all, in any department of state, what plans, what overlooks, what vitalizes, is one single human mind. And it is not easy to get minds anywhere clear enough and capacious enough for the large duties. It is easy to obtain men who can command a company well. It is not difficult to find those who can control efficiently a regiment. There are many to whom the care of five thousand men is no burden; a few who are adequate to an army corps. But the generals who can handle with skill a hundred thousand men, and make these giant masses do their bidding, are the rare jewels in war's diadem. Even so is it in every department of life. It is perhaps impossible to find a mind which can sweep over the whole field of our medical operations, and prepare for every emergency and avoid every mistake; not because all men are unfaithful or incapable, but because there must be a limit to the most capacious intellect. Looking simply at the structure of the human mind, we might have foreseen, what facts have amply demonstrated, that in a war of such magnitude as that which we are now waging there always must be room for an organization like the Sanitary Commission to do its largest and noblest work.

But, above and beyond all such reflections, there are great national and patriotic considerations which more than justify, yea, demand, the existence of our war charities. Allowing that the outward comfort of the soldier (and who would grant it?) might be accomplished just as well in some other way,--allowing that in a merely sanitary aspect the Government could have done all that voluntary organizations have undertaken, and have done it as well as they or better than they,--even then we do not allow for a moment that what has been spent has been wasted. What is the Sanitary Commission, and what are kindred associations, but so many bonds of love and kindness to bind the soldier to his home, and to keep him always a loyal citizen in every hope and in every heart-throb? This is the influence which we can least of all afford to lose. He must have been blind who did not see at the outset of the war, that, beyond the immediate danger of the hour, there were other perils. We were trying the most tremendous experiment that was ever tried by any people. Out of the most peaceful of races we were creating a nation of soldiers. In a few months, where there seemed to be scarcely the elements of martial strength, we were organizing an army which was to be at once gigantic and efficient. Who could calculate the effect of such a swift change? The questions many a patriotic heart might have asked were these: When this wicked Rebellion is ended,--when these myriads of our brethren whose lives have been bound up in that wondrous collective life, the life of a great army, shall return to their quiet homes by the hills and streams of New England or on the rolling prairies of the West, will they be able to merge their life again in the simple life of the community out of which they came? Will they find content at the plough, by the loom, in the workshop, in the tranquil labors of civil life? Can they, in short, put off the harness of the soldier, and resume the robe of the citizen? Many a one could have wished to say to every soldier, as he went forth to the war, "Remember, that, if God spares your life, in a few months or a few years you will come back, not officers, not privates, but sons and husbands and brothers, for whom some home is waiting and some human heart throbbing. Never forget that your true home is not in that fort beside those frowning cannon, not on that tented field amid the glory and power of military array, but that it nestles beneath yonder hill, or stands out in sunshine on some fertile plain. Remember that you are a citizen yet, with every instinct, with every sympathy, with every interest, and with every duty of a citizen."

Can we overestimate the influence of these associations, of these Soldiers'-Aid Societies, rising up in every city and village, in producing just such a state of mind, in keeping the soldier one of us, one of the people? Five hundred thousand hearts following with deep interest his fortunes,--twice five hundred thousand hands laboring for his comfort,--millions of dollars freely lavished to relieve his sufferings,--millions more of tokens of kindness and good-will going forth, every one of them a message from the home to the camp: what is all this but weaving a strong network of alliance between civil and military life, between the citizen at home and the citizen soldier? If our army is a remarkable body, more pure, more clement, more patriotic than other armies,--if our soldier is everywhere and always a true-hearted citizen,--it is because the army and soldier have not been cast off from public sympathy, but cherished and bound to every free institution and every peaceful association by golden cords of love. The good our Commissions have done in this respect cannot be exaggerated; it is incalculable.

Nor should we forget the influence they have had on ourselves,--the reflex influence which they have been pouring back into the hearts of our people at home, to quicken their patriotism, We often say that the sons and brothers are what the mothers and sisters make them. Can you estimate the electric force which runs like an irresistible moral contagion from heart to heart in a community all of whose mothers and daughters are sparing that they may spend, and learning the value of liberty and country by laboring for them? It does not seem possible, that, amid the divers interests and selfish schemes of men, we ever could have sustained this war, and carried it to a successful issue, had it not been for the moral cement which these wide-spread philanthropic enterprises have supplied. Every man who has given liberally to support the Commission has become a missionary of patriotism; every woman who has cut and made the garments and rolled the bandages and knit the socks has become a missionary. And so the country has been full of missionaries, true-hearted and loyal, pleading, "Be patient, put up with inconveniences, suffer exactions, bear anything, rather than sacrifice the nationality our fathers bequeathed to us!" And if our country is saved, it will be in no small degree because so many have been prompted by their benevolent activity to take a deep personal interest in the struggle and in the men who are carrying on the struggle.

These national and patriotic influences are the crowning blessings which come in the train of the charities of the war; and they constitute one of their highest claims to our affection and respect. The unpatriotic utterances which in these latter days so often pain our ears, the weariness of burdens which tempt so many to be ready to accept anything and to sacrifice anything to be rid of them, admonish us that we need another uprising of the people and another re-birth of patriotism; and they show us that we should cherish more and more everything which fosters noble and national sentiments. And when this war is over, and the land is redeemed, and we come to ask what things have strengthened us to meet and overcome our common peril, may we not prophesy that high among the instrumentalities which have husbanded our strength, and fed our patriotism, and knit more closely the distant parts of our land and its divided interests, will be placed the United States Sanitary Commission?

ART.

HARRIET HOSMER'S ZENOBIA.

It took a long while for artists to understand that the Greek face was the ideal face merely to Greek sculptors. During the baser ages of the sculpturesque art, (how far towards our own day the epicycle inclusive of those ages extended it would be invidious for us to say,) sculpture consisted of the nearest imitation of Greek models which was possible of attainment by _talents_, with an occasional intercalated _genius_, hampered by prevailing modes. That the Greek face was _beautiful_, none could doubt. That in the sovereign points of _intellect_ it was the absolute beau-ideal is open to great doubt. Apart from all such questions, the fact of subservience exists. Even Benjamin Robert Haydon, the man who thought himself called to be the æsthetic saviour of the age, knew no other, no better way of making himself master of solid form than by lying down in the cold with a candle before the Elgin marbles. Let not this be mistaken as a slur upon one of the most devoted men in history,--a man who surely lived, and who, aside from the pangs of poverty, probably died, for the regeneration of Art. We only mean to select an instance preëminent over all that can be mentioned, to show that until a very late date even the most learned men in the Art-world had not cut loose from the fascination of old models, considered not as suggestive, but as dominant. There is nothing in the sculptors of Haydon's period to prove that their view differed essentially from that of the most self-devoted theorist among painters.

We hold that it has been left for America to complete the æsthetic, as well as the social and political emancipation of the world. The fact that pre-Raphaelism began in England (we refer to the _new_ saints standing on their toe-nails, not the _old_ ones) proves nothing respecting the origination of Art's highest liberty. In the first place, the man who was selected by the Elisha to be the Elijah of the school would under no circumstances have chosen a fiery chariot to go up in, but would have taken the Lord Mayor's coach, (if he could have got it without paying,) and, like a true Englishman, been preceded by heralds, and after-run by lackeys. The idea of Turner _en martyre_ is to a calm spectator simply amusing. If "a neglected disciple of Truth" had met him out a-sketching, and asked him for help, or a peep, he would have shut up his book with a slap, and said, like the celebrated laird, "_Puir bodie! fin' a penny for yer ain sel'_." In the second place, this Elijah never dropped his mantle on the _soi-disant_ Elisha. Search over the whole range of walls where (with their color somewhat the worse for time) Turner's pictures are preserved, and if any critic but Ruskin's self can find the qualities which unite Turner with modern pre-Raphaelism, we will buy the view of Köln and make it a present to him. In the third place, apart from all ancestry or indorsement, we regard modern pre-Raphaelism, as a school full of vital mistakes. It refuses to acknowledge this preëminent, eternal fact of Art, _that the entire truth of Nature cannot be copied_: in other words and larger, that the artist must select between the major and the minor facts of the outer world; that, before he executes, he must pronounce whether he will embody the essential effect, that which steals on the soul and possesses it without painful analysis, or the separate details which belong to the geometrician and destroy the effect,--still further, whether he will make us feel what Nature says, or examine below her voice into the vibration of the _chordæ vocales_.

We have not touched on pre-Raphaelism with the idea of attacking it, still less of defending it, and not at all of discussing it. Our view has been simply to excuse the assertion that with America has begun, must necessarily begin and belong, the enfranchisement of Art from subservience to a type,--the opening of its doors into the open air of æsthetic catholicity.

Years ago, the writer in several places presented to the consideration of American Art-lovers the plaster bust of "The Old Trapper," as one of the foremost things which up to that period had been done by any man for such enfranchisement as that referred to above. Palmer, the noble master and teacher of the sculptor who created this bust, had done many things entirely outside of the old ring-fence, had made himself famous by them; but this, on some accounts, seemed to us the chief, because the most audacious of all. What did it represent? Simply an old, worn, peril-tried, battle-scarred man, who had fought grislies and Indians,--walked leagues with his canoe on his back,--camped under snow-peaks,--dined on his rifle's market,--had nothing but his heroic pluck, patience, and American individuality, to fascinate people,--and now, under a rough fur cap of his own making, showed a face without a line that was Greek in it, and said to Launt Thompson, "Make me, if you dare!"

What we then admired in "The Old Trapper" we now admire in Miss Hosmer's "Zenobia."

* * * * *

There now stands on exhibition in this country one of the finest examples of the spirit which animates our best American artists in their selection of ideals, and their execution of them on the catholic principle.

Miss Hosmer has not thought it necessary to color her statue, because she knew that the utmost capability of sculpture is the expression of form,--that, had she colored it, she would have brought it into competition with a Nature entirely beyond her in mere details, and made it a doll instead of a statue. Neither has she made it a travel-stained woman with a carpet-bag, because in history all mean details melt away, and we see its actors at great distances like the Athené, and because our whole idea of Zenobia is this:--

_A Queen led in Chains._

Neither has she made her Zenobia a Greek woman, because she was a Palmyrene. What she has made her is this:--

_Our idea of Zenobia won from Romance and History._

This Zenobia is a queen. She is proud as she was when she sat in pillared state, under gorgeous canopies, with a hundred slaves at her beck, and a devoted people within reach of her couriers. She does not tremble or swerve, though she has her head down. That head is bowed only because she is a woman, and she will not give the look of love to the man who has forced her after him. Her lip has no weakness in it. She is a _lady_, and knows that there is something higher than joy or pain. Miss Hosmer has evidently believed nothing of the legends to the effect that she did swerve afterward, else she could not have put that noble soul in her heroine's mouth. Or did she believe the swerving, she must have felt that Aurelian had the right, after all pain and wrong, to come and claim the queen,--to say,--

"I did all this wrong _for_ you, and you were worth it."

The face (perhaps, with the present necessities of a catholicized Art, its most important excellence) is not a Greek face, but a much farther Oriental.

The bas-reliefs of Layard's Nineveh are not more characteristic, national, faithful to the probable facts in that best aspect of facts with which Art has to do.

As for the figure, none of those who from Roman studios have hitherto sent us their work have ever given a juster idea of their advancement in the understanding of the human anatomy. The bones of the right metatarsus show as they would under the flesh of a queenly foot. The right foot is the one flexed in Zenobia's walking, and that foot has never been used to support the weight of burdens; it has gone bare without being soiled. The shoulders perfectly carry the head, and no anatomist could suggest a place where they might be bent or erected in truer relative proportion to either of the feet. The dejection of the right arm is a wonderful compromise between the valor of a queen who has fought her last and best, and the grief of a woman who has no further resource left to her womanliness.

Both arms, in their anatomy, in their truthfulness to the queenly circumstances, may equally delight and challenge criticism. The chains which the queen carries are smaller than we suspect a _Roman_ conqueror put even upon a woman and a queen; but let that pass,--for they do not hurt the harmony of the idea, and are simply a matter of detail, which womanly sympathy might well have erred in since chivalric days, though their adherence to actual truth would not have blemished the idea. At all events, Zenobia holds them like a queen, so as not to hurt her. She _will_ remember her glory.

The drapery of the statue is a subordinate matter; but that has been attended to as true artists attend to even the least things which wait on a great idea. The tassels of the robe have been chiselled by Miss Hosmer's marble-cutter with a care which shows that the last as well as the first part of the work went on under her womanly supervision. Every fold of the robe, which must have been copied from the cast, falls and swings before our eyes as the position demands. Grace and truth lie in the least wrinkle of a garment which needs no after-cast of the anatomist's cloak of charity to hide a sin.

In many respects, we regard Miss Hosmer's "Zenobia" as one of the very highest honors paid by American Art to our earliest assertions of its dominant destiny.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Patriotism in Poetry and Prose._ Being Selected Passages from Lectures and Patriotic Readings. By JAMES E. MURDOCH. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co. 12mo.

This volume, published in aid of the funds of the Sanitary Commission, is one of the indications of the patriotism of the time. Mr. Murdoch, an eminent and estimable actor and elocutionist, has been engaged, ever since the war began, in doing his part towards rousing and sustaining the enthusiasm of the people, by scattering the burning words of patriotic poets in our Western camps and towns. The volume contains specimens of lyric poetry which have stood the test of actual delivery before soldiers who were facing the grim realities of war. Sometimes the elocutionist has been so near the enemy as to have a shell come into whizzing or screaming competition with the clear and ringing tones of his voice; at other times, he has cheered with "The American Flag," "Old Ironsides," or "The Union," audiences shivering with cold and famishing on a short allowance of hard-tack. He has seen the American soldier under all circumstances, and practically understands all the avenues to his heart and brain. Many of the poems in the volume which have obtained a national popularity were originally written at his suggestion. This is especially true of the sounding lyrics of Boker, Read, and Janvier. His own hearty and well-considered words, so full of manly feeling and genuine patriotism, are none the worse for catching a little of that inflation which the sights of the hospital and the battle-field, and a sympathy with the average sentiment of sensitive crowds, are so sure to provoke in an earnest and ardent mind. The poets who are represented in this volume have cause for gratification in the assurance that they have been more generally read than any of their American contemporaries. It is estimated that Mr. Murdoch has recited their pieces to a quarter of million of people during the last four years. In the hospital, in the camp, before the lyceum audience, they have been made to do their good work of comforting, rousing, or inflaming their auditors. They have sent many a volunteer to the front, and nerved him afterwards at the moment of danger. And certainly the friends of the soldiers will desire to read what soldiers have so heartily applauded, especially as the money they give for the book goes to sustain the most popular and beneficent of all charities.

_Philosophy as Absolute Science, founded in the Universal Laws of Being, and including Ontology, Theology, and Psychology made one, as Spirit, Soul, and Body._ By E. L. and A. L. FROTHINGHAM. Volume I. Boston: Walker, Wise, & Co.

We must go back to the time when a certain father and son of Crete stretched their waxen wings and soared boldly into space, to discover any "external representation" of the sublime attempt of the authors of this volume. Yet it may reasonably be objected that in the Dædalian legend we can detect but a partial and deceptive correspondence; for, whereas we read that one of the ancient voyagers, having ventured too near the sun, met his end by a distressing casualty, it is certain, that, when the reader loses sight of this modern family-excursion in the metaphysical ether, both parties are pushing vigorously on, wings in capital condition, wind never better, and the grand tour of the universe in process of most happy accomplishment. And let it here be mentioned that the senior of the gentlemen whose names are given upon the title-page is understood to resemble the classical artificer in being inventor and manufacturer of pinions for the two. Mr. E. L. Frothingham is to be regarded as substantially the author of the volume before us.

And so Philosophy is not dead, after all! Mr. Lewes's rather handsome resolutions, of which copies have been forwarded to the friends of the supposed deceased, turn out to be premature; Dr. Mansel's pious obituary is an impertinence; Comte and Buckle, Mill and Spencer, are not the spendthrift heirs of her homestead estate in Dreamland. The Positive Mrs. Gamp may continue to assure us that the bantling "never breathed to speak on in this wale," but the perennial showman persists in depicting it "quite contrairy in a livin' state, and performing beautiful upon the 'arp." We play with metaphors, hesitating to characterize this latest Minerva-birth. For it is either that "new sensation" demanded by the Sir Charles Coldstream who has used up all religions and all philosophies, or, being a _reductio ad absurdum_ of speculative pretension, it fulfils the promise of a recent quack advertisement, and is in very truth "The Metaphysical Cure."

Perhaps it were better to cancel the preceding paragraphs. Is not any savor of banter out of place in the reception we are bound to accord to an alleged solution of the unthinkable problem which underlies creation and man's position therein? If the impulse which first controlled us is not denied expression, it is because it implies at once the worst that can be said of a very extraordinary performance. Let this worst be written roughly, and in a single sentence. To the vast majority of upright and thoughtful men who are at present living and laboring in the world, Mr. Frothingham's "Philosophy as Absolute Science" can be saved from being infinitely repulsive only by being infinitely ridiculous. But to stop with this assertion would give no adequate impression of an earnest and most conscientious work. A remarkable mind, even if a misdirected one, has mounted upon the battlements of its system, and proclaimed victory over all things. Of all tellers of marvels, Swedenborg alone is so absolutely free from a vulgar fanaticism, and so innocent of any appeal to passion, prejudice, or taste. With an equipoise of disposition which is almost provoking, Mr. Frothingham announces as dogmas speculations from whose sweep and immensity the human mind recoils. Having posited his principles, he confidently proceeds to deduce a system which shall include every spiritual and material fact of which man can take cognizance. And he is too genuine a philosopher to be troubled at the practical application of his discoveries. He repudiates with contempt whatever expression has been found for the energy of the purest and noblest leaders of modern society. Esculapius is not accommodated with the sacrifice of so much as a February chicken. The manly works of Wilberforce and Garrison, the gracious influence of Channing, the stalwart conviction of Parker, the deep perception of Emerson,--all these must be beaten down under our feet as the incarnate Satan of the Litany. But if this is rather rough treatment for the advance-guard of civilization, the brethren in the rear rank are prevented from taking the comfort to which they seem to be justly entitled. For we are utterly unable to understand what a recent reviewer means in commending this work to conservatives as a noble text-book and grand summary of arguments in favor of their positions. The truth is, that no conservative can possibly accept the system. For it is constantly shown that what may be called a progressive _bouleversement_ is to every individual a necessary advance, securing to him experiences which are essential to the realization of that spiritual consciousness which is alone capable of receiving the Absolute Philosophy. The editor of the "Richmond Examiner" must become as he of the "Liberator," and the Bishop of Vermont must meditate a John Brown raid, before either of them can receive the ultimate redemption now published to the world.

From what Mr. Frothingham calls "an internal-natural point of observation," which we understand to be that of a great majority of the most intelligent and gifted people at present on the earth, the results of this scheme appear so false and contradictory as to furnish its very adequate refutation. Nevertheless, there doubtless exists a class of spiritually minded, cultivated, unsatisfied men and women who will feel that the sober sincerity of this voice crying in the commercial wilderness must challenge a respectful hearing. Such persons will find no difficulty in accepting the statement, that a system of Absolute Truth must be "contrary to the natural conceptions of the mind, to the facts of the natural consciousness, and to the inclinations of the natural heart." Their past experiences have told them that no precision of human speech can reveal a spiritual condition, or even render intelligible the highest mental operations. Instead of the "this-will-never-do" dictum of superficial and carnal criticism, they will offer patient study, and be content that much shall appear foolish and meaningless until a change in the interior being can interpret it aright. It is just to mention that a very few persons of the character described have already received Mr. Frothingham's philosophy, and profess to find it full of instruction and delight. And let it not be concealed that no one who did not possess the very abundant leisure necessary for investigation and meditation, and had not passed through mental states represented by Romanism, Protestantism, Unitarianism, and Transcendentalism, could be accepted by the veriest neophyte as a competent reviewer. We attempt nothing more than a very humble notice which may bring the existence of this latest salvation before some of the scattered fellowship who are ready for it. We despair of making any statement concerning it which believers would not consider ludicrously inadequate or absolutely false. All and singular are accordingly warned that what is here printed comes from a mental point of view totally opposed to the alleged Truth, as well as from that limited amount of application which a regular calling in the week and customary church-going on Sunday has left at our disposal.

Mr. Frothingham claims to have obtained cognizance of certain laws which govern the relations of the Universe. He maintains that the natural understanding of man is led through various educative processes to that vague and variously interpreted condition known as Transcendentalism. This final manifestation, although no other than Antichrist and the Man of Sin in person, is a necessary forerunner of our possible redemption through acceptance of the ultimate Gospel. For external philosophy has here reached its lowest form, which is necessarily self-destructive; and so ends what may be called the natural development of the human consciousness. The personal principle has achieved its utmost might of self-assertion against that which is universal. Selfishness now appears in its most destructive form, demanding the liberty instead of the subjection of men. Sympathy usurps the seat of Justice, the individual is cruel under pretence of being kind, and fanaticism and mischief are baptized as Duty. The divinely ordained institutions of society are sacrificed, and ruin and chaos inevitably result. Having shown that Philosophy, developed in its natural form, can produce nothing better than Pantheism, Atheism, Anthropomorphism, and Skepticism, there arises an inquiry for the causes which have produced these seemingly unhappy results. And now it appears "that the Consciousness must be developed in its natural form from a natural point of view before its spiritual form can be developed; and therefore that Philosophy must be developed as a natural production in three spheres before it can be realized as a Universal Spiritual Science." Again, the Cause of All has hitherto been conceived from a pagan, Unitarian, and naturalistic point of view. For, if we understand Mr. Frothingham, the Pope is not a whit sounder than M. Renan,--the Head of the Church being unable to "consciously appropriate" his own theological formularies, until, governed by a Unitarian and naturalistic law, they are contradicted in being incarnated. Philosophy, then, hitherto demanding that everything should be realized from one Universal Cause or Substance, "has failed to explain the nature of God and the nature of man from any rational point of view." It has been obliged to "recognize necessity as the universal law of life, and to conceive the production of the phenomenal from the absolute,--therefore of man from God; and also the production of the finite from the infinite,--therefore of diversity from unity, of evil from good, and of death from life; which is the greatest violation of rationality that can possibly be supposed." But it is now time to state, or rather faintly to adumbrate, the grand assumption of this singular work. There are held to be two Spiritual Causes, whose union is the condition of all existence. Each of these Causes, represented under the terms of Infinite and Finite Law, are conceived to be threefold principles which act and operate together as Death and Life. Neither the Infinite nor the Finite Principle can obtain definite manifestation without the aid of the other; but there is a capacity in the latter for becoming receptive and productive from the former. And from this august union come all the works of creation, where death is still made productive from life, evil from good, the natural from the spiritual,--this last happy productiveness never taking place by any development of the natural, but only by means of a spiritual conception and birth. Every individual must commence his existence as a dualistic substance necessarily discordant and unreal. Through various appearances, representing an experience of opposing spiritual laws, he reaches a position where true spiritual life becomes possible through presentation to the consciousness of the opposing Spiritual Laws already noticed. The solemn moment of choice, when for the first and only time man can be said to be a free agent, has now arrived. Affinities for the Laws of Death and Life are felt within him. He may become productive from the Infinite for universal ends, or from the Finite for those which are personal. He is saved or lost at his own election.

Within the limits to which we are restricted, it is impossible to give any account of the multiplex and abstruse details into which the system is carried. The present volume contains an ontology constructed upon the new basis. It shows varied study, and abounds in ponderous quotations and laborious analyses. It will be profoundly interesting to the few who are able to accept as axioms the teacher's assumptions, and to trace a vigorous deduction in the changes which are rung upon a small set of words. By a legitimate course of reasoning from his primal conception, Mr. Frothingham claims to have demonstrated the fact of Tripersonality in the Deity. He finds the universal law of spiritual life through Marriage or the union of opposites through voluntary sacrifice. It is likewise maintained that all the important statements of Absolute Science are represented in Philosophy, the Scriptures, and the Church,--each abounding in poetic symbols of absolute facts now for the first time revealed. The Bible is held to be of supernatural origin and universal application,--though of course its real significance has hitherto been hidden from men. An exgesis of the Book of Job is given in the appendix as a specimen of what may be disclosed in the sacred records from this ultimate position of belief.

Mr. Frothingham's claims are in some measure those of a seer. His immense show of philosophical apparatus, his prodigality of logical balance-wheels and escapements, resemble the superfluous clock-work of the "automaton" which plays its game as the gentleman concealed inside shall judge expedient. It is of course impossible to probe the Two Absolutes, or the wonderful marriage which takes place between them. Mr. Frothingham _sees_ that so it is. Men of aspirations as high, and of intellect as cultivated, will think that they have no difficulty in seeing quite as distinctly that so it is not. Others, lovers of Truth, zealous for human welfare, may look up a moment from their patient study of phenomena in their coexistences and successions, and humbly confess their inability to see into the matter at all. But it is to be observed that the most distinguished representatives of the two classes of the world's instructors have at present come to nearly identical conclusions as to what should be the aims of human society. Mr. Henry James and Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Emerson and Dr. Draper, would find little difficulty in working together in a state cabinet or on a legislative committee. Without discussing the breadth or character of their several knowledges or intuitions, they would probably approve the same measures, and agree in the routine which, under existing circumstances, it was best to pursue. But unless Mr. Frothingham should be wrecked upon a desolate island, and there be visited by picnics of Transcendentalists from whom he might occasionally reclaim a Caucasian Man Friday, we cannot see what practical parturition can come of his mighty labor. He offers nothing which is capable of becoming incorporated with the existing intelligence of the age. He furnishes no acceptable basis for the caution of maturity or the generous vision of youth. Charles Lamb's recipe for witnessing with any quietude of conscience the artificial comedy of the last century was, to regard the whole as a passing pageant, and to accept with cheerful unconcern its issues for life and death. Some such state of mind must be commended to the student of this Philosophy. Let him be indifferent to that great act of political justice which Abraham Lincoln was constrained to do. Let him have no glow of satisfaction in the improved condition of woman, allowed to own herself and to hold the property which her labor accumulates. Let him not remember how she has repaid every effort made in her behalf by marking the gauge upon the thermometer of civilization, and by raising man as he raises her. In short, let him provisionally stand upon such a platform as might be constructed by a committee of which Legree was chairman and Bluebeard the rest of it, and if he does not accept "Absolute Science," he will at least be patient in reading what may be said in its behalf. But if, in justice to ourselves, we present the obvious objections of the general reader, in justice to Mr. Frothingham, we are bound to confess that they shrivel in the blaze of special illumination with which he has been favored. He grants the value of effort as it appears in the accepted channels of the day, but contends that its value is confined to the development and growth of the individual who exercises it. It furnishes a groundwork which at the right time shall provide the material suggestive of supernatural thought. It prepares the sacrifice that will be necessary in view of the new order of spiritual experiences now presented for the first time to the consciousness of man.

It scarcely need be said that Mr. Frothingham does not expect to make many proselytes. He is well aware that his stupendous gift of a supreme and ultimate Philosophy will produce no perceptible effect upon the public. A complaint of taxes and a gossip of stocks continue audible; but no neighbor drops in to tell us that the Mystery of Mysteries has received elucidation, and that a man may know even as he is known. It is fortunate that the lofty aim of a sincere and earnest thinker is its own sufficient recompense. The quality of mind which struggles out of the easy-going electicism which at present contents the majority of cultivated men, and achieves a position where our poor half-truths combine in a grand organic whole, is beyond the reach of human congratulation. And the results of such conscientious and arduous striving we are bound to receive with respect. To the disciples of Mr. Frothingham we shall doubtless seem to have uttered some superficial commonplaces about his creed, and have displayed our total inability to penetrate to its true profundities. They will probably say that his theory can tolerate no partial statement, and that the attempts of the uninitiated can compass nothing but caricature and burlesque. We cordially give them the advantage of this supposed stricture, and as cordially refer all earnest inquirers to this first instalment of the heroic work. We say _heroic_, and would abate the adjective of no jot of meaning. It requires the stuff of which heroes are made to promulgate a religious idea so unadapted to the conscious demands of any order or condition of men. A few persons of redundant leisure, touched with the restlessness in belief which is characteristic of the time, may thread the mazes of "Absolute Science" until they awaken the desirable perception of it coherency and strength. We know that there is somewhere a flock awaiting the leadership of any vigorous mind which does not doubt its mission, and mocks at all question and compromise. Especially is it the duty of those who feel that they have attained the necessary condition of "transcendental imbecility" to test the enormous pretension of a doctrine of whose reception they alone are capable. Whether Mr. Frothingham's book is wise and satisfying, they only can tell us. It is our humbler duty to declare that we have found it decidedly interesting, and perfectly harmless. The old charge of corrupting youth cannot be preferred against this newest of philosophers. For as error is dangerous only in proportion to its plausibility, the risk encountered by the reader is infinitesimal.

_Looking toward Sunset._ By L. MARIA CHILD. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

For forty years it has been the good fortune of Mrs. Child to achieve a series of separate literary successes, whose accumulated value justly gives her a high claim to gratitude. Every one of her chief works has been a separate venture in some new field, always daring, always successful, always valuable. Her "Juvenile Miscellany" was the delight of all American childhood, when childish books were few. Her "Hobomok" was one of the very first attempts to make this country the scene of historical fiction. In the freshness of literary success, she did not hesitate to sacrifice all her newly won popularity, for years, by the publication of her remarkable "Appeal for the Class of Americans called Africans," a book unsurpassed in ability and comprehensiveness by any of the innumerable later works on the same subject,--works which would not even now supersede it, except that its facts and statistics have become obsolete. Time and the progress of the community at length did her justice once more, and her charming "Letters from New York" brought all her popularity back. Turning away, however, from fame won by such light labors, she devoted years of her life to the compilation of her great work on the "Progress of Religious Ideas," a book unequalled in the English language as a magazine of the religious aspirations of the race. And now, still longing to look in some new direction, she finds that direction in "Sunset,"--the only region towards which her name and her nature have alike excused her from turning her gaze before.

This volume is a collection of essays and poems, old and new, original and selected, but all bearing on the theme of old age. Her authors range from Cicero to Dickens, from Mrs. Barbauld to Theodore Parker. The book includes that unequalled essay by Jean Paul, "Recollections of the Best Hours of Life for the Hour of Death"; and then makes easily the transition to that delicious scene of humor and pathos from "Cranford," where dear Miss Matty meets again the lover of her youth. Some trifling errors might be noticed here and there, such as occur even in books looking this side of "Sunset": as when Burns's line, "But now your brow is beld, John," is needlessly translated into "But now your head's turned bald, John,"--where the version is balder than the head. It is singular, too, how long it takes to convince the community that Milton did not write the verses, "I am old and blind," and that Mrs. Howell of Philadelphia did. Mrs. Child discreetly cites for them no author at all, and thus escapes better than the editor of the new series of "Hymns for the Ages," who boldly appends to the poem, "Milton, 1608-1674." Yet Mrs. Child's early ventures in the way of writing speeches for James Otis and sermons for Whitefield should have made her a sharper detective of the ingenuity of others. Those successful imitations, published originally in her novel of "The Rebels," have hardly yet ceased to pass current in the school elocution-books.

Nothing occurs to us as being omitted from this collection, which justly belongs there, unless she could have rescued from the manuscript that charming essay, read by President Quincy at a certain Cambridge dinner, wherein that beloved veteran--_Roscius sua arte_--taught his academic children to grow old.

_The Autobiography of a New England Farm-House._ A Book. By N. H. CHAMBERLAIN. New York: Carleton.

We have read this little book with some tenderness, and have been interested in its calm, homelike pictures. The author appears to have been drawn by a sincere affinity towards the poet to whom he does himself the honor to dedicate his story in words of simple and sincere appreciation.

There is a pellucid stillness, like that of a summer lake, over the pages wherein the story lies reflected. And this perhaps we may consider to be the charm and value of the book. But the author does not remember that only those things are read which _must be said_; therefore the simple incidents of his narrative are forced into a growth of many instead of few chapters, and the long-drawn cord becomes weak, and will not easily lead us to the end. He also betrays his lack of art by printing verses which stick like deep sea-shells far below the high-water mark of poetry. Nevertheless, there is a fine New England color and flavor in the book which attract us, and a gentle, high-minded peace reigns throughout the volume.

Is the author young? we are tempted to ask. Then let him turn priest straightway, and enter the temple of Art, and let him weave his pictures sacredly of the pure gold fibres of inspiration and thought.

_Lowell Lectures. The Problem of Human Destiny; or, The End of Providence in the World and Man._ By ORVILLE DEWEY, D.D. New York: James Miller.

The publication of a second edition of this thoughtful, genial, and eloquent volume enables us to correct the omission of not noticing it on its first appearance a few months ago. Originally prepared as a course of lectures for the Lowell Institute, and repeated with marked success in various cities of the Union, the mode of treatment is of course popular rather than scientific. The subject is necessarily complicated with the problem of evil; but the design is not so much to attempt a new solution of the problem as to present, in a vivid and impressive form, certain invigorating and consoling truths which relieve the weight of its burden. The most comprehensive definition of evil, to all minds which are forced, by the contradiction involved in the affirmation of two Infinites, to deny its essential existence, is that which declares it to be imperfect good. But as this definition implies that evil characterizes all grades of created being, and includes the saint singing in heaven as well as the savage prowling in the woods, it carries with it little help or satisfaction to the practical will and conscience. Dr. Dewey takes up the problem at one or two removes from its purely abstract essence, and fastens on its concrete manifestations, and the compensations for its existence in the system of the world. The leading ideas he aims to inculcate are these: that the system of the moral world is a system of spontaneous development, having for its object human culture; that man, being free, must do, within the sphere of his permitted activity, what he will, and therefore is free to do what is wrong; that, in order that his growth may be free and rational, the system of treatment under which he lives must be one of general laws, and not of capricious expedients; and that there are two restraints on his wild or pernicious activity,--one inward, from his moral nature, the other outward, from material Nature. After illustrating these at considerable, though by no means tedious length, Dr. Dewey proceeds to exhibit the adaptation of the material world to human culture,--the physical and moral constitution of man, and the complexity of his being,--the mental and moral activity elicited by his connection with Nature and life,--the problems of pain, hereditary evil, and death, which affect his individual existence,--the problems of bad or defective institutions and usages, religious, political, and warlike, which affect his social existence,--and the testimony of history to human progress, and to the principles of human spontaneity and divine control which underlie it.

But this bare enumeration conveys no impression of the richness of the author's matter or the fineness of his spirit. The volume is full of interesting facts, gathered from a wide range of thoughtful reading, literary, historical, theological, and scientific, and of facts, too, which are associated with thoughts and related to a plan. The judgments expressed on all the vital questions which come up in the discussion of the theme bear the impress of genuine convictions. They are not merely the assent of the understanding to propositions, but of the soul to truths; and many must have been subjected to the test of personal experience as well as mental scrutiny. The first requisite of a work on the problem of human destiny is, that it should kindle the reader into sympathy with human nature, and lodge in his mind an abiding conviction of the reality of human progress; and this requisite Dr. Dewey's volume satisfies better than many treatises of more scientific exactness and more ambitious pretensions.