Dick Venner had seen life enough to wear out the earlier sensibilities of adolescence. He was tired of worshipping or tyrannizing over the bistred or umbered beauties of mingled blood among whom he had been living. Even that piquant exhibition which the Rio de Mendoza presents to the amateur of breathing sculpture failed to interest him. He was thinking of a far-off village on the other side of the equator, and of the wild girl with whom he used to play and quarrel, a creature of a different race from these degenerate mongrels.

"A game little devil she was, sure enough!"—and as Dick spoke, he bared his wrist to look for the marks she had left on it: two small white scars, where the two small sharp upper teeth had struck when she flashed at him with her eyes sparkling as bright as those glittering stones sewed up in the belt he wore.—"That's a filly worth noosing!" said Dick to himself, as he looked in admiration at the sign of her spirit and passion. "I wonder if she will bite at eighteen as she did at eight! She shall have a chance to try, at any rate!"

Such was the self-sacrificing disposition with which Richard Venner, Esq., a passenger by the Condor from Valparaiso, set foot upon his native shore, and turned his face in the direction of Rockland, The Mountain, and the mansion-house. He had heard something, from time to time, of his New-England relatives, and knew that they were living together as he left them. And so he heralded himself to "My dear Uncle" by a letter signed "Your loving nephew, Richard Venner," in which letter he told a very frank story of travel and mercantile adventure, expressed much gratitude for the excellent counsel and example which had helped to form his character and preserve him in the midst of temptation, inquired affectionately after his uncle's health, was much interested to know whether his lively cousin who used to be his playmate had grown up as handsome as she promised to be, and announced his intention of paying his respects to them both at Rockland. Not long after this came the trunks marked R.V. which he had sent before him, forerunners of his advent: he was not going to wait for a reply or an invitation.

What a sound that is,—the banging down of the preliminary trunk, without its claimant to give it the life which is borrowed by all personal appendages, so long as the owner's hand or eye is on them! If it announce the coming of one loved and longed for, how we delight to look at it, to sit down on it, to caress it in our fancies, as a lone exile walking out on a windy pier yearns towards the merchantman lying along-side, with the colors of his own native land at her peak, and the name of the port he sailed from long ago upon her stern! But if it tell the near approach of the undesired, inevitable guest, what sound short of the muffled noises made by the undertakers as they turn the corners in the dim-lighted house, with low shuffle of feet and whispered cautions, carries such a sense of knocking-kneed collapse with it as the thumping down in the front entry of the heavy portmanteau, rammed with the changes of uncounted coming weeks?

Whether the R.V. portmanteaus brought one or the other of these emotions to the tenants of the Dudley mansion, it might not be easy to settle. Elsie professed to be pleased with the thought of having an adventurous young stranger, with stories to tell, an inmate of their quiet, not to say dull, family. Under almost any other circumstances, her father would have been unwilling to take a young fellow of whom he knew so little under his roof; but this was his nephew, and anything that seemed like to amuse or please Elsie was agreeable to him. He had grown almost desperate, and felt as if any change in the current of her life and feelings might save her from some strange paroxysm of dangerous mental exaltation or sullen perversion of disposition, from which some fearful calamity might come to herself or others.

Dick had been some weeks at the Dudley mansion. A few days before, he had made a sudden dash for the nearest large city,—and when the Doctor met him, he was just returning from his visit.

* * * * *

It had been a curious meeting between the two young persons, who had parted so young and after such strange relations with each other. When Dick first presented himself at the mansion, not one in the house would have known him for the boy who had left them all so suddenly years ago. He was so dark, partly from his descent, partly from long habits of exposure, that Elsie looked almost fair beside him. He had something of the family beauty which belonged to his cousin, but his eye had a fierce passion in it, very unlike the cold glitter of Elsie's. Like many people of strong and imperious temper, he was soft-voiced and very gentle in his address, when he had no special reason for being otherwise. He soon found reasons enough to be as amiable as he could force himself to be with his uncle and his cousin. Elsie was to his fancy. She had a strange attraction for him, quite unlike anything he had ever known in other women. There was something, too, in early associations: when those who parted as children meet as man and woman, there is always a renewal of that early experience which followed the taste of the forbidden fruit,—a natural blush of consciousness, not without its charm.

Nothing could be more becoming than the behavior of "Richard Venner, Esquire, the guest of Dudley Venner, Esquire, at his noble mansion," as he was announced in the Court column of the "Rockland Weekly Universe." He was pleased to find himself treated with kindness and attention as a relative. He made himself very agreeable by abundant details concerning the religious, political, social, commercial, and educational progress of the South American cities and states. He was himself much interested in everything that was going on about the Dudley mansion, walked all over it, noticed its valuable wood-lots with special approbation, was delighted with the grand old house and its furniture, and would not be easy until he had seen all the family silver and heard its history. In return, he had much to tell of his father, now dead,—the only one of the Tenners, beside themselves, in whose fate his uncle was interested. With Elsie, he was subdued and almost tender in his manner; with the few visitors whom they saw, shy and silent,—perhaps a little watchful, if any young man happened to be among them.

Young fellows placed on their good behavior are apt to get restless and nervous, all ready to fly off into some mischief or other. Dick Venner had his half-tamed horse with him to work off his suppressed life with. When the savage passion of his young blood came over him, he would fetch out the mustang, screaming and kicking as these amiable beasts are wont to do, strap the Spanish saddle tight to his back, vault into it, and, after getting away from the village, strike the long spurs into his sides and whirl away in a wild gallop, until the black horse was flecked with white foam, and the cruel steel points were red with his blood. When horse and rider were alike tired, he would fling the bridle on his neck and saunter homeward, always contriving to get to the stable in a quiet way, and coming into the house as calm as a bishop after a sober trot on his steady-going cob.

After a few weeks of this kind of life, he began to want some more fierce excitement. He had tried making downright love to Elsie, with no great success as yet, in his own opinion. The girl was capricious in her treatment of him, sometimes scowling and repellent, sometimes familiar, very often, as she used to be of old, teasing and malicious. All this, perhaps, made her more interesting to a young man who was tired of easy conquests. There was a strange fascination in her eyes, too, which at times was quite irresistible, so that he would feel himself drawn to her by a power which seemed to take away his will for the moment It may have been nothing but the common charm of bright eyes; but he had never before experienced the same kind of attraction.

Perhaps she was not so very different from what she had been as a child, after all. At any rate, so it seemed to Dick Venner, who, as was said before, had tried making love to her. They were sitting alone in the study one day; Elsie had round her neck that somewhat peculiar ornament, the golden torque, which she had worn to the great party. Youth is adventurous and very curious about neck laces, brooches, chains, and other such adornments, so long as they are worn by young persons of the female sex. Dick was seized with a great passion for examining this curious chain, and, after some preliminary questions, was rash enough to lean towards her and put out his hand toward the neck that lay in the golden coil. She threw her head back, her eyes narrowing and her forehead drawing down so that Dick thought her head actually flattened itself. He started involuntarily; for she looked so like the little girl who had struck him with those sharp flashing teeth, that the whole scene came back, and he felt the stroke again as if it had just been given, and the two white scars began to sting as they did after the old Doctor had burned them with that stick of gray caustic, which looked so like a slate pencil, and felt so much like the end of a red-hot poker.

It took something more than a gallop to set him right after this. The next day he mentioned having received a letter from a mercantile agent with whom he had dealings. What his business was is, perhaps, none of our business. At any rate, it required him to go at once to the city where his correspondent resided.

Independently of this "business" which called him, there may have been other motives, such as have been hinted at. People who have been living for a long time in dreary country-places, without any emotion beyond such as are occasioned by a trivial pleasure or annoyance, often get crazy at last for a vital paroxysm of some kind or other. In this state they rush to the great cities for a plunge into their turbid life-baths, with a frantic thirst for every exciting pleasure, which makes them the willing and easy victims of all those who sell the Devil's wares on commission. The less intelligent and instructed class of unfortunates, who venture with their ignorance and their instincts into what is sometimes called the "life" of great cities, are put through a rapid course of instruction which entitles them very commonly to a diploma from the police court. But they only illustrate the working of the same tendency in mankind at large which has been occasionally noticed in the sons of ministers and other eminently worthy people, by many ascribed to that intense congenital hatred for goodness which distinguishes human nature from that of the brute, but perhaps as readily accounted for by considering it as the yawning and stretching of a young soul cramped too long in one moral posture.

Richard Venner was a young man of remarkable experience for his years. He ran less risk, therefore, in exposing himself to the temptations and dangers of a great city than many older men, who, seeking the livelier scenes of excitement to be found in large towns as a relaxation after the monotonous routine of family-life, are too often taken advantage of and made the victims of their sentiments or their generous confidence in their fellow-creatures. Such was not his destiny. There was something about him which looked as if he would not take bullying kindly. He had also the advantage of being acquainted with most of those ingenious devices by which the proverbial inconstancy of fortune is steadied to something more nearly approaching fixed laws, and the dangerous risks which have so often led young men to ruin and suicide are practically reduced to somewhat less than nothing. So that Mr, Richard Venner worked off his nervous energies without any troublesome adventure, and was ready to return to Rockland in less than a week, without having lightened the money-belt he wore round his body, or tarnished the long glittering knife he carried in his boot.

Dick had sent his trunk to the nearest town through which the railroad leading to the city passed. He rode off on his black horse and left him at the place where he took the cars. On arriving at the city station, he took a coach and drove to one of the great hotels. Thither drove also a sagacious-looking, middle-aged man, who entered his name as "W. Thompson" in the book at the office immediately after that of "R. Venner." Mr, "Thompson" kept a carelessly observant eye upon Mr. Venner during his stay at the hotel, and followed him to the cars when he left, looking over his shoulder when he bought his ticket at the station, and seeing him fairly off without obtruding himself in any offensive way upon his attention. Mr. Thompson, known in other quarters as Detective Policeman Terry, got very little by his trouble. Richard Venner did not turn out to be the wife-poisoner, the defaulting cashier, the river-pirate, or the great counterfeiter. He paid his hotel-bill as a gentleman should always do, if he has the money, and can spare it. The detective had probably overrated his own sagacity when he ventured to suspect Mr. Venner. He reported to his chief that there was a knowing-looking fellow he had been round after, but he rather guessed he was nothing more than "one o' them Southern sportsmen."

The poor fellows at the stable where Dick had left his horse had had trouble enough with him. One of the ostlers was limping about with a lame leg, and another had lost a mouthful of his coat, which came very near carrying a piece of his shoulder with it. When Mr. Venner came back for his beast, he was as wild as if he had just been lassoed, screaming, kicking, rolling over to get rid of his saddle,—and when his rider was at last mounted, jumping about in a way to dislodge any common horseman. To all this Dick replied by sticking his long spurs deeper and deeper into his flanks, until the creature found he was mastered, and dashed off as if all the thistles of the Pampas were pricking him.

"One more gallop, Juan!" This was in the last mile of the road before he came to the town—which brought him in sight of the mansion-house. It was in this last gallop that the fiery mustang and his rider flashed by the old Doctor. Cassia pointed her sharp ears and shied to let them pass. The Doctor turned and looked through the little round glass in the back of his sulky.

"Dick Turpin, there, will find more than his match!" said the Doctor.

CHAPTER XII.

THE APOLLINEAN INSTITUTE.

With Extracts from the "Report of the Committee."

The readers of this narrative will hardly expect any elaborate details of the educational management of the Apollinean Institute. They cannot be supposed to take the same interest in its affairs as was shown by the Annual Committees who reported upon its condition and prospects. As these Committees were, however, an important part of the mechanism of the establishment, some general account of their organization and a few extracts from the Report of the one last appointed may not be out of place.

Whether Mr. Silas Peckham had some contrivance for packing his Committees, whether they happened always to be made up of optimists by nature, whether they were cajoled into good-humor by polite attentions, or whether they were always really delighted with the wonderful acquirements of the pupils and the admirable order of the school, it is certain that their Annual Reports were couched in language which might warm the heart of the most cold-blooded and calculating father that ever had a family of daughters to educate. In fact, these Annual Reports were considered by Mr. Peckham as his most effective advertisements.

The first thing, therefore, was to see that the Committee was made up of persons known to the public. Some worn-out politician, in that leisurely and amiable transition-state which comes between official extinction and the paralysis which will finish him as soon as his brain gets a little softer, made an admirable Chairman for Mr. Peckham, when he had the luck to pick up such an article. Old reputations, like old fashions, are more prized in the grassy than in the stony districts. An effete celebrity, who would never be heard of again in the great places until the funeral sermon waked up his memory for one parting spasm, finds himself in full flavor of renown a little farther back from the changing winds of the sea-coast. If such a public character was not to be had, so that there was no chance of heading the Report with the name of the Honorable Mr. Somebody, the next best thing was to get the Reverend Dr. Somebody to take that conspicuous position. Then would follow two or three local worthies with Esquire after their names. If any stray literary personage from one of the great cities happened to be within reach, he was pounced upon by Mr. Silas Peckham. It was a hard case for the poor man, who had travelled a hundred miles or two to the outside suburbs after peace and unwatered milk, to be pumped for a speech in this unexpected way. It was harder still, if he had been induced to venture a few tremulous remarks, to be obliged to write them out for the "Rockland Weekly Universe," with the chance of seeing them used as an advertising certificate as long as he lived, if he lived as long as the late Dr. Waterhouse did after giving his certificate in favor of Whitwell's celebrated Cephalic Snuff.

The Report of the last Committee had been signed by the Honorable ——, late —— of ——, as Chairman. (It is with reluctance that the name and titles are left in blank; but our public characters are so familiarly known to the whole community that this reserve becomes necessary.) The other members of the Committee were the Reverend Mr. Butters, of a neighboring town, who was to make the prayer before the Exercises of the Exhibition, and two or three notabilities of Rockiand, with geoponic eyes, and glabrous, bumpless foreheads. A few extracts from the Report are subjoined:—

"The Committee have great pleasure in recording their unanimous opinion, that the Institution was never in so flourishing a condition....

"The health of the pupils is excellent; the admirable quality of food supplied shows itself in their appearance; their blooming aspect excited the admiration of the Committee, and bears testimony to the assiduity of the excellent Matron.

"......moral and religious condition most encouraging, which they cannot but attribute to the personal efforts and instruction of the faithful Principal, who considers religious instruction a solemn duty which he cannot commit to other people.

".......great progress in their studies, under the intelligent superintendence of the accomplished Principal, assisted by Mr. Badger, [Mr. Langdon's predecessor,] Miss Darley, the lady who superintends the English branches, Miss Crabs, her assistant and teacher of Modern Languages, and Mr. Schneider, teacher of French, German, Latin, and Music.

"Education is the great business of the Institute. Amusements are objects of a secondary nature; but these are by no means neglected....

".........English compositions of great originality and beauty, creditable alike to the head and heart of their accomplished authors......several poems of a very high order of merit, which would do honor to the literature of any age or country.....life-like drawings, showing great proficiency.... Many converse fluently in various modern languages......perform the most difficult airs with the skill of professional musicians.....

".....advantages unsurpassed, if equalled, by those of any Institution in the country, and reflecting the highest honor on the distinguished Head of the Establishment, SILAS PECKHAM, Esquire, and his admirable Lady, the MATRON, with their worthy assistants....."

The perusal of this Report did Mr. Bernard more good than a week's vacation would have done. It gave him such a laugh as he had not had for a month. The way in which Silas Peckham had made his Committee say what he wanted them to—for he recognized a number of expressions in the Report as coming directly from the lips of his principal, and could not help thinking how cleverly he had forced his phrases, as jugglers do the particular card they wish their dupe to take—struck him as particularly neat and pleasing.

He had passed through the sympathetic and emotional stages in his new experience, and had arrived at the philosophical and practical state, which takes things coolly, and goes to work to set them right. He had breadth enough of view to see that there was nothing so very exceptional in this educational trader's dealings with his subordinates, but he had also manly feeling enough to attack the particular individual instance of wrong before him. There are plenty of dealers in morals, as in ordinary traffic, who confine themselves to wholesale business. They leave the small necessity of their next-door neighbor to the retailers, who are poorer in statistics and general facts, but richer in the every-day charities. Mr. Bernard felt, at first, as one does who sees a gray rat steal out of a drain and begin gnawing at the bark of some tree loaded with fruit or blossoms, which he will soon girdle, if he is let alone. The first impulse is to murder him with the nearest ragged stone. Then one remembers that he is a rodent, acting after the law of his kind, and cools down and is contented to drive him off and guard the tree against his teeth for the future. As soon as this is done, one can watch his attempts at mischief with a certain amusement.

This was the kind of process Mr. Bernard had gone through. First, the indignant surprise of a generous nature, when it comes unexpectedly into relations with a mean one. Then the impulse of extermination,—a divine instinct, intended to keep down vermin of all classes to their working averages in the economy of Nature. Then a return of cheerful tolerance,—a feeling, that, if the Deity could bear with rats and sharpers, he could; with a confident trust, that, in the long run, terriers and honest men would have the upperhand, and a grateful consciousness that he had been sent just at the right time to come between a patient victim and the master who held her in peonage.

Having once made up his mind what to do, Mr. Bernard was as good-natured and hopeful as ever. He had the great advantage, from his professional training, of knowing how to recognize and deal with the nervous disturbances to which overtasked women are so liable. He saw well enough that Helen Darley would certainly kill herself or lose her wits, if he could not lighten her labors and lift off a large part of her weight of cares. The worst of it was, that she of those women who naturally overwork themselves, like those horses who will go at the top of their pace until they drop. Such women are dreadfully unmanageable. It is as hard reasoning with them as it would have been reasoning with lo, when she was flying over land and sea, driven by the sting of the never-sleeping gadfly.

This was a delicate, interesting game that he played. Under one innocent pretext or another, he invaded this or that special province she had made her own. He would collect the themes and have them all read and marked, answer all the puzzling questions in mathematics, make the other teachers come to him for directions, and in this way gradually took upon himself not only all the general superintendence that belonged to his office, but stole away so many of the special duties which might fairly have belonged to his assistant, that, before she knew it, she was looking better and feeling more cheerful than for many and many a month before.

When the nervous energy is depressed by any bodily cause, or exhausted by overworking, there follow effects which have often been misinterpreted by moralists, and especially by theologians. The conscience itself becomes neuralgic, sometimes actually inflamed, so that the least touch is agony. Of all liars and false accusers, a sick conscience is the most inventive and indefatigable. The devoted daughter, wife, mother, whose life has been given to unselfish labors, who has filled a place which it seems to others only and angel would make good, reproaches herself with incompetence and neglect of duty. The humble Christian, who has been a model to others, calls himself a worm of the dust on one page of his diary, and arraigns himself on the next for coming short of the perfection of an archangel.

Conscience itself requires a conscience, or nothing can be more unscrupulous. It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the Christians. It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to endless forms of self-torture. The cities of India are full of cripples it has made. The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the vermin they harbored. Our libraries are crammed with books written by spiritual hypochondriacs, who inspected all their moral secretions a dozen times a day. They are full of interest, but they should be transferred from the shelf of the theologian to that of the medical man who makes a study of insanity.

This was the state into which too much work and too much responsibility were bringing Helen Darley, when the new master came and lifted so much of the burden that was crushing her as must be removed before she could have a chance to recover her natural elasticity and buoyancy. Many of the noblest women, suffering like her, but less fortunate in being relieved at the right moment, die worried out of life by the perpetual teasing of this inflamed, neuralgic conscience. So subtile is the line which separates the true and almost angelic sensibility of a healthy, but exalted nature, from the soreness of a soul which is sympathizing with a morbid state of the body, that it is no wonder they are often confounded. And thus many good women are suffered to perish by that form of spontaneous combustion in which the victim goes on toiling day and night with the hidden fire consuming her, until all at once her cheek whitens, and, as we look upon her, she drops away, a heap of ashes. The more they over-work themselves, the more exacting becomes the sense of duty,—as the draught of the locomotive's furnace blows stronger and makes the fire burn more fiercely, the faster it spins along the track.

It is not very likely, as was said at the beginning of this chapter, that we shall trouble ourselves a great deal about the internal affairs of the Apollinean Institute. These schools are, in the nature of things, not so very unlike each other as to require a minute description for each particular one among them. They have all very much the same general features, pleasing and displeasing. All feeding-establishments have something odious about them,—from the wretched country-houses where paupers are farmed out to the lowest bidder, up to the commons-tables at colleges, and even the fashionable boarding-house. A person's appetite should be at war with no other purse than his own. Young people, especially, who have a bone-factory at work in them, and have to feed the living looms of innumerable growing tissues, should be provided for, if possible, by those that love them like their own flesh and blood. Elsewhere their appetites will be sure to make them enemies, or, what are almost as bad, friends whose interests are at variance with the claims of their exacting necessities and demands.

Besides, all commercial transactions in regard to the most sacred interests of life are hateful even to those who profit by them. The clergyman, the physician, the teacher, must be paid; but each of them, if his duty be performed in the true spirit, can hardly help a shiver of disgust when. money is counted out to him for administering the consolations of religion, for saving some precious life, for sowing the seeds of Christian civilization in young, ingenuous souls.

And yet all these schools, with their provincial French and their mechanical accomplishments, with their cheap parade of diplomas and commencements and other public honors, have an ever fresh interest to all who see the task they are performing in our new social order. These girls are not being educated for governesses, or to be exported, with other manufactured articles, to colonies where there happens to be a surplus of males. Most of them will be wives, and every American-born husband is a possible President of these United States. Any one of these girls may be a four-years' queen. There is no sphere of human activity so exalted that she may not be called upon to fill it.

But there is another consideration of far higher interest. The education of our community to all that is beautiful is flowing in mainly through its women, and that to a considerable extent by the aid of these large establishments, the least perfect of which do something to stimulate the higher tastes and partially instruct them. Sometimes there is, perhaps, reason to fear that girls will be too highly educated for their own happiness, if they are lifted by their culture out of the range of the practical and every-day working youth by whom they are surrounded. But this is a risk we must take. Our young men come into active life so early, that, if our girls were not educated to something beyond mere practical duties, our material prosperity would outstrip our culture; as it often does in large places where money is made too rapidly. This is the meaning, therefore, of that somewhat ambitious programme common to most of these large institutions, at which we sometimes smile, perhaps unwisely or uncharitably.

We shall take it for granted that the routine of instruction went on at the Apollinean Institute much as it does in other schools of the same class. People, young or old, are wonderfully different, if we contrast extremes in pairs. They approach much nearer, if we take them in groups of twenty. Take two separate hundreds as they come, without choosing, and you get the gamut of human character in both so completely that you can strike many chords in each which shall be in perfect unison with corresponding ones in the other. If we go a step farther, and compare the population of two villages of the same race and region, there is such a regularly graduated distribution and parallelism of character, that it seems as if Nature must turn out human beings in sets like chessmen.

It must be confessed that the position in which Mr. Bernard now found himself had a pleasing danger about it which might well justify all the fears entertained on his account by more experienced friends, when they learned that he was engaged in a Young Ladies' Seminary. The school never went on more smoothly than during the first period of his administration, after he had arranged its duties, and taken his share, and even more than his share, upon himself. But human nature does not wait for the diploma of the Apollinean Institute to claim the exercise of its instincts and faculties. There young girls saw but little of the youth of the neighborhood. The mansion-house young men were off at college or in the cities, or making love to each other's sisters, or at any rate unavailable for some reason or other. There were a few "clerks,"—that is, young men who attended shops, commonly called "stores,"—who were fond of walking by the Institute, when they were off duty, for the sake of exchanging a word or a glance with any one of the young ladies they might happen to know, if any such were stirring abroad: crude young men, mostly, with a great many "Sirs" and "Ma'ams" in their speech, and with that style of address sometimes acquired in the retail business, as if the salesman were recommending himself to a customer,—"First-rate family article, Ma'am; warranted to wear a lifetime; just one yard and three quarters in this pattern, Ma'am; sha'n't I have the pleasure?" and so forth. If there had been ever so many of them, and if they had been ever so fascinating, the quarantine of the Institute was too rigorous to allow any romantic infection to be introduced from without.

Anybody might see what would happen, with a good-looking, well-dressed, well-bred young man, who had the authority of a master, it is true, but the manners of a friend and equal, moving about among these young girls day after day, his eyes meeting theirs, his breath mingling with theirs, his voice growing familiar to them, never in any harsh tones, often soothing, encouraging, always sympathetic, with its male depth and breadth of sound among the chorus of trebles, as if it were a river in which a hundred of these little piping streamlets might lose themselves; anybody might see what would happen. Young girls wrote home to their parents that they enjoyed themselves much this term at the Institute, and thought they were making rapid progress in their studies. There was a great enthusiasm for the young master's reading-classes in English poetry. Some of the poor little things began to adorn themselves with an extra ribbon, or a bit of such jewelry as they had before kept for great occasions. Dear souls! they only half knew what they were doing it for. Does the bird know why its feathers grow more brilliant and its voice becomes musical in the pairing season?

And so, in the midst of this quiet inland town, where a mere accident had placed Mr. Bernard Langdon, there was a concentration of explosive materials which might at any time change its Arcadian and academic repose into a scene of dangerous commotion. What said Helen Darley, when she saw with her woman's glance that more than one girl, when she should be looking at her book, was looking over it toward the master's desk? Was her own heart warmed by any livelier feeling than gratitude, as its life began to flow with fuller pulses, and the morning sky again looked bright and the flowers recovered their lost fragrance? Was there any strange, mysterious affinity between the master and the dark girl who sat by herself? Could she call him at will by looking at him? Could it be that ——? It made her shiver to think of it.—And who was that strange horseman who passed Mr. Bernard at dusk the other evening, looking so like Mephistopheles galloping hard to be in season at the witches' Sabbath-gathering? That must be the cousin of Elsie's who wants to marry her, they say. A dangerous-looking fellow for a rival, if one took a fancy to the dark girl! And who is she, and what?—by what demon is she haunted, by what taint is she blighted, by what curse is she followed, by what destiny is she marked, that her strange beauty has such a terror in it, and that hardly one shall dare to love her, and her eye glitters always, but warms for none?

Some of these questions are ours. Some were Helen Darley's. Some of them mingled with the dreams of Bernard Langdon, as he slept the night after meeting the strange horseman. In the morning he happened to be a little late in entering the school-room. There was something between the leaves of the Virgil that lay upon his desk. He opened it and saw a freshly gathered mountain-flower. He looked at Elsie, instinctively, involuntarily. She had another such flower on her breast.

A young girl's graceful compliment,—that is all,—no doubt,—no doubt. It was odd that the flower should have happened to be laid between the leaves of the Fourth Book of the "neid," and at this line,—

"Incipit effari, medique in voce resistit."

A remembrance of an ancient superstition flashed through the master's mind, and he determined to try the Sortes Virgilian. He shut the volume, and opened it again at a venture.—The story of Laocon!

He read, with a strange feeling of unwilling fascination, from "Horresco referens" to "Bis medium amplexi," and flung the book from him, as if its leaves had been steeped in the subtle poisons that princes die of.

* * * * *



THE SPHINX'S CHILDREN.

"Que la volont soit le destin!"

Long had she sat, crouched upon her breast,—crouched, but not for slumber or for spring. No slumber gloomed darkly in those broad, sad eyes; no dream indefinably softened the lips, whose patient outline breathed only wakefulness and expectation,—a long-deferred, yet constant expectation,—a hope that would have been despair, save that it was just within hope's limits,—a monotonous, reiterate, indestructible chord in the creature's mystic existence, that, once struck by some mighty, shrouded Hand of Power, still reverberated, and trailed its still renewing echoes through every fibre of its secret habitation. Nor yet for spring;—a couchant leopard has posed itself with horrid intent; murder glitters in its fixed golden eye, quivers in the tense loins, creeps in the tawny glitter of the skin, clutches the keen claws, that recoil, and grasp, and recoil again from the velvet ball of that heavy foot; murder grins in the withdrawn lip, the white, red-set teeth, the slavering crunch of the jaw: but nothing of all these fired the quiet and the silence of the crouching Sphinx; nerve and muscle in tranquil strength lay relaxed, though not unconscious. Year after year the yellow Desert robed itself in burning mists, splendid and deadly; year after year the hot simoom licked up its sands, and, whirling them madly over the dead plain, dashed them against the silent Sphinx, and grain by grain heaped her slow-growing grave; the Nile spread its waters across the green valley, and lapped its brink with a watery thirst for land, and then receded to its channel, and poured its ancient flood still downward to the sea; worshipped, or desecrated; threaded by black Nubian boatmen, who mocked its sacred name with such savage mirth as satyrs might have spirted from their hairy lips; navigated by keen-eyed Arabs, lithe and dark and treacherous as the river beneath them; Coptic shepherds, lingering on the brink, drank the sweet waters, and led their flocks to drink at the shallows, when the shepherd's star cleft that deepest sky with its crest, and warned the simple people of their hour;—yet forever stood the Sphinx, passionately patient, looking for sunrise, over desert, vale, and river,—beyond man,—to her hour.—And the hour came.

Once to all things comes their hour. The black column of basalt quivers to its heart with one keen lightning thrill that vindicates its kin to the electric flash without; the granite cliff loses one atom from its bald front, and every other atom quails before the dumb shiver of gravitation and shifts its place; the breathing, breathless marble, which a sculptor has rescued from its primeval sleep, and, repeating after God, though with stammering and insufficient lips, the great drama of Paradise, makes a man out of dust,—once, once, in the dcadness of its beauty, that marble thrills with magnetic life, drinks its maker's soul, repeats the Paradisaic amen, and owns that it is good. Yea, greater miracle of transcendental truth,—once,—perhaps twice,—the sodden, valueless heart of that old man, whose gold has sucked out all that made him a man, beats with a pulse of generous honor; even in the dust of stocks and the ashes of speculation, amid the howling curses of the poor and the bitter weeping of his own flesh, once he hears the Voice of God, and all eternity cleaves the earth at his feet with a glare of truth. Once in her loathsome life, that woman, brazen with sin and shame, flaunting on the pavement, the scorn and jest of decency and indecency, the fearful index of corrupt society,—even she has her hour of softness, when the tiny grass that creeps out from the stones comes greenly into a spring sunshine, and as with a divine whisper recalls to her the time before she fell, the unburdened heart, the pure childish pleasures, the kind look of her dead mother's eye, the clasp of that sister's arm who passed her but yesterday pallid with disgust and ashamed to own their sacred birth-tie: then the tide rolls back: the hour is come! She, too, called a woman, who leads society, and triumphs over caste and custom with metallic ring and force,—she who forgets the decencies of age in her shameless attire, and supplies its defects with subterfuges, falser in heart even than in aspect,—she, about whom cluster men old and young, applauding with brays of laughter and coarser jeers the rancor of her wit, as it drops its laughing venom or its sneering sophisms of worldly wisdom,—even she, when the lights are fled, when the music has ceased from its own desecration, when the frenzy of wine and laughter mock her in their dead dregs, when the men who flattered and the women who envied are all gone,—she recalls one calm eye in the crowd, that stung her with its pure contemptuous pity, a look not to be shut out with draperies as the stars are; and even through her soul, harder than the soul of that unowned sister walking the midnight street beneath the window, since it has ceased to know the stab of sin or the choking agony of shame,—even through that world-trodden heart flashes one conscious pang, one glimpse of a possible heaven and an inevitable hell, one naked and open vision of herself.

Long had the Sphinx waited. Year after year the flocking pigeons flitted and wheeled through the sweet skies of spring, built their nests and reared their young; tiny lizards, the new birth of the season, coiled and glittered on the hot sands like wandering jewels; every creature, dying out of conscious life, left its perpetuated self behind it, and repeated its own youth in its young, according to its kind: but the Sphinx lived alone. Nor all-unconscious of her solitude: for he who formed that massive shape, chiselled those calm, expectant lips, and wide eyes pensive as setting moons, he had not failed to do what all true artists do in virtue of their truth,—he had shared his own life with his own creation, and it was his lonely yearning that stirred her pulseless heart. Little did he think, toiling at that stupendous figure, ages gone by, that he transfused into the stone at which he labored, like a patient ant at some stupendous burden, no little share of that creative yearning that inspired him to his task; as little as you think, dear poet, whether poet, painter, or sculptor,—for all are one, and one is all,—that in those dreams which you write, as unconscious of your power as the transcribing stylus of its office, your own heart pulsates for a listening world, and the very linking of words that so respire their own music makes those words self-sentient of their breaking, thrilling melody, and wrings or exalts them, idea-garments as they are, with the restless heaving of the thought that wears them.

Or you, whose sun-steeped brush brings to life on canvas the golden trances of August noons, the high, still splendor of its mountain-tops, which the sun caresses with fiery languor, the unrippled slumber of its warm streams, the broad glory of its woods and meadows fused with light and heat into the resplendent haze that earth exhales in her day of prime, till he who sees the picture hears the cricket's chirping in its moveless grasses, and scents the rich aromatic breath of its summer-passion and its rapturous noon,—do you dream, when at last the perfect work repeats your thought, and you rest in the tropie atmosphere you have created, that in very truth the picture itself is full of inward heat and breathless languor? For you have poured out the colors that light makes out of heat, and in them the still inevitable light shall ever stir the recreating heat that clothes itself in color, and bring your thought, no more a dead abstraction, but a living power, into the very substance whereby you have expressed it. And even so far as you were creative, so shall your work be informed by you, and not mere dead pigment and dried oil and dull canvas be your autograph, but the vivid and inspiring blazon of an inspired idea shall glow life-like on some friendly wall, and in its turn inspire some other soul, whose light within needs but the breath from without to burst upward in clear flame.

Or you, who unveil from its marble tomb that figure of a chained and stainless woman, whose atmosphere is as a nun's veil, whose sad divinity is a crown,—do you dare imagine that the holy despair you have imaged, the pause of a saint's resignation and a martyr's courage, is but the outline and the faultless contour of a stone? Come back, Pygmalion, from your mythic sleep! return, Art's divinest mystery, germ of all its power, from the deep dust of ages! and teach these modern men that his story whose passion fired a statue's breast was but an immortal fable, a similitude of the truth you feel, but do not see,—that even as our Creator shared His life with His creatures, so do you pour, in far less measure, but obedient to that precedent which is law, your own life and the magnetic instincts of that life, into what you create!

Keep your hearts pure and your hands clean, therefore; for these things that you sell for dead shall one day livingly confront you, and tell their own story of your life and your nature with terrible honesty to men and angels.

But whoever, in those mystic ages that have ceased to be historic and have become mythic, whoever made the Sphinx,—whether it were some Titaness sequestered from all her kind by genie-spells, forced to live amid these desert solitudes, fed from the abundant hands of Nature, and taught by dreams inspired and twilight visions,—

"A daughter of the gods, divinely tall, And most divinely fair";

her only image of human beauty the reflex of her white, symmetric limbs, her wide, dark eyes, her full lips and soft Egyptian features, wherewith the river greeted her from its blue placidity; her only sense of love the unspoken yearning within, when the soft, tumultuous stress of the west-wind kissed her, who should have been clasped in tender arms and caressed by loving lips; whose dumb, creative instincts, becoming genius instead of maternity, struggled outward from their home in heart and brain to culminate in this world's-wonder, and so build a monument namelessly splendid to the grand nature that found its bread of life was a stone and perished: or whether this creature were the fashioning of some demigod,—"for there were giants in those days,"—who, in the fulness of his strength, despairing of a mortal mate, wandered away from men and wrought his patience and his longing into the rock,—as lesser men have carved their memorials on hard Fate,—and then died between its paws, sated with labor and glad to sleep: or whether, indeed, the captive spirits, sealed in Caucasus with the seal of Solomon, did penance for their rebellion in mortal work on mere dull matter, and with anguished essence toiled for ages to mimic in her own clay the dumb pathos of waiting Earth:—whichever of these dreams be nearest truth, one thing is true,—that the maker of the Sphinx infused into his work, in as much greater measure as his nature was greater than that of other men, that yearning of pathetic solitude that most wrings a woman's heart; and the outward semblance, working in, wrought upon the heavy stone with incessant and accumulative power, till through that sluggish sandstone crept a confused thrill of consciousness, and the great creature felt the loneliness that she looked. Far away below her the Nile-valley teemed with life; the antelopes coursed beside their young to feed on the green pasture fresh from its long overflow; red foxes sported with their cubs on the tawny sand; the birds taught their infant offspring their own sweet arts of flight and song on every bough; and even the ostrich, lonely Desert-runner, heaped her treasure of white eggs in the sand, or guided her callow young far from the sight and fear of man;—but the Sphinx sat alone.

Mightier and mightier grew the yearning within her, as the full moon floated upward from the east and cast her dewy dreams over land and sea. The hour was come; the whole impulse and persistence of her nature went out in vivid life, and, filling the very stones which the winds had gathered and piled against her breast, cleft them with its sentient spell, clothed them with lean flesh and wiry sinews, shaped them after the fashion of the Desert men, and sent them out alive with intellect and will, but with hearts of flint, into the wide world,—the Sphinx's children!

With a sigh that shook the shores of Egypt and smote the Sicilian midnight with sickening vibrations of earthquake, the Sphinx beheld this culmination of her great desire; in the very hour of fruition, hope fled; and as this grim certainty sped away from before her, taking with it all her borrowed life, she dropped that majestic head lower upon her bosom, uplifted it again for one last look at her offspring, and so stiffened,—once more a stone.

Age after age rolled by; storm and tempest hurled their thunders at her head; wave after wave of bright insidious sand curled about her feet and heaped its sliding grains against her side; men came and went in fleeting generations, and seasons fled like hours through the whirling wheel of Time; but the Sphinx longed and suffered no more. Her hour had come and gone; her dull instinct had burnt out, her comely outline began to disintegrate, her face grew blank and stony, her features crumbled away, altars and inscriptions defaced her breast and hieroglyphed her ponderous sides, men worshipped and wondered there, and travellers from lands beyond the sun pitched their tents before her face and defiled her feet with barbaric orgies; but she knew it no more,—her children were gone out into the world. And the world had need of them. Its rank and miasmatic civilization,—its hotbeds of sin and misery,—its civil corruptions and its social lies,—its reeling, rotten principalities,—its sickly atmosphere of effeminate luxury, wherein neither justice nor judgment lived, and the solitary virtues left mere effete shadows of philanthropy and cowardly impulses called love and mercy,—needed a new race, stony and strong, unshrinking in conquest and reformation, full of zeal, and incapable of pity, to rend away the fogs that smothered truth and decency, to disperse the low-lying clouds of weak passion and maudlin luxury, to blow a reveille clear and keen as the trumpet of the northwest wind, when it sweeps down from its mountain-tops in stern exultation, and shouts its Puritanic battle-psalm across the reeking, steaming meadows of sultry August, fever-smitten and pestilent.

Such were the Sphinx's children: had they but died out with their need! Here and there a monk, fresh from his Desert-Laura, hurtles through the eclipse-light of history like the stone from a catapult,—rules a church with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and emperors with the grand audacity of a commission presumedly divine, while Greeks cringe, and Jews blaspheme, and heathen flee into, or away from, conversion; and the Church itself canonizes this spiritual father, this Sphinx-son of an instinct and a stone!

Or an Emperor exalted himself above the legions and the populace of Rome, banqueted his enemies and beheaded them at table, drank in the sight of blood and the sound of human shrieks as if they were his natural light and air, tormented God's creatures and cursed his kind, kindled a fire among the miserable myriads of his own city, and, exulting in a safe height, mixed the leaping, frantic discords of his own music with the horrid sounds of the hell's tragedy below him; seething in crime, steeped in murder, black with blasphemy, the horror and the hate of men, death gaped for his coming, and he went! Men revile him through all posterior ages; women shudder at the legend of his deeds; but the Sphinx stands unconscious in the Desert,—she knew not her child!

Or a Reformer springs up. High above his birthplace the snowy Alps paint themselves against the sky, an aerial dream of beauty, softened by the tender hues of dawn and sunset, serenely fair through the rift of the tempest; even their white death takes a nameless grace from distance and atmosphere, clothing itself in beauty as a spirit in clay, and tempting wanderers to their graves: but no such beauty clothes the man whose daily vision beholds them; hard, clamorous, disputatious, with one hand he rends the rotten splendors of Rome from its tottering Image, and with the other plunges baby-souls to inevitable damnation; strong and fiercely rigid, full of burning and slaughter for the idolatries and harlotries of Popery, fired with lurid zeal, and bestriding one stringent idea, he rides on over dead and living, preaches predestination and hell as if the Gospel dwelt only upon destiny and despair, casts no tender look at the loving piety that underlay shrines and woman-worship and bead-counting wherever a true heart sought its God through the sole formulas it knew, but spurs forward to the end, a mighty power to destroy, to do away with old corruptions and break down idols on their altars,—saint and iconoclast! Did the heart of stone within him know its ancestry,—track its hard, loveless descent from the Sphinx's children?

Then a Queen;—a solitary woman, proud of her solitude, isolated in her regnant splendor, a dead planet like the moon, sung and pictured and adored, but keeping on her majestic path in awful beauty, deaf to human entreaty, cold to human love; a great statesman in a queen's robes; a keen, subtle politician, coifed and farthingaled; a revengeful sovereign; a deadly enemy; a woman who forgave nothing to a woman, and retaliated everything upon a man; she who brought unshrinkingly to death a sister queen discrowned and captive, a sister whose grace and loveliness and kindly aspect might have moved the lions of the arena to fawn upon her, but nowise disarmed the tigress who lapped her blood; she who banished and slew the man she would not stoop to love, because he dared to love another; and when death stared her in the face, and open-eyed judgment shook her soul, rose from that death-pallet to grapple and abuse a false woman, penitent for and confessing her falseness; a virgin-monarch, pitiless, relentless, cruel as jealousy; an anomalous woman, were she not a stone-born child of the Sphinx!

Or a great General, before whose iron will horse and horseman quailed and fled, like dry stubble before flame; who wielded the sword of Gideon, and cut off the armies of his kindred people and his anointed king as a mower fells the glittering grass on a summer dawn, heedless that he, too, shall be cut down from his flourishing. On his track fire and blood spread their banners, and the raven scented his trophies afar off; age and youth alike were crushed under the tread of his war-horse; honor and valor and life's best prime opposed him as summer opposes the Arctic hail-fury, and lay beaten into mire at his feet. Hated, feared, followed to the death; victorious or vanquished, the same strong, imperturbable, sullen nature; persistent rather than patient in effort, vigorously direct in action; a minister of unconscious good, of half-conscious evil; stern and gloomy to the sacrilegious climax of his well-battled life, even in the regicidal act going as one driven to his deeds by Fate that forgot God;—was he to be wondered at, whose life, in ages far gone, began among the stony Sphinx children?

Nor alone in these great landmarks of their dwelling have the Sphinx's children haunted Earth. Poets have sung them under myriad names; History has chronicled them in groups; Painting and Sculpture have handed down their aspect to a gazing world. From them sprung the Eumenides, pursuers and destroyers of men. They wore the garb of Roman legionaries, when Ramah wept for her children dashed against the walls of the Holy City, and not one stone stood upon another in Zion. They crowded the offices of the Inquisition, and tested the endurance of its victims, with steady finger on the flickering pulse, and calm eye on the death-sweating brow and bitten lip. They put on the Druid's robe and wreath, and held the human sacrifice closer to its altar. In the Asiatic jungle, lurking behind the palm-trunk, they waited, lithe and swarthy Thugs, treacherously to slay whatever victim passed by alone; or in the fair Pacific islands kept horrid jubilee above their feasts of human flesh, and streaked themselves with kindred blood in their carousals. Holland tells its fearful story of their Spanish rule. Russian serfs record their despotism, cowering at the memory of the knout. France cringes yet at the names of the black few who guided her roaring Revolution as one might guide the ravages of a tiger with curb of adamant and rein of linked steel.

Africa stretches out her hands to testify of their presence. Too well those golden shores recall the wail of women and the yelling curses of men, driven, beast-fashion, to their pen, and floated from home to hell, or,—happier fate!—dragged up, in terror of pursuit, and thrown overboard, a brief agony for a long one. They know them, too, whose continual cry of separation, starvation, insult, agony, and death rises from the heart of freedom like the steam of a great pestilence,—Pity them, hearts of flesh! pity also the captors,—the Sphinx children, the flint-hearts! pity those who cannot feel, far beyond those who can,—though it be but to suffer!

New England knew them, in band and steeple-hat, hanging and pressing to death helpless women, bewitched with witchcraft. Acadia knew them, when its depopulated shores lay barren before the sun, and its homes sent up no smoke to heaven.

Greece quivers at the phantasm of their Turkish turbans and gleaming sabres, their skill at massacre and their fiendish tortures; Italy, fair and sad, "woman-country," droops shuddering at sight of their Austrian uniforms; and the Brahmin sees them in scarlet, blood-dyed, hurling from the cannon's mouth helpless captives,—killing, not converting.

Wherever, all the wide world over, a nation shrinks from its oppressors, or a slave from his master,—wherever a child flees from the face of a parent who knows neither justice nor mercy, or a wife goes mad under the secret tyranny of her inevitable fate,—wherever pity and mercy and love veil their faces and wring their hands outside the threshold,—there abide the Sphinx's children.

For this she longed and hoped and waited in the Desert! for this she envied the red fox and the ostrich! for this her dumb lips parted, in their struggle after speech, to ask of earth and air some solace to her solitude! for this, for these, she poured out her dim life in one strong, wilful aspiration!

Happy Sphinx, to be left even of that dull existence! blessedly unconscious of that granted desire! mouldering away in the curling sand-hills, the prey of hostile elements, the mysterious symbol of a secret yearning and a vain desire! Not for thee the bitterness of success! not for thee the conscious agony of penitence,—the falling temple of the will crushing its idolater! No wild voices in the wind reproach the wilder pulses of a slow-breaking heart; no keen words of taunt sting thee into madness; Memory hurls at thee no flying javelins; broken-winged Hope flutters about thee no more! Thy day is over, thine hour is past!

"Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead, more than the living which are yet alive!"

* * * * *



REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Dies Irae: in Thirteen Original Versions. By Abraham Coles, M.D. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1859. pp. xxxiv., 70.

It is pleasant to see how many wiles Nature employs to draw off into side channels the enthusiasm which is always secreting itself and gathering in the human brain. She knows what a dangerous clement it may become, if the individual rills of it run together, and, with united forces, take for a time a single direction. So she taps it at its sources, and leads it away to various ends, useful because they are harmless. Bibliomania, tulipomania, potichomania, squaring the circle, perpetual motion, a religious epic, the northwest passage,—anything will serve the purpose. Divide et impera is her motto. The hobby is the safeguard of society. Once mounted, every enthusiast ambles quietly off on some errand of his own, caring little what direction he takes, provided only it be the other. The Fifth-Monarchy men might have been troublesome, but for the Beast in Revelation;—each insisted on a Beast to himself. Protestantism might have become Democracy, had either Luther or Calvin been willing to ride behind. The five points of the Charter are blunted to a Lancashire weaver who is fattening a prize-gooseberry.

We sympathize heartily with such gentle enthusiasms as this of Dr. Coles. It is the interest of all Grub Street that men should be encouraged whose amiable weakness it is to fall in love with pieces of poetry. In this case, to be sure, the verses are Latin, and the author more nameless even than Junius; but who knows but some one's turn shall come next whose verses were at least meant to be English, and whose name is—Legion? If some translator, charged from the other pole of Dr. Coles's enthusiasm, should favor us with thirteen Latin versions of some modern English poems, it would give them a chance of being more generally intelligible to the laity. Nay, even if such a baker's-dozen of medival-Latin renderings of Mrs. Browning's last poem—and by this term we mean, of course, the rather shady Latin of middle-aged men—should be shuffled together, we are not sure that it would not be a help to the understanding of the Coptic original. But this, perhaps, is hoping too much.

In the case of Dr. Coles, how lucky the direction of the superfluous energy! how wise the humane precaution of Nature! For there is no destructive agency like a doctor with a hygienic hobby. If your constitution be a salt or sugar one, he will melt you away with damp sheets and duckings; if you are as exsanguine as a turnip, his scientific delight in getting blood out of you will be only heightened. For such erratic enthusiasms as this of Dr. Coles we want a milder term than monomania. Something like monowhimsia would do. It is seldom that an oddity takes so pleasant a turn. He has published a dainty little volume, with a well-written introduction, giving the history of the "Dies Ir," and an account of the various versions of it; this is followed by his own thirteen translations; and an appendix tells us what is meant by a Sequence, has a page or two on the origin of rhyming Latin, and concludes with the music of the hymn itself. The book is illustrated by delicate photographs from the Last Judgments of Michel Angelo, Rubens, and Cornelius, and from the "Christus Remunerator" of Ary Scheffer. It is exquisitely printed at the Riverside Press, which is doing such good service to everybody but the spectacle-makers.

We hold the translation of any first-rate poem, nay, even of any second-rate one which has any peculiar charm of rhythm or tone, to be an impossibility. The translation of rhyming Latin verses presents peculiar difficulties. The rhythm is always simple and strongly accented, it is true; but the ear-filling sonority, the variety of female rhymes, and the simple directness of expression cannot be echoed by our muffling consonants, our endings in ing and ed, and a-s, the-s, and of the-s. For example, the stanza,

"Tuba, mirum spargens sonum Per sepulchra regionum, Coget omnes ante thronum,"

is very inadequately represented by

"Trumpet, scattering sounds of wonder Rending sepulchres asunder, Shall resistless summons thunder,"

in which, to speak of nothing else, there are thirteen s-s to five in the original. Even Crashaw, whose translation of Strada's "Music's Duel" is a masterpiece for litheness of phrase and sinuous suppleness of rhythm, quails before the "Dies Ir," and contents himself with a largely watered paraphrase. No one has ever yet succeeded more than tolerably with the opening stanza,—

"Dies Ir, dies illa, Solvet sclum in favill, Teste David cum Sibyll."

The difficulty is increased where the Latin word has some special force of theological or other meaning which has no single equivalent in English.

Doctor Coles has made, we think, the most successful attempt at an English translation of the hymn that we have ever seen. He has done all that could be done, where complete success was out of the question. Out of his first two versions, which seem to us the best, a very satisfactory rendering of the original can be made up by choosing the better stanzas from each. In his first trial he misses the pathetic force of the

"Rex tremend majestatis, Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salva me, fons pietatis!"

where the petition is piercingly individualized by the accentual stress thrown on the me. He gives it thus:—

"King Almighty and All-knowing, Grace to sinners freely showing, Save me, Fount of Good o'erflowing!" His second attempt is better:—

"Awful King, who nothing cravest, Since Thyself full ransom gavest, Save thou me, who freely savest!"

Here the emphatic me is preserved, but in neither version is the true meaning of salvandos even hinted at, and in both we miss the tenderness of the fons pietatis, with which the tremenda majestas is balanced and softened.

There are three or four of these Latin hymns that for simple force and pathos have never been matched in their kind, and never approached, except by a few of the more fortunate poems of Herbert, Vaughan, and Quarles. We know not why it is that what is called religious poetry is commonly so bad. The thing gives the lie to both the adjective and the noun of its title. Anything more flat and flavorless, whether in sentiment or language, is beyond the conception even of an editor with the nightmare. Men have been hanged for more venial murders than some have been praised for who have choked out the immortal soul of the Psalms of David. We have, however, the consolation of thinking that the Devil's Psalter of convivial songs is quite as bad.

Dr. Coles has done so well that we hope he will try his hand on some of the other Latin hymns. He cannot expect to satisfy those who have been penetrated by the almost inexplicable charm of the originals; but by rendering them in their own metres, and with so large a transfusion of their spirit as characterizes his present attempt, he will be doing a real service to the lovers of that kind of religious poetry in which neither the religion nor the poetry is left out. As we said before, to translate rhyming Latin without losing its peculiar tang is wellnigh impossible. Even Father Prout himself would be staggered by Walter Mapes's "Mihi est propositum" or "Testamentum Goliae"; but perhaps the spirit of the hymns is more easily caught, and Dr. Coles has shown that he knows the worth of faithfulness.



Mademoiselle Mori; A Tale of Modern Rome. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1860. Author's Edition. 16mo. pp. 526.

This is a reprint of a remarkable book. It is the book of a person familiar with Rome and with the Romans, who has thought seriously and felt deeply in regard to their character and fortunes, who has studied with keen and sympathetic imagination the hearts of the people, and observed closely the outward aspect and common shows of the city. The story is well constructed, and has the essential merit of interest. Not only are the characters distinctly presented, but there is in them, what it is rare to find in the personages of our modern novelists, a real and natural development, which is exhibited not so much by what is said about them as by their own apparently unconscious words and acts. So just a view is given in this novel of Italian habits of thought and tones of feeling, so true an appreciation is shown of the peculiarities of national disposition and temperament, and so intimate and exact an acquaintance with public events and the course of politics in Rome, as to lead to the conclusion that the author writes from the fulness of personal experience, and was no stranger to the interests of the stirring period in which the scenes of the story are laid.

The book, indeed, has a double character. It is not a mere novel; for it contains, in addition to its story, a sketch of the course of public affairs in Rome during the three memorable years from the accession of Pius IX. to the fall of the Republic and the entry of the French troops into the city, which they still hold in subjection to rulers who claim to govern it for the spiritual interests of the world. And while it may be warmly recommended to such readers as only desire to find an interesting story, it deserves not less hearty recommendation to such as may care to understand one of the most striking and dramatic episodes of modern history, and to gain an acquaintance with events which throw great illustration on the present condition and hopes of Italy. In this respect, as well as in the ability with which it is written, it may fairly be classed with the novels of Ruffini,—"Lorenzo Benoni" and "Doctor Antonio." To those who have read these two books it need not be said that this is high praise.

History is not treated by the author of "Mademoiselle Mori" after the common fashion of novelists. Events are not misrepresented in it, nor are the characters of the prominent actors in public affairs distorted to suit any theory, or to advance the interest of the story. The chief value of the book, and that which ought to secure for it a permanent place, does not, however, consist in any formal narrative of events, or in its pictures of noted individuals, but in its representation of the states of mind and feeling of the Romans during the first years of the pontificate of the present Pope, of the objects and methods of action of the various parties that were then called into active existence, of the occasions of the rapid changes in the popular disposition from the time when Pius IX. was the idol of the crowd to that when he was a faithless fugitive to Gaeta, and of the causes which led to the bitter disappointment and utter failure of the efforts of the Roman patriots.

We do not know of any book in which so intelligent and so true an account of these things, which were the springs from which events issued, and which underlie all their currents, is to be found. The sympathies of the author are with the liberal party, with the party that labored for reform, but not for a republic, and whose hopes and plans were crushed by the horrible assassination of Rossi. It is one of the most calamitous results of a tyranny like that exercised at Rome, that it renders a gradual progress of reform at any time when it may be undertaken almost an impossibility, and sows the seed of inevitable violence and of revolution, which is apt to end, as in the Roman instance, in a return of despotism. The view given of the Roman revolution and republic of 1849 by the author of "Mademoiselle Mori" coincides in the main with that taken by Farini, and the other chief Italian statesmen of the present day; and its accuracy and good sense are confirmed by the course of recent events, not merely in Rome, but in other parts of Italy as well. It is vain to predict the future of a state so anomalous as that of Rome; but it is safe to say that the Romans learned much from their last revolution, and are learning much from its results, so that, when another opportunity arrives for them to gain some share of that freedom which Northern Italy has been so happy in securing, they will not repeat their former mistakes, and will not be found less competent for liberty than the Tuscans or the people of the Romagna. Perhaps the failure of 1849 may then turn out to have been a dark blessing; and the blood of those who fell on the Roman walls, and the tears of those who have wept in Roman prisons, may not have been shed in vain.

The cause of Italy deserves the heartiest sympathy, and, if need be, a personal sacrifice on the part of every lover of liberty and of justice in the world. The question of Italian unity and independence is the most important that has been presented in Europe in our time. The issue involved in it is that of the advance or the degradation of a nation so noble that none can be called nobler,—of the rights of the many, as against the power of the few,—of the rights of thought, as against those of the sword,—of the establishment of those principles which do most to make life precious, as against those by which it is made vile and wretched. The last year has seen a part of the great work of freeing Italy accomplished. If Sardinia can but have time allowed her in which to knit her forces, if she can for a time escape from foreign attacks and from internal divisions, Italy is secure. Venice, Rome, and Naples will not long languish under the tyranny of Austrian, of priest, and of Bourbon.

We return for a few words to "Mademoiselle Mori." The readers of Mr. Hawthorne's imaginative Italian romance will be pleased to find in this book further illustrations of the Rome he has so admirably pictured. The author has not the genius of Mr. Hawthorne, but the descriptions which the book contains of Roman scenes and places are full of truth, and render the common, every-day aspect of streets and squares, of gardens and churches, of popular customs and social habits, with equal spirit and fidelity. The interest of the story is sustained by the distinctness with which the localities in which it passes are depicted. The style of the book is so excellent that we the more regret a few careless and clumsy expressions, and some awkward sentences, which a little pains might have prevented. We regret also that the Italian words and phrases which appear in the volume are sometimes grievously disfigured by misprints. The distinguished name of Saffi is travestied by being misprinted Gaffi,—and there are other blunders of the same sort, in which the Riverside Press has but too faithfully followed the English edition.



Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Collected and republished by THOMAS CARLYLE. In Four Volumes. Boston: Brown and Taggard. 1860.

Carlyle's Essays need at the present day no introduction or commendation to American readers. Their place is established, and they will hold it permanently, in spite of the wild philosophy, and in spite of characteristics of style which would ruin weaker writings. As Ben Jonson said of a volume of poems, now quite forgotten, by his friend Sir John Beaumont,—

"This book will live; it hath a genius; this Above his reader or his praiser is."

There is no fear that these Essays will be forgotten; for, beside their intrinsic merits and interest, they are at once introductory and supplementary to their author's more important works,—to his "French Revolution" and his "Life of Frederic the Great."

This new edition of the Essays is a reprint of the last English edition revised by the author, and both printer and publisher deserve high credit for the beauty of the volumes. The paper, press-work, and binding are all excellent, and of a sort not only to please the general public, but to satisfy the demands of the exacting lover of good books. We are glad to welcome Messrs. Brown and Taggard among our publishing houses, on occasion of the issue of a book so creditable alike to their taste and to their judgment, and we hope that the success of this edition of these Essays may he such as to encourage them to follow it with a reprint of the other volumes of the revised edition of Mr. Carlyle's works.

We trust, that, though the words "Author's Edition" are not found upon the back of the title-page, it is not because the moral, if not legal rights which the author possesses have been disregarded.



The Mill on the Floss. By GEORGE ELIOT, Author of "Scenes of Clerical Life" and "Adam Bede." New York: Harper & Brothers.

It is not difficult to understand how the reader's attention may he attracted and his interest retained by a romance of the old chivalrous days whose very name and dim memory fill the mind with fascinating images, or by a novel whose high-born characters claim sympathy for their dignified sorrows and refined delights, or whose story is illuminated by the light of artistic culture and adorned with gems of rhetoric and fine fancy; but it is sometimes surprising to observe the favor which attends a simple tale of humble, unobtrusive, we might almost say insignificant people, whose plane of life appears nowhere to coincide with our own, and to whom romance and passion seem entirely foreign. Such a tale was "Adam Bede," whose great success as a literary venture hardly yet belongs to the chronicle of the past; such a tale is also "The Mill on the Floss," by the author of "Adam Bede," and such, we are confident, will also be its success.

Both books have many elements in common, but the second is the greater work of art, and indicates more fairly the scope and vigor of the author's mind. It is written in the same pure, hardy style, strong with Saxon words that admit of no equivocation or misunderstanding; it is illustrated with sketches of outward Nature and tranquil rural beauty, none the less vivid or truthful that they are drawn with the pen rather than the brush; and it is instinct with an honest, high-souled purpose. In these respects it resembles "Adam Bede," but in others it surpasses its predecessor. It displays a far keener insight into human passion, a subtler analysis of motives and principles, and it suggests a mental and a moral philosophy nobler in themselves and truer to humanity and religion. The pathos, too, is more genuine; for it is not based upon the mere utterance of grief or of entreaty,—which the eloquent and the artful may, indeed, feign,—but it is found in that skilful combination of material circumstance and spiritual influence which impresses upon the feeling, more than it proves to the reason, that the hour of heart-break is at hand, and which depends less for its effect upon the dramatic power of the imagination than upon the instant sympathy of the soul.

The principal fault which will be found with "The Mill on the Floss," and probably the only one, is, that the action moves too slowly and tamely in the first three or four books, and that the author shows an undue inclination to reflection and metaphysical digression. This will, indeed, be a great objection to the superficial reader, who will impatiently regret that the tedious growth of a miller's boy and girl should usurp so many pages which might better have been filled with exciting incidents. But this very elaboration, tardy and idle though it may seem, was necessary to the completion of the author's plan, and—in our eyes—instead of being a blemish upon a fair story, is one of its principal charms. On this very account, however, the book will be less popular, and fewer persons will admire it wholly; but, as thoughtful readers draw near to the end of the narrative, and anxiously hasten on past trial, temptation, and conflict, to the dreaded and yet inevitable downfall, muse mournfully over the agony and remorse that follow, and slowly close the volume upon tender forgiveness and final joy, they will be thankful for the far-seeing genius which, by this gradual process of education, enabled them to understand clearly the fateful scroll at last unfolded to them, and which, if they have read in the true spirit, has made them wiser and better.



Nugamenta; a Book of Verses, By GEORGE EDWARD RICE. Boston: J. E. Tilton & Co. 1860. pp. 146.

The author of this little volume modestly waives all claim to the title of poet, and thus disarms severer criticism. His book, nevertheless, has the merit of being lively and agreeable, which is more than can be said of many more pretentious volumes of verse. His pieces are mostly of the kind called verses of society, a variety whose range is all the way up from Concanen to Horace. It is enough, if they are only passable; but good specimens are easy and sprightly,—their philosophy not worldly precisely, but man-of-the-worldly,—their morality an elegant Poor-Richardism,—their poetry whatever may be reached by the fancy and understanding. Sometimes, if the author have been lucky enough, like Branger, to have enjoyed low company, his verses will gather a richer tone, his wit will broaden into humor, his sentiment deepen to hearty good-nature, and his worldliness ripen into a genuine humanity.

To embody primeval sentiments, to deal with transcendent passions, and to idealize those fatal moods by which not individuals merely, but races, are possessed, those tidal ebbs and flows which, for want of a better name, we call the Spirit of the Age,—this is a gift whose return among us we do not look for with as much certainty as that of shad and salmon, but meanwhile we are not too nice to be pleased with verses that express average thoughts and feelings gracefully and with a dash of sentiment. It is a vast deal wiser and better to express neatly, in language that is not alien to the concerns of every day, feelings we have really had, than to maunder about what we think we ought to have felt in a diction that has no more to do with our ordinary habits of thought and expression than Monmouth with Macedon. The contrast of matter and manner in much of our current verse is such as to remind one of the notes which are sometimes sent to their sweethearts by schoolboys, who cut their fingers (not too deep) that they may asseverate the eternal constancy of the three-weeks'-vacation in that solemn fluid proper to contracts with the Evil One.

It is pleasant to meet with one who is able to say a natural thing in a natural way, as Mr. Rice has shown that he can do. There is a very agreeable mingling of feeling and fun in his lighter pieces, rising into real grace and lyric fancy in some of them, such as "New Year's Eve" and "The Revisit."



A Voyage down the Amoor; with a Land Journey through Siberia, and Incidental Notices of Manchooria, Kamschatka, and Japan. By PERRY McDONOUGH COLLINS, United States Commercial Agent at the Amoor River, New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1860. pp. 390.

This is a very amusing book. The introductory part of it, in which the author recounts his adventures in Siberia before setting out on his expedition down the Amoor, is full of bad taste, bad rhetoric, and bad grammar. If we had read no farther, we should have thought that a more unfit personage than this gentleman with the monumental name could not have been chosen for any public service.

Mr. Perry McDonough Collins gives us the bill of fare of gentlemen's tables at which he dined, tells us how much and what kinds of wine were "drank," and sometimes winds up his account of the feast with a compliment to the "amiable and interesting" family of his host. Mr. Egouminoff's dinner, he tells us, "was excellent, with several kinds of wine, closing with Champagne. We had also the pleasure of the company of Mrs. E. and her daughter, and several other guests, besides a handsome widow." There is something charmingly naf in thus throwing in the company as a succedaneum to the dinner, and carefully segregating the widow from the rest of mankind as a distinct species.

Mr. Collins also reports for us carefully the orations he made on various festive occasions,—a piece of very proper economy, since they were delivered in English to an audience of Russians. He confesses that it is not the custom to make after-dinner-speeches in Siberia, which proves that the Russian Government has neglected at least one opportunity of adding to the terrors of a Penal Colony. At one dinner he had the satisfaction of making three of these terrible mistakes. He responds to the health of General Mouravieff, Governor of the Province, to that of President Buchanan, and to that of "our guests." We should like to have been present at this display, provided we could have been speech-proofed, like the Russians in their ignorance of English. It was certainly a proud day for America, and the bird of our country will be glad that the eloquence has been carefully saved by Mr, Collins for the good of his compatriots.

After this multiloquent festival, the Siberian merchants, naturally exasperated, seized upon Mr. Collins, and an unhappy countryman of his who was present, and tossed them after the fashion of Sancho Panza. "This sport," adds our traveller, gravely, "is called in Russian podkeedovate, or tossing-up, and is considered a mark of great respect. General Mouravieff told me, after our return, that he had had podkeedovate performed upon him in the same room." The General must be something of a humorist.

Mr. Collins, however, has a more astounding incident to relate than even the respectful tossing-up of a general in the army and governor of Siberia by a party of provincial shopkeepers. In returning from an excursion, Mr. Collins had the ill-luck to lose a horse.

"The death of that horse," he says, "was a singular circumstance. We were galloping rapidiy and were approaching the station, when the animal dropped as if struck by lightning. We were in such rapid motion upon the smooth ice of the river, that, though several yards from the stopping-point, the other horses kept on, dragging the dead horse, nor did the driver attempt to stop them, but seemed determined to reach the station at full speed. As soon as we had stopped, I got out and examined the body. It was as stiff as a poker and stirred not a muscle, the eyes being cold and glassy. The fact is, the horse must have been dead before he fell, and his muscular action was kept up some time after life had departed." (p. 89.)

We do not remember to have met with a more wonderful example of the force of habit.

After Mr. Collins is fairly embarked, however, on his voyage of exploration, his book becomes more interesting. He shows himself a thoroughly good-humored, observant, and intelligent traveller. If, in the earlier pages of his journal, he is indiscreetly communicative as to the good cheer he enjoyed, in the later ones he does not waste time in grumbling at discomforts and lenten fare. He observes minutely and describes well all that he sees along the great river,—the people, the productions, the scenery, and the vegetation. He gives us a lively impression of the capabilities of the country, and of the results which are to follow the introduction of steam-navigation on the Amoor. Like a true American, he believes in the manifest destiny of Russia, and looks forward to the not distant time when, with a kind of retributive justice, the Muscovite is to swallow up the Manchew, as Charles Lamb used to call him. Already American merchants have established themselves at the mouth of the Amoor, and, unless Mr. Collins is oversanguine, a great trade is to spring up between the Californians and their opposite neighbors on the eastern coast of Asia.

On the whole, we take leave of Mr. Collins with a feeling of decided esteem for his genuine good qualities, and can safely commend his book as both lively and instructive.



Revolutions in English History. By ROBERT VAUGHAN, D.D. Vol. I. Revolutions of Race. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1860. pp. xvi., 663.

We do not think that Dr. Vaughan has been happy in his choice of a title for his book. It is more properly an introduction to the study of English history, than the limitation of the title would seem to import. The Saxon occupation of England is, perhaps, the only event which may fitly be called a revolution of race. The volume, however, is a solid and sensible one. Dr. Vaughan is not a brilliant writer; but brilliancy is not always the best quality in an historian, for it as often leaves readers dazzled as taught. A decidedly matter-of-fact turn of mind prevents his being a theorist, so that he does not formulate characters and events in accordance with some fixed preconception. His learning seems sometimes limited by what was accessible to him at the least expense of study,—as, for example, in his account of the religion of the Teutonic races, where he depends almost altogether on Mallet. His style is generally clear and unpretending, never remarkable for any rhetorical merit, sometimes disfigured by inaccuracies, which, had they occurred in an American book, would have been attributed by English critics to the low grade of our culture and civilization. In one instance he is guilty of the barbarous cockneyism of using the word party as an equivalent for person. He speaks of the Roman Wall as having been kept perpetually guarded when he means constantly, of border land as "separating between" two races, and of ornaments made "from jet."

Though we do not find in Dr. Vaughan the fascinating qualities which we have been spoiled into expecting by some recent English and French examples of historical composition, we can give him the praise of being fair-minded, sensible, and clear. If he anywhere shows prejudice, it is in his somewhat depreciatory estimate of the Normans, whom he rather gratuitously supposes to have acquired civilization and the love of art from the Saxons,—a supposition at war with probability as well as fact. If anything distinguished the Norman from the Saxon, it was his aptitude for appreciating beauty as distinguished from use,—an aptitude on which French influence could not have been lost before the Conquest of England. The Normans in Sicily certainly had not had the advantage of Saxon training in aesthetics, and the poetry and architecture of the Normans in England were no reproduction of Saxon models.

But whatever deductions are to be made on the score of want of picturesqueness in style, of generalizing power, and of that imagination which sets before us dramatically the mutual interaction of men and events, Dr. Vaughan's history will be found a useful and enlightened compendium of the facts with which it deals.



Fresh Hearts that failed Three Thousand Years Ago; with Other Things. By the Author of "The New Priest in Conception Bay." Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1860. pp. 121.

In noticing the "New Priest," in a former number of the "ATLANTIC," we had occasion to speak of the author's remarkable beauty and vigor of style, his keen sense of the picturesque and imaginative aspects of outward Nature, his comic power, and his original conception of character. At the same time we could not but feel that a certain tendency to multiplicity of detail, and a neglect of form or insensibility to it, hindered the book of that direct and vigorous effect which its power and variety of resource would otherwise have produced. Something of the same impression is made by the present volume. There are glimpses in it of real genius, but it shows itself generally here and there only, as the natural outcrop, seldom in the bars and ingots which give proof of patient mining and smelting at furnace-heat, still more seldom in the beautiful shapes of artistic elaboration. Here, again, we find the same unborrowed feeling for outward Nature and familiarity with her moods, the same poetic beauty of expression, and in many of the pieces the same overcrowdedness, as if the author would fain say all he could, instead of saying only what he could not help.

There are some of the poems that do more justice to the abilities of the author. In "The Year is Gone" there is great tenderness of sentiment and grace of expression; "Love Disposed of" is a pretty fancy embodied with true lyric feeling; but the poem which over crests all the others like a decuman wave is "The Brave Old Ship, the Orient." It is a truly masculine poem, full of vigor and imagination, and giving evidence of true original power in the author. There is scarce a weak verse in it, and the measure has a swing, at once easy and stately, like that of the sea itself. We know not if we are right in conjecturing some hint of deeper meaning in the name "Orient," but, taking it merely as a descriptive poem, it is one of the finest of its kind. The writer's heart seems more in the work here than in the devotional verses. We quote a single passage from it, which seems to us particularly fine:—

"We scanned her well, as we drifted by: A strange old ship, with her poop built high, And with quarter-galleries wide, And a huge beaked prow, as no ships are builded now, And carvings all strange, beside: A Byzantine bark, and a ship of name and mark Long years and generations ago; Ere any mast or yard of ours was growing hard With the seasoning of long Norwegian snow. * * * * * "Down her old black side poured the water in a tide, As they toiled to get the better of a leak. We had got a signal set in the shrouds, And our men through the storm looked on in crowds: But for wind, we were near enough to speak. It seemed her sea and sky were in times long, long gone by, That we read in winter-evens about; As if to other stars She had reared her old-world spars, And her hull had kept an old-time ocean out."