"Many years after," she writes, "when these ladies were (through M. de Girardin) at the head of one of the chief organs of the Paris press, they were much flattered and courted; at the period I speak of" (about 1817-1825) "their position was far from brilliant, and Mme. Gay was far from popular. Every word that fell from her mouth, uttered in a sharp tone, and full of bitterness and envy, went to speak ill of others and prodigiously well of herself. She had a mania for titles and tuft-hunting, and could speak of no one under a marquis, a count, or a baron. Her daughter's beauty and talents caused her afterwards to be more generally admitted into society; but at this period she was avoided by most people."

Her daughter's beauty was certainly marvellous, and when, under the reign of Louis Philippe, American society had in Paris more than one brilliant representative and more than one splendid centre of hospitality, where all that was illustrious in the society of France perpetually flocked, we make no doubt many of our countrymen noticed, whether at theatre or concert or ball, the really queenlike air of Mme. de Girardin, and the exquisitely classic profile, which, enframed, as it were, by the capricious spirals of the lightest, fairest flaxen hair, resembled the outline of some antique statue of a Muse.

Delphine Gay and her mother were more the ornaments of the salon of the Duchesse d'Abrantes, perhaps, than of that of Gerard; and as the former continued open long after the latter was closed by death, not only the young girl, whose verses were so immensely in fashion during the Restoration, was one of the constant guests of Junot's widow, but she continued to be so as the wife of Emile de Girardin, the intelligent and enterprising founder of the newspaper "La Presse."

The salon of the Duchesse d'Abrantes was one of the first of a species which has since then found imitators by scores and hundreds throughout France. It was the salon of a person not in herself sufficiently superior or even celebrated to attract the genuine superiorities of the country without the accessory attractions of luxury, and not sufficiently wealthy to draw around her by her splendid style of receiving, and to disdain the bait held out to those she invited by the presence of great "lions." Gerard gave to his guests, at twelve o'clock at night, a cup of tea and "eternally the same cakes" all the year round; but Gerard was the type of the great honors rendered, as we have observed, to Art under the Empire, and to his house men went as equals, whose daily occupations made them the associates of kings. This was not the case with the Duchesse d'Abrantes. She had notoriety, not fame. Her "Memoires" had been read all through Europe, but it is to be questioned whether anything beyond curiosity was satisfied by the book, and it certainly brought to its author little or none of that which in France stands in lieu even of fortune, but which is not easy to obtain, namely,—consideration.

The Duchesse d'Abrantes was rather popular than otherwise; she was even beloved by a certain number of persons; but she never was what is termed consideree,—and this gave to her salon a different aspect from that of the others we have spoken of. A dozen names could be mentioned, whose wearers, without any means of "entertaining" their friends, or giving them more than a glass of eau sucree, were yet surrounded by everything highest and best in the land, simply because they were gens considerables, as the phrase went; but Mme. d'Abrantes, who more or less received all that mixed population known by the name of tout Paris, never was, we repeat, consideree.

The way in which Mme. Ancelot introduces her "friend," the poor Duchesse d'Abrantes, on the scene, is exceedingly amusing and natural; and we have here at once the opportunity of applying the remark we made in commencing these pages, upon Mme. Ancelot's truthfulness. She is the habituee of the house of Mme. d'Abrantes; she professes herself attached to the Duchess; yet she does not scruple to tell everything as it really is, nor, out of any of the usual little weaknesses of friendship, does she omit any one single detail that proves the strange and indeed somewhat "Bohemian" manner of life of her patroness. We, the readers of her book, are obviously obliged to her for her indiscretions; with those who object to them from other motives we have nothing to do.

Here, then, is the fashion in which we are introduced to Mme. la Duchesse d'Abrantes, widow of Marshal Junot, and a born descendant of the Comneni, Emperors of Byzantium.

Mme. Ancelot is sitting quietly by her fireside, one evening in October, (some short time after the establishment of the monarchy of July,) waiting to hear the result of a representation at the Theatre Francais, where a piece of her own is for the first time being performed. All at once, she hears several carriages stop at her door, a number of persons rush up the stairs, and she finds herself in the arms of the Duchesse d'Abrantes, who was resolved, as she says, to be the first to congratulate her on her success. The hour is a late one; supper is served, and conversation is prolonged into the "small hours." All at once Mme. d'Abrantes exclaims, with an explosion of delight,—"Ah! what a charming time is the night! one is so deliciously off for talking! so safe! so secure! safe from bores and from duns!" (on ne craint ni les ennuyeux ni les creanciers.')

Madame Ancelot affirms that this speech made a tremendous effect, and that her guests looked at each other in astonishment. If this really was the case, we can only observe that it speaks well for the Parisians of the epoch at which it occurred; for, assuredly, at the present day, no announcement of the kind would astonish or scandalize any one. People in "good society," nowadays, in France, have got into a habit of living from hand to mouth, and of living by expedients, simply because they have not the strength of mind to live out of society, and because the life of "the world" forces them to expenses utterly beyond what they have any means of providing for. However, we are inclined to believe that some five-and-twenty years ago this was in no degree a general case, and that Mme. d'Abrantes might perfectly well have been the first maitresse de maison to whom it happened.

"Alas!" sighs Mme. Ancelot, commenting upon her excellent friend's strange confidence,—"it was the secret of her whole life that she thus revealed to us in a moment of abandon,—the secret of an existence that tried still to reflect the splendors of the Imperial epoch, and that was at the same time perplexed and tormented by all the thousand small miseries of pecuniary embarrassment. There were the two extremes of a life that to the end excited my surprise. Grandeur! want!—between those two opposites oscillated every day of the last years of the Duchesse d'Abrantes; the exterior and visible portion of that life arranged itself well or ill, as it best could, in the middle,—now apparently colored by splendor, and now degraded by distress; but at bottom the existence was unvaryingly what I state."

Madame d'Abrantes, at the period of her greatest notoriety, occupied the ground-floor of a hotel in the Rue Rochechouart, with a garden, where dancing was often introduced upon the lawn. Some remnants of the glories of Imperialism were collected there, but the principal habitues were men of letters, artists, and young men who danced well! (les jeunes beaux qui dansaient bien!) That one phrase characterizes at once the ex-belle of the Empire, the contemporary of the sentimental Hortense de Beauharnais, and of the more than legere Pauline Borghese.

To the "new society of July" Mme. d'Abrantes was an object of great curiosity. "I dote on seeing that woman!" said Balzac, one evening, to Mme. Ancelot. "Only fancy! she saw Napoleon Bonaparte as a mere boy,—knew him well,—knew him as a young man, unknown,—saw him occupied, like anybody else, with the ordinary occurrences of every-day life; then she saw him grow, and grow, and rise, and throw the shadow of his name over the world. She seems to me somewhat like a canonized creature who should all at once come and recount to me the glories of paradise."

Balzac, it must be premised, was bitten just at this period by the Napoleon mania, and this transformed his inquisitive attachment for Mme. d'Abrantes into a kind of passion. It was at this period that he chose to set up in his habitation in the Rue Cassini a sort of altar, on which he placed a small statue of the Emperor, with these words engraved upon the pedestal:—

"Ce qu'il avait commence par l'epee, Je l'acheverai par la plume!"

What particular part of the Imperial work this was that Balzac was to "complete by the pen" was never rightly discovered,—but for a time he had a sun-stroke for Napoleon, and his attachment for Mme. d'Abrantes partook of this influence.

One anecdote told by Mme. Ancelot proves to what a degree the union of "grandeur" and "want" she has alluded to went. "Mme. d'Abrantes," says her biographer of the moment, "was always absorbed by the present impression, whatever that might happen to be; she passed from joy to despair like a child, and I never knew any house that was either so melancholy or so gay." One evening, however, it would seem that the Hotel d'Abrantes was gayer than usual. Laughter rang loud through the rooms, the company was numerous, and the mistress of the house in unparalleled high spirits. If the tide of conversation seemed to slacken, quickly Madame la Duchesse had some inimitable story of the ridicules of the ladies of the Imperial court, and the whole circle was soon convulsed at her stories, and at her way of telling them. The tea-table was forgotten. Generally, tea at her house was taken at eleven o'clock; but on this occasion, midnight was long past before it was announced, and before her guests assembled round the table. If our readers are curious to know why, here was the reason: All that remained of the plate had that very morning been put in pawn, and when tea should have been served it was found that tea-spoons were wanting! Whilst these were being sent for to the house of a friend who lent them, Madame la Duchesse took charge of her guests, and drowned their impatience in their hilarity.

It must be allowed that this lady was worthy to be the mother of the young man who, one day, pointing to a sheet of stamped paper, on which a bill of exchange might be drawn, said: "You see that; it is worth five sous now; but if I sign my name to it, it will be worth nothing!" This was a speech made by Junot's eldest son, known in Paris as the Duc d'Abrantes, and as the intimate friend of Victor Hugo, from whom at one time he was almost inseparable.

The eccentric personage we have just spoken of—the Duchesse d'Abrantes—died in the year 1838, in a garret, upon a truckle-bed, provided for her by the charity of a friend. The royal family paid the expenses of her funeral, and Chateaubriand, accompanied by nearly every celebrity of the literary world, followed on foot behind her coffin, from the church to the burying-ground.

Madame d'Abrantes may be considered as the inventor, in France, of what has since become so widely spread under the name of les salons picaresques, and of what, at the present day, is famous under the appellation of the demi-monde. Her example has been followed by numberless imitators, and now, instead of presuming (as was the habit formerly) that those only receive who are rich enough to do so, it is constantly inquired, when any one in Paris opens his or her house, whether he or she is ruined, and whether the soirees given are meant merely to throw dust into people's eyes. The history of the tea-spoons—so singular at the moment of its occurrence—has since been parodied a hundred times over, and sometimes by mistresses of houses whose fortune was supposed to put them far above all such expedients. Madame d'Abrantes, we again say, was the founder of a genre in Paris society, and as such is well worth studying. The genre is by no means the most honorable, but it is one too frequently found now in the social centres of the French capital for the essayist on Paris salons to pass it over unnoticed.

The salon of Mme. Recamier is one of a totally different order, and the world-wide renown of which may make it interesting to the reader of whatever country. As far as age was concerned, Mme. Recamier was the contemporary of Mme. d'Abrantes, of Gerard, nay, almost of Mme. Lebrun; for the renown of her beauty dates from the time of the French Revolution, and her early friendships associate her with persons who even had time to die out under the first Empire; but the salon of Madame Recamier was among the exclusively modern ones, and enjoyed all its lustre and its influence only after 1830. The cause of this is obvious: the circumstance that attracted society to Mme. Recamier's house was no other than the certainty of finding there M. de Chateaubriand. He was the divinity of the temple, and the votaries flocked around his shrine. Before 1830 the temple had been elsewhere, and, until her death, Mme. la Duchesse de Duras was the high-priestess of the sanctuary, where a few privileged mortals only were admitted to bow down before the idol. It is inconceivable how easy a certain degree of renown finds it in Paris to establish one of these undisputed sovereignties, before which the most important, highest, most considerable individualities abdicate their own merit, and prostrate themselves in the dust. M. de Chateaubriand in no way justified the kind of worship that was paid him, nor did he even obtain it so long as he was in a way actively to justify it. It was when he grew old and produced nothing, and was hourly more and more rusted over by selfishness, churlishness, and an exorbitant adoration of his own genius, that the society of his country fell down upon its knees before him, and was ready to make any sacrifice to insure to itself the honor of one of his smiles or one of his looks. In this disposition, Madame Recamier speedily obtained a leading influence over Paris society, and when it was notorious that from four to six every day the "Divinity" would be visible in her salons, her salons became the place of pilgrimage for all Paris. As with those of Mme. d'Abrantes, there was a certain mixture amongst the guests, because, without that, the notoriety, which neither Chateaubriand nor Mme. Recamier disliked, would have been less easily secured; but the tone of the reunions was vastly different, and at the celebrated receptions of the Abbaye aux Bois (where Mme. Recamier spent her last quarter of a century) the somewhat austere deportment of the siecle de Louis XIV. was in vogue. All the amusements were in their nature grave. Mlle. Rachel recited a scene from "Polyeucte" for the author of "Les Martyrs," and for archbishops and cardinals; the Duc de Noailles read a chapter from his history of Mme. de Maintenon; some performance of strictly classical music was to be heard; or, upon state occasions, Chateaubriand himself vouchsafed to impart to a chosen few a few pages of the "Memoires d'Outre-Tombe."

In her youth Mme. Recamier had been reputed beautiful, and her sole occupation then was to do the honors of her beauty. She did not dream of ever being anything else; and as she remained young marvellously long,—as her beauty, or the charm, whatever it was, that distinguished her, endured until a very late epoch of her life,—she was far advanced in years before the idea of becoming famous through any other medium save that of her exterior advantages ever struck her. Madame Recamier had no intellectual superiority, but, paraphrasing in action Moliere's witty sentence, that "silence, well employed, may go far to establish a man's capacity," she resolved to employ well the talent she possessed of making other people believe themselves clever. Mme. Ancelot, whose "good friend" she is supposed to have been, and who treats her with the same sincerity she applies to Mme. d'Abrantes, has a very ingenious and, we have reason to fancy, a very true parallel, for Mme. Recamier. She compares her to the mendicant described by Sterne, (or Swift,) who always obtained alms even from those who never gave to any other, and whose secret lay in the adroit flatteries with which he seasoned all his beggings. The best passages in Mme. Ancelot's whole Volume are those where she paints Mme. Recamier, and we will therefore quote them.

"The Recluse of the Abbaye aux Bois," she says, "had either read the story of the beggar, or her instinct had persuaded her that vanity and pride are the surest vulnerable points by which to attack and subject the human heart. From the first to the last of all the orators, writers, artists, or celebrities of no matter what species, that were invited to Mme. Recamier's house, all heard from her lips the same admiring phrases, the first time they were presented to her. With a trembling voice she used to say: 'The emotion I feel in the presence of a superior being does not permit me to express, as I should wish to do, all my admiration, all my sympathy;—but you can divine,—you can understand;—my emotion tells the rest!' This eulogistic sentence, a well-studied hesitation, words interrupted, and looks of the most perfect enthusiasm, produced in the person thus received a far more genuine emotion than that with which he was met. It was no other than the artifice of wholesale, universal flattery,—always and invariably the same,—with which Mme. Recamier achieved her greatest conquests, and continued to draw around her almost all the eminent men of our epoch. All this was murmured in soft, low tones, so that he only to whom she spoke tasted the honey poured into his ear. Her grace of manner all the while was infinite; for though she had no talent for conversation, she had, in the highest degree, the ability which enables one to succeed in certain little combinations, and when she had determined that such or such a great man should become her habitue, the web she spun round him on all sides was composed of threads so imperceptibly fine and so innumerable, that those who escaped were few, and gifted with marvellous address."

Mme. Ancelot confesses to having "studied narrowly" all Mme. Recamier's manoeuvres, and to having watched all the thousand little traps she laid for social "lions"; but we are rather astonished herein at Mme. Ancelot's astonishment, for, with more or less talent and grace, these are the devices resorted to in Paris by a whole class of maitresses de maison, of whom Mme. Recamier is simply the most perfect type.

But the most amusing part of all, and one that will be above all highly relished by any one who has ever seen the same game carried on, is the account of Mme. Recamier's campaign against M. Guizot, which signally failed, all her small webs having been coldly brushed away by the intensely vainglorious individual who knew he should not be placed above Chateaubriand, and who would for no consideration under heaven have been placed beneath him. The spectacle of this small and delicate vanity doing battle against this vanity so infinitely hard and robust is exquisitely diverting. Mme. Recamier put herself so prodigiously out of her way; she who was indolent became active; she who was utterly insensible to children became maternal; she who was of delicate health underwent what only a vigorous constitution would undertake. But all in vain; she either did not or would not see that M. Guizot would not be second where M. de Chateaubriand was first. Besides, she split against another rock, that she had either chosen to overlook, or the importance of which she had undervalued. If Mme. Recamier had for the idol of her shrine at the Abbaye aux Bois M. de Chateaubriand, M. Guizot had also his Madame Recamier, the "Egeria" of the Hotel Talleyrand,—the Princess Lieven. The latter would have resisted to the death any attempt to carry off "her Minister" from the salons where his presence was the "attraction" reckoned upon daily, nay, almost hourly; and against such a rival as the venerable Princess Lieven, Mme. Recamier, spite of all her arts and wiles, had no possible chance. However, she left nothing untried, and when M. Guizot took a villa at Auteuil, whither to repair of an evening and breathe the freshness of the half-country air after the stormy debates of the Chambers, she also established herself close by, and opened her attack on the enemy's outposts by a request to be allowed to walk in the Minister's grounds, her own garden being ridiculously small! This was followed by no end of attentions directed towards Mme. de Meulan, M. Guizot's sister-in-law, who saw through the whole, and laughed over it with her friends; no end of little dancing matinees were got up for the Minister's young daughters, and no end even of sweet biscuits were perpetually provided for a certain lapdog belonging to the family! All in vain! We may judge, too, what transports of enthusiasm were enacted when the Minister himself was by chance (!) encountered in the alleys of the park, and with what outpourings of admiration he was greeted, by the very person who, of all others, was so anxious to become one of his votaries. But, as we again repeat, it was of no use. M. Guizot never consented to be one of the habitues of the salon of the Abbaye aux Bois. It should be remarked, also, that M. Guizot cared little for anything out of the immediate sphere of politics, and of the politics of the moment; he took small interest in what went on in Art, and none whatever in what went on in the so-called "world"; so that where a salon was not predominantly political, there was small chance of presenting Louis Philippe's Prime-Minister with any real attraction. For this reason he was now and then to be met at the house of Mme. de Chatenay, often at that of Mme. de Boigne, but never in any of the receptions of the ordinary run of men and women of the world. His own salon, we again say,—the salon where he was what Chateaubriand was at the Abbaye aux Bois,—was the salon of the Princess Lieven; and to have ever thought she could induce M. Guizot to be in the slightest degree faithless to this habit argues, on the part of Mme. Recamier, either a vanity more egregious than we had even supposed, or an ignorance of what she had to combat that seems impossible. To have imagined for a moment that she could induce M. Guizot to frequent her reunions shows that she appreciated neither Mme. de Lieven, nor M. Guizot, nor, we may say, herself, in the light of the high-priestess of Chateaubriand's temple.

However, what Mme. Recamier went through with regard to the arrogant President du Conseil of the Orleans dynasty, more than one of her imitators are at this hour enduring for some "lion" infinitely illustrious. This kind of hunt after celebrated persons is a feature of French civilization, and a feature peculiarly characteristic of the French women who take a pride in their receptions. A genuine maitresse de maison in Paris has no affections, no ties, save those of her salon. She is wholly absorbed in thinking how she shall render this more attractive than the salon of some other lady, who is her intimate friend, but whose sudden disappearance from the social scene, by any catastrophe, death even, would not leave her inconsolable. She has neither husband, children, relatives, nor friends (in the genuine acceptation of the word);—she has, above all, before all, always and invariably, her salon. This race of women, who date undoubtedly from the famous Marquise de Rambouillet in the time of the Fronde, are now dying out, and are infinitely less numerous than they were even twenty years ago in Paris; but a few of them still exist, and in these few the ardor we allude to, and which would lead them, following in Mme. Recamier's track, to embark for the North Cape in search of some great celebrity, is in no degree abated. Madame Recamier is curious as the arch-type of this race, so purely, thoroughly, exclusively Parisian.

Perhaps to a foreigner, however, no salon was more amusing than that of Charles Nodier; but this was of an utterly different description, and all but strictly confined to the world of Literature and Art. Nodier himself occupied a prominent place in the literature that was so much talked of during the last years of the Restoration and the first years of the Monarchy of July, and his house was the rendezvous for all the combatants of both sides, who at that period were engaged in the famous Classico-Romantic struggle. Nodier was the Head Librarian of the Arsenal, and it was in the salons of this historic palace that he held his weekly gatherings. He himself was scarcely to be reputed exclusively of either party; he enjoyed the favors of the Monarchy, and the sympathies of the Opposition; the "Classics" elected him a member of the Academie Francaise, and the "Romantics" were perpetually in his intimacy. The fact was, that Nodier at heart believed in neither Classics nor Romantics, laughed at both in his sleeve, and only cared to procure to himself the most agreeable house, the greatest number of comforts, and the largest sums of money possible.

"By degrees," says Mme. Ancelot, "as Nodier cared less for other people, he praised them more, probably in order to compensate them in words for the less he gave them in affection. Besides this, he was resolved not to be disturbed in his own vanities, and for this he knew there was one only way, which was to foster the vanities of everybody else. Never did eulogium take such varied forms to laud and exalt the most mediocre things. Nowhere were so many geniuses whom the public never guessed at raised to the rank of divinities as in the salons of Charles Nodier."

The description contained in the little volume before us, the manner in which every petty scribbler of fiftieth-rate talent was transformed into a giant in the society of Nodier, is extremely curious and amusing, and the more so that it is strictly true, and tallies perfectly with the recollections of the individuals who, at the period mentioned, were admitted to the reunions of the Arsenal.

Every form of praise having been expended upon persons of infinitely small merit, what was to be done when those of real superiority entered upon the scene? It was impossible to apply to them the forms of laudation adapted to their inferiors. Well, then, a species of slang was invented, by which it was thought practicable to make the genuine great men conceive they had passed into the condition of demigods. A language was devised that was to express the fervor of the adorers who were suddenly allowed to penetrate into Olympus, and the strange, misapplied terms whereof seemed to the uninitiated the language of insanity. For instance, if, after a dozen little unshaved, unkempt poetasters had been called "sublime," Victor Hugo vouchsafed to recite one of his really best Odes, what was the eulogistic form to be adopted? Mme. Ancelot will tell us.

"A pause would ensue, and at the end of a silence of some minutes, when the echo of Hugo's sonorous voice had subsided, one after another of the elect would rise, go up to the poet, take his hand with solemn emotion, and raise to the ceiling eyes full of mute enthusiasm. The crowd of bystanders would listen all agape. Then, to the surprise, almost to the consternation, of the uninitiated, one word only would be spoken,—loudly, distinctly, and with strong, deep emphasis spoken; that word would be:

"Cathedral!!!

"The first orator, after this effort, would return to the place whence he had come, and another, succeeding to him, after repeating the same pantomime as the former, would exclaim:

"Ogive!!!

"Then a third would come forward, and, after looking all around, would risk the word:

"Pyramid-of-Egypt!!!

"And thereat the whole assembly would start off into frenzies of applause, and fifty or sixty voices would repeat in chorus the sacramental words that had just been pronounced separately."

The degree of absurdity to which a portion of society must have attained before such scenes as the above could become possible may serve as a commentary and an explanation to half the literature which flooded the stage and the press in France for the first six or eight years after the Revolution of 1830. However, to be just, we must, in extenuation of all these absurdities, cite one passage more from Mme. Ancelot's book, in which, in one respect, at all events, the youth of twenty years ago in Paris are shown to have been superior to the youth of the present day.

"Nodier's parties were extremely amusing," says our authoress; "his charming daughter was the life of the whole; she drew around her young girls of her own age; poets, musicians, painters, young and joyous as these, were their partners in the dance, and every one was full of hope and dreaming of glory. But what brought all the light-heartedness, all the enthusiasm, all the exultation to its utmost height was, that, in all that youth, so trusting and so hopeful, no one gave a single thought to money!"

Assuredly, it would be impossible to say as much nowadays.

Taken as a whole, Mme. Ancelot's little volume is, as we said, an amusing and an instructive one. It is not so from any portion of her own individuality she has infused into it, but, on the contrary, from the entire sincerity with which it mirrors other people. We recommend it to our readers, for it is a record of Paris society in its successive transformations from 1789 to 1848, and paints a class of people and a situation of things, equally true types whereof may possibly not be observable in future times.

Footnote 1: Les Salons de Paris.—Foyers Eteints. Par Mme. Ancelot. 12mo. Paris.

Footnote 2: It will be remembered that on field-days Murat had adopted a hat and feathers of a most ridiculous kind, and that have become proverbial.



THE DISCOVERER OF THE NORTH CAPE.

A LEAF FROM KING ALFRED'S "OROSIUS."

Othere, the old sea-captain, Who dwelt in Helgoland, To Alfred, the Lover of Truth, Brought a snow-white walrus-tooth, Which he held in his brown right-hand.

His figure was tall and stately; Like a boy's his eye appeared; His hair was yellow as hay, But threads of a silvery gray Gleamed in his tawny beard.

Hearty and hale was Othere, His cheek had the color of oak; With a kind of laugh in his speech, Like the sea-tide on a beach, As unto the King he spoke.

And Alfred, King of the Saxons, Had a book upon his knees, And wrote down the wondrous tale Of him who was first to sail Into the Arctic seas.

"So far I live to the northward, No man lives north of me; To the east are wild mountain-chains, And beyond them meres and plains; To the westward all is sea.

"So far I live to the northward, From the harbor of Skeringes-hale, If you only sailed by day, With a fair wind all the way, More than a month would you sail.

"I own six hundred reindeer, With sheep and swine beside; I have tribute from the Fins,— Whalebone, and reindeer-skins, And ropes of walrus-hide.

"I ploughed the land with horses, But my heart was ill at ease, For the old seafaring men Came to me now and then With their sagas of the seas,—

"Of Iceland, and of Greenland, And the stormy Hebrides, And the undiscovered deep;— I could not eat nor sleep For thinking of those seas.

"To the northward stretched the desert,— How far I fain would know; So at last I sallied forth, And three days sailed due north, As far as the whale-ships go.

"To the west of me was the ocean,— To the right the desolate shore; But I did not slacken sail For the walrus or the whale, Till after three days more.

"The days grew longer and longer, Till they became as one; And southward through the haze I saw the sullen blaze Of the red midnight sun.

"And then uprose before me, Upon the water's edge, The huge and haggard shape Of that unknown North Cape, Whose form is like a wedge.

"The sea was rough and stormy, The tempest howled and wailed, And the sea-fog, like a ghost, Haunted that dreary coast,— But onward still I sailed.

"Four days I steered to eastward, Four days without a night: Bound in a fiery ring Went the great sun, O King, With red and lurid light."

Here Alfred, King of the Saxons, Ceased writing for a while; And raised his eyes from his book, With a strange and puzzled look, And an incredulous smile.

But Othere, the old sea-captain, He neither paused nor stirred; And the King listened, and then Once more took up his pen, And wrote down every word.

"And now the land," said Othere, "Bent southward suddenly, And I followed the curving shore And ever southward bore Into a nameless sea.

"And there we hunted the walrus, The narwhale, and the seal: Ha! 'twas a noble game, And like the lightning's flame Flew our harpoons of steel!

"There were six of us altogether, Norsemen of Helgoland; In two days and no more We killed of them threescore, And dragged them to the strand!"

Here Alfred the Truth-Teller Suddenly closed his book, And lifted his blue eyes With doubt and strange surmise Depicted in their look.

And Othere, the old sea-captain, Stared at him wild and weird, Then smiled, till his shining teeth Gleamed white from underneath His tawny, quivering beard.

And to the King of the Saxons, In witness of the truth, Raising his noble head, He stretched his brown hand, and said. "Behold this walrus-tooth!"



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL.

[The schoolmistress came down with a rose in her hair,—a fresh June rose. She has been walking early; she has brought back two others,—one on each cheek.

I told her so, in some such pretty phrase as I could muster for the occasion. Those two blush-roses I just spoke of turned into a couple of damasks. I suppose all this went through my mind, for this was what I went on to say:—]

I love the damask rose best of all. The flowers our mothers and sisters used to love and cherish, those which grow beneath our eaves and by our doorstep, are the ones we always love best. If the Houyhnhnms should ever catch me, and, finding me particularly vicious and unmanageable, send a man-tamer to Rareyfy me, I'll tell you what drugs he would have to take and how he would have to use them. Imagine yourself reading a number of the Houyhnhnms Gazette, giving an account of such an experiment.

"MAN-TAMING EXTRAORDINARY.

"The soft-hoofed semi-quadruped recently captured was subjected to the art of our distinguished man-tamer in presence of a numerous assembly. The animal was led in by two stout ponies, closely confined by straps to prevent his sudden and dangerous tricks of shoulder-hitting and foot-striking. His countenance expressed the utmost degree of ferocity and cunning.

"The operator took a handful of budding lilac-leaves, and crushing them slightly between his hoofs, so as to bring out their peculiar fragrance, fastened them to the end of a long pole and held them towards the creature. Its expression changed in an instant,—it drew in their fragrance eagerly, and attempted to seize them with its soft split hoofs. Having thus quieted his suspicious subject, the operator proceeded to tie a blue hyacinth to the end of the pole and held it out towards the wild animal. The effect was magical. Its eyes filled as if with raindrops, and its lips trembled as it pressed them to the flower. After this it was perfectly quiet, and brought a measure of corn to the man-tamer, without showing the least disposition to strike with the feet or hit from the shoulder."

That will do for the Houyhnhnms Gazette.—Do you ever wonder why poets talk so much about flowers? Did you ever hear of a poet who did not talk about them? Don't you think a poem, which, for the sake of being original, should leave them out, would be like those verses where the letter a or e or some other is omitted? No,—they will bloom over and over again in poems as in the summer fields, to the end of time, always old and always new. Why should we be more shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of blossoms or the night of stars? Look at Nature. She never wearies of saying over her floral pater-noster. In the crevices of Cyclopean walls,—in the dust where men lie, dust also,—on the mounds that bury huge cities, the Birs Nemroud and the Babel-heap,—still that same sweet prayer and benediction. The Amen! of Nature is always a flower.

Are you tired of my trivial personalities,—those splashes and streaks of sentiment, sometimes perhaps of sentimentality, which you may see when I show you my heart's corolla as if it were a tulip? Pray, do not give yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot whose conceit it is to treat himself as an exceptional being. It is because you are just like me that I talk and know that you will listen. We are all splashed and streaked with sentiments,—not with precisely the same tints, or in exactly the same patterns, but by the same hand and from the same palette.

I don't believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for the blue hyacinth which I have,—very certainly not for the crushed lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they are. You love the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don't doubt; but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with young memories as it does me. For the same reason I come back to damask roses, after having raised a good many of the rarer varieties. I like to go to operas and concerts, but there are queer little old homely sounds that are better than music to me. However, I suppose it's foolish to tell such things.

——It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time,—said the divinity-student;—saying it, however, in one of the dead languages, which I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and therefore do not bear quotation as such.

Well, now,—said I,—suppose a good, clean, wholesome-looking countryman's cart stops opposite my door.—Do I want any huckleberries?—If I do not, there are those that do. Thereupon my soft-voiced handmaid bears out a large tin pan, and then the wholesome countryman, heaping the peck-measure, spreads his broad hands around its lower arc to confine the wild and frisky berries, and so they run nimbly along the narrowing channel until they tumble rustling down in a black cascade and tinkle on the resounding metal beneath.—I won't say that this rushing huckleberry hail-storm has not more music for me than the "Anvil Chorus."

——I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.

——Where are your great trees, Sir? said the divinity-student.

Oh, all round about New England. I call all trees mine that I have put my wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham Young has human ones.

——One set's as green as the other,—exclaimed a boarder, who has never been identified.

They're all Bloomers,—said the young fellow called John.

[I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our landlady's daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by putting my wedding-ring on a tree.]

Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear,—said I.—I have worn a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New England elms and other big trees.—Don't you want to hear me talk trees a little now? That is one of my specialties.

[So they all agreed that they should like to hear me talk about trees.]

I want you to understand, in the first place, that I have a most intense, passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had several romantic attachments to certain trees in particular. Now, if you expect me to hold forth in a "scientific" way about my tree-loves,—to talk, for instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and describe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all that,—you are an anserine individual, and I must refer you to a dull friend who will discourse to you of such matters. What should you think of a lover who should describe the idol of his heart in the language of science, thus: Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; Genus, Homo; Species, Europeus; Variety, Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental Formula

2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3 i—- c—- p—- m——, 2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3

and so on?

No, my friends, I shall speak of trees as we see them, love them, adore them in the fields, where they are alive, holding their green sun-shades over our heads, talking to us with their hundred thousand whispering tongues, looking down on us with that sweet meekness which belongs to huge, but limited organisms,—which one sees in the brown eyes of oxen, but most in the patient posture, the outstretched arms, and the heavy-drooping robes of these vast beings endowed with life, but not with soul,—which outgrow us and outlive us, but stand helpless,—poor things!—while Nature dresses and undresses them, like so many full-sized, but underwitted children.

Did you ever read old Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of English men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman. I always supposed "Dr. Syntax" was written to make fun of him. I have a whole set of his works, and am very proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and orange-juice landscapes. The Pere Gilpin had the kind of science I like in the study of Nature,—a little less observation than White of Selborne, but a little more poetry.—Just think of applying the Linnaean system to an elm! Who cares how many stamens or pistils that little brown flower, which comes out before the leaf, may have to classify it by? What we want is the meaning, the character, the expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual.

There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if well marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language. Take the oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a type of strength and endurance. I wonder if you ever thought of the single mark of supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all our other forest-trees? All the rest of them shirk the work of resisting gravity; the oak alone defies it. It chooses the horizontal direction for its limbs, so that their whole weight may tell,—and then stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that the strain may be mighty enough to be worth resisting. You will find, that, in passing from the extreme downward droop of the branches of the weeping-willow to the extreme upward inclination of those of the poplar, they sweep nearly half a circle. At 90 deg. the oak stops short; to slant upward another degree would mark infirmity of purpose; to bend downwards, weakness of organization. The American elm betrays something of both; yet sometimes, as we shall see, puts on a certain resemblance to its sturdier neighbor.

It won't do to be exclusive in our taste about trees. There is hardly one of them which has not peculiar beauties in some fitting place for it. I remember a tall poplar of monumental proportions and aspect, a vast pillar of glossy green, placed on the summit of a lofty hill, and a beacon to all the country round. A native of that region saw fit to build his house very near it, and, having a fancy that it might blow down some time or other, and exterminate himself and any incidental relatives who might be "stopping" or "tarrying" with him,—also laboring under the delusion that human life is under all circumstances to be preferred to vegetable existence,—had the great poplar cut down. It is so easy to say, "It is only a poplar!" and so much harder to replace its living cone than to build a granite obelisk!

I must tell you about some of my tree-wives. I was at one period of my life much devoted to the young lady-population of Rhode Island, a small, but delightful State in the neighborhood of Pawtucket. The number of inhabitants being not very large, I had leisure, during my visits to the Providence Plantations, to inspect the face of the country in the intervals of more fascinating studies of physiognomy. I heard some talk of a great elm a short distance from the locality just mentioned. "Let us see the great elm,"—I said, and proceeded to find it,—knowing that it was on a certain farm in a place called Johnston, if I remember rightly. I shall never forget my ride and my introduction to the great Johnston elm.

I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time. Provincialism has no scale of excellence in man or vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature's best. I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and that a sort of shiver came over it as over a betrothed maiden when she first stands before the unknown to whom she has been plighted. Before the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all quails and shrinks into itself. All those stories of four or five men stretching their arms around it and not touching each other's fingers, of one's pacing the shadow at noon and making it so many hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions.

As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object of my journey, the rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time at the road-side. Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the rest, I asked myself,—"Is this it?" But as I drew nearer, they grew smaller,—or it proved, perhaps, that two standing in a line had looked like one, and so deceived me. At last, all at once, when I was not thinking of it,—I declare to you it makes my flesh creep when I think of it now,—all at once I saw a great, green cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the lesser forest-growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my ribs as a hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through me, without need of uttering the words,—"This is it!"

You will find this tree described, with many others, in the excellent Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts. The author has given my friend the Professor credit for some of his measurements, but measured this tree himself, carefully. It is a grand elm for size of trunk, spread of limbs, and muscular development,—one of the first, perhaps the first, of the first class of New England elms.

The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the ground is in the great elm lying a stone's throw or two north of the main road (if my points of compass are right) in Springfield. But this has much the appearance of having been formed by the union of two trunks growing side by side.

The West-Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows belong also to the first class of trees.

There is a noble old wreck of an elm at Hatfield, which used to spread its claws out over a circumference of thirty-five feet or more before they covered the foot of its bole up with earth. This is the American elm most like an oak of any I have ever seen.

The Sheffield elm is equally remarkable for size and perfection of form. I have seen nothing that comes near it in Berkshire County, and few to compare with it anywhere. I am not sure that I remember any other first-class elms in New England, but there may be many.

——What makes a first-class elm?—Why, size, in the first place, and chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above the ground; and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across, may claim that title, according to my scale. All of them, with the questionable exception of the Springfield tree above referred to, stop, so far as my experience goes, at about twenty-two or twenty-three feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of spread.

Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to eighteen feet, are comparatively common. The queen of them all is that glorious tree near one of the churches in Springfield. Beautiful and stately she is beyond all praise. The "great tree" on Boston Common comes in the second rank, as does the one at Cohasset, which used to have, and probably has still, a head as round as an apple-tree, and that at Newburyport, with scores of others which might be mentioned. These last two have perhaps been over-celebrated. Both, however, are pleasing vegetables. The poor old Pittsfield elm lives on its past reputation. A wig of false leaves is indispensable to make it presentable.

[I don't doubt there may be some monster-elm or other, vegetating green, but inglorious, in some remote New England village, which only wants a sacred singer to make it celebrated. Send us your measurements,—(certified by the postmaster, to avoid possible imposition,)—circumference five feet from soil, length of line from bough-end to bough-end, and we will see what can be done for you.]

—I wish somebody would get us up the following work:—

SYLVA NOVANGLICA.

Photographs of New England Elms and other Trees, taken upon the Same Scale of Magnitude. With Letter-Press Descriptions, by a Distinguished Literary Gentleman. Boston: —— —— & Co. 185..

The same camera should be used,—so far as possible,—at a fixed distance. Our friend, who is giving us so many interesting figures in his "Trees of America," must not think this Prospectus invades his province; a dozen portraits, with lively descriptions, would be a pretty complement to his larger work, which, so far as published, I find excellent. If my plan were carried out, and another series of a dozen English trees photographed on the same scale, the comparison would be charming.

It has always been a favorite idea of mine to bring the life of the Old and the New World face to face, by an accurate comparison of their various types of organization. We should begin with man, of course; institute a large and exact comparison between the development of la pianta umana, as Alfieri called it, in different sections of each country, in the different callings, at different ages, estimating height, weight, force by the dynamometer and the spirometer, and finishing off with a series of typical photographs, giving the principal national physiognomies. Mr. Hutchinson has given us some excellent English data to begin with.

Then I would follow this up by contrasting the various parallel forms of life in the two continents. Our naturalists have often referred to this incidentally or expressly; but the animus of Nature in the two half-globes of the planet is so momentous a point of interest to our race, that it should be made a subject of express and elaborate study. Go out with me into that walk which we call the Mall, and look at the English and American elms. The American elm is tall, graceful, slender-sprayed, and drooping as if from languor. The English elm is compact, robust, holds its branches up, and carries its leaves for weeks longer than our own native tree.

Is this typical of the creative force on the two sides of the ocean, or not? Nothing but a careful comparison through the whole realm of life can answer this question.

There is a parallelism without identity in the animal and vegetable life of the two continents, which favors the task of comparison in an extraordinary manner. Just as we have two trees alike in many ways, yet not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so we have a complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the same ideal, embody it with various modifications. Inventive power is the only quality of which the Creative Intelligence seems to be economical; just as with our largest human minds, that is the divinest of faculties, and the one that most exhausts the mind which exercises it. As the same patterns have very commonly been followed, we can see which is worked out in the largest spirit, and determine the exact limitations under which the Creator places the movement of life in all its manifestations in either locality. We should find ourselves in a very false position, if it should prove that Anglo-Saxons can't live here, but die out, if not kept up by fresh supplies, as Dr. Knox and other more or less wise persons have maintained. It may turn out the other way, as I have heard one of our literary celebrities argue,—and though I took the other side, I liked his best,—that the American is the Englishman reinforced.

—Will you walk out and look at those elms with me after breakfast?—I said to the schoolmistress.

[I am not going to tell lies about it, and say that she blushed,—as I suppose she ought to have done, at such a tremendous piece of gallantry as that was for our boarding-house. On the contrary, she turned a little pale,—but smiled brightly and said,—Yes, with pleasure, but she must walk towards her school.—She went for her bonnet.—The old gentleman opposite followed her with his eyes, and said he wished he was a young fellow. Presently she came down, looking very pretty in her half-mourning bonnet, and carrying a school-book in her hand.]

MY FIRST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.

This is the shortest way,—she said, as we came to a corner.—Then we won't take it,—said I.—The schoolmistress laughed a little, and said she was ten minutes early, so she could go round.

We walked under Mr. Paddock's row of English elms. The gray squirrels were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them came toward us in light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to the rail of the burial-ground. He was on a grave with a broad blue-slate-stone at its head, and a shrub growing on it. The stone said this was the grave of a young man who was the son of an Honorable gentleman, and who died a hundred years ago and more.—Oh, yes, died,—with a small triangular mark in one breast, and another smaller opposite, in his back, where another young man's rapier had slid through his body; and so he lay down out there on the Common, and was found cold the next morning, with the night-dews and the death-dews mingled on his forehead.

Let us have one look at poor Benjamin's grave,—said I.—His bones lie where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone says they lie,—which is more than can be said of most of the tenants of this and several other burial-grounds.

[The most accursed act of Vandalism ever committed within my knowledge was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at least of our city burial-grounds, and one at least just outside the city, and planting them in rows to suit the taste for symmetry of the perpetrators. Many years ago, when this disgraceful process was going on under my eyes, I addressed an indignant remonstrance to a leading journal. I suppose it was deficient in literary elegance, or too warm in its language; for no notice was taken of it, and the hyena-horror was allowed to complete itself in the face of daylight. I have never got over it. The bones of my own ancestors, being entombed, lie beneath their own tablet; but the upright stones have been shuffled about like chessmen, and nothing short of the Day of Judgment will tell whose dust lies beneath any of those records, meant by affection to mark one small spot as sacred to some cherished memory. Shame! shame! shame!—that is all I can say. It was on public thoroughfares, under the eye of authority, that this infamy was enacted. The red Indians would have known better; the selectmen of an African kraal-village would have had more respect for their ancestors. I should like to see the gravestones which have been disturbed all removed, and the ground levelled, leaving the flat tombstones; epitaphs were never famous for truth, but the old reproach of "Here lies" never had such a wholesale illustration as in these outraged burial-places, where the stone does lie above, and the bones do not lie beneath.]

Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman's sigh over poor Benjamin's dust. Love killed him, I think. Twenty years old, and out there fighting another young fellow on the Common, in the cool of that old July evening;—yes, there must have been love at the bottom of it.

The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through the rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge. That was all her comment upon what I told her.—How women love Love! said I;—but she did not speak.

We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from the main street.—Look down there,—I said.—My friend the Professor lived in that house at the left hand, next the further corner, for years and years. He died out of it, the other day.—Died?—said the schoolmistress.—Certainly,—said I.—We die out of houses, just as we die out of our bodies. A commercial smash kills a hundred men's houses for them, as a railroad crash kills their mortal frames and drives out the immortal tenants. Men sicken of houses until at last they quit them, as the soul leaves its body when it is tired of its infirmities. The body has been called "the house we live in"; the house is quite as much the body we live in. Shall I tell you some things the Professor said the other day?—Do!—said the schoolmistress.

A man's body,—said the Professor,—is whatever is occupied by his will and his sensibility. The small room down there, where I wrote those papers you remember reading, was much more a portion of my body than a paralytic's senseless and motionless arm or leg is of his.

The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose outside wrapper.

You shall observe,—the Professor said,—for, like Mr. John Hunter and other great men, he brings in that shall with great effect sometimes,—you shall observe that a man's clothing or series of envelopes do after a certain time mould themselves upon his individual nature. We know this of our hats, and are always reminded of it when we happen to put them on wrong side foremost. We soon find that the beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with all its irregular bumps and depressions. Just so all that clothes a man, even to the blue sky which caps his head,—a little loosely,—shapes itself to fit each particular being beneath it. Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets, lovers, condemned criminals, all find it different, according to the eyes with which they severally look.

But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it. There is a shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller shells into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own past. See what these are, and you can tell what the occupant is.

I had no idea,—said the Professor,—until I pulled up my domestic establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of roots I had been making during the years I was planted there. Why, there wasn't a nook or a corner that some fibre had not worked its way into; and when I gave the last wrench, each of them seemed to shriek like a mandrake, as it broke its hold and came away.

There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably, and which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable aspect and in all dimensions. The infinite galleries of the Past await but one brief process and all their pictures will be called out and fixed forever. We had a curious illustration of the great fact on a very humble scale. When a certain bookcase, long standing in one place, for which it was built, was removed, there was the exact image on the wall of the whole, and of many of its portions. But in the midst of this picture was another,—the precise outline of a map which had hung on the wall before the bookcase was built. We had all forgotten everything about the map until we saw its photograph on the wall. Then we remembered it, as some day or other we may remember a sin which has been built over and covered up, when this lower universe is pulled away from before the wall of Infinity, where the wrongdoing stands self-recorded.

The Professor lived in that house a long time,—not twenty years, but pretty near it. When he entered that door, two shadows glided over the threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for the last time,—and one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be longer than his own. What changes he saw in that quiet place! Death rained through every roof but his; children came into life, grew to maturity, wedded, faded away, threw themselves away; the whole drama of life was played in that stock-company's theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling. Peace be to those walls, forever,—the Professor said,—for the many pleasant years he has passed within them!

The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been with him in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in imagination with tender interest wherever he goes.—In that little court, where he lived in gay loneliness so long,—

—in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes loitering down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord, swallowing up the small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it goes, until it gets proud and swollen and wantons in huge luxurious oxbows about the fair Northampton meadows, and at last overflows the oldest inhabitant's memory in profligate freshets at Hartford and all along its lower shores,—up in that caravansary on the banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement processions,—where blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance, and the hills of Beulah, as the Professor always called them, rolled up the opposite horizon in soft climbing masses, so suggestive of the Pilgrim's Heavenward Path that he used to look through his old "Dollond" to see if the Shining Ones were not within range of sight,—sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks that carried them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to the terminus of their harmless stroll,—the patulous fage, in the Professor's classic dialect,—the spreading beech, in more familiar phrase,—[stop and breathe here a moment, for the sentence is not done yet, and we have another long journey before us,]—

—and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the amber-flowing Housatonic,—dark stream, but clear, like the lucid orbs that shine beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed demi-blondes,—in the home overlooking the winding stream and the smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the tracks of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the winter snow; facing the twin summits which rise in the far North, the highest waves of the great land-storm in all this billowy region,—suggestive to mad fancies of the breasts of a half-buried Titaness, stretched out by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden away beneath the leaves of the forest,—in that home where seven blessed summers were passed, which stand in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer,—

—in that modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious, yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,—full of great and little boys' playthings from top to bottom,—in all these summer or winter nests he was always at home and always welcome.

This long articulated sigh of reminiscences,—this calenture which shows me the maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire and the mountain-circled green of Grafton beneath the salt waves that come feeling their way along the wall at my feet, restless and soft-touching as blind men's busy fingers,—is for that friend of mine who looks into the waters of the Patapsco and sees beneath them the same visions that paint themselves for me in the green depths of the Charles.

——Did I talk all this off to the schoolmistress?—Why, no,—of course not. I have been talking with you, the reader, for the last ten minutes. You don't think I should expect any woman to listen to such a sentence as that long one, without giving her a chance to put in a word?

——What did I say to the schoolmistress?—Permit me one moment. I don't doubt your delicacy and good-breeding; but in this particular case, as I was allowed the privilege of walking alone with a very interesting young woman, you must allow me to remark, in the classic version of a familiar phrase, used by our Master Benjamin Franklin, it is nullum tui negotii.

When the schoolmistress and I reached the school-room door, the damask roses I spoke of were so much heightened in color by exercise that I felt sure it would be useful to her to take a stroll like this every morning, and made up my mind I would ask her to let me join her again.

EXTRACT FROM MY PRIVATE JOURNAL.

(To be burned unread.)

I am afraid I have been a fool; for I have told as much of myself to this young person as if she were of that ripe and discreet age which invites confidence and expansive utterance. I have been low-spirited and listless, lately,—it is coffee, I think,—(I observe that which is bought ready-ground never affects the head,)—and I notice that I tell my secrets too easily when I am downhearted.

There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, like that on Dighton Rock, are never to be seen except at dead-low tide.

There is a woman's footstep on the sand at the side of my deepest ocean-buried inscription!

——Oh, no, no, no! a thousand times, no!—Yet what is this which has been shaping itself in my soul?—Is it a thought?—is it a dream?—is it a passion?—Then I know what comes next.

——The Asylum stands on a bright and breezy hill; those glazed corridors are pleasant to walk in, in bad weather. But there are iron bars to all the windows. When it is fair, some of us can stroll outside that very high fence. But I never see much life in those groups I sometimes meet;—and then the careful man watches them so closely! How I remember that sad company I used to pass on fine mornings, when I was a schoolboy!—B., with his arms full of yellow weeds,—ore from the gold mines which he discovered long before we heard of California,—Y., born to millions, crazed by too much plum-cake, (the boys said,) dogged, explosive,—made a Polyphemus of my weak-eyed schoolmaster, by a vicious flirt with a stick,—(the multi-millionnaires sent him a trifle, it was said, to buy another eye with; but boys are jealous of rich folks,—and I don't doubt the good people made him easy for life,)—how I remember them all!

I recollect, as all do, the story of the Hall of Eblis, in "Vathek," and how each shape, as it lifted its hand from its breast, showed its heart,—a burning coal. The real Hall of Eblis stands on yonder summit. Go there on the next visiting-day, and ask that figure crouched in the corner, huddled up like those Indian mummies and skeletons found buried in the sitting posture, to lift its hand,—look upon its heart, and behold, not fire, but ashes.—No, I must not think of such an ending! Dying would be a much more gentlemanly way of meeting the difficulty. Make a will and leave her a house or two and some stocks, and other little financial conveniences, to take away her necessity for keeping school.—I wonder what nice young man's feet would be in my French slippers before six months were over! Well, what then? If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn't marry her for the world, if he were not quite sure that he was the best person she could by any possibility marry.

——It is odd enough to read over what I have just been writing.—It is the merest fancy that ever was in the world. I shall never be married. She will; and if she is as pleasant as she has been so far, I will give her a silver tea-set, and go and take tea with her and her husband, sometimes. No coffee, I hope, though,—it depresses me sadly. I feel very miserably;—they must have been grinding it at home.—Another morning walk will be good for me, and I don't doubt the schoolmistress will be glad of a little fresh air before school.

* * * * *

——The throbbing flushes of the poetical intermittent have been coming over me from time to time of late. Did you ever see that electrical experiment which consists in passing a flash through letters of gold-leaf in a darkened room, whereupon some name or legend springs out of the darkness in characters of fire?

There are songs all written out in my soul, which I could read, if the flash might but pass through them,—but the fire must come down from heaven. Ah! but what if the stormy nimbus of youthful passion has blown by, and one asks for lightning from the ragged cirrus of dissolving aspirations, or the silvered cumulus of sluggish satiety? I will call on her whom the dead poets believed in, whom living ones no longer worship,—the immortal maid, who, name her what you will,—Goddess, Muse, Spirit of Beauty,—sits by the pillow of every youthful poet, and bends over his pale forehead until her tresses lie upon his cheek and rain their gold into his dreams.

MUSA.

O my lost Beauty!—hast thou folded quite Thy wings of morning light Beyond those iron gates Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates, And Age upon his mound of ashes waits To chill our fiery dreams, Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy streams?

Leave me not fading in these weeds of care, Whose flowers are silvered hair!— Have I not loved thee long, Though my young lips have often done thee wrong And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song? Ah, wilt thou yet return, Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar burn?

Come to me!—I will flood thy silent shrine With my soul's sacred wine, And heap thy marble floors As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores In leafy islands walled with madrepores And lapped in Orient seas, When all their feathery palms toss, plume-like, in the breeze.

Come to me!—thou shalt feed on honeyed words, Sweeter than song of birds;— No wailing bulbul's throat, No melting dulcimer's melodious note, When o'er the midnight wave its murmurs float, Thy ravished sense might soothe With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-smooth.

Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen, Sought in those bowers of green Where loop the clustered vines And the close-clinging dulcamara twines,— Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines, And Summer's fruited gems, And coral pendants shorn from Autumn's berried stems.

Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves,— Or stretched by grass-grown graves, Whose gray, high-shouldered stones, Carved with old names Life's time-worn roll disowns, Lean, lichen-spotted, o'er the crumbled bones Still slumbering where they lay While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf away!

Spread o'er my couch thy visionary wing! Still let me dream and sing,— Dream of that winding shore Where scarlet cardinals bloom,—for me no more,— The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor, And clustering nenuphars Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced stars!

Come while their balms the linden-blossoms shed!— Come while the rose is red,— While blue-eyed Summer smiles O'er the green ripples round yon sunken piles Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian isles, And on the sultry air The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men in prayer!

Oh, for thy burning lips to fire my brain With thrills of wild sweet pain!— On life's autumnal blast, Like shrivelled leaves, youth's passion-flowers are cast,— Once loving thee, we love thee to the last!— Behold thy new-decked shrine, And hear once more the voice that breathed "Forever thine!"

THE TRUSTEE'S LAMENT.

Per aspera ad astra.

(SCENE.—Outside the gate of the Astronomical Observatory at Albany.)

There was a time when I was blest; The stars might rise in East or West With all their sines and wonders; I cared for neither great nor small, As pointedly unmoved by all As, on the top of steeple tall, A lightning-rod at thunders.

What did I care for Science then? I was a man with fellow-men, And called the Bear the Dipper; Segment meant piece of pie,—no more; Cosine, the parallelogram that bore JOHN SMITH & CO. above a door; Arc, what called Noah skipper.

No axes weighed upon my mind, (Unless I had a few to grind.) And as for my astronomy, Had Hedgecock's quadrant then been known, I might a lamp-post's height have shown By gas-tronomic skill,—if none Find fault with the metonymy.

O hours of innocence! O ways How far from these unhappy days When all is vicy-versy! No flower more peaceful took its due Than I, who then no difference knew 'Twixt Ursy Major and my true Old crony, Major Hersey.

Now in long broils and feuds we roast, Like Strasburg geese that living toast To make a liver-pate,— And all because we fondly strove To set the city of our love In scientific fame above Her sister Cincinnati!

We built our tower and furnished it With everything folks said was fit, From coping-stone to grounsel; And then, to give a knowing air, Just nominally assigned its care To that unmanageable affair, A Scientific Council.

We built it, not that one or two Astronomers the stars might view And count the comets' hair-roots, But that it might by all be said How very freely we had bled,— We were not laying out a bed To force their early square-roots.

The observations we wished made Were on the spirit we'd displayed, Worthy of Athens' high days; But they've put in a man who thinks Only of planets' nodes and winks, So full of astronomic kinks He eats star-fish on Fridays.

The instruments we did not mean For seeing through, but to be seen At tap of Trustee's knuckle; But the Director locks the gate, And makes ourselves and strangers wait While he is ciphering on a slate The rust of Saturn's buckle.

So on the wall's outside we stand, Admire the keyhole's contour grand And gateposts' sturdy granite;— But, ah, is Science safe, we say, With one who treats Trustees this way? Who knows but he may snub, some day, A well-conducted planet?

Who knows what mischief he may brew With such a telescope brand-new At the four-hundredth power? He may bring some new comet down So near that it'll singe the town And do the Burgess-Corps crisp-brown Ere they can storm his tower.

We wanted (having got our show) Some man, that had a name or so, To be our public showman; But this one shuts and locks the gate: Who'll answer but he'll peculate, (And, faith, some stars are missed of late,) Now that he's watched by no man?

Our own discoveries he may steal, Or put night's candles out, to deal At junkshops with the sockets: Savants, in other lands or this, If any theory you miss Whereon your cipher graven is, Don't fail to search his pockets!

Lock up your comets: if that fails, Then notch their ears and clip their tails, That you at need may swear to 'em; And watch your nebulous flocks at night, For, if your palings are not tight, He may, to gratify his spite, Let in the Little Bear to 'em.

Then he's so quarrelsome, we've fears He'll set the very Twins by the ears,— So mad, if you resist him, He'd get Aquarius to play A milkman's trick, some cloudy day, And water all the Milky Way To starve some sucking system.

But plaints are vain! through wrath or pride, The Council all espouse his side And will our missives con no more; And who that knows what savants are, Each snappish as a Leyden jar, Will hope to soothe the wordy war 'Twixt Ologist and Onomer?

Search a Reform Convention, where He- and she-resiarehs prepare To get the world in their power, You will not, when 'tis loudest, find Such gifts to hug and snarl combined As drive each astronomic mind With fifty-score Great-Bear-power!

No! put the Bootees on your foot, Elope with Virgo, strive to shoot That arrow of O'Ryan's, Drain Georgian Ciders to the lees, Attempt what crackbrained thing you please, But dream not you can e'er appease An angry man of science!

Ah, would I were, as I was once, To fair Astronomy a dunce, Or launching jeux d'esprit at her, Of light zodiacal making light, Deaf to all tales of comets bright, And knowing but such stars as might Roll r-rs at our theatre!

Then calm I drew my night-cap on, Nor bondsman was for what went on Ere morning in the heavens; Twas no concern of mine to fix The Pleiades at seven or six,— But now the omnium genitrix Seems all at sixes and sevens.

Alas, 'twas in an evil hour We signed the paper for the tower, With Mrs. D. to head it! For, if the Council have their way, We've merely had, as Frenchmen say, The painful maladie du pay, While they get all the credit!

Boys, henceforth doomed to spell Trustees, Think not it ends in double ease To those who hold the office; Shun Science as you would Despair, Sit not in Cassiopeia's chair, Nor hope from Berenice's hair To bring away your trophies!



THE POCKET-CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTH.

Well, it has happened, and we have survived it pretty well. The Democratic Almanacs predicted a torrent, a whirlwind, and we know not what meteoric phenomena,—but the next day Nature gave no sign, the dome of the State-House was in its place, the Monument was as plumb as ever, no chimney mourned a ravished brick, and the Republican Party took its morning tea and toast in peace and safety. On the whole, it must be considered a wonderful escape. Since Partridge's time there had been no such prophecies,—since Miller's, no such perverse disobligingness in the event.

But what had happened? Why, the Democratic Young Men's Celebration, to be sure, and Mr. Choate's Oration.

The good city of Boston in New England, for we know not how many years, had been in the habit of celebrating the National Birthday, first, with an oration, as became the Athens of America, and second, with a dinner, as was meet in the descendants of Teutonic forefathers. The forenoon's oration glorified us in the lump as a people, and every man could reckon and appropriate his own share of credit by the simple arithmetical process of dividing the last census by the value he set upon himself, a divisor easily obtained by subtracting from the total of inhabitants in his village the number of neighbors whom he considered ciphers. At the afternoon's dinner, the pudding of praise was served out in slices to favored individuals; dry toasts were drunk by drier dignitaries; the Governor was compared to Solon; the Chief Justice to Brutus; the Orator of the Day to Demosthenes; the Colonel of the Boston Regiment to Julius Caesar; and everybody went home happy from a feast where the historic parallels were sure to hold out to the last Z in Lempriere.

Gradually matters took a new course; the Union was suddenly supposed to lie at the point of dissolution, and what we may call the Doctor-Brandreth style of oratory began. Every orator mounted the rostrum, like a mountebank at a fair, to proclaim the virtues of his private panacea for the morbid Commonwealth, and, as was natural in young students of political therapeutics, fancied that he saw symptoms of the dread malady of Disunion in a simple eruption of Jethro Furber at a convention of the Catawampusville Come-outers, or of Pyrophagus Quattlebum at a training of the Palmetto Plug-Uglies,—neither of which was skin-deep. The dinners became equally dreary. Did the eye of a speaker light on the national dish of beans, he was reminded of the languid pulse of the sentiment of union; did he see a broiled chicken, it called up to his mind's eye the bird of our uncommon country, with the gridiron on his breast, liable to be reduced at any moment to the heraldic duality of his Austrian congener by the strife of contending sections pulling in opposite directions; an innocent pippin was enough to suggest the apple of discord; and with the removal of the cloth came a dessert of diagnoses on the cancer that was supposed to be preying on the national vitals. The only variety was a cringing compliment, in which Bunker Hill curtsied to King's Mountain, to any Southern brother who chanced to be present, and who replied patronizingly,—while his compatriots at the warmer end of the Union were probably, with amiable sincerity, applying to the Yankees that epithet whose expression in type differs but little from that of a doctorate in divinity, but which precedes the name it qualifies, as that follows it, and was never, except by Beaumarchais and Fielding, reckoned among titles of honor or courtesy.

A delusion seemed to have taken possession of our public men, that the people wanted doctors of the body-politic to rule over them, and, if those were not to be had, would put up with the next best thing,—quacks. Every one who was willing to be an Eminent Statesman issued his circulars, like the Retired Physician, on all public occasions, offering to send his recipe in return for a vote. The cabalistic formula always turned out to be this:—"Take your humble servant for four years at the White House; if no cure is effected, repeat the dose."

Meanwhile were there any symptoms of disease in the Constitution? Not the least. The whole affair was like one of those alarms in a country-town which begin with the rumor of ten cases of confluent small-pox and end with the discovery that the doctor has been called to a case of nettle-rash at Deacon Scudder's. But sober men, who loved the Union in a quiet way, without advertising it in the newspapers, and who were willing to sacrifice everything to the Constitution but the rights it was intended to protect, began to fear that the alarmists might create the disease which they kept up so much excitement about.

This being the posture of affairs, the city of Boston, a twelvemonth since, chose for their annual orator a clergyman distinguished for eloquence, and for that important part of patriotism, at least, which consists in purity of life. This gentleman, being neither a candidate for office nor the canvasser of a candidate, ventured upon a new kind of address. He took for his theme the duties consequent upon the privileges of Freedom, ventured to mention self-respect as one of them, and commented upon the invitation of a Virginia Senator, the author of the Fugitive Slave Bill, to a Seventeenth-of-June Celebration, while the Senators of Massachusetts were neglected. In speaking of this, he used, we believe, the word "flunkeyism." It is not an elegant word; it is not even an English one;—but had the speaker sought for a Saxon correlative, he could hardly have found one that would have seemed more satisfactory, especially to those who deserved it; for Saxon is straightforward, and a reluctance to be classified (fatal to science) is characteristic of the human animal.

An orator who suggests a new view of any topic is a disturber of the digestive organs,—this was very properly a matter of offence to the Aldermen who were to dine after the oration,—but an orator who tampers with the language we have inherited from Shakspeare and Milton, and which we share with Tupper, was an object for deeper reprobation. The Young Men's Democratic Association of Boston are purists; they are jealous for their mother-tongue,—and it is the more disinterested in them as a large proportion of them are Irishmen; they are exclusive,—a generous confusion of ideas as to the meaning of democracy, even more characteristically Hibernian; they are sentimental, too,—melancholy as gibcats,—and feared (from last year's example) that the city might not furnish them with a sufficiently lachrymose Antony to hold up before them the bloody garment of America, and show what rents the envious Blairs and Wilsons and Douglasses had made in it. Accordingly they resolved to have a public celebration all to themselves,—a pocket-edition of the cumbrous civic work,—and as the city provided fireworks in the evening, in order to be beforehand with it in their pyrotechnics, they gave Mr. Choate in the forenoon.

We did not hear Mr. Choate's oration; we only read it in the newspapers. Cold fireworks, the morning after, are not enlivening. You have the form without the fire, and the stick without the soar. But we soon found that we were to expect no such disappointment from Mr. Choate. He seems to announce at the outset that he has closed his laboratory. The Prospero of periods had broken his wand and sunk his book deeper than ever office-hunter sounded. The boys in the street might wander fancy-free, and fire their Chinese crackers as they listed; but for him this was a solemn occasion, and he invited his hearers to a Stoic feast of Medford crackers and water, to a philosophic banquet of metaphors and metaphysics.

We confess that we expected a great deal. Better a crust with Plato than nightingales' tongues with Apicius; and if Mr. Choate promised only the crust, we were sure of one melodious tongue, at least, before the meal was over. He is a man of whom any community might be proud. Were society an organized thing here, as in Europe, no dinner and no drawing-room would be perfect without his talk. He would have been heard gladly at Johnson's club. The Hortensins of our courts, with a cloud of clients, he yet finds time to be a scholar and a critic, and to read Plato and Homer as they were read by Plato's and Homer's countrymen. Unsurpassed in that eloquence which, if it does not convince, intoxicates a jury, he was counted, so long as Webster lived, the second advocate of our bar.

All this we concede to Mr. Choate with unreserved admiration; but when, leaving the field where he had won his spurs as the successful defender of men criminally accused, he undertakes to demonstrate the sources whence national life is drawn, and the causes which lead to its decay,—to expound authoritatively the theory of political ethics and the principles of sagacious statesmanship, wary in its steps, and therefore durable in its results,—it becomes natural and fair to ask, What has been the special training that has fitted him for the task? More than this: when he comes forward as the public prosecutor of the Republican Party, it becomes our duty to examine the force of his arguments and the soundness of his logic. Has his own experience given him any right to talk superciliously to a great party overwhelmingly triumphant in the Free States? And does his oration show him to possess such qualities of mind, such grasp of reason, such continuity of induction, as to entitle him to underrate the intelligence of so large a number of his fellow-citizens by accusing them of being incapable of a generalization and incompetent to apprehend a principle?

The Bar has given few historically-great statesmen to the world,—fewer than the Church, which Mr. Choate undervalues in a sentence which, we cannot help thinking, is below the dignity of the occasion, and jarringly discordant with the generally elevated tone of his address. Burke, an authority whom Mr. Choate will not call in question, has said that the training of the bar tends to make the faculties acute, but at the same time narrow. The study of jurisprudence may, no doubt, enlarge the intellect; but the habit of mind induced by an indiscriminate advocacy—which may be summoned to the defence of a Sidney to-day and of a spoon-thief to-morrow—is rather that of the sophist than of the philosophic reasoner. Not truth, but the questionable victory of the moment, becomes naturally and inevitably the aim and end of all the pleader's faculties. For him the question is not what principle, but what interest of John Doe, may be at stake. Such has been Mr. Choate's school as a reasoner. As a politician, his experience has been limited. The member of a party which rarely succeeded in winning, and never in long retaining, the suffrages of the country, he for a time occupied a seat in the Senate, but without justifying the expectations of his friends. So far, his history shows nothing that can give him the right to assume so high and mighty a tone in speaking of his political opponents.

But in his scholarship he has a claim to be heard, and to be heard respectfully. Here lies his real strength, and hence is derived the inspiration of his better eloquence. The scholar enjoys more than the privilege, without the curse, of the Wandering Jew. He can tread the windy plain of Troy, he can listen to Demosthenes, can follow Dante through Paradise, can await the rising of the curtain for the first acting of Hamlet. Mr. Choate's oration shows that he has drawn that full breath which is, perhaps, possible only under a Grecian sky, and it is, in its better parts, scholarly in the best sense of the word.[1] It shows that he has read out-of-the-way books, like Bodinus "De Republica," and fresh ones, like Gladstone's Homer,—that he can do justice, with Spinoza, to Machiavelli,—and that in letters, at least, he has no narrow prejudices. Its sentences are full of scholarly allusion, and its language glitters continually with pattins of bright gold from Shakspeare. We abhor that profane vulgarity of our politics which denies to an antagonist the merits which are justly his, because he may have been blinded to the truth of our principles by the demerits which are justly ours,—which hates the man because it hates his creed, and, instead of grappling with his argument, seeks in the kitchen-drains of scandal for the material to bespatter his reputation. Let us say, then, honestly, what we honestly think,—the feeling, the mastery and choice of language, the intellectual comprehensiveness of glance, which can so order the many-columned aisle of a period, that the eye, losing none of the crowded particulars, yet sees through all, at the vista's end, the gleaming figure of thought to enshrine which the costly fabric was reared,—all these qualities of the orator demand and receive our sincere applause. In an age when indolence or the study of French models has reduced our sentences to the economic curtness of telegraphic despatches, to the dimension of the epigram without its point, Mr. Choate is one of the few whose paragraphs echo with the long-resounding pace of Dryden's coursers, and who can drive a predicate and six without danger of an overset.

Mr. Choate begins by congratulating his hearers that there comes one day in our year when "faults may be forgotten,— ... when the arrogance of reform, the excesses of reform, the strife of parties, the rivalries of regions, shall give place to a wider, warmer, juster sentiment,—when, turning from the corners and dark places of offensiveness, ... we may go up together to the serene and secret mountain-top," etc. Had he kept to the path which he thus marked out for himself, we should have had nothing to say. But he goes out of his way to indulge a spleen unworthy of himself and the occasion, and brings against political opponents, sometimes directly, sometimes by innuendo, charges which, as displaying personal irritation, are impolitic and in bad taste. One fruit of scholarship, and its fairest, he does not seem to have plucked,—one proof of contented conviction in the truth of his opinions he does not give,—that indifference to contemporary clamor and hostile criticism, that magnanimous self-trust, which, assured of its own loyalty to present duty, can wait patiently for future justice.

His exordium over, Mr. Choate proceeds to define and to discuss Nationality. We heartily agree with him in all he says in its praise, and draw attention, in passing, to a charming idyllic passage in which he speaks of the early influences which first develope in us its germinal principle. But when he says, that the sentiment of a national life, once existing, must still be kept alive by an exercise of the reason and the will, we dissent. It must be a matter of instinct, or it is nothing. The examples of nationality which he cites are those of ancient Greece and modern Germany. Now we affirm, that, with accidental exceptions, nationality has always been a matter of race, and was eminently so in the instances he quotes. If we read rightly, the nationality which glows in the "Iliad," and which it was, perhaps, one object of the poem to rouse or to make coherent, is one of blood, not territory. The same is true of Germany, of Russia, (adding the element of a common religious creed,) and of France, where the Celtic sentiment becomes day by day more predominant. The exceptions are England and Switzerland, whose intense nationality is due to insulation, and Holland, which was morally an island, cut off as it was from France by difference of language and antipathy of race, and from kindred Germany by the antagonism of institutions. A patriotism by the chart is a monster that the world ne'er saw. Men may fall in love with a lady's picture, but not with the map of their country. Few persons have the poetic imagination of Mr. Choate, that can vivify the dead lines and combine the complex features. It seems to us that our own problem of creating a national sentiment out of such diverse materials of race, such sometimes discordant or even hostile traditions, and then of giving it an intenseness of vitality that can overcome our vast spaces and our differences of climate and interest, is a new problem, not easily to be worked out by the old methods. Mr. Choate's plan seems to consist in the old formula of the Fathers. He would have us think of their sacrifices and their heroisms, their common danger and their common deliverance. Excellent, as far as it goes; but what are we to do with the large foreign fraction of our population imported within the last forty years, a great proportion of whom never so much as heard even of the war of 1812? Shall we talk of Bennington and Yorktown to the Germans, whose grandfathers, if they were concerned at all in those memorable transactions, were concerned on the wrong side? Shall we talk of the constancy of Puritan Pilgrims to the Romanist Irishman, who knows more of Brian Boroo than of the Mayflower?

It will be many generations before we become so fused as to have a common past, and the conciliation and forbearance which Mr. Choate recommends to related sections of country will be more than equally necessary to unrelated races. But while we are waiting for a past in which we can all agree, Mr. Choate sees danger in the disrespect which he accuses certain anonymi of entertaining for the past in general. But for what past? Does Mr. Choate mean our own American past? Does he refer us to that for lessons of forbearance, submission, and waiting for God's good time? Is the contemplation of their own history and respect for their own traditions the lenitive he prescribes for a people whose only history is a revolution, whose only tradition is rebellion? To what past and to what tradition did the Pilgrim Fathers appeal, except to that past, older than all history, that tradition, sacred from all decay, which, derived from an antiquity behind and beyond all the hoary generations, points the human soul to the God from whom it derived life, and with it the privilege of freedom and the duty of obedience? To what historical past did Jefferson go for the preamble of the Declaration, unless to the reveries of a half-dozen innovating enthusiasts, men of the closet,—of that class which Mr. Choate disparages by implication, though it has done more to shape the course of the world than any number of statesmen, whose highest office is, commonly, to deal prudently with the circumstances of the moment?

Mr. Choate does a great injustice to the Republican Party when he lays this irreverence for the past to their charge. As he seems to think that he alone has read books and studied the lessons of antiquity, he will be pleased to learn that there are persons also in that party who have not neglected all their opportunities in that kind. The object of the Republicans is to bring back the policy and practice of the Republic to some nearer agreement with the traditions of the fathers. They also have a National Idea,—for some of them are capable of distinguishing "a phrase from an idea," or Mr. Choate would find it easier to convert them. They propose to create a National Sentiment, in the only way that is possible under conditions like ours, by clearing the way for the development of a nation which shall be, not only in Fourth-of-July orations, but on every day in the year, and in the mouths of all peoples, great and wise, just and brave, and whose idea, always august and venerable, by turns lovely and terrible, shall bind us all in a common nationality by our loyalty to what is true, our reverence for what is good, our love for what is beautiful, and our sense of security in what is mighty. That is the America which the Fathers conceived, and it is that to which the children look forward,—an America which shall displace Ireland and Germany, Massachusetts and Carolina, in the hearts of those who call them mother, with an image of maternity at once more tender and more majestic.

There is a past for which Republicans have indeed no respect,—but it is one of recent date; there is a history from which they refuse to take lessons except for warning and not example,—but it is a history which is not yet written. When the future historian shall study that past and gather materials for writing that history, he will find cause for wonder at the strength of that national vitality which could withstand and survive, not the efforts of Mr. Choate's dreadful reformers, but of an administration calling itself Democratic, which, with the creed of the Ostend Manifesto for its foreign, and the practice of Kansas for its domestic policy, could yet find a scholar and a gentleman like Mr. Choate to defend it.