'Not every one doth it beseem to question The far-off, high Arcturus.'

And we, the lazzaroni on the piazza, can not even see the sky for the mist of 'mottoes Italianate and Spanish terms' of an effete logic that has risen before it.

Nevertheless, here are the first gleams of a genial appreciation of the AEsthetik of Germany, that large-hearted discernment that grasps similitudes from the antipodes of Thought, and writes them upon its sunny equator. And there are appeals to those finer impulses and experiences of every feeling soul that manifest a sense, imperfect yet animated, of that marvelous sympathy that exists between all phases of life, whether in humanity or in external nature. His natural outbursts of feeling are rare, but delicious as caviare, with a certain quaver of piquancy. 'Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding, and night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.' Only a fantasy, and yet how he bends Nature to suit the curve of his own temperament. And who has not felt the involuntary exhilaration, appalling from its very depth, that possessed him, crossing a bare common, on a bleak October afternoon, sunless and chill, with gray winds sweeping by—'I was glad to the brink of fear.' An intense emotion is imprisoned in these words,—the irresistible intoxication of deep delight, the consciousness of an unbounded faculty for enjoyment, and a lurking but delicious dread of the lavish power of sensation cooped within the senses. Heine, in his 'Lutetia,' speaks of the 'secret raptures attendant upon the tremors of fear.' Still, Emerson's Nature is rather a Nature a la Pompadour, in powdered hair and jeweled stomacher and high-heeled slippers; not the dear green mother of our dreams, who was wooed by the bending heavens, and

'Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth from the mighty embracement; Thousand-fold tribes of dwellers, impelled by thousand-fold instincts, Filled, as a dream, the wide waters; the rivers sang on in their channels; Laughed on their shores the hoarse seas; the yearning ocean swelled upward; Young life lowed through the meadows, the woods, and the echoing mountains, Wandered bleating in valleys, and warbled in blossoming branches.'

But Nature had been broached and Society was scandalized. Like the Chancellor in Faust, it mounted its tripod and solemnly proclaimed its verdict upon the inadmissible theory, so inadequately proved of the identity of Nature and Spirit. But 'was sagt mein Thales?'

'Natur und Geist! so spricht man nicht zu Christen: Desshalb verbrennt man Atheisten, Weil solche Reden hoechst gefaehrlich sind. Natur ist Suende, Geist ist Teufel; Sie hegen zwischen sich den Zweifel, Ihr miss-gestaltet Zwitterkind.'

The Transcendental movement did not fail to attract severe opposition, not only to its agitators, but toward the whole body of Unitarians, from a portion of which it in a great measure sprang. If indeed, as Ellis, its champion, asserts, Transcendentalism was not a native emanation from New England, i.e., Unitarianism, yet it obviously paved the way for its entrance, and even erected triumphal arches at intervals over its projected route. The consequence of the renewed attack upon this already sorely aggrieved sect was its virtual separation into moderates and extremists: the one holding to its primitive theories, the other inclining graciously to the more comprehensive and fascinating, because more liberal and mystical, tenets of the new faith. The Rev. Andrew Norton, an eminent Unitarian divine of the old school, in a discourse before the Alumni of the Cambridge Theological School, took occasion to attack with great vigor what he termed the 'new form of infidelity.' This and his subsequent replies were most ably answered by George Ripley, a zealous and genial scholar, eminent in belles-lettres and philosophy, in his 'Letters on the latest form of Infidelity, including the Opinions of Spinoza, Schleiermacher, and De Wette. Boston, James Munroe & Co., 1840.'

This contest constituted the central polemic of the strife. Chilled by the cold breath of popular intolerance, these persecuted advocates of a metaphysical faith, which even themselves comprehended but dimly, might have warmed their trembling hands by the fire of that auto da fe whose flames three centuries have not extinguished. Even those most opposed by culture and habit to the innovators, could not but acknowledge that the Bestia Triofante, that Giordano Bruno undertook to expel, was still rampant and powerful in the midst of a civilized and intelligent community. The fact was that the Transcendentalists were as much astonished at this accusation of infidelity as even Fenelon himself could have been. They were men of irreproachable character, the majority religious by nature and scholarly by disposition, and they found in their new field scope for an increased piety and a more enlarged benevolence. Their infinitely pliable philosophy expanded amiably to suit the requirements of any and every sect. The Rev. W. H. Furness, of Philadelphia, though not thoroughly identified with the movement, yet, in several volumes published at that time, manifested the influence of Rationalism upon his own studies. But the machinery of his mind, though exquisite in its details, was too delicate to work up successfully the heavy material of the German importations. In a review of his 'Life of Jesus,' by A. P. Peabody, in the N. A. Review, after a merited tribute of praise and respect to the talented author, occurs the following: 'AEsthetic considerations weigh more with him than historical proofs, and vividness of conception than demonstration. So far is he from needing facts to verify his theories, that he is ready to reject the best authenticated facts, if they would not flow necessarily from his a priori reasoning.' This was severe, too severe in the instance cited; but the remark is worth preserving, as strikingly characteristic of much of the belles-lettres writings of the New School of thinkers, as they were once, and indeed might yet be termed. But impiety was never the result of Transcendentalism. Its advocates endeavored rather to prove the adaptability of a generous and catholic spirit of Philosophy to religion than to subvert it. They never advanced to a love of Strauss and Feuerbach, and men of the second generation, of whom G.H. Lewes may be taken as a type, have generally been regarded by them as the Girondists regarded the Jacobins. Both urge reform, the Vergniaud and the Robespierre, but the one respects the old landmarks, while the other, with an unequaled nonchalance, sweeps by, unconscious of them all, and plants his standard on a foundation as yet unshaken by foot of man.

The consequences of the Transcendental movement were truly remarkable. Those latitudes to which habit had accustomed us to look for our literati became one immense hot-house, in which exotics of the most powerful fragrance bloomed luxuriantly.[4] As if by miracle, they assumed hues and adopted habits to which, in their native soil, they had been strangers. Every small litterateur wore conspicuously his cunningly entwined wreath. Ladies appeared at 'aesthetic tea-parties,' crowned with the most delicate of the new importations. Young clergymen were not complete without a flower in their button-holes, and the tables of staid old professors groaned beneath the weight of huge pyramidal bouquets. The cursory examination of foreign literature had given rise to an eclecticism which reflected the distinguishing features of that of Cousin, yet went a step further in daring. Yet this was not an eclecticism that, gifted with the power of a king, the dignity of a priest, and the discernment of a prophet, drew from the treasure-troves of European libraries only their choicest gems. Diamonds, it is true, flashed among the spoils; sapphires and emeralds gleamed; but beside them lay bits of sandstone and scraps of anthracite, rainbow-tinted, perhaps, but of an unconquerable opaqueness. And the alchemy that should have transmuted these to gold, and educed from the one light and from the other majesty, was wanting. A trace of Behmen here, a reading of Cousin's lectures there, some Schiller and more Goethe, some pietism encouraged by a love of Channing, the American Fenelon, some German ballads and a flavor of Plato,—all these helped the initiated to a curious dialect and a curious melange. And this was Transcendentalism. The great revelation that the grand Moonsee of the new movement had declared necessary in 1838 had been made; the ninth avatar had descended, and men looked about them for the representative of Krishna, and reverenced him in RALPH WALDO EMERSON. Under his auspices, the Dial, the organ of the new sect, was published, and the next year, 1841, the first collection of his writings appeared under the simple caption Essays, followed by a second series in 1847.

Spite of the fragmentary Germano-pantheism of the new Philosophy, as set forth in these volumes, that a grand advance had been made upon the old modes of thought was proved by the dismay in the opposing ranks. The outcry against Unitarianism was faint compared with the howls of horror and defiance that greeted Transcendentalism. The very name was a synonym for arrogance. The pride of its opponents was touched. Alarming indeed, and transcendental beyond conception, were the outpourings of thought that anointed the Dial and these Essays. The very chrism of mysticism trickled along their running-titles, and dripped fragrantly from their pages. Not only new opinions, but new words and phrases, puzzled the uninitiated. Among these were subjective and objective, and the concise, comprehensive Germanisms were assailed as sure evidence of treason or insanity. He who used them was a marked man, and liable to find on the first oyster-shell his sentence of exile from the assemblage of the faithful. The name of Goethe was as terrible as the sacred 'Om' of the Brahmins; it was whispered with 'bated breath, and was generally believed to be diabolical per se. In short, everything bearing the stamp of Germany was a bit of sweet, forbidden lore. Travels in that fog-land by dull old fogies, and simple outlines of its Philosophy by divines high in rank, were obtained by stealth, and read in secret by college-boys, with as much zeal as the 'Kisses' of Johannes Secundus or the Epigrams of Martial. Even Klopstock's 'Messiah' became gilded with a sort of delightful impropriety.

Disapprobation and distrust had merged into abuse and persecution. Orestes A. Brownson, then drifting with the strong tide of the liberals, published in 1840 a sort of pantheistically ending novel, entitled Charles Elwood, or the Infidel Converted. The Rev. Dr. Bright, at present editor of the Baptist Examiner, was at that tune a bookseller of the firm of Bennett & Bright, and publisher of the Baptist Register. When Charles Elwood appeared, he ordered the usual number of copies; but, discovering the nature of the book, made a Servetus of the 'lot' by burning them up in the back-yard of his store. A funeral pyre worthy the admiration and awe it must have excited.

The Essays of Emerson were subsequently attacked furiously in the Princeton Review by Prof. Dod and Jas. W. Alexander. These gentlemen gave to the world, as criticisms of Emerson and other writers, several treatises on Pantheism, aiding the very cause they designed to destroy, by disseminating among the religious public a statement of the primitive Philosophy of the Vedas, and its reflection in Germany and America, clearer than any that had yet appeared: a task for which their scholarship and ability eminently fitted them. But in attacking German Philosophy, both learned to respect that which was practically useful in it. Prof. Dod left among his papers an unfinished translation of Spinoza, and the lamented Dr. Alexander, in his admirable lectures on literature to the students of Princeton College, recommended a perusal of what Kant and other German metaphysicians had written on AEsthetics. It is no reflection on the piety or sincerity of these sound divines and ripe scholars that they found something good and useful even in the armory of the enemy. The last step in piety, as in learning, is always to that noble liberality which recognizes Truth and Beauty wherever found.

And, while the religious reviews abounded in jeremiads and philippies, the newspaper wits stood outside and shouted in derision. The game was indeed too rare to be passed unnoticed. In a poem on Fanny Ellsler (1841) occurred the following:—

Our wits, as usual, late upon the road, Pick up what Europe saw long since explode. If this you doubt, ask Harvard, she can tell How many fragments there from Deutschland fell; How many mysteries boggle Cambridge men That erst in England boggled Carlyle's pen, And will, no doubt, be mysteries again; And also what great Coleridge left unsung. He, too, saw Germany when very young.'

To Emerson, at this moment, numbers looked with the deepest admiration or with fiercest hate. He was the type of his age, what Carlyle might perhaps call its 'Priest Vates.' In his Essays he stood aloft and proclaimed, 'In me is the kernel of truth: eat and live!' But the shell that enclosed the kernel was hard to crack, and was, moreover, like the 'Sileni' of the old French apothecaries, as described by Rabelais, so decorated with wondrous figures, harpies, satyrs, horned geese and bridled hares, that men were incredulous, and doubted that precious ambergris, musk and gems were to be found within. In his first crudities, fyttes and tilts with thought, both knight and field are covered with a cloth of gold so dazzling that the crystalline lenses of our common vision are in danger of dissolution, and we vainly hope for page or dame who will whisper to us the magic word that shall dispel this scene of enchantment. Meanwhile, his sentences, like arrows, darken that sun, himself, and we hasten with bits of smoked glass to view the eclipse. Happily, we have chosen the right medium: the luminousness is destroyed, but the opaqueness remains visible. Entrenched behind a mannerism so adroitly constructed as at once to invite and repel invasion, Emerson hurls out axioms and establishes precedents that prove upon examination to be either admirably varnished editions of old truths or statements of new ones of questionable legitimacy. Turn over leaf by leaf these early essays, and doubts arise as to the validity of the author's claim to originality. Carlyle has led before these pompous parades of moral truths that your child recognizes in the nursery when he makes war upon Johnny, who has knocked down his ten-pins. The law of compensation and the existence of evil and consequent suffering are actual entities to him. And yet these men do not belong to the same school. The resemblance is on the surface. Emerson dabbles delicately, yet, let it be conceded, energetically, with theories: his hands are not the nervy, sinewy hands of the Viking of English literature; he lacks his keen discernment of life, his quick comprehension of the mutual relations of men and their times; he often wants his fine analytical power. Carlyle sees in the life of a man his actions, associations, aspirations, disappointments, successes, what deep principles swayed him, what noble or ignoble nature provided his impulses, and wrought his manhood: Emerson tests him by the great problems of the universe, as he understands them, and educes from their application to certain circumstances the character of the man. The one is sagacious, argus-eyed; the other oracular, sibylline. And yet Emerson, perhaps unconsciously, through admiration of the liberal views and unquestioned bravery of his contemporary, adopted something like his peculiarities of style and domesticated foreign idioms, that yet, like tamed tigers, are not to be relied on in general society. As Carlyle was the rhinoceros of English, Emerson aspired to be its hippopotamus,—both pachyderms, and impenetrable to the bullets of criticism.

We have called Cousin an eclecticist. His Philosophy is a positive one compared with that of Emerson. Here are scraps of Plato and Hegel, of Porphyry and Swedenborg, of AEschylus and De Stael. Like the Lehrer zu Sais, 'he looks on the stars, and imitates their courses and positions in the sand.' In the obscurity that proves him great, for 'To be great is to be misunderstood,' (is this the true 'misery of greatness' of Milton?) it is hard to grasp his individuality. His haughty assertions meet us at every turn. We no more dare to question them than so many 'centaurs or sphinxes or pallid gorgons' in a nightmare. But he relieves our perplexity and gives us the key to that enigma himself. 'I unsettle all things. No facts to me are sacred, none are profane. I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.' What is this but another version of Brahma? 'Far or forgot to me is near.' It is a reflection of the Veda. 'I myself never was not, nor thou, nor all the princes of the earth, nor shall we ever hereafter cease to be.' Spinoza, the God-intoxicated man, never ventured on a declaration so bold. 'The eternal wisdom of God, Dei oeterna Sapientia,' says he, more modestly, 'is manifested in all things, but mostly in the human mind, and most of all in Jesus Christ.' Here then we find the individuality of Emerson, in his pure Pantheism, and, like the sword of Martin Antolinez, it illumines all the field. Now we understand the constant warfare, the 'inevitable polarity,' in these pages. We forgive the occasional inconsistencies of a man who is at once, by his own confession, 'God in Nature and a weed by the wall.' His weakness strives after infinite power. Conscious of a divinity within, he struggles to express it worthily; but ah! says Hermes Trismegistus,—'It is hard to conceive God, but impossible to express him.' Freedom within chafes at the iron necessity without, 'a necessity deep as the world,' all-controlling, imperial, which he acknowledges in the very depths of his being. But the necessity of Emerson is a Hegelian element, such as every Aristophanic comedy reveals. It is not the necessity of Fichte. 'I, with all that relates to me, am imprisoned within the bonds of Necessity. I am one link of her inflexible chain. A time was when I was not, so those have assured me who were before me, and, as I have no consciousness of this time, I am constrained to believe their testimony.' This is the necessity of mere existence, which bears no relation to the will of the man, not that inflexible destiny to which Emerson refers, that underlies his continued being. The first does not oppose the 'instinct of an activity free, independent,' which Emerson afterwards acknowledges. But 'I am God in Nature,' he repeats. 'The simplest person who in his integrity proclaims God, becomes God.' 'This thorough integrity of purpose,' writes Fichte, 'is itself the divine idea in its most common form, and no really honest mind is without communion with God.' In Emerson the last height is reached. Brahm as Arjoon could do no more, no less. His eye roams over the universe and sees only manifestations of himself: the rose of morning, the shining splendor of the sea, the purple of the distant mountains, are his dawn and noon and eve.

'Alas! what perils do environ The man who meddles with—a siren!'

This may be Pantheism, but if it is not in accordance with the needs of the ages, it is not the Pantheism of Giordano Bruno, it has little in common with Plato. The great idea, the latter tells us, in the Republic, 'the idea of the God, is perceived with difficulty, but can not be perceived without concluding that in the visible world it produces light, and the star whence the light directly comes, and in the invisible world it directly produces Strength and Intelligence.' Strength and Intelligence; whose correlatives are Progress and Happiness. Are there among Emerson's earlier 'big-sounding sentences and words of state,' any of which these are the legitimate fruit? Does the soul of Infinite Love that beamed from Nazareth inform these pages with the active, perfect, immortal spirit of truth? No. In these essays, Emerson is a royalist, an aristocrat: he aims for the centralization of power; he does not elevate the masses; he claims for himself, for all nature, ultra-refined and cultivated, to whom the Open Secret 'has been discovered, a separate and highly superior personality. 'The height, the duty of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.' What an Apollo Belvidere the man would be, moulded by no sympathies, standing aloof from his race, and independent of it, disdainful, magnificent, a palace of ice, untenable by the summer heat of Love. The true cosmopolite is the man of his age, even if he has known no latitude but that of his birth, for he has won for himself the highest individuality, and the greatest power of association with his fellow-man, and the laws that govern man in his efforts to secure these are the laws of the only true social science. Henry Carey says with reason, in Italy the highest individuality was found when the Campagna was filled with cities. It is a narrow belief that the highest development of character demands solitude. Give to a young man, genial, impulsive, and intelligent, only the companionship of forest, sea, and mountain, and the chances are, he will become morbid, unpractical, and selfish. But place him in the same position in the decline, or even in the noon of life, when the different parts of his nature have become subordinated to each other, by friction with diverse human organizations about him, and he will carry a brave individuality among nature's gifts, being himself her noblest development. 'Men,' says Emerson, 'resemble their contemporaries even more than their progenitors. It is observed in old couples, or in persons who have been house-inmates for a course of years, that they grow alike: if they should live long enough we should not be able to know them apart. Nature abhors such complaisances, which threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens to break up such maudlin agglutinations.' But Darby and Joan in the chimney-corner are not types of mankind at large.

'Right ethics are central, and go from the soul outward. Gift is contrary to the law of the universe. Serving others is serving myself. I must absolve me to myself.' And what is myself? Let Fichte answer. 'I affirm that in what we call the knowledge or the contemplation of things, it is always ourselves that we know or contemplate: in every sentiment of consciousness it is only modifications of ourselves that we feel.' And again: 'The universe lives. From it arises a marvelous harmony that resounds deliciously in the very depths of my heart. I live in all that surrounds me. I recognize myself in every manifestation of Nature, in the various forms of the beings about me, as a sunbeam that sparkles in the million dew-drops that reflect it.... Within me Nature is flesh, nerves, muscles; without, turf, plant, animal.'

Thus the semi-poetical Pantheism of the Bhagvat-Gita is reproduced, beautiful, dreamy and mythical, but without the shadow of an addition. Emerson presents to us the primeval faith in its imposing majesty and terrible unity, but omits to mention its final winding up in the sacred Maya or Illusion of the Hindoos. Though his early essays are brilliant with many noble thoughts, the principles he advocates in them are thoroughly unprogressive and unpractical. Plato is to him the 'exhaustive generalizer,' beyond whom it is folly to aspire, and by whose stature he measures the nations. Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, are only brisk young men translating into the vernacular wittily his good things. St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg also 'say after him.' Emerson either addresses men whose ignorance he greatly exaggerates, or else the ideal men of some centuries hence. His mission is to the Past or the Future, not to the Present. His theories, fine and venerable, as they are as here expressed, will never save a soul, and men are still convinced that one sharp, decisive action is worth a thousand fine strategic points on paper. Yet he won an enviable and wide reputation by these his early works. 'There is merit without elevation,' says La Rochefoucauld, 'but there is no elevation without some merit.' Such we find him in his earlier essays, while he had as yet only grasped at the Pantheistic wing of the Egyptian globe. In England, in 1848, four thousand people crowded Exeter Hall, to hear the champion of free thought from America. In Poland, men who knew him only by some fragments in a Polish review, considered him the thinker of the age. His courage was the talisman that won him admiration, and his earnestness, visible through the veil of arrogance and petty affectations, secured respect.

In Representative Men, the old Plato-worship illumined by Schelling—Wissenschaften—is the key-note, and English Traits is the record of impressions received during the Sturm und Drang, or rather 'cloud-compelling' days of the Dial and Essay developments. A volume of Poems, published in 1856, recalls the old landmarks. If they are rich in thought, they are also luxuriant in labyrinthine sentences that puzzle even the initiated in the Ziph language. A thought once extricated from a maze of inversion and entangled particles,

'we are in pain To think how to unthink that thought again.'

As a poet, Emerson is careless in versification. Like Friar John, of the Funnels, he does not rhyme in crimson. His imagination is too bold to be confined by the petty limits of trochee or iambus. Consequently his pictures, when he condescends to paint, present rather a mass of brilliant coloring than the well-finished detail that we demand in a work of art. We look in vain in his poems for that effort of identity between the conscious and the unconscious activities that Schelling calls the sole privilege of genius. 'The infinite (or perfect) presented as the finite, is Beauty.' Yet the single poem 'Threnody' would establish Emerson's title to a place among the guild of poets. It is classically beautiful and faultless in mechanism. Its flow is that of a river over sands of gold, its solemn monotone broken now and then by staccato plaints, and the tender gold of its shining waters dimmed by dark shadows, as rock beneath or tree above assails the gentle stillness of its onward flow. Only that which comes from the heart goes again to the heart. We find a new and delicious personality, a simple Greek naturalness, in this exquisite dirge that scarcely owns the 'blasphemy of grief,' that are wanted in his sententious instructions and metaphysical wanderings.

We open Emerson's latest work, the Conduct of Life, in a hopeful mood. Some mysterious sympathy, born from a natural faith in the progress of a mind that had already proved its power by a daring and successful onslaught upon old habits and associations, strengthened by a more practical philosophy that dawns in English Traits, and culminating in the intense passion of yearning in the Phrenody, justifies an expectation that is gloriously realized. To the vigilant thinker a decade is worth more than aeons to his sleeping brother. The Emerson of to-day is not the Emerson of twenty or even ten years ago. Here is still the true, epigrammatic style of his youth. He is as lavish of his aphorisms, which, like the coins of Donatello, hang over our heads and are free to every passer-by. Still an antiquarian, like Charles Kingsley, he peers among Etruscan vases, Greek ruins, Norse runes and ancient Dantean Infernos and Escurials for the models of a new literature, a new art, a new life. But an enlarged spirit is visible on every page.

'The south wind is strengthened With the wild, sweet vigor of pine.'

We breathe a new air, gaze at new landscapes; a new climate is around us. Take this book into the sultry midsummer, and its words summon the ripe autumn with its fruits up from the west; read it by the light of the blazing Yule log, and it will still recall the wild breezes and warm suns of October. And it is this growing maturity of thought, this evident tendency to a grand realization, that prove the honesty and greatness of the man. He has worked perseveringly at his problems, disdaining to be aided by criticism or crushed by opposition. His power has silently gathered its energies in the mines of Thought, dark but rich, striking shaft after shaft of vast promise. He is a gymnast struggling now with the realities and possibilities of Life, and no longer grappling with ignis-fatui in the marshes by the road. Now his humor gleams genially in keen, swift comparisons: he sports with truths, like a king tossing up his crown-jewels or Vishnu worlds in the 'Cosmogony of Menu,' and he dares do this because they are no longer his masters, because he has made them subservient to an end—the great end of the amelioration of his race.

It is this great element of sport that in its broadest development elevates man to the far heights of his nature. There all is serene.

'Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.'

Even the Hindoos, those earliest literati of the young earth, whose eyes peered first into the intricate machinery of Being, and brought therefrom strange and glowing and miraculous impressions of its mechanical appliances,—strong levers that men use now for criticism,—recognized this element. Afar from the scene of their sorrow, in the lotos a-bloom on Vishnu's head, they beheld the primitive Humor, the laughter of infinite Strength springing from bar to bar in the great gymnasium of life. Thus we read in the Cosmogony of Menu,—

'Numerous world-developments there are, creation and extermination; Sportively he produces either, the highest Creator for ever and ever.'

And says the more orthodox Schlegel, 'Nature was in its origin naught else than a beautiful image, a pure emanation, a wonderful creation, a sport of omnipotent love.' And Schiller, whom an impregnable aristocracy of soul shut out from the ranks of humorists, who rode in his coupee, three feet above the level of the common stream of humanity, and never drifted with its tide, yet, with clear-eyed insight into the passions he did not share, acknowledged the Spieltrieb as the highest possibility of man's nature. 'The last perfection of our faculties,' he says, 'is, that their activity, without ceasing to be sure and earnest, becomes sport.

Emerson's humor is peculiar to himself. It is not the massive, exuberant play of Jean Paul. He does not challenge the slow-riding moon to a cricket match, nor hurl the stars from their orbits in his mad game in the skies. Neither has he the brusque but more solid geniality of Lessing. Imagination fails him for the one, and a strong power of logic for the other. But he tears the clouds of ignorance and prejudice that are beneath his feet into ribbons and sends them streaming through space, filmy banners of blue and white, heavily charged with the electricity of his enfranchised thought, and illumines the world with the lightnings of their chance collision. His humor is rather latent than striking. It does not gleam through showy words, the paraphernalia of a harlequinade, but peeps out from the homeliest phrases, and convulses some simple law of our nature with laughter at its own grotesqueness. Formerly, imprisoned as it was within unyielding limits, it was as imposing as a miniature Gothic cathedral in a dark cave, but now the queen-rose of the architrave blows fresh and sweet in the sunny air. Step by step Emerson has traveled the great road worn by so many of old, passing from the 'ideal' to the real, from reverie to a cheerful awaking,—and the prophecy of genius is at last fulfilled.

For at last he has come out from the misty twilight of Transcendentalism into the clear daylight of common sense. And surely it is not for us to decry the bridge, or, if you please, the tunnel through which he has crossed. He agitates the necessity and practicability of social reform, but it must be through individual effort. Years ago he decided that society was in a low state, now he calls on all men to put their shoulders to the wheel and lift it out of the Slough of Despond, where it has been floundering to no purpose for so long. His investigations are aided by a keen shrewdness, that bespeaks the practical man, who knows where to find the vulnerable heel of circumstance, and aims at it his swiftest arrows. In his essay on Wealth this sharp practical insight hardens every sentence. The sentimentalist, who believes, with Henri Blaze, that romance must be the issue of this marriage of Nature with Religion, betakes himself in consternation to his dainty, poetical dreams of a Utopia that shall arise, ready made, from the promising East. The capitalist, who sneers at Philosophy, and would ignorantly couple Faust with the Mysteries of Udolpho, or Andromeda with Jack the Giant-killer, rubs his hands gleefully over our author's nice appreciation of capital and the mysteries of its sudden fluctuations. 'Every step of civil advancement makes a dollar worth more.' 'Political Economy is as good a book wherein to read the life of man, and the ascendency of laws over all private and hostile influences, as any Bible which has come down to us.' 'The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic.... He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent, for every effect a perfect cause, and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.' 'The basis of political economy is non-interference.' The merchant looks narrowly at his theory of compensation, and finds it tallies well with the result of his own after-dinner meditations, expressed of mornings to doubting confreres. The philanthropist rejoices at the crushing of the shell of foppish indolence, the heralded downfall of the petty vanities, sprung, Heaven knows with what reason, from the loins of Norman robbers, of Huguenot refugees, of Puritans beggared and ignorant, and centered in some wide-spreading genealogical tree, that a whole family unite to cultivate into a banyan that may embrace the whole little world of their satellites with inflexible ligatures. Thus 'the doctrine of the snake' is to go out, and good men see that the sinews of society are to be strengthened.

It is worth while to observe, in that first chapter on Fate, how admirably Emerson provides for the exercise of a free activity in every man. 'Every spirit makes its house, but afterward the house confines the spirit.' This leaves no room for the coward, who declines to work out his salvation, even with fear and trembling. It summons all men to clear away the brush and dry leaves of a perverted fatalism,

'To make the absolute best of what God made,'

to sharpen every faculty, expand every capacity, and bow only to the Eternal.

AEterna aeternus tribuit, mortalia confert Mortalis; divina Deus, peritura caducus.'

Here is the choice, eternal or mortal, divine or perishable. This drives men to seek their Paradise in Culture. Well, they find in it a Beulah, and beyond rolls the Jordan of the soul. Men have made a dwarfed Providence to suit their dwarfed aims, an amorphous Deity, whose attributes are imperfect, disproportioned. But yesterday I heard a Frenchman, who has no acquaintance with our literature and never heard of Emerson, say, 'God, with the multitude, is no more than a feeble old man, whose whims and whose age we must respect. What is to become of his high claims upon creatures who are to work out an infinite purpose? Il faut honorer la vieillesse? Emerson had anticipated this with his 'pistareen Providence, dressed in the clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity;' yet it proves that minds are arriving by widely diverging paths at the same truths.

There is nothing ideal or vague in the vigorous efforts he makes in this volume to rise to political economy and to set forth the practical action of capital and industry on life. He says no longer, 'To me commerce is of trivial import,' but endorses Henry Carey's theory of wealth, and acknowledges unreservedly, in its broadest sense, the universal domination of Law. Statistics bourgeon into prophecies under his pen: he does not disdain their significance, but rather aids their influence with all the power which his spasmodic style has given in drawing our grotesque-loving public to him. We suspect Buckle, and feel a cheerful sense of Bacon and Comte. In his plea for socialism, for education, we see the dawn of the ultimate triumph and dignity of labor. 'We shall one day,' he says, 'supersede Politics by Education.' Pause well here, you who grope forward into the dark future with misgiving and faithless hearts. This is not the chimerical delusion of a transcendental philosophy, this death-knell to the Slavery of Ignorance and Vice. Recognize in it the wide generosity that says with Leczinsky, 'Je ne connais d'avarice permise que celle du temps.' Here is wealth for want, industry for indolence, distinction for degradation, virtue for vice. It beams clear as the red of morning. Hear it in the whistle of the engine, the roar of the loom, the plowing of the steam-ship through battling waves, the tick of the telegraph, the whirr of the mill wheel, the click of the sewing machine; and he who doubts still may listen to the voice of cannon, the whistling of lances and the clash of swords, and catch the notes of the same chant with a sterner chorus. Hear even the idealist Schelling awaiting that broader freedom than any we have yet known:—

'The third period in history will be that when that which in preceding periods appeared as Destiny or Nature, shall develop and manifest itself as Providence. Thus what seems to us as the work of Destiny or Nature is already the beginning of a Providence, which reveals itself but imperfectly. When we shall look for the birth of this period, man can not say, but know that when it is, God will be.'

And Emerson takes up the strain with words of fire:—

'If Love, red Love, with tears and joy; if Want, with his scourge; if War, with his cannonade; if Christianity, with its charity; if Trade, with its money; if Art, with its portfolios; if Science, with her telegraphs through the deeps of space and time, can set man's dull nerves throbbing, and, by loud taps on the tough chrysalis, can break its walls and let the new creature emerge erect and free,—make way and sing paean! The age of the quadruped is to go out—the age of the brain and the heart is to come in. The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all the material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power. The formidable mischief will only make the more useful slave. And if one shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna. He will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells into benefit.'



SPHINX AND OEDIPUS.

Why poets should sing of this WAR In rapturous anthems of praise, I know not. Its meanings so jar, Its purpose hath so many ways, The SPHINX never readeth the whole. 'Tis a riddle propounded to me That I am unskillful to tell. The Sphinx by the way-side, I see, Is watching (I know her so well) To mangle us, body and soul.

Is it 'Freedom, that Bondage may live,' Which cheers on the North to the fray? Is it 'Slavery more Freedom to give,' That slogans the Southern foray? She asks, and awaits your reply: Now answer, ye marshal-bred bands Whose business is murder and blood; Ye priests with incarnadined hands; Ye peace-men who 'fight for the good;' Now solve her this riddle or die!

'Our Flag,' the conservative says, 'Waves over the land of the free;' God save us!—I think many ways, But still 'tis a riddle to me, Whose mystery is hid from the eye; But Oedipus, showing the souls All fettered, imbruted and blained, Who point where its blazonry rolls, And wail the sad plaint of the chained,— Asserts, 'There is, somewhere, a lie.'



THE ACTRESS WIFE.

I had been sent by my New York employers to superintend a branch of their business in a southern city. On the evening of a brilliant Sabbath, as I walked musingly through the cemetery, where thousands of the city's dead had found a calm and sequestered resting place, my attention was drawn to a monumental structure, the character and symbolism of which defied my comprehension. On a grassy mound, in a grove of oak trees, almost concealing it from observation, rose a mausoleum of dark stone, which at the first glance I conjectured to represent a Druidical temple. At the four corners were the carved resemblances of oak trees, the trunks forming columns for the structure, and the limbs branching out, intertwining above into a graceful net-work. The spaces between the trunks—forming the four sides of the edifice—were simply plain, deep-set slabs. The design could not be mistaken. It was that of an oak grove inclosing a tomb. But whose, and why this singular design? There was no inscription to afford an explanation. Another view added to the mystery. Standing in the middle of one of the sides, underneath the arch formed by the branching limbs, was an exquisite female figure of white marble. One foot and the body advanced, one hand grasping her robe, the other extended pointing into the distance, her head turned to one side, the lips parted as if speaking, the countenance expressive of the enthusiasm of love combined with impetuous resolution, an attire of the most perfect simplicity, similar to that worn by Roman maidens, and with a plain bandeau around the head,—the whole presented a figure of perfect symmetry and life-like impassioned earnestness, as beautiful as it was unintelligible. I sought through all my recollections of ancient and modern impersonations—of mythology, history, Scripture, and poetry—but could find nothing to furnish a solution. The structure and the figure surpassed even conjecture. Velleda, and Lot's wife, according to an old picture in the catechism, were the only resemblances I could recall, but the surroundings evidently did not suit the types.

While in my embarrassment, I became dimly conscious of seeing an elderly man coming towards me from behind the structure, but should have received no distinct impression of his presence had he not approached the gate of the inclosure upon which I chanced to be leaning, and mildly requested my permission to pass. Recalled to myself, I saw by a hasty glance that the person before me was a man apparently some sixty years of age, to whom time had imparted only a 'richness' of appearance, exhibiting the gentleman at every point, and with an aspect of the most profound grief, tempered with resignation, benevolence, and urbanity. Having politely assisted his egress, he passed onward with a graceful gesture of acknowledgment. He had taken but a few steps, when the thought occurred to me that he must have come from within the perplexing structure by some secret door, and that he could unravel its mystery. I was impelled to follow him, and proceeded hastily to do so, when the indelicacy of my intrusion on one evidently connected with the grief which the monument was designed to commemorate, flashed upon me, and I suddenly paused. He probably observed my rapid footsteps and their pause, for he turned toward me, when in a confused manner I stammered forth an apology, which, undesignedly on my part, involved a statement of the contradictory motives which had influenced me. With the most quiet and prepossessing demeanor he questioned me if I were a stranger visiting the city, and in reply I gave him all the necessary particulars concerning myself,—that my name was Waters, that I was employed by the firm of Brown, Urthers & Co., managing their branch business. A conversation ensued, which elicited the fact that the gentleman had been acquainted with my father a score of years before. The latter, whose head lies on his last pillow, was then a clerk in the New York house of Sampson, Bell & Co. The gentleman before me was Mr. Bell, who during the existence of the house had been first a clerk, and subsequently the partner who conducted their branch business at the city of my own present residence.

With this preliminary acquaintance, he kindly took my arm, and, leading me back to the monument, informed me, in a manner entirely free from any poignancy, or from that lionizing of costly memorials to departed friends so often indulged in, that it was erected to the memory of his wife; that she had formerly been an actress of celebrity, attaining peculiar distinction by her representation of the character of Imogen, in Shakespeare's Cymbeline; and that the marble figure portrayed her at the utterance of the words—

'Oh for a horse with wings! Hear'st thou, Pisanio? He is at Milford Haven. Read and tell me How far 'tis thither ... Say, and speak quick, How far it is To this same blessed Milford;'[5]

and that the architecture of the tomb was intended to correspond with the period at which the incidents of the drama transpired.

* * * * *

Mr. Bell's ordinary life was one neither of seclusion nor of widely extended social courtesies; but of active benevolence and cheerful retirement, disfigured neither by ostentatious philanthropy nor studied recluseness. A son and daughter who had hardly passed the confines of juvenility, with the necessary attendants, formed his household. For the rest, he lived apparently as a gentleman of taste and wealth might be supposed to do.

In this household I gradually acquired an intimacy. This was partially owing to the circumstance that I had solaced the many lonely hours of my bachelorhood in acquiring by memory and rehearsing many scraps of poetry. Mr. Bell's favorite method of passing the evening was in teaching his children to read and declaim poetry with dramatic expression, and in this delightful occupation I was an acceptable assistant. Many were the domestic dramas which we produced,—pieces of our own invention,—in addition to our readings from the poets.

* * * * *

Frederick and Clara were to pass a year or two in schools at the North, and thither Mr. B. removed. The first winter of their absence, I received a letter from him relating that Clara had succumbed to the rigor of a northern climate. Soon came the father and brother with the corpse of their darling, which was placed within the cemetery mausoleum. Into this I entered for the first time, but the interior differed in no respect from others. Within its walls the mother and daughter were left together. In less than a week it was again opened, to receive the son. He had been drowned while attempting the rescue of a companion.

To my surprise at the time, the desolate father exhibited no grief. There was in his demeanor an appearance of satisfaction that their removal had preceded his own,—that he would leave none of his heart's treasures behind him, but be enabled to claim them all in the future existence.

* * * * *

The days lengthened and shortened through three years, in which the routine of my life was varied by no incident. With Mr. Bell my relations continued the same. At all times he spoke cheerfully of the past and the future, frequently giving utterance to the feelings above attributed to him. In one of these conversations I ventured to inquire concerning his wife. His whole countenance was irradiated. It seemed that some bright and glorious recollection of her had been recalled. The fancy impressed itself on me that he had a visible consciousness of her presence. The animation subsided into a quiet self-communing, and he soon proceeded to relate the history of her whose marble similitude had so excited my wonder and admiration.

* * * * *

It is nearly thirty years since I came from a New England country house to this city, as a clerk in the branch house of Sampson Brothers. I was then a raw youth; but my New England training had given me the serious and money-seeking characteristics of that part of our country. For ten years I applied myself exclusively to the details of business, having but few associates, devoting my leisure to self-improvement, and steadily accumulating a competency. On the death of a member of the firm I took his place. Five years passed, and I had attained a fortune. Some friends from the North called upon me in their travels, and during the week of their visit, I participated in more gaieties than had been comprised in my whole previous life. One evening it was proposed to visit the theatre. Into a place of dramatic representation I had never before entered, and the enchantment of all its accessories was irresistible. But when the heroine of the evening appeared, I was deprived of every faculty except that of the most absorbing adoration. What was the drama enacted mattered not,—I had no perception of it, nor of anything except the person who had fascinated me. Tall in figure, commanding in gesture, scarcely developed into the full wealth of womanhood, with an eye of piercing blackness, yet changing with every gradation of passion, profuse black tresses, and a voice whose intonations swayed the audience to every mood of feeling, SHE for the first time appeared to me.

Well, I had passed my premiere jeunesse, and had arrived at that age when a passion, once called into active life, becomes unappeasable. I need not particularize the effects upon me of my first experience of love. For weeks and months I had no desire, no ability to do anything else than frequent the theatre. My want of acquaintance with all the peculiar circumstances connected with actors and actresses almost maddened me; for I knew of no method by which I might ever be able to exchange a word with her who had become to me more than an idol to a devotee, or the dream of fame to a poet. I sickened. To the physician called in attendance, after much shrewd questioning on his part, I revealed my secret. With a jocose laugh he left me, but in a half-hour returned, accompanied by a somewhat vulgar-looking female, whom he introduced as the mother of Evelyn Afton—the name of her for whom my life was wasting and my soul pining.

The mother was the widow of an actor, and Evelyn her only daughter, who had been bred for the stage, and her beauty and ability having secured success, she had been enabled to attain all the accomplishments of cultivated womanhood.

If anything could have disenchanted me, the manner of the mother would certainly have had such an effect. She regarded my passion as simply a business affair. She would present me to her daughter that day, and I might contract an engagement, if I would make certain liberal allowances and settlements. But a recurrence to these matters creates disgust. It is sufficient to say, that I surpassed in my provisions all the demands of the mother's avarice, and in a few months Evelyn and I were married.

There was on the part of my beautiful bride an inexplicable expression,—a demeanor in which cold and haughty reserve blended strangely with an utter carelessness, and occasional rapidly checked electric ebullitions of passion to the lip and eye, but never reaching words, followed by a passive yet proud languor. I was too happy to observe or speculate. I received merely the impression, but was too much occupied in arranging for my wedded life, too much absorbed in the feeling of bliss, to analyze it. I believed in her love,—that was sufficient for me. In after years I resolved the impression into its prismatic elements, and thus it is I am able to delineate them.

Time passed. The extravagance of my first raptures gradually subsided into a more settled but not less complete happiness. In all her attentions to myself my wife was perfect. In society she was supremely brilliant and fascinating; in private her demeanor preserved the characteristics of which I have spoken. I accepted it as her natural manner, and did not give it further thought. My son Frederick was born, and for a short time, under the influence of maternal impulses, my wife exhibited animation and emotions which I had not before witnessed,—soon, however, relapsing into her previous demeanor. The same contrasts—less strongly marked—occurred upon the birth of my daughter.

* * * * *

Returning one evening from business, at the usual dinner hour, I visited, before entering my residence, as was frequently my custom, the stables, and inquired, in passing, of the coachman—a favorite negro—if he had driven his mistress out that afternoon. He replied,—

'No, massa; Missers' brudder on here; been wid her dese two hours.'

The answer created much surprise, as I had not been informed that my wife had any relatives. A moment's reflection, however, on some of the peculiar connections of theatrical life, led me to believe that such a person might be in existence, who, for some unpleasant reasons, had not been recognized. Respecting my wife's secret, I passed on without further inquiry; and, to avoid an interview with the visitor, ascended a staircase into a conservatory connected with the upper apartments, intending to remain there until he had departed. As I entered the conservatory I was startled by the sound of voices, which proceeded from the adjoining apartment,—my wife's boudoir,—and was transfixed at beholding through the shrubbery, in the dim light of the room, my wife sitting upon a sofa, exhibiting traces of powerful but suppressed emotion, such as I had never seen in her, and partly kneeling, partly reclining at her side, a young man, apparently in the most violent and passionate entreaty.

'O, Evelyn! Evelyn!' he said, 'will you bid me leave you thus? Will you have no pity? For years I toiled at my art, poor and desolate, in a foreign land, sustained only by the hope of achieving success—fame—fortune—to lay them before you;—your love gifting me with all my ideal life—the hope of winning you the only incentive of my labor. When I heard of your marriage, I dashed away my chisels, with an oath never to resume them. In mad desperation, I destroyed the works of years. But I have lived on in solitude and wretchedness, unvisited even by the imaginations which once made life glorious. Now I have come to claim you—to take you from him who robbed me. Such a marriage as yours is not valid before just heaven. Renounce your contract. Fly with me to Italy,—let the world say what it will. With you at my side I can create works that will compel homage; knowing our own purity, we can laugh at its scorn, and, contented with each other, despise both its friendship and its enmity.'

'Stop, Frank!' she replied, 'and leave me. Do not prolong this agony. What you wish is, it must be, impossible. It is not for myself that I deny it. God knows I could brave any thing for you. But to yield your request would only aid your ruin. No, no, Frank; you are mad!'

'If I am not, I soon shall be!' he murmured bitterly.

'I shall fulfill my contract to the letter,' she continued; 'or, rather, that which was made for me. I consented to be the sacrifice, and I will accept the fire and the knife resolutely. But you—you—should I link myself to your fate, I should draw you to perdition. Even in the air of Italy, my presence would be poison to you. I speak not of guilt. But my connection—a perjured wife—would debar you from the companionship of all that is noble and good and beautiful. I am but a woman—one woman. Could I have been placed at your side, I might have assisted your conceptions and stimulated your aspirations. But now—now—it can not be. Go—seek some other. There are many worthy of your choice. You can find them. If not, live for your art, Frank, and forget me.'

'My art!' he replied, with passionate bitterness; 'curses on it! Aye, I can almost curse the Heaven which gifted me with "ideality." What is it, but unsatisfied mockery of longing?—the execution always failing to meet the promise of the conception. My art! What can the cold marble be to me, when no longer animated by the soul with which my hope of your presence infused it? My art! Would to God that a divine flash of genius would impel me to wield the chisel but for one short month, and then that I might expire by the side of my creation!'

'No, no, Frank,' she interposed; 'you will live long, become renowned, and create not one, but many works for fame; and I shall read of your successes and rejoice in them. More than that, I shall be present with you always in spirit and sympathy. Think of that, Frank. Make me your ideal still, if you will. This will be exquisite satisfaction to me. Let me think that I am always inspiring you. Work for me, Frank.'

The young man buried his face in the sofa and sobbed passionately. My wife bent over, and, unknown to him, unless he felt her breath, gently kissed the curls of his hair. 'Come,' she said, 'now you must be gone. Neither of us can endure this longer. Go—go. Do not give me a word or a look. You would only rend my heart, without killing me.'

Presently he rose, and, with an effort at self-control, walked towards the door, but stopped and faltered forth, 'Must this be? Is this then our last farewell?'

She merely waved her hand, hiding her face.

The young man sprang to her side, fell upon his knees, grasped her hand, and covered it with kisses, then rushed to the door and was gone.

My wife flung herself upon the sofa and burst forth into a flood of tears. Never before had I beheld her weeping.

During this interview I stood like a statue. It seemed to me that I had lived an age,—such a life as those may be supposed to have, who, as related in Eastern tales, are transformed to stone for a century, retaining their consciousness. A revolution had gone through its entire progress in me. For the first time did I understand how selfish had been my adoration of my wife,—how I had merely purchased her of her scheming and avaricious mother,—how I had wronged her and one who loved her,—how incompatible with her youth and brilliancy were my maturity and unpoetic nature. Her conduct since our marriage was now fully explained. My love for her was immeasurably increased, but I loathed myself. I had but one thought, how reparation could best be made. I swear before Heaven, that could it have been possible without staining her name, I would have torn her from my heart, and given her to the one who rightfully claimed her from me. This was impossible. Only by guilt or vulgar disgrace could she become his. Then the question took possession of me, 'How shall I win her love?—how shall I win her love?' This repeated itself again and again, with a distinct and fearful iteration, as if a demon were whispering it in my ear. A thousand mad thoughts took possession of me, and suicide thrust itself on me. For a few moments,—though it seemed an age of experience,—I was insane. The blow had dispossessed my reason. Dimly, as in a drunken man, however, still remained the ordinary instincts, and that perception, which, like the muscles of respiration, keeps ever at work, let the mind be filled as it may with thoughts and purposes that seem entirely to engross and absorb it. I crept silently from the conservatory, and passing out into the street, entered the house at the front. Dinner was soon served, as usual, and my wife took her seat, with her customary manner. I, too, was confident, exhibited no variation from mine. Her self-possession was the result of control, mine of mere numbness. The machinery of life was temporarily continuing its regular motion without any supervision.

This benumbed condition continued through a large portion of a sleepless night. The unintermitted repetition of the query, 'How shall I win her love?' tortured me into an agony like that experienced in a nightmare dream. Slowly and gradually my reason began to work, and I methodically commenced to elaborate a system by which to acquire what was now the chief object of my life,—my wife's love. I arose in the morning determined to obtain this, even should every other pursuit be relinquished and every other desire sacrificed. My system was formed. Life thereafter was to be devoted to it.

My first object was to create a change in her feelings toward my rival;—not to destroy her love for him,—of the futility of such an attempt I was aware,—but to modify the cold, desperate, and resentful feeling of disappointment she entertained; to superimpose upon her thwarted passion, which would continue to regard him as a hero of romance, another condition of feeling, that should bring him before her in a different aspect, and to rouse her listlessness by suggesting something to be done which should be connected with him,—the only incentive, I was assured, sufficiently powerful to stimulate her to action. I had a patient whom I intended to treat in the most delicate and scientific manner. I determined to appeal to her benevolence,—a feeling which, though latent, always exists in a true woman. My disconsolate hero of romance was to be brought down and made a mortal, capable of receiving favors. Instead of being the object of love, he was to become one of charity.

'My dear,' said I, one evening, with a suppressed yawn, as I was perusing a magazine, 'I have been reading a stupid account of the pictures and statues, and so on, in Florence. These things are very fine, doubtless, to those who understand and appreciate them. My early education in aesthetics was neglected; or rather the hard necessities of my youth allowed me no opportunity to cultivate them. But it is a good thing to encourage art, and I have been thinking it might be well for us to have some paintings and statuary. If I attempt to select them I shall be tricked and bamboozled into purchasing mere daubs and botches. Would it not be well to engage some person of judgment—perhaps an artist—to go to Italy and make an investment for us? I know none such, but you have been more associated with artists, and if you can secure one, I will give him carte blanche. Will you please make some inquiries?'

I had kept my eyes on the magazine, but felt that she was looking at me with scrutinizing glances. Had she suspected my knowledge of her love, she would probably—with some of that passion of which I had been a secret witness—have declared the whole matter, and then, with scornful upbraidings of my hypocrisy, perhaps have left me forever. I was careful to avoid any such premature explosion, and with another yawn continued carelessly turning the leaves of the magazine. Reassured, she replied that she would undertake the business. With a hasty glance, through apparently sleepy eyes, I saw that I had roused her,—that she was already intent on planning occupation for Frank, and laying out for him a course of success and honor, through the stimulus which would be imparted by the execution of a commission of her bestowal. Another feeling I was delighted to see exhibited. She felt that she was now about to render him some equivalent for his disappointment. Already was he become to her less Frank the lover than Frank the artist, whose fortunes she was to assist. I will make you yet his lady-patroness, thought I. I foresaw that some of my rival's productions would grace my apartments, in a year or two. But, better his imagination than his heart, said I to myself,—better the works of his chisel, which I and all the throng of the public can eulogize, than the secret, doating passion confined to the intense idolatry of one breast.

After a few premonitory nods I retired.

I did not trouble myself about the manner in which the commission was conveyed to Frank. Thither, however, it went, as I learned in after time.

I well understood that to attempt rivaling Frank in matters cognate with his own department of talent, would render me only as ridiculous as an old beau who seeks to gain favor with the girls by imitating with his rouge, hair dyes, and laced waistcoats, the freshness and symmetry of youth. But I must endeavor to establish some common ground on which I and the magnificent creature at my side could meet and hold converse. I must find it in literature. In a garret over my store I had a safe and some papers conveyed, ostensibly for attention to private business. I kept my room securely locked. Thither, from time to time, I secretly carried a library of English classics, and all works of the day which received public intention. I revived all my early recollections of literature, and made myself acquainted with the lighter contemporaneous works, which are the most prolific topics of conversation in society. Under pretense of business I devoted every moment I could to my solitary chamber. Never did college student, cramming himself for examination, labor more intently than I. I stored my mind not only with words, but ideas. I committed to memory innumerable fine passages. Personally, I was well repaid for my toil. Literature is always solacing, elevating, and ennobling. The Bedouin of the desert is less of a robber and murderer while singing the songs of his national poets.

My acquisitions, however, were carefully hidden. They were for future use. At present I continued to talk nothing that was beyond the scope of the newspapers.

Thus some months passed. It was near the close of summer, and the gorgeous autumnal season was at hand. I designed to attempt something which would create a change in my wife's nature,—her acquired nature, to substitute some healthful exuberance for the weary listlessness which had become habitual to her. The physical is the foundation of all other departments of humanity. With a physical system of glowing health, mental or emotional or moral disease is impossible; and the converse is true, that when these exist, the physical system must deteriorate. I must then give a filip to my wife's physical vigor,—dissipate her desperateness and her love in the same manner in which a good game of billiards drives from a man the blues. I must remove all her morbidness. Where could I go but to the great mother Nature? If physical enjoyment, in connection with an appreciative view of the beauties and glories everywhere spread before humanity, on the mountains, the plains, the valleys, and the oceans, does not revive and restore, the case is hopeless. My wife was an excellent equestrian. Her theatrical experience had familiarized her with firearms. She had a cultivated taste for scenery, and some degree of skill in delineating it. Far off, then, into the prairies and the western mountains, into scenes away from the beaten track, where everything should be as dissimilar as possible from all previous life, I determined to lead her.

My arrangements were quickly and quietly made,—my equipments secretly completed. On pretense of visiting business acquaintances, I requested my wife to accompany me on a journey to St. Louis. With her usual passiveness, she consented. In a few days we were on our way. After our arrival, we made trips into the interior. Gradually, I diverged from civilization. Professing to find an unexpected charm in the novelty of this, I led the way still onward. We traveled on horseback,—often amid solitudes. I first astonished my wife by occasionally displaying on the game my precision with the rifle. (I had spent scores of hours at a shooting gallery in St. Louis.) I persuaded her to try a few shots. (I had provided a beautiful light rifle for her use.) Ambition to shoot well soon possessed her. By degrees, our open-air life gave her blood a bound which no secret grief could counteract. The excitement of the chase on our fleet horses, the incidents of our hunting adventures, and the novelty of our associations, created a glow of spirit which burst forth in unrestrained conversation, mirth, and song. Now, then, I began to display my literary acquisitions. During the long evenings in our tent, or the wigwam of an Indian, or the log cabin of a backwoods settler, we alternated in reading aloud from an excellent collection of books I had prepared. Reading introduced topics of conversation, in which I employed all that I had in memory, and all that had been created in myself by the electric collision of great authors. Never did a professional wit more ingeniously produce as sudden coruscations the bon mots tediously studied; never did a philosophical conversationalist use to more advantage the wisdom conned over in the closet. I talked eloquently, profoundly. I rattled forth witticisms and poetical quotations. I amazed her. The man whom she thought incapable of any ideas beyond his ledger, and the stock market, and the cotton warehouse, was revealed as a person of taste and reading. Instead of appearing to her merely an indifferent person, to whom her fate had been chained, and whom she regarded in somewhat the same manner as Prometheus did his rock, I had become a pleasant companion,—a being of more vitality than she had perhaps ever met.

Still, I had not excited the emotion of love. I did not expect it at this stage of the treatment, but I observed its absence with a pang.

For woman's love is not a slowly extorted tribute to excellence, but a spontaneous bestowal. Unlike evil spirits, which, according to popular superstition, need urging over the threshold before they can enter and possess the hearthstone. Love leaps in unsolicited at any unguarded aperture, and becomes master of the household.

Only genius could command her homage, and to this I could make no pretension.

Love is oftener a response to appreciation, than a concession granted upon a rational estimate of him who seeks it. She did not yet know that I appreciated her. The time for her to learn it had not come.

The casket of a woman's heart is oftener forced than opened with a key.

Love had once entered my wife's soul, and, after accomplishing his mischief, left demons in possession. I could not exorcise—only charm them. For the present,—perhaps for years,—I must be content with this. In the distant future, which had a dim horizon of hope, I expected to make some final stroke by which to expel them. What it should be, I could scarcely anticipate. Necessarily, I foresaw, it must be like the highwayman's challenge, 'Money or life.' After becoming endurable to her, in fact, inveigling her into unforeseen familiarity, I must suddenly throw off the mask, and demand the love for which I had waited and plotted. Either she would surrender, or there would be a tragedy.

The denouement came in a way of which I had no prescience. You will learn it in the due course of my narrative.

But she charmed me, fearfully, when she appeared, after a morning's chase, resplendent in the fullness of her healthful beauty, beaming with excitement, her superb figure undulating gracefully to the restive movements of her horse. I could have prostrated myself before her, in a wild worship of her beauty. She had that quality which is so rare in woman, but so admirable where it exists,—entire fearlessness; for it is a most absurd mistake to suppose that masculine virtues can not co-exist in woman with the most lovable, feminine delicacy. Partly her unblenching courage was the product of a strong will in a splendid physical organization; partly, alas! it arose from a disregard of life, which she felt was worthless.

One morning, as we turned our faces homeward, our Indian escort and baggage having preceded us, we were riding quietly along, with no intention of hunting, but accidentally coming on a few buffaloes separated from their herd, the temptation to attack them was too strong to be resisted. We both urged our horses in pursuit, and, overtaking them, fired simultaneously at different animals. My wife's quarry—a stout bull—continued his flight, not being fatally wounded. Suddenly, some of our Indians who had heard the shot, and started to return, came into view over the brow of a hill, and the buffalo, thinking himself surrounded, turned and rushed at my wife. She avoided the onset by a quick whirl of her horse. The buffalo gathered himself and returned to the charge with a roar of rage. Not having reloaded my rifle, I spurred forward, and leaped my steed full upon his massy form. We all fell together, and when, after several seconds, I extricated myself, my wife was standing on the buffalo's neck to prevent him from rising. I plunged my knife into his chest, but in the mad struggle of death he partially rose, throwing her to the ground, while one of his horns entered her side. Never before, since I commenced my system, had I lost my studied calmness. But the sight of her blood, dyeing her garments and the grass, made me frantic. I tore away her vestments from the wound, pressed my lips in an agony to the gash, and then, hastily stanching the blood, bore her, nearly senseless as she was, in an embrace, the thrilling energy of which can not be told, to a rivulet in the vicinity. Happily the wound was but a lesion of the flesh, for which my surgery was sufficient, and by the aid of stimulants she revived, subsequently recovering without injury.

Since my fatal discovery in the conservatory, I had not before touched her person, except for such courtesies as any gentleman may render a lady of his acquaintance. Now, with my arms clasping her, my veins throbbed as in a delirium. The tender light of her eyes, as she revived, resulting partially from weakness and partially from a natural thankfulness, moved me to the very point of prematurely throwing myself at her feet and disclosing all. By a great throe I controlled myself. As she resumed her natural condition, I fell back into that most ordinary and common-place character,—a self-satisfied husband,—qualified somewhat by sympathy and attention, of course, but without the least infusion of sentiment.

Oh, if she had known of the volcano under this exterior! If she had known how, at that moment, I could have exclaimed, 'Give me your love, or here let us die!'

* * * * *

So, after various desultory wanderings, we returned home. Home! how I dreaded it, for I knew the power of association—the effect of localities and customary external habits on the feelings. You may take a careworn, dyspeptic, melancholy man out for a week's excursion, and he will show himself preeminent in all good fellowship. But as the familiar sights gradually open on him at returning, you may see the shadows flitting down upon his brow and entering his soul. How many good resolutions of change and reform—of breaking old associations and forming new ones—we make when absent from our usual haunts! How impossible it becomes to realize them when we re-occupy the familiar places!

* * * * *

But so it was, we reached home. All my anticipations were realized. The old spirit, the old manner, were revived in my wife. At this time an installment of pictures and statues from Italy came to hand. I welcomed them as angels of mercy. When I announced the arrival to my wife, a flush struggled to her cheek, and a radiance to her eye. 'Ha! you think,' said I in my communings, 'that Frank is to be present with you in his works, and that through them you may be in his presence. So you shall, but they shall become only an annoyance and a weariness,—for themselves and for him.'

The statues and pictures were brought to the house and unpacked. My wife was almost tremulous with eagerness to behold them. I had taken care, however, to have a number of acquaintances present,—some of genuine artistic taste, some of only pretensions, and others utterly ignorant. As the various works were displayed, my artistic friends, as in courtesy bound, and as their merit really deserved, duly eulogized them, and the praises were echoed by the rest. Finally we came to a box which contained a label marked 'The statue of Hope Downcast.' 'Aha! master Frank,' thought I, 'so I have you at last.' I could see my wife quivering with the contest of feeling,—between her annoyance at the presence of visitors, and the necessity of controlling herself and uniting in their commendations.

'Hope Downcast' was raised to the perpendicular, and proved to be a beautiful life-size statue, representing a female figure standing on a rock, in a most dejected attitude, one foot unsandaled, her raiment torn, her hair loose, the fillet which confined it lying parted at her feet, the star upon the fillet deprived of some of its points, and the ordinary emblem of Hope, the anchor, broken at her side. The applicability of the conception to the history of Frank and my wife, I readily understood. My guests broke out into raptures, in which I joined, and, by continual appeals to my wife, constrained her to do the same. I also took the opportunity of inquiring the name of the artist, and requested my wife to express to him the entire satisfaction he had given in the execution of his commission.

The ordeal closed, but was renewed and repeated day after day, till all the poetry and romance connected with our artistic acquisitions was thoroughly destroyed in my wife's mind. They became, as I could easily observe, positively odious to her, and, doubtless, could she have obeyed the promptings of her feelings, she would have trampled on them, and cast them into the street.

But in this disappointment she became so forlorn, so passively desperate, that my heart almost burst at beholding her.

Since my discovery in the conservatory I had often used it for watching my wife,—not of course with any miserable design of playing the spy upon, her,—but to observe her various moods, in order to adapt, my own conduct and the progress of my system to them. One night, after we had entertained a party of visitors, whom I had made instruments of torture to my wife by their common-place eulogies of Frank's contributions, I ascended my perch in the conservatory. She was sitting in her apartment, her hands, listlessly clasped, resting on her knees, her form bowed with the most profound dejection, coupled with that indescribable aspect of cold, desperate defiance which I have previously noticed, exhibited in her countenance and position. 'Oh! Frank, Frank!' she seemed to say, 'would that I had forsaken all and fled to Italy with you. There, the creations of your taste and genius would have afforded a solace. Here they are but torments.'

'You shall go to Italy, Evelyn, and have your fill of Frank's society,' said I in my imaginary comment. 'But not yet; the time has not yet come.'

Having permitted her to learn the disappointment derived from the works of art associated with Frank's memory, I now brought into action a scheme for teaching her the pleasure which I could afford. Before our hunting expedition I had purchased a spacious and beautiful mansion, and engaged upholsterers from New York to decorate it, during our absence, in the most elegant style their taste could design. A large apartment had been constructed by my order for the purpose of a private theatre.

I informed Evelyn of my plan, and conveyed her to our destined residence. She was not at first much moved, but after we had entered on possession, and she was thoroughly engaged in selecting an amateur company from our acquaintances and arranging for our forthcoming exhibitions, the old enthusiasm of her former profession revived, and she appeared for the time transported back to the auspicious hours of her young triumphs. 'The School for Scandal' was chosen for our first performance—I of course taking the part of Sir Peter, and she that of Lady Teazle. I did not allow my feelings once to transcend the part, and in the conclusion looked completely the happy, good-natured, self-satisfied, old husband. Heaven! had her protestations, where the reconciliation occurred, been genuine, and not mere dramatic fiction! The thought almost overpowered me. I could see the young bucks of the city chuckling over my position, and evidently wishing they were in the place of that old fool!

* * * * *

I need not relate the innumerable stratagems I devised to employ the attention and heart of my wife in pleasures emanating from myself. I was continually careful, however, to exhibit no sign of tender appreciation, but allowed her to regard them as the mere ordinary gratification of my own whims and wishes. I had now been for about a year disconnected with my business. I had encouraged Evelyn in every species of extravagance, and expended money lavishly in all methods. I was conscious of living far beyond the ability of even my ample means, but there could not be an hesitation or halting. The city looked on me with wonder; some spoke of me as one whom fortune had crazed; others pitied me as the victim of an extravagant wife. My New York partners expostulated with me, and, when my theatrical exhibition reached their ears, hinted at a dissolution. But I was deaf to rumor and reproof.

* * * * *

The person who took the part of Joseph Surface, in our representation of 'The School for Scandal,' was an unmarried gentleman of high standing, socially and politically, of middle age, fine presence, and superior abilities. Under polished manners and captivating conversational powers, were concealed persistent passions and a conscience of marble. Before even Evelyn suspected it, I was aware that he had resolved on subduing her to his own designs, for I seemed in all things relating to her to be gifted with preternatural intuitions.

Our next representation was to be 'The Fatal Marriage,' in which the person alluded to—whose name was Sefton—was to take the character of the wooer.

The necessary consultations concerning the production of the piece brought him frequently to my house, and both the excuse and the opportunities it gave were diligently improved.

I had a premonition one evening that his intentions toward Evelyn were then to take some decisive expression. I left my solitary study, of which I have before spoken, and, going home, entered the house softly, and directed my steps towards our theatrical apartment. My confidence in Evelyn was unbounded, but I wished to witness the apprehended collision. Stealing behind the scenery, I saw Evelyn sitting on the stage, with cold and erect pride,—which was yet free from affectation,—and Sefton standing before her, having evidently just concluded speaking.

'So, sir,' she said, 'I have heard you without interruption. But the character you rehearse is inappropriate. You forget that we are now concerned with a piece representing the tribulations of a faithful wife, and not a comedy of the school of Charles the Second. I see that you are sincere; but sincerity renders a bad passion the more hateful. Now leave me. For your own contentment crush it. If this is impossible, conceal it. Should you ever again intimate it by even a glance, I will expel you from my society as I would a viper.'

'Madam,' he gasped forth in suppressed rage, 'I understand you. You shall also understand me, if you now do not. I will reduce your haughty pride. Of this be assured. You play well the role of the faithful wife, but I will not do you the injustice of supposing that it is through any regard for him on whose behalf you assume it.'

He would have said more, but Evelyn sprang up, her eyes flashing, and, seizing a dagger which lay on a table among other 'properties,' exclaimed,—

'Begone, sir, or you shall find me an actress who can perform a terrible reality.'

She advanced toward him, and he turned away, passing out slowly, cowed, but not vanquished. I could see that he was determined to become her master, though it cost him all that he had invested in ambition, honor, and life.

She flung down the dagger, paused till he was out of the house, and then went to her rooms. I emerged from my hiding-place, laughing and sobbing hysterically,—rejoicing over my glorious Evelyn, and bewailing that she was not in truth mine.

A few weeks after this scene, I found on several occasions, when returning home late, that Evelyn was out. I never interfered with her freedom, nor questioned her in regard to any of her proceedings; but, nevertheless, in all cases, as there was no concealment concerning them, I was, by the ordinary channels of social and domestic intercourse, acquainted with them. With regard to the absences alluded to, however, I was at fault. They were not attributable to any of the engagements of society. It became, of course, requisite, as part of my system, to investigate the mystery. So, on a certain evening, after going out apparently as usual, I watched the house, and, shortly after dusk, saw her emerge, clad in plain habiliments, and followed her at a distance through several secluded streets. She stopped at a very ordinary tenement in a remote quarter of the city, and remained till a late hour, when she returned home.

I resolved quietly to take observations, and ascertain the motive for her visit. My intentions were precluded the next morning by the entrance into my place of business of Mr. Sefton, who, after many complimentary and cordial expressions, requested a private conference; which being granted, he said,—

'My dear Mr. Bell, I wish to speak to you concerning a very delicate and painful matter. I am conscious of involving myself in an affair, which may, perhaps, have unpleasant consequences for me, but my friendship and esteem for you will not permit me to remain quiet concerning a matter which is injurious to your honor.'

He then proceeded to inform me that a certain actor, named Foster, who once had a high reputation, but had become degraded through dissoluteness, recently came to him, apparently in abject poverty and dangerous illness, begging assistance and shelter; that he had placed Foster in a tenement, which he described (the same that I had seen my wife enter), and supplied his wants, but had reason to suppose that Foster was imposing on his charity, having learned from others that, so far from being ill, he was sufficiently able to enjoy his appetites and licentious desires. 'On going,' said Mr. Sefton, 'to reprimand and expel him, he confessed to me that he had taken this method of covering an intrigue with a lady, and assured me he intended to repay all I had advanced him. I became, also,' continued Mr. Sefton, 'a witness of an interview with the lady, as she entered while I was there, and Foster, in the haste of the occasion, was obliged to conceal me in an adjoining room. The lady, I was astonished to perceive, was Mrs. Bell. I then recollected that Foster was formerly intimate with her, and that they performed on the stage together. I have deemed it my duty to relate this astounding development to you.'

I received Mr. Sefton's announcement in all seriousness, and thanked him. What would he have me do? He replied that my own judgment must dictate, but that he supposed it would be best for all parties to remove quietly to another State and apply for a divorce. I promised to consider the matter, and after many mutual compliments he departed.

'What does this mean?' I mused. 'The supposition of an intrigue is preposterous. Probably Foster has merely deceived Evelyn as he did Sefton, in order to obtain her bounty. But why make her visits so secret? That is easily explained;—she does not wish to be connected publicly with any unhappy sequences of her former histrionic career. I will have an interview with Foster before proceeding further.'

I visited him that night, pushing into the house immediately after the black female servant who opened the door, lest I should be refused admittance. I found Foster in a half-intoxicated condition, seated comfortably at a table, with a pipe in his hand, and liquor before him.

'I am Mr. Bell,' said I, 'and had learned from my wife of your destitute condition, which I came to relieve. But you appear in excellent circumstances.'

Through his intoxication there was an evidence of confusion, as he stammered out,—

'Yes, sir; much obliged to you. Take a seat—a seat. Good spell now. Doctor prescribes a little comfort, you know, old boy!'

'A very kind doctor, I should judge, Mr. Foster, and I am glad to find you in such a good condition. Suppose I take a glass with you?'

'Certainly. Very happy—happy. Your health, sir.'

'I hope, sir,' I said, 'that you will soon recover, after the attentions of my wife and Mr. Sefton.'

'Sefton!' he exclaimed. 'Rascal! D—d rascal! sir.' He continued murmuring in his throat, 'Rascal! D—d rascal!'

'I'll take another glass,' said I. 'The liquor is very good—very good, sir. Who furnishes it?'

'Liquor! Yes—very good! Sefton—yes, Sefton sent it. Rascal! D—d rascal!' (in a murmur, as before.)

'Now, Foster,' said I, 'I am rich. There is a purse,—and pretty well filled. I will give it to you, and others like it, if you will tell me why Sefton is a rascal, and how you happen to be connected with him.'

His eyes glistened with greediness, as I anticipated. He grasped the purse and thrust it into his pocket, then immediately pulled it out, tossed it on the table, leaned his head down on his arms and began to sob, all in the most maudlin manner.

TO BE CONTINUED.



A SONG OF FREEDOM.

Not now, my tongue, to legends old, Or tender lays of sunny clime; A sterner tale must now be told, Deep thoughts must burn in warlike rhyme; For Freedom, with a mighty throe, Rouses from sleep to active life, And loud her clarion trumpets blow, To summon men to join the strife.

The seed, which long ago was sown By free New England's rock-bound rills, At length, in noble vigor grown, Casts branches o'er the Southern hills. Far o'er the prairies of the West Rings Freedom's thrilling battle-cry, Re-echoed where each mountain crest Lifts Maine's dark forests to the sky.