I assured him that he might as well pretend to miss one tree in the forest of "Fontainebleu"—that after furnishing a squadron like myself, his would be still the first beard in the Republic; and at last he yielded, and gave in.

Never did a little damsel of the nursery array her doll with more delighted looks, and gaze upon her handiwork with more self-satisfaction, than did old Tronchon survey me, as, with the aid of a little gum, he decorated my lip with a stiff line of his iron red beard.

"Diantre!" cried he, in ecstasy, "if thou ben't something like a man, after all. Who would have thought it would have made such a change? Thou might pass for one that saw real smoke and real fire, any day, lad. Ay! thou hast another look in thine eye, and another way to carry thy head, now! Trust me, thou'lt look a different fellow on the left of the squadron."

I began to think so, too, as I looked at myself in the small triangle of a looking-glass, which decorated Tronchon's wall, under a picture of Kellerman, his first captain. I fancied that the improvement was most decided. I thought that, bating a little over-ferocity, a something verging upon the cruel, I was about as perfect a type of the hussar as need be. My jacket seemed to fit tighter—my pelisse hung more jauntily—my shako sat more saucily on one side of my head—my sabre banged more proudly against my boot—my very spurs jangled with a pleasanter music—and all because a little hair bristled over my lip, and curled in two spiral flourishes across my cheek! I longed to see the effect of my changed appearance, as I walked down the "Place Carriere," or sauntered into the cafe where my comrades used to assemble. What will Mademoiselle Josephine say, thought I, as I ask for my "petit verre," caressing my mustache thus! Not a doubt of it, what a fan is to a woman, a beard is to a soldier! a something to fill up the pauses in conversation, by blandly smoothing with the finger, or fiercely curling at the point!

"And so thou art going to ask for thy grade, Maurice?" broke in Tronchon, after a long silence.

"Not at all. I am about to petition for employment upon active service. I don't seek promotion till I have deserved it."

"Better still, lad. I was eight years myself in the ranks before they gave me the stripe on my arm. Parbleu! the Germans had given me some three or four with the sabre before that time."

"Do you think they'll refuse me, Tronchon?"

"Not if thou go the right way about it, lad. Thou mustn't fancy it's like asking leave from the captain to spend the evening in a guinguette, or to go to the play with thy sweetheart. No, no, boy. It must be done 'en regle.' Thou'lt have to wait on the general at his quarters at four o'clock, when he 'receives,' as they call it. Thou'lt be there, mayhap, an hour, ay, two, or three belike, and after all, perhaps, won't see him that day at all! I was a week trying to catch Kellerman, and, at last, he only spoke to me going down stairs with his staff.

"'Eh, Tronchon, another bullet in thy old carcass; want a furlough to get strong again, eh?'

"'No, colonel; all sound this time. I want to be a sergeant—I'm twelve years and four months corporal.'

"'Slow work, too,' said he, laughing, 'ain't it, Charles?' and he pinched one of his young officers by the cheek. 'Let old Tronehon have his grade; and I say, my good fellow,' said he to me, 'don't come plaguing me any more about promotion, till I'm General of Division. You hear that?'

"Well, he's got his step since; but I never teased him after."

"And why so, Tronchon?" said I.

"I'll tell thee, lad," whispered he, in a low, confidential tone, as if imparting a secret well worth the hearing. "They can find fellows every day fit for lieutenants and chefs d'escadron. Parbleu! they meet with them in every cafe, in every 'billiard' you enter; but a sergeant, Maurice, one that drills his men on parade—can dress them like a wall—see that every kit is well packed, and every cartouch well filled—who knows every soul in his company as he knows the buckles of his own sword-belt—that's what one should not chance upon, in haste. It's easy enough to manoeuvre the men, Maurice; but to make them, boy, to fashion the fellows so that they be like the pieces of a great machine, that's the real labor—that's soldiering, indeed."

"And you say I must write a petition, Tronchon?" said I, more anxious to bring him back to my own affairs, than listen to these speculations of his. "How shall I do it?"

"Sit down there, lad, and I'll tell thee. I've done the thing some scores of times, and know the words as well as I once knew my 'Pater.' Parbleu, I often wish I could remember that now, just to keep me from gloomy thoughts when I sit alone of an evening."

It was not a little to his astonishment, but still more to his delight, that I told the poor fellow I could help to refresh his memory, knowing, as I did, every word of the litanies by heart; and, accordingly, it was agreed on that I should impart religious instruction, in exchange for the secular knowledge he was conferring upon me.

"As for the petition," said Tronchon, seating himself opposite to me at the table, "it is soon done; for, mark me, lad, these things must always be short; if thou be long-winded, they put thee away, and tell some of the clerks to look after thee—and there's an end of it. Be brief, therefore, and next—be legible—write in a good, large round hand; just as, if thou wert speaking, thou wouldst talk with a fine, clear, distinct voice. Well, then, begin thus, 'Republic of France, one and indivisible!' Make a flourish round that, lad, as if it came freely from the pen. When a man writes 'FRANCE!' he should do it as he whirls his sabre round his head in a charge! Ay, just so."

"I'm ready, Tronchon, go on."

"'Mon General!' Nay, nay—General mustn't be as large as France—yes, that's better. 'The undersigned, whose certificates of service and conduct are herewith inclosed.'" "Stay, stop a moment, Tronchon; don't forget that I have got neither one or t'other." "No matter; I'll make thee out both. Where was I? Ay, 'herewith inclosed; and whose wounds, as the accompanying report will show—'"

"Wounds! I never received one."

"No matter, I'll—eh—what? Feu d'enfer! how stupid I am! What have I been thinking of? Why, boy, it was a sick-furlough I was about to ask for; the only kind of petition I have ever had to write in a life long."

"And I am asking for active service."

"Ha! That came without asking for in my case."

"Then, what's to be done, Tronchon? clearly, this won't do!"

He nodded sententiously an assent, and, after a moment's rumination, said,

"It strikes me, lad, there can be no need of begging for that which usually comes unlooked for; but if thou don't choose to wait for thy billet for t'other world, but must go and seek it, the best way will be to up and tell the general as much."

"That was exactly my intention."

"If he asks thee 'Canst ride?' just say, 'Old Tronchon taught me;' he'll be one of the young hands, indeed, if he don't know that name! And mind, lad, have no whims or caprices about whatever service he names thee for, even were't the infantry itself! It's a hard word, that! I know it well! but a man must make up his mind for any thing and every thing. Wear any coat, go any where, face any enemy thou'rt ordered, and have none of those new-fangled notions about this general, or that army. Be a good soldier, and a good comrade. Share thy kit and thy purse to the last sous, for it will not only be generous in thee, but that so long as thou hoardest not, thou'lt never be over eager for pillage. Mind these things, and with a stout heart and a sharp sabre, Maurice, 'tu ira loin.' Yes, I tell thee again, lad, 'tu ira loin'."

I give these three words as he said them, for they have rung in my ears throughout all my life long. In moments of gratified ambition, in the glorious triumph of success, they have sounded to me like the confirmed predictions of one who foresaw my elevation, in less prosperous hours. When fortune has looked dark and louring, they have been my comforter and support, telling me not to be downcast or depressed, that the season of sadness would soon pass away, and the road to fame and honor again open before me.

"You really think so, Tronchon? You think that I shall be something yet?'

"'Tu ira loin,' I say," repeated he emphatically, and with the air of an oracle who would not suffer further interrogation. I therefore shook his hand cordially, and set out to pay my visit to the general.

(To be continued.)



[From the London Eclectic Review.]

HAVE GREAT POETS BECOME IMPOSSIBLE?[18]

"Poetry is declining—poetry is being extinguished—poetry is extinct. To talk of poetry now is eccentricity—to write it is absurdity—to publish it is moonstruck madness." So the changes are rung. Now, it is impossible to deny that what is called poetry has become a drug, a bore, and nuisance, and that the name "Poet," as commonly applied, is at present about the shabbiest in the literary calendar. But we are far from believing that poetry is extinct. We entertain, on the contrary, sanguine hopes of its near and glorious resurrection. Soon do we hope to hear those tones of high melody, which are now like the echoes of forgotten thunder:

"From land to land re-echoed solemnly, Till silence become music."

We expect, about the very time, when the presumption against the revivication of poetry shall have attained the appearance of absolute certainty, to witness a Tenth Avatar of Genius—and to witness its effect, too, upon the sapient personages who had been predicting that it was forever departed.

But this, it seems, is "not a poetical age." For our parts, we know not what age has not been poetical—in what age have not existed all the elements of poetry, been developed all its passions, and been heard many of its tones. "Were the dark ages poetical?" it will be asked. Yes, for then, as now, there was pathos—there was passion—there were hatred, revenge, love, grief, despair, religion. Wherever there is the fear of death and of judgment, there is, and must be poetry—and when was that feeling more intensely developed than during that dim period? The victims of a spell are objects of poetical interest. Here was a strong spell, embracing a world. Was no arm during the dark ages bared aloft in defense of outraged innocence? Or was no head then covered with the snows of a hundred winters, through one midnight despair? Was the voice of prayer then stifled throughout Europe's hundred lands? Was the mighty heart of man—the throbbing of which is just poetry, then utterly silent? But it was not expressed! We maintain, on the contrary, that it was—expressed at the time, in part by monks, and scalds, and orators, and expressed afterward in the glad energy of the spring which human nature made from its trance, into new life and motion. The elements of poetry had been accumulating in secret. The renovation of letters merely opened a passage for what had been struggling for vent. What is Dante's work but a beautiful incarnation of the spirit of the Middle Ages? His passion is that of a sublimated Inquisitor. His "Inferno" is such a dream as might have been dreamed by a poet monk, whose body had been macerated by austerities, and whose spirit had been darkened by long broodings on the fate of the victims of perdition. It is the poetical part of the passion of those ages of darkness finding a full voice—an eternal echo. And it was not in vain that so deep had been the slumber, when such had been its visions. There is a grandeur about any passion when carried to excess. Superstition, therefore, became the inspiration of one of the greatest productions of the universe. Dante was needed precisely when he appeared. The precise quantity of poetical material to answer the ends of a great original poet was accumulated; and the mighty Florentine, when he rose, became the mouth-piece and oracle of his age and of its cognate ages past—the exact index of all that redeemed, animated, excited, or adorned them.

The crusades, too, were another proof that the slumber in which Europe had been buried was not absolutely and altogether that of stupor or death. They occurred after the noon of that period we usually denominate dark. But they were the realization of a dream which had often passed through the monkish heart—the embodiment, of a wish which had often brought tears into the eyes of genuine enthusiasts. There was, surely, as much sublimity in the first conception as in the execution. What indeed were the crusades, but the means of bringing to light, feelings, desires, passions, a lofty disinterested heroism, which the very depth of the former darkness had tended to foster and fire?

If the dark ages had thus their poetical tendencies, climbing toward a full poetic expression, surely no age need or can be destitute of theirs—need or can be called unpoetical. But the misfortune is, that men will not look at the essential poetry which is lying around them, and under their feet. They suppose their age to be unpoetical, merely because they grapple not with its great excitements, nor will venture to sail upon its "mighty stream of tendency." They overlook the volcano in the next mountain—while admiring or deploring those which have been extinct for centuries, or which are a thousand miles away. They are afraid that if they catch the spirit of their age in verse, they will give it a temporary stamp; and therefore they either abstain from writing, and take to abusing the age on which they have unluckily fallen, or else come to the same resolution after an unsuccessful attempt to revive faded stimulants. Dante embodied, for instance, his countrymen's rude conception of future punishment—and he did well. But our modern religious poets have never ventured to meddle with those moral aspects of the subject which have now so generally supplanted the material. They talk instead, with Pollok, of the "rocks of dark damnation," or outrage common sense by such barbarous mis-creations as he has sculptured on the gate of hell, and think they have written an "Inferno," or that, if they have failed, it is because their age is not poetical.

Indeed, the least poetry is sometimes written in the most poetical ages. Men, when acting poetry, have little time either to write or to read it. There was less poetry written in the age of Charles I., than in that which preceded it, and more poetry enacted. But the majority of men only listen to the reverberations of emotion in song. They sympathize not with poetry, but with poets. And, therefore, when a cluster of poets die, or are buried before they be dead, they chant dirges over the death of poetry—as if it ever did or ever could die! as if its roots, which are just the roots of the human soul, were perishable—as if, especially when a strong current of excitement was flowing, it were not plain, that there was a poetry which should, in due time, develop its own masters to record and prolong it forever. Surely, as long as the grass is green and the sky is blue, as long as man's heart is warm and woman's face is fair, poetry, like seed-time and harvest, like summer and winter shall not cease.

There was little poetry, some people think, about England's civil war, because the leader of one party was a red-nosed fanatic. They, for their part, cannot extract poetry from a red nose; but they are in raptures with Milton. Fools! but for that civil war, its high and solemn excitement, the deeds and daring of that red-nosed fanatic, would the "Paradise Lost" ever have been written, or written as it has been? That stupendous edifice of genius seems cemented by the blood of Naseby and of Marston Moor.

Such persons, too, see little that is poetical in the American struggle—no mighty romance in tumbling a few chests of tea into the Atlantic. Washington they think insipid; and because America has produced hitherto no great poet, its whole history they regard as a gigantic commonplace—thus ignoring the innumerable deeds of derring-do which distinguished that immortal contest—blinding their eyes to the "lines of empire" in the "infant face of that cradled Hercules," and the tremendous sprawlings of his nascent strength—and seeking to degrade those forests into whose depths a path for the sunbeams must be hewn, and where, lightning appears to enter trembling, and to withdraw in haste; forests which must one day drop down a poet, whose genius shall be worthy of their age, their vastitude, the beauty which they inclose, and the load of grandeur below which they bend.

Nor, to the vulgar eye, does there seem much poetry in the French Revolution, though it was the mightiest tide of human passion which ever boiled and raved: a great deal, doubtless, in Burke's "Reflections"—but none in the cry of a liberated people, which was heard in heaven—none in the fall of the Bastile—none in Danton's giant figure, nor in Charlotte Corday's homicide—nor in Madame Roland's scaffold speeches, immortal though they be as the stars of heaven—nor in the wild song of the six hundred Marseillese, marching northward "to die." The age of the French Revolution was proved to be a grand and spirit-stirring age by its after results—by bringing forth its genuine poet-children—its Byrons and Shelleys—but needed not this late demonstration of its power and tendencies.

Surely our age, too, abounds in the elements of poetical excitement, awaiting; only fit utterance. The harvest is rich and ripe—and nothing now is wanting but laborers to put in the sickle.

Special objections might indeed, and have been taken, to the poetical character of our time, which we may briefly dispose of before enumerating the qualities which a new and great poet, aspiring to be the Poet of the Age, must possess, and inquiring how far Mr. S. Yendys exhibits those qualities in this very remarkable first effort, "The Roman."

"It is a mechanical age," say some. To use Shakspeare's words, "he is a mechanical salt-butter rogue who says so." Men use more machines than formerly, but are not one whit more machines themselves. Was James Watt an automaton? Has the press become less an object of wonder or terror since it was worked by steam? How sublime was the stoppage of a mail as the index of rebellion. Luther's Bible was printed by a machine. The organ is a machine—and not the roar of a lion in a midnight forest is more sublime, or a fitter reply from earth to the thunder. The railway carriages of this mechanical age are the conductors of the fire of intellect and passion—and its steamboats may be loaded with thunderbolts, as well as with bullocks or yarn. The great American ship is but a machine; and yet how poetical it becomes, as it walks the waters of the summer sea, or wrestles, like a demon of kindred power, with the angry billows. Mechanism, indeed, may be called the short-hand of poetry, concentrating its force and facilitating its operations.

But this is an "age too late." So doubted Milton, while the shadow of Shakspeare had scarce left the earth, and while he himself was writing the greatest epic the world ever saw. And so any one may say, provided he does not mutilate or restrain his genius in consequence. We have reason to bless Providence that Milton did not act upon his hasty peradventure. But some will attempt to prove its truth, by saying that the field of poetry is limited—that the first cultivators will probably exhaust it, and that, in fact, a decline in poetry has been observed—the first poets being uniformly the best. But we deny that the field of poetry is limited. That is nature and the deep heart of man; or, more correctly, the field of poetry is human nature, and the external universe, multiplied indefinitely by the imagination. This, surely, is a wide enough territory. Where shall poetry, if sent forth like Noah's dove, fail to find a resting-place? Each new fact in the history of man and nature is a fact for it—suited to its purposes, and awaiting its consecration.

"The great writers have exhausted it." True, they have exhausted, speaking generally, the topics they have handled. Few will think of attempting the "Fall of Man" after Milton—and Dryden and Galt, alone, have dared, to their own disgrace, to burst within Shakspeare's magic circle. But the great poets have not verily occupied the entire field of poetry—have not counted all the beatings of the human heart—have not lighted on all those places whence poetry, like water from the smitten rock, rushes at the touch of genius—have not exhausted all the "riches fineless" which garnish the universe—nay, they have multiplied them infinitely, and shed on them a deeper radiance. The more poetry there is, the more there must be. A good criticism on a great poem becomes a poem itself. It is the essence of poetry to increase and multiply—to create an echo and shadow of its own power, even as the voice of the cataract summons the spirits of the wilderness to return it in thunder. As truly say that storms can exhaust the sky, as that poems can exhaust the blue dome of poesy. We doubt, too, the dictum that the earliest poets are uniformly the best. Who knows not that many prefer Eschylus to Homer; and many, Virgil to Lucretius; and many, Milton to Shakspeare; and that a nation sets Goethe above all men, save Shakspeare; and has not the toast been actually given, "To the two greatest of poets—Shakspeare and Byron?" To settle the endless questions connected with such a topic by any dogmatical assertion of the superiority of early poets, is obviously impossible.

But "the age will not now read poetry." True, it will not read whatever bears the name it will not read nursery themes; nor tenth-rate imitations of tenth-rate imitations of Byron, Scott, or Wordsworth; nor the effusions either of mystical cant, or of respectable commonplace; nor yet very willingly the study-sweepings of reputed men, who deem, in their complacency, that the world is gaping for the rinsings of their intellect. But it will read genuine poetry, if it be accommodated to the wants of the age, and if it be fairly brought before it. "Vain to cast pearls before swine!" Cast down the pearls before you call the men of the age swine. In truth, seldom had a true and new poet a fairer field, or the prospect of a wider favor, than at this very time. The age remembers that many of those poets it now delights to honor, were at first received with obloquy or neglect. It is not so likely to renew the disgraceful sin, since it recollects the disgraceful repentance. It is becoming wide awake, and is ready to recognize every symptom of original power. The reviews and literary journals are still, indeed, comparatively an unfair medium; but, by their multitude and their contradictions, have neutralized each other's power, and rendered the public less willing and less apt to be bullied or blackguarded out of its senses. Were Hazlitt alive now, and called, by any miserable scribbler in the "Athenaeum" or "Spectator," a dunce, he could laugh in his face; instead of retiring as he did, perhaps hunger-bitten, to bleed out his heart's blood in secret. Were Shelley now called in "Blackwood" a madman, and Keats a mannikin, they would be as much disturbed by it as the moon at the baying of a Lapland wolf. The good old art, in short, of writing an author up or down, is dying hard, but dying fast; and the public is beginning to follow the strange new fashion of discarding its timid, or truculent, or too-much-seasoned tasters, and judging for itself. We have often imaged to ourselves the rapture with which a poet, of proper proportions and due culture, if writing in his age's spirit, would be received in an age when the works of Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and Keats, are so widely read and thoroughly appreciated. He would find it "all ear."

Great things, however, must be done by the man who cherishes this high ambition. He must not only be at once a genius and an artist, but his art and his genius must be proportioned, with chemical exactness, to each other. He must not only be a poet, but have a distinct mission and message, savoring of the prophetic—he must say as well as sing. He must use his poetic powers as wonders attesting the purpose for which he speaks—not as mere bravados of ostentatious power. He must, while feeling the beauty, the charm, and the meaning of mysticism, stand above it, on a clear and sun-lighted peak, and incline rather to the classical and masculine, than to the abstract and transcendental. His genius should be less epic and didactic, than lyrical and popular. He should be not so much the Homer as the Tyrtaeus of this strange time. He should have sung over to himself the deep controversies of his age, and sought to reduce them into an unique and intelligible harmony. Into scales of doubt, equally balanced, he should be ready to throw his lyre, as a makeweight. Not a partisan either of the old or the new, he should seek to set in song the numerous points in which they agree, and strive to produce a glorious synthesis between them. He should stand (as on a broad platform) on the identity and eternity of all that is good and true—on the fact that "faiths never die, but are only translated"—on the fact that beauty physical and beauty moral are in heart the same; and that Christianity, as rightly understood, is at once the root and the flower of all truth—and, standing on this, should sing his fearless strains to the world. He should have a high idea of his art—counting it a lower inspiration, a sacred trust, a minor grace—a plant from a seed originally dropped out of the paradise of God! He should find in it a work, and not a recreation—an affair of life, not of moments of leisure. And while appealing, by his earnestness, his faith, his holiness, his genius, to the imagination, the heart, and the conscience of man, he should possess, or attain to, the mechanical ingenuity that can satisfy man's constructive understanding, the elegance that can please his sensuous taste, the fluency that can blend ease with instruction, and the music that can touch through the ear the inner springs of his being. Heart and genius, art and nature, sympathy with man and God, love of the beautiful apparition of the universe, and of that divine halo of Christianity which surrounds its head, must be united in our poet. He should conjoin Byron's energy—better controlled; Shelley's earnestness—better instructed; Keats's sensibility—guarded and armed; Wordsworth's Christianized love of Nature; and Coleridge's Christianized view of philosophy—to his own fancy, language, melody, and purpose; a lofty ideal of man the spirit, to a deep sympathy with man the worm, toiling, eating, drinking, struggling, falling, rising, and progressing, amidst his actual environments; and become the Magnus Apollo of our present age.

Perhaps we have fixed the standard too high, and forced a renewal of the exclamation in Rasselas, "Thou hast convinced me that no man can ever be a poet"—or, at least, the poet thus described. But nothing, we are persuaded, is in the imagination which may not be in the fact. Had we defined a Shakspeare ere he arose, "impossible" had been the cry. It must, too, be conceded that hitherto we have no rising, or nearly-risen poet, who answers fully to our ideal. Macaulay and Aytoun are content with being brilliant ballad-singers—they never seek to touch the deeper spiritual chords of our being. Tennyson's exquisite genius is neutralized, whether by fastidiousness of taste or by morbidity of temperament—neutralized, we mean, so far as great future achievements are concerned. Emerson's undisguised Pantheism casts a cold shade over his genius and his poetry. There is something odd, mystical, and shall we say affected, about both the Brownings, which mars their general effect—the wine is good, but the shape of the cyathus is deliberately queer. Samuel Brown is devoted to other pursuits. Marston's very elegant, refined, and accomplished mind, lacks, perhaps, enough of the manly, the forceful, and the profound. Bailey of "Festus," and Yendys of the poem before us, are the most likely candidates for the vacant laurel.

That Bailey's genius is all that need be desired in the "coming poet," will be contested by few who have read and wondered at "Festus"—at its fire of speech, its force of sentiment, its music of sound, its Californian wealth of golden imagery; the infinite variety of its scenes, speeches, and songs; the spirit of reverence which underlies all its liberties, errors, and extravagances; and the originality which, like the air of a mountain summit, renders its perusal at first difficult, and almost deadly, but at last excites and elevates to absolute intoxication. It has, however, been objected to it, that it seems an exhaustion of the author's mind—that its purposeless, planless shape betrays a lack of constructive power—that it becomes almost polemical in its religious aspect, and gives up to party what was meant for mankind—that it betrays a tendency toward obscure, mystical raptures and allegorizings, scarcely consistent with healthy manhood of mind, and which seems growing, as is testified by the "Angel World"—that there is a great gulf between the powers it indicates, and the task of leading the age—and that, on the whole, it is rather a prodigious comet in the poetical heavens, than either a still, calm luminary, or even the curdling of a future fair creation.

Admitting the force of much of this criticism, and that Bailey's art and aptitude to teach are unequal to his native power and richness of mind, we are still willing to wait for a production more matured than "Festus," and less fragmentary and dim than the "Angel World;" and till then, must waive our judgment as to whether on his head the laurel crown is transcendently to flourish.

But meanwhile a young voice has suddenly been uplifted from a provincial town in England, crying, "Hear me—I also am a poet; I aspire, too, to prove myself worthy of being a teacher I aim at no middle flight, but commit myself at once to high, difficult, and daring song, and that, too, of varied kinds." Nor has the voice been despised or disregarded. Some of the most fastidious of critical journals have already waxed enthusiastic in his praise. Many fine spirits, both young and old, have welcomed him with acclamation, as his own hero was admitted, for the sake of one song, into the society of a band of experienced bards. Even the few who deny—unjustly and captiously, as it appears to us—the artistic, admit the poetical merit of his work And we have now before us, not the miserable drudgery of weighing a would-be poet, but the nobler duty of inquiring how far a man of undoubted genius, and great artistic skill, is likely to fulfill the high-raised expectations of the period. The scene of the "Roman" is in Italy. The hero is a patriot, filled and devoured by a love for the liberation of Italy, and for the re-establishment of the ancient Roman Republic—"One, entire, and indivisible." To promote this purpose, he assumes the disguise of a monk; and the history of his progress—addressing now little groups, now single individuals, and now large multitudes of men—at one time captivating, unwittingly, a young and enthusiastic lady, by the fervor of his eloquence, who delivers him from death by suicide—and at another, shaking the walls of his dungeon, through the power and grandeur of his predictions and dreams—till at last, as, after the mockery of a trial, he is led forth to death, he hears the shout of his country, rising en masse—is the whole story of the piece. But around this slender thread, the author has strung some of the largest, richest, and most resplendent gems of poetry we have seen for years.

Let us present our readers with a few passages, selected almost at random. Take the "Song of the Dancers" for its music:

"Dancers. Sing lowly, foot slowly, oh, why should we chase The hour that gives heaven to this earthly embrace? To-morrow, to-morrow, is dreary and lonely; Then love as they love who would live to love only! Closer yet, eyes of jet—breasts fair and sweet! No eyes flash like those eyes that flash as they meet! Weave brightly, wear lightly, the warm-woven chain, Love on for to-night if we ne'er love again. Fond youths! happy maidens! we are not alone! Bright steps and sweet voices keep pace with our own, Love-lorn Lusignuolo, the soft-sighing breeze, The rose with the zephyr, the wind with the trees. While heaven blushing pleasure, is full of love notes, Soft down the sweet measure the fairy world floats."

P. I, 2.

Take the Monk's Appeal to his "Mother, Italy," for its eloquence:

"By thine eternal youth, And coeternal utterless dishonor— Past, present, future, life and death, all oaths Which may bind earth and heaven, mother, I swear it We know we have dishonored thee. We know All thou canst tell the angels. At thy feet, The feet where kings have trembled, we confess, And weep; and only bid thee live, my mother, To see how we can die. Thou shalt be free! By all our sins, and all thy wrongs, we swear it We swear it, mother, by the thousand omens That heave this pregnant time. Tempests for whom The Alps lack wombs—quick earthquakes—hurricanes That moan and chafe, and thunder for the light, And must be native here. Hark, hark, the angel! I see the birthday in the imminent skies! Clouds break in fire. Earth yawns. The exulting thunder Shouts havoc to the whirlwinds. And men hear Amid the terrors of consenting storms, Floods, rocking worlds, mad seas, and rending mountains, Above the infinite clash, one long great cry, THOU SHALT BE FREE!"

P. 14, 15.

Take the few lines about "Truth," for their depth:

"Truth is the equal sun, Ripening no less the hemlock than the vine. Truth is the flash that turns aside no more For castle than for cot. Truth is a spear Thrown by the blind. Truth is a Nemesis Which leadeth her beloved by the hand Through all things; giving him no task to break A bruised reed, but bidding him stand firm Though she crush worlds."

P. 21, 22.

Take, for its harrowing power, blended with beauty, the description of a "Lost Female," symbolizing the degradation of Italy, and addressed to the heroine of the tale:

"Or, oh, prince's daughter, if In some proud street, leaning 'twixt night and day From out thy palace balcony to meet The breeze—that tempted by the hush of eve, Steals from the fields about a city's shows, And like a lost child, scared with wondering, flies, From side to side in touching trust and terror, Crying sweet country names and dropping flowers— Leaning to meet that breeze, and looking down To the so silent city, if below, With dress disordered, and disheveled passions Streaming from desperate eyes that flash and flicker Like corpse-lights (eyes that once were known on high Morning and night, as welcome there as thine), And brow of trodden snow, and form majestic That might have walked unchallenged through the skies. And reckless feet, fitful with wine and woe, And songs of revel that fall dead about Her ruined beauty—sadder than a wail— (As if the sweet maternal eve for pity Took out the joy, and, with a blush of twilight, Uncrowned the Bacchanal)—some outraged sister Passeth, be patient, think upon yon heaven, Where angels hail the Magdalen, look down Upon that life in death, and say, 'My country!'"

P. 36.

Take, for its wondrous pathos and truth, the description of "Infancy:"

"Thou little child, Thy mother's joy, thy father's hope—thou bright Pure dwelling where two fond hearts keep their gladness— Thou little potentate of love, who comest With solemn sweet dominion to the old, Who see thee in thy merry fancies charged With the grave embassage of that dear past, When they were young like thee—thou vindication Of God—thou living witness against all men Who have been babes—thou everlasting promise Which no man keeps—thou portrait of our nature, Which in despair and pride we scorn and worship."

P. 71, 72.

But time would fail us to quote, or even indicate a tithe of the beautiful, melting, and magnificent passages in this noble "Roman." We would merely request the reader's attention to the whole of the sixth scene; to the ballad, a most exquisite and pathetic one, entitled the "Winter's Night;" to the "Vision of Quirinus," a piece of powerful and condensed imagination; and, best of all, to the "Dream of the Coliseum," in scene viii.—a dream which will not suffer by comparison with that of Sardanapalus.

But it is not the brilliance of occasional parts and passages alone, which justifies us in pronouncing the "Roman" an extraordinary production. We look at it as a whole, and thus regarding it, we find—first, a wondrous freedom from faults, major or minor, juvenile or non-juvenile; wondrous, inasmuch as the author is still very young, not many years, indeed, in advance of his majority. There is exaggeration, we grant, in passages, but it is exaggeration as essential to the circumstances and the characters as Lear's insane language is to his madness, or Othello's turbid tide of figures to his jealousy. The hero—an enthusiast—speaks always in enthusiastic terms; but of extravagance we find little, and of absurdity or affectation none. Diffusion there is, but it is often the beautiful diffusion of one who dallies with beloved thoughts, and will not let them go till they have told him all that is in their heart. And ever and anon we meet with strong single lines and separate sentences, containing truth and fancy concentrated as "lion's marrow."

Take a few specimens. Of Italy he says:

"She wraps the purple round her outraged breast, And even in fetters cannot be a slave."

Again, she

"Stands menacled before the world, and bears Two hemispheres—innumerable wrongs, Illimitable glories."

"The soul never Can twice be virgin—the eye that strikes Upon the hidden path to the unseen Is henceforth for two worlds."

"To both worlds —The inner and the outer—we come naked, The very noblest heart on earth, hath oft No better lot than to deserve."

"Before every man the world of beauty, Like a great artist, standeth night and day With patient hand retouching in the heart God's defaced image."

"Rude heaps that had been cities clad the ground With history."

"Strange fragments Of forms once held divine, and still, like angels, Immortal every where."

"The poet, In some rapt moment of intense attendance, The skies being genial, and the earthly air Propitious, catches on the inward ear The awful and unutterable meanings Of a divine soliloquy."

"The very stars themselves are nearer to us than to-morrow."

"The great man ... is set Among us pigmies, with a heavenlier stature, And brighter face than ours, that we must leap Even to smite it."

"Great merchants, men Who dealt in kingdoms; ruddy aruspex, And pale philosopher, who bent beneath The keys of wisdom."

"The Coliseum ... stood out dark With thoughts of ages: like some mighty captive Upon his death-bed in a Christian land, And lying, through the chant of Psalm and Creed Unshriven and stern, with peace upon his brow, And on his lips strange gods."

Our readers must perceive from such extracts, that our author belongs more to the masculine than to the mystic school. Deep in thought, he is clear in language and in purpose. Since Byron's dramas, we have seldom had such fiery and vigorous verse. He blends the strong with the tender, in natural and sweet proportions. His genius, too, vaults into the lyric motion with very great ease and mastery. He is a minstrel as well as a bard, and has shown power over almost every form of lyrical composition. His sentiment is clear without being commonplace, original, yet not extravagant, and betokens, as well as his style, a masculine health, maturity, and completeness, rarely to be met with in a first attempt. Above all, his tone of mind, while sympathizing to rapture with the liberal progress of the age, is that of one who feels the eternal divinity and paramount power of the Christian religion; that what God has once pronounced true can never become a lie; that what was once really alive may change, but can never die; that Christianity is a fact, great, real, and permanent, as birth or death; and that its seeming decay is only the symptom that it is putting off the old skin, and about to renew its mighty youth.

We have thus found many, if not all, the qualities of our ideal poet united in the author of the "Roman," and are not ashamed to say that we expect more from him than from any other of our rising "Sons of the Morning." But he must work and walk worthy of his high vocation, and of the hopes which now lie upon him—hopes which must either be the ribbons of his crown or the cords of his sacrifice. He must discard his tendency to diffusion, and break in that demon-steed of eloquence, who sometimes is apt to run away with him. He must give us next, not scattered scenes, but a whole epic, the middle of which shall be as obvious as the beginning or the end. He should, in his next work, seek less to please, startle, or gain an audience, than to tell them in thunder and in music what they ought to believe and to do. Thus acting, he may "fill his crescent-sphere;" revive the power and glory of song; give voice to a great dumb struggle in the mind of the age; rescue the lyre from the camp of the Philistines, where it has been but too long detained; and render possible the hope, that the day shall come when again, as formerly, the names "of poet and of prophet are the same."

FOOTNOTES:

[18] The Roman: a Dramatic Poem. By Sydney Yendys. London: Rantley, 1850.



[From Sharpe's London Magazine.]

RECOLLECTIONS OF THOMAS CAMPBELL.

In his intercourse with society, Campbell was a shrewd observer of those often contradictory elements of which it is composed. Adverting to the absurd and ludicrous, he had the art or talent of heightening their effect by touches peculiarly his own; while the quiet gravity with which he related his personal anecdotes or adventures, added greatly to the charm, and often threw his unsuspecting hearers into uncontrollable fits of laughter. Nor was the pathos with which he dilated on some tale of human misery less captivating; it runs through all his poetry, and in hearing or relating a story of human wrongs or suffering, we have often seen him affected to tears, which he vainly strove to conceal by an abrupt transition to some ludicrous incident in his own personal history. As an example, which has not yet found its way to the public, we may relate the following, which he told one evening in our little domestic circle where he was a frequent visitor, and where the conversation had taken, as he thought, a somewhat too serious turn:

"In my early life, when I resided in the island of Mull, most of those old feudal customs which civilization had almost banished from the Lowlands, were still religiously observed in the Hebrides—more especially those of a social and festive character, which it was thought had the effect of keeping up old acquaintance, and of tightening the bonds of good fellowship. Rural weddings and "roaring wakes" were then occasions for social rendezvous, which were not to be overlooked. Both these ceremonies were accompanied by feasting, music, dancing, and that liberal enjoyment of the native browst which was too often carried to excess. I was in general a willing and a welcome guest at these doings; for, smitten as I often was with melancholy in this dreary solitude, I was glad to avail myself of any occasion that promised even temporary exhilaration. Well, the first of these meetings at which I was present one evening, happened to be a dredgee, a term which I need only explain, by saying that it was got up for the sake of a young widow, who had just put on her weeds, and stood much in need of friendly sympathy, and consolation. At first it was rather a dull affair, for the widow looked very disconsolate, and every look of her fair face was contagious. But as the quaigh was active, and the whisky went its frequent round, the circle became more lively; until at last, to my utter astonishment, the bagpipes were introduced; and after a coronach or so—just to quiet the spirit of their departed host—up started a couple of dancers, and began jigging it over the floor with all the grace and agility peculiar to my Hebridean friends. This movement was infectious: another and another couple started up—reel followed upon reel, until the only parties who had resisted the infection," continued the poet, "were the widow and myself, she, oppressed with her own private sorrow, and I, restrained by feelings of courtesy from quitting her side. I observed, however, that she 'kept time' with her hand—all unconsciously, no doubt—against the bench where we sat, while her thoughts were wandering about the moorland Cairn, which had that very morning received her husband's remains. I pitied her from my very heart. But, behold, just as I was addressing to her one of my most sympathizing looks, up came a brisk Highlander, whose step and figure in the dance had excited both admiration and envy; and, making a low bow to the widow, followed by a few words of condolence, he craved the honor of her hand for the next reel. The widow, as you may well suppose, was shocked beyond measure! while I starting to my feet, made a show as if I meant to resent the insult. But she, pulling me gently back, rebuked the kilted stranger with a look, at which he instantly withdrew. In a few minutes, however, the young chieftain returned to the charge. The widow frowned, and wept, and declared that nothing on earth should ever tempt her to such a breach of decorum. But the more she frowned, the more he smiled, and pressed his suit: 'Just one reel,' he repeated, 'only one! Allan of Mull, the best piper in the Isles, was only waiting her bidding to strike up.' The plea was irresistible. 'Weel, weel,' sighed the widow, rising, and giving him her hand, 'what maun be, maun be! But, hech, sirs, let it be a lightsome spring, for I hae a heavy, heavy heart!' The next minute the widow was capering away to a most 'lightsome' air—hands across—cast off—down the middle, and up again. And a merrier dredgee," concluded the poet, "was never seen in Mull."

On another occasion, when he presented a copy of some verses, which he had just finished, to a lady of our family, he described their origin as follows: "Many long years ago, while I was sealed up in the Hebrides, I became intimate with a family who had a beautiful parrot, which a young mariner had brought from South America, as a present to his sweetheart. This happened long before my arrival in Mull; and Poll for many years had been a much-prized and petted favorite in the household. He was a captive, to be sure, but allowed at times to be outside his cage on parole; and, always observing good faith and gratitude for such indulgences, they were repeated as often as appeared consistent with safe custody. The few words of Gaelic which he had picked up in his voyage to the north, were just sufficient, on his arrival, to bespeak the good-will of the family, and recommend himself to their hospitality; but his vocabulary was soon increased—he became a great mimic—he could imitate the cries of every domestic animal—the voices of the servants: he could laugh, whistle, and scold, like any other biped around him. He was, in short, a match even for Kelly's renowned parrot: for although he could not, or would not, sing 'God save the King,' he was a proficient in 'Charlie is my Darling,' and other Jacobite airs, with which he never failed to regale the company, when properly introduced.

"Poll was indeed a remarkable specimen of his tribe, and the daily wonder of the whole neighborhood. Years flew by: and although kind treatment had quite reconciled him to his cage, it could not ward off the usual effects of old age, particularly in a climate where the sun rarely penetrated within the bars of his prison. When I first saw him, his memory had greatly failed him; while his bright green plumage was vast verging into a silvery gray He had but little left of that triumphant chuckle which used to provoke such laughter among the younkers; and day after day he would sit mute and moping on his perch, seldom answering the numerous questions that were put to him regarding the cause of his malady. Had any child of the family been sick, it could hardly have been treated with greater tenderness than Poll.

"At last, one fine morning, just as the vernal equinox had blown a few ships into harbor, a stranger was announced, and immediately recognized by the master of the house as a 'Don' something—a Spanish merchant, whose kindness to a young member of the family had been often mentioned in his letters from Mexico. One of his own ships, a brig, in which he had made the voyage, was then in the bay, driven in by stress of weather, for Mull was no market for Spanish goods. But that was not my business; he would most likely pay a visit to Greenock, where, in the present day at least, Spanish cargoes are rife enough.

"No sooner had their visitor exchanged salutations with the master of the house and his family, than the parrot caught his eye; and, going up to the cage, he addressed the aged bird in familiar Spanish. The effect was electric: the poor blind captive seemed as if suddenly awakened to a new existence; he fluttered his wings in ecstasy—opened his eyes, fixed them, dim and sightless as they were, intently on the stranger; then answered him in the same speech—not an accent of which he had ever heard for twenty years. His joy was excessive—but it was very short; for in the midst of his screams and antics, poor Poll dropped dead from his perch."

Such was the incident upon which Campbell composed the little ballad entitled "The Parrot." It had taken strong hold of his memory, and, after the lapse of forty years,[19] found its way into the pages of the "New Monthly," and is now incorporated with his acknowledged poems.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] See "Life and Letters of Campbell." Vol. I. Residence in Mull.



[From Sharpe's London Magazine.]

GALILEO AND HIS DAUGHTER.

BY J. B.

I had been walking in a grove of lime-trees, arched above me, like the stately roofing of a cathedral. As I entered, the daylight was yet strong; but when I left my temporary retreat, the heavens were clustered over with stars, and one of them, high above the old gray tower of the ancient monastery of St. Augustine, almost cast a shadow across the landscape—it was the planet Jupiter: and I have never observed it—at least, thus eminent among its brethren—without being more or less reminded of,

"The starry Galileo, and his woes."

To this planet did the philosopher direct the then newly-invented telescope, the result being the discovery of four attendant moons: while the analogy derived from the motions of these little stars, performing their revolutions round the primary planet in perfect order and concord, afforded an argument that had a powerful influence in confirming Galileo's own views in favor of the Copernican system of the universe, and ultimately converting the scientific world to the same opinion.

Yet little more than two centuries since, on the 14th February, 1633, the astronomer, cited before the Inquisition, arrived at Rome, to answer the charge of heresy and blasphemy; while, a few months ago, in the brief but glorious day-burst of Roman liberty, that very Inquisition was invaded by an exultant populace, and among its archives, full memorials of martyred worth and of heroic endurance, most eagerly, but in vain, was sought the record of the process against the great philosopher.

Galileo, on a former occasion, in reference to some of his scientific discoveries, had heard rumors of papal persecution, and as a cautious friend whispered to him the unpleasing tidings, he had exclaimed, "Never will I barter the freedom of my intellect to one as liable to err as myself!"

The time quickly arrived to test his courage and his resolution.

For a little while, we are informed, he was allowed to remain secluded in the palace of his friend Nicolini. In a few months, however, he was removed to an apartment in the Exchequer of the Inquisition, still being permitted the attendance of his own servant, and many indulgences of which they had not decided to deprive him. On the twenty-first of June, of the same year, he appeared before the Holy Office. Through its gloomy halls and passages he passed to the tribunal. There was little here, as in the other ecclesiastical buildings of Rome, to captivate the senses. The dark walls were unadorned with the creations of art; state and ceremony were the gloomy ushers to the chamber of intolerance. In silence and in mystery commenced the preparations. The familiars of the office advanced to the astronomer, and arrayed him in the penitential garment; and as he approached, with a slow and measured step, the tribunal, cardinals, and prelates noiselessly assembled, and a dark circle of officers and priests closed in, while, as if conscious that the battle had commenced in earnest between mind and power, all the pomp and splendor of the hierarchy of Rome—that system which had hitherto possessed a sway unlimited over the fears and opinions of mankind—was summoned up to increase the solemnity and significance of the judgment about to be pronounced against him.

To the tedious succession of technical proceedings, mocking justice by their very assumption of formality, it would be needless to refer. Solemnly, however, and by an authority which it was fatal to resist, Galileo was called on to renounce a truth which his whole life had been consecrated to reveal and to maintain, "The motion through space of the Earth and Planets round the Sun."

Then, immediately, assuming he had nothing to allege, would attempt no resistance, and offer no defense, came the sentence of the tribunal, banning and anathematizing all who held the doctrine, that the sun is the centre of the system, as a tenet "philosophically false, and formally heretical."

And then they sentenced the old and infirm philosopher—this band of infallibles!—they bade him abjure and detest the said errors and heresies. They decreed his book to the flames, and they condemned him for life to the dungeons of the Inquisition, bidding him recite, "once a week, seven penitential psalms for the good of his soul!"

Did Galileo yield? Did he renounce that theory now affording such ample proof of the beauty and order of the universe; to whose very laws Kepler, the friend and contemporary of the philosopher, was even then, though unconsciously, bearing evidence, by his wonderful theorem of velocities and distances, a problem which Newton afterward confirmed and illustrated?

Did Galileo yield? He did. Broken by age and infirmity, importuned by friends more alarmed than himself, perhaps, at the terrors of that merciless tribunal, he signed his abjuration; yielded all his judges demanded; echoed their curse and ban, as their superstition or their hate required. There is a darker tale dimly hinted by those familiar with the technicalities of the Holy Office, that the terms, "Il rigoroso esame," during which Galileo is reported to have answered like a good Christian, officially announce the application of the torture.

Then occurred, perhaps scarcely an hour afterward, that remarkable episode in this man's history. As he arose from the ground on which, all kneeling, he had pronounced his abjuration, he gave a significant stamp, and whispered to a friend, "E pur si muove!" "Yet it does move"—ay, and in spite of Inquisitions, has gone round—nay, the whole world of thought itself has moved, and having received an impulse from such minds, will revolve for ages in a glorious cycle for mankind! But the most touching incident of Galileo's story is yet to come.

After several years of confinement at Arcetri, the great astronomer was permitted to retire to Florence, upon the conditions that he should neither quit his house, nor receive the visits of his friends. They removed him from a prison, to make a prison of his home. Alas! it was even worse than this.

Much as the greatest minds love fame, and struggle to obtain it, the proudest triumphs of genius and of science, the applause of the world itself, ever loud and obtrusive, is not to be compared to the low and gentle murmurs of pleasure and of pride from those we love. There was one being from whom Galileo had been accustomed to hear those consolations—his child his gentle Maria Galilei. He had been otherwise a solitary indeed, and now more than ever so, when he was cut off from the communion of the greatest minds. To his lovely girl, his daughter, his heart clung with more than fondness. No wife of Pliny, perhaps, ever wafted to her husband with sweeter devotion the echoes of the applauding world without, greeting him she loved, than she did—his Maria Galilei. As he returned from prison, the way seemed tedious, the fleetest traveling all too slow, till he should once more fold her to his heart; and she, too, she anticipated meeting her father with a pleasure greater than ever before enjoyed, since he had now become a victim, sainted in her eyes, by the persecution he had suffered.

Short, indeed, was this happiness, if enjoyed at all. Within the month, she died, and the home of Galileo was more than a prison—it was a desolate altar, on which the last and most precious of his household gods was shivered. And he died too, a few years afterward, that good old man!

But he had yielded—he was no martyr! Yes, indeed! But be it remembered, that if he possessed not the moral courage of a Huss, a Savonarola, or a Luther, he was not called to exercise it in so high a cause. The assertion and support of a religious truth is impressed with far deeper obligations than the advocacy of a scientific one, however well maintained by analogy, and confirmed by reason.

Still there was a deep devotional sentiment that pervaded the character of Galileo. Before he died, he became totally blind; yet he did not despair. Like Milton, he labored on for mankind—nay, pursued his scientific studies, inventing mechanical substitutes for his loss of vision, to enable him still to pursue his arduous researches.

It is true he was shut out, like the elder Herschel, from the view of that glorious company, toward which his spirit had so often soared. Well might his friend Castelli say, in allusion to his infirmity, "that the noblest eyes were darkened which nature had ever made—eyes so privileged, and gifted with such rare qualities, that they might be said to have seen more than all those who had gone before him, and to have opened the eyes of all who were to come." Galileo himself bore noble tribute to his friend, when he exclaimed,

"Never, never will I cease to use the senses which God has left me; and though this heaven, this earth, this universe, be henceforth shrunk for me into the narrow space which I myself fill, so it please God, it shall content me."

The malice of his enemies long survived his death. The partisans of Rome disputed his right to make a will. They denied him a monument for which large sums had been subscribed.

A hundred years afterward, when a splendid memorial was about to be erected to his memory, the President of the Florentine Academy descended into his grave, and desecrated his remains, by bearing off, as relics for a museum, the thumb of his right hand, and one of his vertebrae! So the victims of the religious fury of one age become the martyrs of science in another!

And what is the moral of what we have written concerning Galileo? Is there no teaching that may instruct our own times, especially when we see how, through scorn and persecution, and this world's contumely, and through the gloom and shadows of ignorance and fear, the form and substance of mighty Truth rises, slowly and dimly, perchance, at first, but grandly and majestically ere long? Little more than two hundred years have passed since the death of Galileo, but ample justice has been done to his memory. His name will be a watchword through all time, to urge men forward in the great cause of moral and intellectual progress; and the Tree of Knowledge, whose fruits were once on earth, plucked, perhaps, ere they were matured, has shot up with its golden branches into the skies, over which has radiated the smiles of a beneficent Providence to cheer man onward in the career of virtue and intelligence.

"There is something," as a profound writer has observed,[20] "in the spirit of the present age, greater than the age itself. It is, the appearance of a new power in the world, the multitude of minds now pressing forward in the great task of the moral and intellectual regeneration of mankind."

And this cause must ultimately triumph. The energies and discoveries of men like Galileo, remote as their history becomes, have an undying influence.

The power of a great mind is like the attraction of a sun. It appears in the infinite bounds of space, far, far away, as a grain among other gold dust at the feet of the Eternal, or, at most, but as a luminous spot; and yet we know that its influence controls, and is necessary for, the order and arrangement of the nearest, as well is the remotest system. So in the moral and intellectual universe, from world to world, from star to star, the influence of one great mind extends, and we are drawn toward it by an unseen, but all-pervading affinity. Thus has the cause of moral and intellectual progress a sure guarantee of success. It has become a necessity, interwoven with the spirit of the age—a necessity impressed by every revelation of social evil, as well as proclaimed by every scientific discovery—gaining increased energy and power from the manifestation of every new wonder and mystery of nature—nay, from the building of every steam-ship, the laying down of every new line of railway.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] Channing.



[From Dickens's "Household Words."]

EBENEZER ELLIOTT

The name of Ebenezer Elliott is associated with one of the greatest and most important political changes of modern times, with events not yet sufficiently removed from us, to allow of their being canvassed in this place with that freedom which would serve the more fully to illustrate his real merits. Elliott would have been a poet, in all that constitutes true poetry, had the corn laws never existed.

He was born on 25th March, 1781, at the New Foundry, Masborough, in the parish of Rotherham, where his father was a clerk in the employment of Messrs. Walker, with a salary of L60 or L70 per annum. His father was a man of strong political tendencies, possessed of humorous and satiric power, that might have qualified him for a comic actor. Such was the character he bore for political sagacity that he was popularly known as "Devil Elliott." The mother of the poet seems to have been a woman of an extreme nervous temperament, constantly suffering from ill health, and constitutionally awkward and diffident.

Ebenezer commenced his early training at a dame's school; but shy, awkward, and desultory, he made little progress; nor did he thrive much better at the school in which he was afterward placed. Here he employed his comrades to do his tasks for him, and of course laid no foundation for his future education. His parents, disheartened by the lad's apparent stolidity, sent him next to Dalton's school, two miles distant; and here he certainly acquired something, for he retained, to old age, the memory of some of the scenes through which he used to pass on his way to and from this school. For want of the necessary preliminary training, he could do little or nothing with letters: he rather preferred playing truant and roaming the meadows in listless idleness, wherever his fancy led him. This could not last. His father soon set him to work in the foundry; and with this advantage, that the lad stood on better terms with himself than he had been for a considerable period, for he discovered that he could compete with others in work—sheer hand-labor—if he could not in the school. One disadvantage, however, arose, as he tells us, from his foundry life; for he acquired a relish for vulgar pursuits, and the village alehouse divided his attentions with the woods and fields. Still a deep impression of the charms of nature had been made upon him by his boyish rambles, which the debasing influences and associations into which he was thrown could not wholly wipe out. He would still wander away in his accustomed haunts, and purify his soul from her alehouse defilements, by copious draughts of the fresh nectar of natural beauty imbibed from the sylvan scenery around him.

The childhood and youth of the future poet presented a strange medley of opposites and antitheses. Without the ordinary measure of adaptation for scholastic pursuits, he inhaled the vivid influences of external things, delighting intensely in natural objects, and yet feeling an infinite chagrin and remorse at his own idleness and ignorance. We find him highly imaginative; making miniature lakes by sinking an iron vessel filled with water in a heap of stones, and gazing therein with wondrous enjoyment at the reflection of the sun and skies overhead; and exhibiting a strange passion for looking on the faces of those who had died violent deaths, although these dead men's features would haunt his imagination for weeks afterward.

He did not, indeed, at this period, possess the elements of an ordinary education. A very simple circumstance sufficed to apply the spark which fired his latent energies, and nascent poetical tendencies: and he henceforward became a different being, elevated far above his former self. He called one evening, after a drinking bout on the previous night, on a maiden aunt, named Robinson, a widow possessed of about L30 a year, by whom he was shown a number of "Sowerby's English Botany," which her son was then purchasing in monthly parts. The plates made a considerable impression on the awkward youth, and he assayed to copy them by holding them to the light with a thin piece of paper before them. When he found he could trace their forms by these means his delight was unbounded, and every spare hour was devoted to the agreeable task. Here commenced that intimate acquaintance with flowers, which seems to pervade all his works. This aunt of Ebenezer's, (good soul! would that every shy, gawky Ebenezer had such an aunt!) bent on completing the charm she had so happily begun, displayed to him still further her son's book of dried specimens; and this elated him beyond measure. He forthwith commenced a similar collection for himself, for which purpose he would roam the fields still more than ever, on Sundays as well as week days, to the interruption of his attendances at chapel. This book he called his "Dry Flora," (Hortus Siccus) and none so proud as he when neighbors noticed his plants and pictures. He was not a little pleased to feel himself a sort of wonder, as he passed through the village with his plants; and, greedy of praise, he allowed his acquaintance to believe that his drawings were at first hand, and made by himself from nature. "Thomson's Seasons," read to him about this time by his brother Giles, gave him a glimpse of the union of poetry with natural beauty; and lit up in his mind an ambition which finally transformed the illiterate, rugged, half-tutored youth into the man who wrote "The Village Patriarch," and the "Corn Law Rhymes."

From this time he set himself resolutely to the work of self-education. His knowledge of the English language was meagre in the extreme; and he succeeded at last only by making for himself a kind of grammar by reading and observation. He then tried French, but his native indolence prevailed, and he gave it up in despair. He read with avidity whatever books came in his way; and a small legacy of books to his father came in just at the right time. He says he could never read through a second-rate book, and he therefore read masterpieces only; "after Milton, then Shakspeare; then Ossian; then Junius; Paine's 'Common Sense;' Swift's 'Tale of a Tub;' 'Joan of Arc;' Schiller's 'Robbers;' Burger's 'Lenora;' Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall;' and long afterward, Tasso, Dante, De Stael, Schlegel, Hazlitt, and the 'Westminster Review.'" Reading of this character might have been expected to lead to something; and was well calculated to make an extraordinary impression on such a mind as Elliott's; and we have the fruit of this course of study in the poetry which from this time he began to throw off.

He remained with his father from his sixteenth to his twenty-third year, working laboriously without wages, except an occasional shilling or two for pocket-money. He afterward tried business on his own account. He made two efforts at Sheffield; the last commencing at the age of forty, and with a borrowed capital of L150. He describes in his nervous language the trials and difficulties he had to contend with; and all these his imagination embodied for him in one grim and terrible form, which he christened "Bread Tax." With this demon he grappled in desperate energy, and assailed it vigorously with his caustic rhyme This training, these mortifications, these misfortunes, and the demon "Bread Tax" above all, made Elliott successively despised, hated, feared, and admired, as public opinion changed toward him.

Mr. Howitt describes his warehouse as a dingy, and not very extensive place, heaped with iron of all sorts, sizes, and forms, with barely a passage through the chaos of rusty bars into the inner sanctum, at once, study, counting-house, library, and general receptacle of odds and ends connected with his calling. Here and there, to complete the jumble, were plaster casts of Shakspeare, Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon, suggestive of the presidency of literature over the materialism of commerce which marked the career of this singular being. By dint of great industry he began to flourish in business, and, at one time, could make a profit of L20 a-day without moving from his seat. During this prosperous period he built a handsome villa-residence in the suburbs. He now had leisure to brood over the full force and effect of the Corn Laws. The subject was earnestly discussed then in all manufacturing circles of that district. Reverses now arrived. In 1837, he lost fully one-third of all his savings, getting out of the storm at last with about L6,000, which he wrote to Mr. Tait of Edinburgh, he intended, if possible, to retain. The palmy days of L20 profits had gone by for Sheffield, and instead, all was commercial disaster and distrust. Elliott did well to retire with what little he had remaining. In his retreat he was still vividly haunted by the demon "Bread Tax." This, then, was the period of the Corn-Law Rhymes, and these bitter experiences lent to them that tone of sincerity and earnestness—that fire and frenzy which they breathed, and which sent them, hot, burning words of denunciation and wrath, into the bosoms of the working classes—the toiling millions from whom Elliott sprang. "Bread Tax," indeed, to him was a thing of terrible import and bitter experience: hence he uses no gentle terms or honeyed phrases when dealing with the obnoxious impost. Sometimes coarse invective and angry assertion take the place of convincing reason and calm philosophy. At others, there is a true vein of poetry and pathos running through the rather unpoetic theme, which touches us with its Wordsworthian feeling and gentleness. Then he would be found calling down thunders upon the devoted heads of the monopolists, with all a fanatic's hearty zeal, and in his fury he would even pursue them, not merely through the world, but beyond its dim frontiers and across the threshold of another state. Take them, however, as they stand—and more vigorous, effective, and startling political poetry has not graced the literature of the age.

It was not to be supposed but that this trumpet-blast of defiance, and shrill scream of "war to the knife," should bring down upon him much obloquy, much vituperation: but all this fell harmlessly upon him; he rather liked it. When people began to bear with the turbid humor and angry utterances of the "Corn Law Rhymer," and grew familiar with the stormy march of his verse, it was discovered that he was something more than a mere political party song-writer. He was a true poet, whose credentials, signed and sealed in the court of nature, attested the genuineness of his brotherhood with those children of song who make the world holier and happier by the mellifluous strains they bring to us, like fragments of a forgotten melody, from the far-off world of beauty and of love.

Elliott will not soon cease to be distinctively known as the "Corn Law Rhymer;" but it will be by his non-political poems that he will be chiefly remembered by posterity as the Poet of the People; for his name will still be, as it has long been, a "Household Word," in the homes of all such as love the pure influences of simple, sensuous, and natural poetry. As an author he did not make his way fast: he had written poetry for twenty years ere he had attracted much notice. A genial critique by Southey in the "Quarterly," another by Carlyle in the "Edinburgh," and favorable notices in the "Athenaeum" and "New Monthly," brought him into notice; and he gradually made his way until a new and cheap edition of his works, in 1840, stamped him as a popular poet. His poetry is just such as, knowing his history, we might have expected; and such as, not knowing it, might have bodied forth to us the identical man as we find him.

As we have said, Nature was his school; but flowers were the especial vocation of his muse. A small ironmonger—a keen and successful tradesman—we should scarcely have given him credit for such an exquisite love of the beautiful in Nature, as we find in some of those lines written by him in the crowded counting-room of that dingy warehouse. The incident of the floral miscellany; the subsequent study of "The Seasons;" the long rambles in meadows and on hill-sides, specimen-hunting for his Hortus Siccus, sufficiently account for the exquisite sketches of scenery, and those vivid descriptions of natural phenomena, which showed that the coinage of his brain had been stamped in Nature's mint. The most casual reader would at once discover that, with Thomson, he has ever been the devoted lover and worshiper of Nature—at wanderer by babbling streams—a dreamer in the leafy wilderness—a worshiper of morning upon the golden hill-tops. He gives us pictures of rural scenery warm as the pencil of a Claude, and glowing as the sunsets of Italy.

A few sentences will complete our sketch, and bring us to the close of the poet's pilgrimage. He had come out of the general collapse of commercial affairs in 1837, with a small portion of the wealth he had realized by diligent and continuous labor. He took a walk, on one occasion, into the country, of about eighteen miles: reached Argilt Hill, liked the place, returned, and resolved to buy it. He laid out in house and land about one thousand guineas. His family consisted of Mrs. Elliott and two daughters; a servant-maid; an occasional helper; a Welch pony and small gig; "a dog almost as big as the mare, and much wiser than his master; a pony-cart; a wheel-barrow; and a grindstone—and," says he, "turn up your nose if you like!"

From his own papers we learn that he had one son a clergyman, at Lothedale, near Skipton; another in the steel trade, on Elliott's old premises at Sheffield; two others unmarried, living on their means; another "druggisting at Sheffield, in a sort of chimney called a shop;" and another, a clergyman, living in the West Indies. Of his thirteen children, five were dead, and of whom he says. "They left behind them no memorial—but they are safe in the bosom of Mercy, and not quite forgotten even here!"

In this retirement he occasionally lectured and spoke at public meetings; but he began to suffer from a spasmodic affection of the nerves, which obliged him wholly to forego public speaking. This disease grew worse; and in December, 1839, he was warned that he could not continue to speak in public, except at the risk of sudden death. This disorder lingered about him for about six years; he then fell ill of a more serious disease, which threatened speedy termination. This was in May, 1849. In September, he writes, "I have been very, very ill." On the first of December, 1849, the event, which had so long been impending, occurred, and Elliott peacefully departed in the sixty-ninth year of his age.

Thus, then, the sun set on one whose life was one continued heroic struggle with opposing influences—with ignorance first, then trade, then the corn laws, then literary fame, and, last of all, disease: and thus the world saw its last of the material breathing form of the rugged but kindly being who made himself loved, feared, hated, and famous, as the "CORN LAW RHYMER."



[From Cumming's Hunting Adventures in South Africa.]

CONFLICT WITH AN ELEPHANT.

In a few minutes one of those who had gone off to our left came running breathless to say that he had seen the mighty game. I, halted for a minute, and instructed Isaac, who carried the big Dutch rifle, to act independently of me, while Kleinboy was to assist me in the chase; but, as usual, when the row began, my followers thought only of number one. I bared my arms to the shoulder, and, having imbibed a draught of aqua pura from the calabash of one of the spoorers, I grasped my trusty two-grooved rifle, and told my guide to go ahead. We proceeded silently as might be for a few hundred yards, following the guide, when he suddenly pointed, exclaiming, "Klow!" and before us stood a herd of mighty bull elephants, packed together beneath a shady grove about a hundred and fifty yards in advance. I rode slowly toward them, and, as soon as they observed me, they made a loud rumbling noise, and, tossing their trunks, wheeled right about and made off in one direction, crashing through the forest and leaving a cloud of dust behind them. I was accompanied by a detachment of my dogs, who assisted me in the pursuit.

The distance I had come, and the difficulties I had undergone to behold these elephants, rose fresh before me. I determined that on this occasion at least I would do my duty, and, dashing my spurs into "Sunday's" ribs, I was very soon much too close in their rear for safety. The elephants now made an inclination to my left, whereby I obtained a good view of the ivory. The herd consisted of six bulls; four of them were full grown, first-rate elephants; the other two were fine fellows, but had not yet arrived at perfect stature. Of the four old fellows, two had much finer tusks than the rest, and for a few seconds I was undecided which of these two I would follow; when, suddenly, the one which I fancied had the stoutest tusks broke from his comrades, and I at once felt convinced that he was the patriarch of the herd, and followed him accordingly. Cantering alongside, I was about to fire, when he instantly turned, and, uttering a trumpet so strong and shrill that the earth seemed to vibrate beneath my feet, he charged furiously after me for several hundred yards in a direct line, not altering his course in the slightest degree for the trees of the forest, which he snapped and overthrew like reeds in his headlong career.

When he pulled up in his charge, I likewise halted; and as he slowly turned to retreat, I let fly at his shoulder, "Sunday" capering and prancing, and giving me much trouble. On receiving the ball the elephant shrugged his shoulder, and made off at a free, majestic walk. This shot brought several of the dogs to my assistance which had been following the other elephants, and on their coming up and barking another headlong charge was the result, accompanied by the never-failing trumpet as before In his charge he passed close to me, when I saluted him with a second bullet in the shoulder of which he did not take the slightest notice. I now determined not to fire again until I could make a steady shot; but, although the elephant turned repeatedly, "Sunday" invariably disappointed me, capering so that it was impossible to fire. At length, exasperated, I became reckless of the danger, and, springing from the saddle, approached the elephant under cover of a tree and gave him a bullet in the side of the head, when, trumpeting so shrilly that the forest trembled, he charged among the dogs, from whom he seemed to fancy that the blow had come; after which he took up a position in a grove of thorns, with his head toward me. I walked up very near, and, as he was in the act of charging (being in those days under wrong impressions as to the impracticability of bringing down an elephant with a shot in the forehead), stood coolly in his path until he was within fifteen paces of me, and let drive at the hollow of his forehead, in the vain expectation that by so doing I should end his career. The shot only served to increase his fury—an effect which, I had remarked, shots in the head invariably produced; and, continuing his charge with incredible quickness and impetuosity, he all but terminated my elephant-hunting forever. A large party of the Bechuanas who had come up, yelled out simultaneously, imagining I was killed, for the elephant was at one moment almost on the top of me: I, however, escaped by my activity, and by dodging round the bushy trees. As the elephant was charging, an enormous thorn ran deep into the sole of my foot the old Badenoch brogues, which I that day sported, being worn through, and this caused me severe pain, laming me throughout the rest of the conflict.

The elephant held on through the forest at a sweeping pace; but he was hardly out of sight when I was loaded and in the saddle, and soon once more alongside. About this time I heard Isaac blazing away at another bull; but when the elephant charged, his cowardly heart failed him, and he very soon made his appearance at a safe distance in my rear. My elephant kept crashing along at a steady pace, with blood streaming from his wounds; the dogs, which were knocked up with fatigue and thirst, no longer barked around him, but had dropped astern. It was long before I again fired, for I was afraid to dismount, and "Sunday" was extremely troublesome. At length I fired sharp right and left from the saddle: he got both balls behind the shoulder, and made a long charge after me, rumbling and trumpeting as before. The whole body of the Bamangwato men had now come up, and were following a short distance behind me. Among these was Mollyeon, who volunteered to help; and being a very swift and active fellow, he rendered me important service by holding my fidgety horse's head while I fired and loaded. I then fired six broadsides from the saddle, the elephant charging almost every time, and pursuing us back to the main body in our rear, who fled in all directions as he approached.

The sun had now sunk behind the tops of the trees; it would very soon be dark, and the elephant did not seem much distressed, notwithstanding all he had received. I recollected that my time was short, and therefore at once resolved to fire no more from the saddle, but to go close up to him and fire on foot. Riding up to him. I dismounted, and, approaching very near, I gave it him right and left in the side of the head, upon which he made a long and determined charge after me; but I was now very reckless of his charges, for I saw that he could not overtake me, and in a twinkling I was loaded, and, again approaching, fired sharp right and left behind his shoulder. Again he charged with a terrific trumpet, which sent "Sunday" flying through the forest. This was his last charge. The wounds which he had received began to tell on his constitution, and he now stood at bay beside a thorny tree, with the dogs barking around him. These, refreshed by the evening breeze, and perceiving that it was nearly over with the elephant, had once more come to my assistance. Having loaded, I drew near and fired right and left at his forehead. On receiving these shots, instead of charging, he tossed his trunk up and down, and by various sounds and motions, most gratifying to the hungry natives, evinced that his demise was near. Again I loaded, and fired my last shot behind his shoulder: on receiving it, he turned round the bushy tree beside which he stood, and I ran round to give him the other barrel, but the mighty old monarch of the forest needed no more; before I could clear the bushy tree he fell heavily on his side, and his spirit had fled. My feelings at this moment can only be understood by a few brother Nimrods who have had the good fortune to enjoy a similar encounter. I never felt so gratified on any former occasion as I did then.

By this time all the natives had come up; they were in the highest spirits, and flocked around the elephant, laughing and talking at a rapid pace. I climbed on to him, and sat enthroned upon his side, which was as high as my eyes when standing on the ground. In a few minutes night set in, when the natives, having illuminated the jungle with a score of fires, and formed a semicircle of bushes to windward, lay down to rest without partaking of a morsel of food. Mutchuisho would not allow a man to put an assagai into the elephant until the morrow, and placed two relays of sentries to keep watch on either side of him. My dinner consisted of a piece of flesh from the temple of the elephant, which I broiled on the hot embers. In the conflict I had lost my shirt, which was reduced to streamers by the wait-a-bit thorns, and all the clothing that remained was a pair of buckskin knee-breeches.



[From The Ladies' Companion.]

LETTICE ARNOLD.

By the Author of "TWO OLD MEN'S TALES," "EMILIA WYNDHAM," &C.

[Concluded from page 178.]

CHAPTER VII.

Bless the Lord, oh my soul! and all that is within me bless his holy name; Who forgiveth all thy iniquities and healeth all thy diseases, Who saveth thy life from destruction, and crowneth thee with loving kindness and tender mercies.

MRS. FISHER.

I must now introduce you to Mrs. Fisher. She is so great a favorite of mine, that before I relate what became of Myra, I must make you acquainted with this lady.

Mrs. Fisher was a respectable gentlewoman like personage of about fifty-four, of a grave, authoritative and somewhat severe aspect; but with the remains of very extraordinary personal beauty which she had once possessed in an eminent degree. She was somewhat above the middle size, of an erect, firm, full figure, her hair now gently turning gray, drawn over her finely proportioned forehead; her eyes large, and of a fine color and form—clear and steady; her mouth expressive of sense and temper; and her dress in character with the rest. Mrs. Fisher was always handsomely dressed in silks of the best description, but in slight mourning, which she always wore; and on her head, also, a cap rather plainer than the mode, but of the finest and most expensive materials: nothing could be more dignified and complete than her appearance.

When first Myra was introduced to her she was both daunted and disappointed; the gravity, amounting almost to sternness, with which Mrs. Fisher received her, and explained to her the duties she was expected to perform, awed in the first place, and mortified in the second. The establishment of this fashionable modiste, with which Myra had associated nothing but laces and ribbons, dresses and trimmings, embroidery and feathers, flattery and display, struck cold and dull upon her imagination. She was introduced into a handsomely but very plainly furnished sitting-room, where not one trace of any of those pretty things were to be seen, and heard of nothing but regularity of hours, persevering industry, quaker neatness, attention to health, and the strictest observance of the rules of what she thought quite a prudish propriety.

Mrs. Fisher's life had been one of vicissitude, and in its vicissitudes, she, a strong, earnest-minded woman, had learned much. She had known sorrow, privation, cruelly hard labor, and the loneliness of utter desolation of the heart She had, moreover, been extremely beautiful, and she had experienced those innumerable perils to which such a gift exposes an unprotected girl, struggling for her bread, under the cruelest circumstances of oppressive labor. Every description of hardship, and every description of temptation belonging to perhaps the hardest and almost the most dangerous position of female life, Mrs. Fisher had gone through.

She had outlived its sufferings and escaped its snares.

The suffering, thanks to one of the finest constitutions in the world; the snares, thanks to what she always, with inexhaustible gratitude, acknowledged as the special mercy and providence of God.

An orphan at the dangerous age of seventeen, the lovely blooming young creature was placed by her friends in one of the most fashionable and largest milliners' establishments at that time in London, and had found herself at once miserable and excited, oppressed and flattered.

The mistress of this flourishing house, intent upon making a rapid fortune before the years in which she could enjoy it should come to a close, cared little—I might say nothing—for the welfare of the poor creatures whose labors were to construct that edifice. She, in fact, never thought about them. Want of thought may be pleaded as the excuse, wretched one as it is, for the cruelties of those days. People certainly had not the claim of common humanity sounded into their ears as it is into all ears now. A few admirable philanthropists talked of it, and preached it; but it was not to be heard calling in the streets, as it is the triumph of our day to acknowledge, till the hardest heart for very shame is forced to pay some attention to the call.

It never entered into Miss Lavington's head that she had any other business with her young women, but to get all the work she possibly could out of their hands, and as well done, and as speedily done as possible. If she objected to night-work in addition to day-work, it was not in the slightest degree out of compassion for the aching limbs and wearied eyes of the poor girls; but because wax candles were expensive, and tallow ones were apt to drip; and there was always double the duty required from the superintendent (her special favorite), to keep the young women at those times to their duty, and prevent fine materials from being injured.

Oh! those dreadful days and nights of the season, which the poor Lucy Miles at that place went through.

She—accustomed to the sweet fresh air of the country, to the cheerful variety of daily labor in her father's large farm, and under the care of a brisk, clever, but most kind and sensible mother—to be shut up twelve, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, nay twenty hours before a birth-night, in the sickening atmosphere of the close work-room. The windows were rarely opened, if ever; for the poor young things were so unnaturally chilly for want of exercise and due circulation of the blood, that they said they should, and perhaps they might, have taken cold if fresh air were admitted. There was nothing they all dreaded so much as taking cold; those fatal coughs, which every season thinned the ranks, to be filled with fresh victims, were invariably attributed to some particular occasion when they had "taken cold." They did not know that they were rejecting the very cordial of life and inhaling poison when they kept the room so close.

Oh! for the dreadful weariness which proceeds from in-action of the limbs! so different from the wholesome fatigue of action, In-action where the blood is stagnating in every vein: in-action, after which rest is not rest, but a painful effort of the repressed currents to recover their circulating power—so different from the delightful sensation of wholesome rest after physical exertion.

At first she felt it almost insupportable. I have heard her say that it seemed at times as if she would have given years of her existence to be allowed to get up and walk up and down the room for a few minutes. The sensation was so insupportable. That craving desire of the body for what it is in want of—be it water, be it bread, be it rest, be it change of posture—is so dreadful in its urgency. The most abominable tortures men have in their wickedness invented are founded upon this fact—tortures that render the black history of inquisitors yet blacker: and here it was, in one at least of its numerous forms, daily inflicted upon a set of helpless young women, by a person who thought herself perfectly justifiable, and whose conscience never pricked her in the least.

Such is negligent moral habit.

Oh! the delight at meal-times—to spring up, I was going to say—I meant to get up—for there was no spring left in these poor stiffened frames. Oh! the delight when the eye of that superintendent was no longer watching the busy circle, and her voice calling to order any one who durst just to raise a head, and pause in the unintermitting toil. Oh! the delight to get up and come to breakfast, or dinner, or tea.