In the meanwhile his friend Garrison had kept an eye on him, and at the close of 1825 secured for him the editorship of The American Manufacturer, a weekly magazine published in Boston. Young Whittier entered with great interest into the work, contributing articles on politics and temperance as well as numerous poems. Though he received only nine dollars a week, he was able, when called back to Haverhill in 1829, by his father's illness, to give about one half of what he had earned to help remove the mortgage on the farm.

He remained at home until his father's death in 1830, editing for a time the Haverhill Gazette and sending to the New England Review, of Hartford, Connecticut, various poems and articles. So much favor did these find with the editor, George D. Prentice, that he invited the young writer to fill his position during a temporary absence. The offer was highly complimentary, for the Review was the principal political journal in Connecticut supporting Henry Clay. However, Whittier was well prepared for the work, for he had become acquainted with the leaders and with the chief interests of the Whig party while editing the Manufacturer, and was himself an enthusiastic follower of Clay. His common sense and shrewd but kindly reading of human nature, united with a high sense of honor and justice, enabled him to fill this responsible position with marked success until his failing health forced him to give it up in January, 1832.

There was much reason for Whittier to look for success in political life, for his editorial work had made him widely known as a man of sane and practical views, and he was so highly regarded in the district where he lived that had he reached the required age of twenty-five, he would in all probability have been made a candidate for Congress in 1832. Thus it was that although he had published more than a hundred favorably received poems between 1828 and 1832, he wrote in the latter year: "My prospects are too good to be sacrificed for any uncertainty. I have done with poetry and literature."

A far nobler mission, however, and greater usefulness than he could have planned for himself lay before Whittier. It was not political success that was to draw forth the greatness of his nature. The strong and fearless interest with which his friend Garrison had begun to champion the abolition of slavery in the United States appealed to him, he felt with all his heart that the cause was right, and, closing his eyes to the bright promise of political success, he chose to unite himself with the scorned and mistreated upholders of freedom. After thorough consideration and study, he wrote and published in 1833 the pamphlet Justice and Expediency, in which he set forth fully the arguments against slavery. This was the first of his strong and stirring protests against oppression. From that time until the close of the Civil War his fervent, fearless love of liberty voiced itself through ringing verses, in constant appeals to the conscience of the nation. The greatness of this influence, as it worked silently in men's hearts, who can estimate?



Whittier's part in the anti-slavery struggle was not always a quiet one. On one occasion, when in company with a famous but unpopular English reformer he was to address an audience on the subject of abolition, he was attacked by a mob while passing quietly along the street with a friend, and narrowly escaped being tarred and feathered. Somewhat later he was set upon in another town by a crowd armed with sticks and stones and other missiles, from which he fled with more haste than dignity. It was while he was editor of the Freeman that Pennsylvania Hall, where the Philadelphia Abolitionists held their meetings, was burned by a mob, and the papers from Whittier's editorial room in this building were used to help start the blaze.

In 1836 the farm at Haverhill had been sold, and a cottage was bought in Amesbury near the Quaker meetinghouse. It was in this quiet place, under the loving care of his mother and sister, that Whittier made his home after resigning his position with the Freeman. These two women were in their way as unselfishly devoted to the cause of freedom as was the poet himself, for they encouraged his loyalty and bore privation uncomplainingly. In the darkest hour of their need, when it seemed as if their home must be mortgaged, Whittier was invited to become a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, then being founded, and thus the long period of want was brought to an end.

After the death of his mother, in the following year (1858), Whittier's association with his sister Elizabeth became even closer than before, though they had always shared each other's hopes and interests with unusual sympathy and understanding. When she died, in 1864, it seemed to him that part of his life had gone with her. It was with this grief still fresh in his mind that he wrote the best known of his poems, Snow-Bound, A Winter Idyl, in which he pictures in the most simple and lifelike manner the quiet loveliness of his childhood home. With especial tenderness he tells of the much-loved sister, and lets his mingled grief and hope of reunion be seen:

"As one who held herself a part Of all she saw, and let her heart Against the household bosom lean, Upon the motley-braided mat Our youngest and our dearest sat, Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes, Now bathed within the fadeless green And holy peace of Paradise. Oh, looking from some heavenly hill, Or from the shade of saintly palms, Or silver reach of river calms, Do those large eyes behold me still? With me one little year ago:— The chill weight of the winter snow For months upon her grave has lain; And now, when summer south-winds blow, And brier and harebell bloom again, I tread the pleasant paths we trod, I see the violet-sprinkled sod, Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak, The hillside flowers she loved to seek, Yet following me where'er I went With dark eyes full of love's content. The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills The air with sweetness; all the hills Stretch green to June's unclouded sky; But still I wait with ear and eye For something gone which should be nigh, A loss in all familiar things, In flower that blooms, and bird that sings. And yet, dear heart! remembering thee, Am I not richer than of old? Safe in thy immortality, What change can reach the wealth I hold? What chance can mar the pearl and gold Thy love hath left in trust with me? And while in life's late afternoon Where cool and long the shadows grow, I walk to meet the night that soon Shall shape and shadow overflow, I cannot feel that thou art far, Since near at need the angels are; And when the sunset gates unbar, Shall I not see thee waiting stand, And, white against the evening star, The welcome of thy beckoning hand?"

After the death of Elizabeth Whittier, the Amesbury home was cared for by the poet's niece. During the remaining years of his life Whittier passed his time here or in the country. He lived in comparative comfort, for the publication of Snow-Bound in 1866 had brought very good returns. These were years of great peace, in which he remained actively interested in the affairs of the nation, yet liked most to dwell upon the beauty of nature and especially upon the thought of God's goodness that must triumph over all the evil in the world. Among the Hills and the collections Tent on the Beach and At Sundown were produced in the last period; but his religious poems seem best to represent his thought and feeling in the closing years. From these were taken the beautiful verses At Last, read as the poet passed away from earth, September 7, 1892.

Though Whittier remained throughout his life a Quaker not only in dress and speech but in belief and character, yet with his quietness and quaint simplicity was blended no severity nor gloom. He had a great love of fun, which alone can account for his mischievous habit of teasing, and for his keeping such pets as the little bantam rooster that aroused the household each morning with its crowing, and the parrot "Charlie" that swore when excited, stopped the horses in the street with its cries of "whoa," and nipped the ankles of unwary visitors. Then, too, he was always attractive to children, and often preferred their society to that of older people. But above all else, with each succeeding year he became more just and compassionate towards others. The kindliness of his nature was untouched by the sorrow and sickness that he bore. "Love—love to all the world," he would often repeat in his last years, and the sweet influence of the benediction is felt by all who read his life and works:

"Best loved and saintliest of our singing train, Earth's noblest tributes to thy name belong. A lifelong record closed without a stain, A blameless memory shrined in deathless song."[390-2]

FOOTNOTES:

[381-1] The poetical quotations given in this article are from Snow-Bound.

[390-2] From an ode written by Oliver Wendell Holmes upon the death of Whittier.



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

Plain indeed was the little home among the hills of Western Massachusetts, near the town of Cummington, where was born on November 3, 1794, the first great American poet, William Cullen Bryant. His father was a physician of scholarly tastes, and his mother, though not highly educated, was a woman of much practical wisdom. Both parents were kind and affectionate, but followed the custom of that time in treating their children with a strictness unknown to American boys and girls of to-day. Even small acts of disrespect or disobedience were promptly punished, and to aid in the work of correction the Bryant home as well as that of almost every neighbor was provided with a good-sized bundle of birch sticks hanging warningly on the kitchen wall. As the poet himself tells us in a sketch of his early life, the children looked upon the older people of the family with so much awe that they could not go to them freely nor act naturally in their presence.

This severity in his home must have made young Bryant, who was by nature grave and thoughtful, even more serious. Then, too, his mental powers developed with surprising quickness, so that by the time he had reached his teens, he was thinking and expressing himself upon subjects usually discussed by men rather than boys. Having begun to write verses when only nine years old, he had had enough practice in this kind of exercise to compose when thirteen years of age a satirical poem addressed to President Jefferson, because of his part in passing the Embargo Act by which New England commerce had been greatly injured. These verses were published and met with a ready sale. But far more remarkable as an early expression of genius was Thanatopsis, written several months before Bryant's eighteenth birthday. This poem deals with the subject of death with such deep thoughtfulness and in such a stately and powerful style that although it did not appear until six years later, it was even then believed to have been written by the poet's father, who had sent it to the publisher.

Though he was thoughtful beyond his years and had shown unusual poetic power, young Bryant was in other ways quite an ordinary boy. He was quiet and studious in the school room, but was active enough in the games played outside. Of the sports enjoyed by himself and the other boys of the district school, he writes: "We amused ourselves with building dams across the rivulet, and launching rafts made of old boards on the collected water; and in winter, with sliding on the ice and building snow barricades, which we called forts, and, dividing the boys into two armies, and using snowballs for ammunition, we contended for the possession of these strongholds. I was one of their swiftest runners in the race, and not inexpert at playing ball, but, being of a slight frame, I did not distinguish myself in these sieges." Sometimes, on long evenings, Cullen and his elder brother Austin would play that they were the heroes of whom they had read in the Iliad, and, fitted out with swords and spears and homemade armor, they would enact in the barn the great battles of the Trojan War.



Not only the Iliad, but other carefully chosen works of literature were discovered by the boy in his father's library, and he read widely and well. It proved that this reading had to take the place of a much hoped-for course at college. After attending Williams College for only two terms, he left there, expecting to enter Yale, but was forced to give up his plan, owing to his father's inability to supply him with the necessary means. He did not let this great disappointment overcome him, however, but a few months later began the study of law, with the result that in 1815 he was admitted to the bar.

It is a fact well worth noting that at the very beginning of his career as a lawyer, on the day when he was walking from his home to the little village where he was to start his practice, having learned, in his doubt and loneliness, a great lesson in faith, he wrote the beautiful poem that shows his genius at its best, and probably more than any other made him famous, the ode To a Waterfowl.

When a little boy, he had prayed, in his simple way, that he might be a great poet, and though he had outgrown the prayer, his desire was unchanged. More than this, he had now produced two works that undoubtedly showed genius. It is not surprising, then, that in a few years a literary career was opened to him and he was able to give up the law, for which he had no especial liking.

In 1825, after his marriage to a Miss Fairchild of Great Barrington, he removed from that town to New York. There he became editor of the New York Review and Athenaeum Magazine; and a year later he accepted the position of assistant editor of the Evening Post, a newspaper with which he remained for the rest of his life, assuming in 1829 the office of editor-in-chief. Though his contributions to this paper were not a poet's work, they enabled him to unite his literary power with his deep interest in the political concerns of the country, and for many years to help direct public opinion during the most critical periods in the history of the new nation. More than this, while steadily provided with a good income he could spend his leisure hours among the quiet country scenes where he found inspiration for his greatest works, his simple nature poems.

The busy years of his life as a journalist were several times interrupted by travel. Besides visiting Mexico, Cuba and various parts of the United States, he made six voyages to Europe, and on the fourth extended the journey to Egypt and the Holy Land. His Letters of a Traveller and Letters from the East tell of the impressions he received in these countries.

Besides translating the Iliad and the Odyssey and writing the two fairy stories in verse, Sella and The Little People of the Snow, Bryant undertook no poetic work of any length. The poems for which his name is most honored are the little lyrics in which the calm and beauty of nature tell us of truths that never change. Among these, some that are best liked by readers both young and old are The Yellow Violet, The Fringed Gentian, A Forest Hymn, The Planting of the Apple Tree, Robert of Lincoln, The Gladness of Nature, March and To a Waterfowl.

These poems, when studied, are sure to reveal the simplicity and sincerity not only of Bryant's love for nature, but of his character as a man. They show the freedom from affectation that marks alike his writings and his everyday life. He followed almost sternly his high ideals both of moral right and literary correctness, and this has made him seem somewhat cold and formal. But probably all who can read most clearly the meaning of his life and works feel that so true-hearted a man could not have been lacking in warm and generous kindliness.



TO A WATERFOWL

By WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

NOTE.—"He says in a letter that he felt, as he walked up the hills, very forlorn and desolate indeed, not knowing what was to become of him in the big world, which grew bigger as he ascended, and yet darker with the coming on of night. The sun had already set, leaving behind it one of those brilliant seas of chrysolite and opal which often flood the New England skies; and, while he was looking upon the rosy splendor with rapt admiration, a solitary bird made wing along the illuminated horizon. He watched the lone wanderer until it was lost in the distance, asking himself whence it had come and to what far home it was flying. When he went to the house where he was to stop for the night, his mind was still full of what he had seen and felt, and he wrote these lines, as imperishable as our language, To a Waterfowl."—Parke Godwin, in Biography of Bryant.



Whither, 'midst falling dew, While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler's eye Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong, As, darkly painted on the crimson sky, Thy figure floats along.

Seek'st thou the plashy brink Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide, Or where the rocking billows rise and sink On the chafed ocean side?

There is a Power whose care Teaches thy way along that pathless coast— The desert and illimitable air— Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day thy wings have fanned, At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere, Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land, Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end; Soon shalt thou find a summer home and rest, And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend, Soon, o'er thy sheltered nest.

Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven Hath swallowed up thy form; yet on my heart Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given, And shall not soon depart.

He who, from zone to zone, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must tread alone, Will lead my steps aright.



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

By GRACE E. SELLON

Besides giving to the United States her great president, Abraham Lincoln, the year 1809 also bestowed upon us one of the most gifted and warmly esteemed of American authors, Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was in a pleasant home in Cambridge, not far from the great university in which he was to serve ably for so many years, that Holmes was born. His mother was a bright and sociable little woman, well liked for her lively ways and quick sympathy, and his father, though a grave and scholarly man, was of a kindly nature. Both parents were descended from families that were looked upon as among the best in New England, and this became a matter of no little pride to their son.

The old colonial house where his boyhood and youth were spent contained a well-chosen library. Here, he has written, "he bumped about among books from the time when he was hardly taller than one of his father's or grandfather's folios." Yet he did not read many of these volumes thoroughly. He liked to "read in books rather than through them" and would hunt out a paragraph here and there that especially pleased and satisfied him. The collections of sermons were always passed by, the lives of pious children met with the same neglect, and even The Pilgrim's Progress seemed to picture the world as such a cruel, gloomy place that this great book too was shunned.



The truth was that, being a lively and cheerful boy, he rebelled against the dark and fear-awakening religion preached by his father, a Congregational minister, discussed by visiting pastors and taught in many of the books that he avoided in the library. He seemed to know by instinct which of the clergymen who called at his father's home were kindly and friendly, and which of them looked on children as "a set of little fallen wretches," and for the forlorn looks and solemn ways of the latter he had an especial dislike. "Now and then," he has written, "would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a wailing voice, which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead upstairs, who took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as being in a bad way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize us with his woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish in the other direction." In fact, he might have pleased his father by becoming a minister if a certain preacher that he knew had not, to use his own words, "looked and talked so like an undertaker."

But the dreary sermons, the visits of the long-faced clergymen and the drill in the Catechism were only shadows that came and went. Most of the time young Holmes was as light-hearted a boy as was to be found in all New England. He liked best of all to go hunting, carrying on such trips an old gun of the kind used in the Revolution. A good many of his hours at home were spent in working with tools, and thus he became skilful enough to carve out of wood a skate on which he learned to travel about on the ice. He was active and industrious at school, too, and he made such a good record there that though he whispered a great part of the time he got along peaceably with the school-master. The only serious troubles that he had came from two great fears. Many times after he had gone to bed at night he would be awakened by ghosts or evil spirits mysteriously roaming through the house. Perhaps he was ashamed to tell of this dread to his mother or father, and so the foolish belief that there might be ghosts about stayed with him through boyhood. His other fear was of the doctor's visits. In helpless terror he would look on while the old physician pronounced his doom and began to measure out the bitter medicine.

In his fifteenth year Holmes left the school at Cambridgeport to attend Phillips Academy, at Andover, and in the following year, 1825, entered Harvard College. During his four years at Harvard he took quite as active an interest in the social life of the college as in his classes. He joined the society known as the Knights of the Square Table, and at the lively meetings of the club, where wine and wit passed freely about the table, he was introduced to a kind of gayety undreamed of in his quiet home. In a humorous description of himself, given at this time in a letter to a former classmate at Andover, he writes:

"I, then, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior in Harvard University, am a plumeless biped of the height of exactly five feet three inches when standing in a pair of substantial boots made by Mr. Russell of this town, having eyes which I call blue, and hair which I do not know what to call.... Secondly, with regard to my normal qualities, I am rather lazy than otherwise, and certainly do not study as hard as I ought to. I am not dissipated and I am not sedate, and when I last ascertained my college rank, I stood in the humble situation of seventeenth scholar."

After graduating from Harvard, Holmes entered the Dane Law School at Cambridge. He did not feel at all sure, however, that he wished to be a lawyer, and at the end of a year he had so far lost interest in his studies that he gave them up. As the physician's calling seemed much more to his liking, he took two courses of study in a private school of medicine. This preparation was not, of course, sufficient to fit him for a larger practice, so a trip to Europe where he could study under the great professors of the School of Medicine at Paris became necessary. Accordingly, his parents, at some sacrifice to themselves, provided him with the required means, and he set sail from New York in the spring of 1833.

During the two years spent abroad, Holmes gave himself up wholly to his chosen study. "I am more and more attached every day to the study of my profession.... I am occupied from morning to night, and as every one is happy when he is occupied, I enjoy myself as much as I could wish," he wrote home. This period of hard work, however, was interrupted by summer vacations spent in the countries along the Rhine, in England and in Italy.

Early in 1836, the young physician established himself in Boston. Perhaps it was that people thought him too much of a wit to take their troubles seriously, or perhaps it was that he was better fitted to teach than to practice the doctor's art. At any rate, his success was very moderate. He was very glad, then, to be appointed Professor of Anatomy at Dartmouth College in 1838, a position that he held until 1840. About this time, too, he received prizes for some Medical Essays that are even to-day regarded as valuable. Thus he was gradually fitting himself for the honorable office offered him in 1847, that of Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical School of Harvard University. For thirty-five years Holmes filled this position with the greatest success. He was given the fifth hour in the day as his lecture period because he was the only one able to hold the attention of students who had already been listening to four long and difficult lectures. He enlivened the dry subject with funny stories, droll comparisons and interesting descriptions, teaching while he entertained.

In 1840 the young doctor had married Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of a highly respected Boston family. His wife was of so gentle and tactful a nature that their home was always a well-ordered and pleasant place of rest for the busy doctor, where unwelcome visitors and other annoyances were not allowed to take his time. Yet he was never too much occupied to find pleasure in what interested his wife and his three children.

During all these years when the profession of medicine had been of chief concern to him, and even before he had begun his medical studies, he had occasionally written poems that won a good deal of praise from friends, but brought no widespread notice. From his very earliest years he could feel very keenly and remember the melody of verse. "The low, soft chirp of the little bird heard in the nest, while his mother is brooding over him," he has written, "lives in his memory, I doubt not, through all the noisy carols of the singing season; so I remember the little songs my mother sang to me when I was old enough to run about, and had not outgrown the rhymes of the nursery." He enjoyed writing poems for the yearly meetings held by his college class long after their graduation, and he made several contributions to the Harvard Collegian. Just once in these early years had his fame traveled far, and that was the occasion when he wrote Old Ironsides. The frigate Constitution that had served the country so well was to be done away with as a useless vessel. Learning of this, Holmes penned in haste the stanzas that stirred the nation's feelings and saved the old boat from destruction.

It came, then, as a surprise to the American people, when upon the founding of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857, the name of Holmes was signed to the articles that probably were most popular of all published in that magazine, to which the greatest literary men in the country were contributing. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, was the title of the delightful series of humorous essays in which the author seemed really to be talking to his readers. A sort of story bound the numbers together. In the fourth issue appeared, perhaps, the best poem written by Holmes—The Chambered Nautilus. This was a favorite with him and was one of those poems of which he said: "I did not write it, but it was written through me," for he believed it to be a work of inspiration.

The Autocrat, which is Holmes' greatest work, was followed by two similar but inferior series, The Professor at the Breakfast Table and The Poet at the Breakfast Table. Between the last two series he had published in 1861 his novel Elsie Venner, followed in 1867 by The Guardian Angel, and in 1885 by A Mortal Antipathy. The first of these novels is considerably the best, but none of them ranks high, for they all deal with unusual people who because of weird inherited traits of mind are forced to go through strange if not impossible experiences.

Still another kind of writing was attempted by Holmes. In 1878 he completed a biography of his intimate friend, the historian Motley, and in 1884 wrote a life of Emerson. These are not, however, among his best productions. Over the Teacups, similar to the Breakfast Table papers, appeared in 1890, and was his last important work.

In 1886, accompanied by his daughter, he spent four months in Europe, chiefly in England. The warm welcome and high honor given him by the English people were very gratifying to the aged professor. He was always at his best when talking, and so brilliant and easy was his wit that had not politeness forbidden he could have entertained a roomful of people during a whole evening. This fact as well as his literary achievements made him popular everywhere.

On the occasion when he received a degree of honor from Cambridge University, the young collegemen greeted him by singing at the tops of their voices a song of "Holmes, sweet Holmes;" and on a similar occasion at Oxford one of the students, making good use of the title of a poem especially known to Holmes' young readers, asked from the gallery whether the Doctor had come in the "One-Hoss Shay." It is likely that the worthy old gentleman was quite as pleased with this hearty good will as with the more dignified tributes received during his memorable visit.

After 1890, Holmes wrote only occasionally. Yet he continued to take his usual walks and to answer a part of his large correspondence, leaving the rest to a secretary. Now and then he would go to a concert or to a dinner among friends, and in other ways he showed himself remarkably active. In fact, he had not become feeble in mind or body when death quietly came to him, October 7th, 1894.

Though the brightness of his wit makes Holmes one of the most entertaining of writers it is his deep kindness that gives to what he has written an even greater power and attractiveness. More than all else, he tried both in his writings and in his everyday living to drive away the shadows of all kinds of suffering, and to share with others the cheerfulness of his own genial nature.

"Long be it ere the table shall be set For the last breakfast of the Autocrat, And love repeat with smiles and tears thereat His own sweet songs that time shall not forget."[405-1]

FOOTNOTES:

[405-1] Whittier's ode on the eightieth birthday of Holmes.



THE CUBES OF TRUTH

By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Listen, Benjamin Franklin.[406-1] This is for you, and such others of tender age as you may tell it to.

When we are as yet small children, long before the time when those two grown ladies offer us the choice of Hercules,[406-2] there comes up to us a youthful angel, holding in his right hand cubes like dice, and in his left spheres like marbles. The cubes are of stainless ivory, and on each is written in letters of gold—TRUTH. The spheres are veined and streaked and spotted beneath, with a dark crimson flush above where the light falls on them and in a certain aspect you can make out upon every one of them the three letters, L, I, E.

The child to whom they are offered very probably clutches at both. The spheres are the most convenient things in the world; they roll with the least possible impulse just where the child would have them. The cubes will not roll at all; they have a great talent for standing still, and always keep right side up. But very soon the young philosopher finds that things which roll so easily are very apt to roll into the wrong corner, and to get out of his way when he most wants them, while he always knows where to find the others, which stay where they are left.

Thus he learns—thus we learn—to drop the streaked and speckled globes of falsehood, and to hold fast the white angular blocks of truth. But then comes Timidity, and after her Good-nature, and last of all Polite-behaviour, all insisting that truth must roll, or nobody can do anything with it; and so the first with her coarse rasp, and the second with her broad file, and the third with her silken sleeve, do so round off and smooth and polish the snow-white cubes of truth, that, when they have got a little dingy by use, it becomes hard to tell them from the rolling spheres of falsehood.

The schoolmistress[407-3] was polite enough to say that she was pleased with this, and that she would read it to her little flock the next day. But she should tell the children, she said, that there were better reasons for truth than could be found in mere experience of its convenience, and the inconvenience of lying.

Yes—I said—but education always begins through the senses, and works up to the idea of absolute right and wrong. The first thing the child has to learn about this matter is, that lying is unprofitable—afterwards, that it is against the peace and dignity of the universe.

1. What does the stainless ivory in the cubes indicate?

2. What is the meaning of the veins, streaks, and spots and the dark crimson flush in the spheres?

3. Are the letters L, I, E, always visible? Does this mean that lies are not always known to be lies to the person who tells them, or that they may deceive the person to whom they are told?

4. Does Dr. Holmes mean to imply that it is natural for a little child to lie when he says that the spheres are the most convenient things in the world?

5. What does Dr. Holmes mean when he says that the spheres are apt to roll into the wrong corner?

6. How does Timidity teach a child to lie? How does Good-nature lead him to lie? What are some of the "polite lies" that help to make the cubes roll?

7. Which cuts most deeply a substance upon which it is rubbed—a rasp, a file, or a silken sleeve?

8. Which causes the most lies, Timidity, Good-nature or Polite-behavior?

9. Do you think the schoolmistress is right? If so, what better reasons are there for telling the truth than mere convenience and the inconvenience of lying?

10. What do you understand by "against the peace and dignity of the universe?"

11. Do you think the schoolmistress would agree with the Autocrat in his last statement as to the way in which children are taught the difference between right and wrong?

12. Do you think if a child is first taught that lying is unprofitable he will without further assistance learn that lying is wrong in itself?

13. Do you gain from the whole selection the idea that all lies, even the polite lies of society and the common and apparently harmless lies of business life, are always and wholly wrong?

FOOTNOTES:

[406-1] The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is the most famous and the best of the prose works of Oliver Wendell Holmes. It consists of a series of rambling talks on a great variety of subjects, addressed to the people who sit at his table in a boarding house. Holmes himself is the "Autocrat," and his sparkling talks are full of wit and wisdom. Among those who regularly sit at the Autocrat's table is a schoolboy, whom he calls Benjamin Franklin, and to whom he tells this beautiful story of the Cubes of Truth.

[406-2] When the old Greek hero, Hercules, was a youth, and nearing manhood, two women appeared to him, both offering beautiful gifts. One of the women was Duty, the other Pleasure. Hercules chose to accept the gifts of Duty and to follow her. The opportunity to make this choice did not come till he was old enough to understand. In Holmes' beautiful allegory the cubes and spheres are presented long before that time, even in early childhood.

[407-3] The schoolmistress is one of the most lovable of the characters introduced by Mr. Holmes into The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. At first she appears only at intervals, but in the book her love story and her marriage to the Autocrat afford the chief interest.



THE LOST CHILD

By JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

I wandered down the sunny glade And ever mused, my love, of thee; My thoughts, like little children, played, As gayly and as guilelessly.



If any chanced to go astray, Moaning in fear of coming harms, Hope brought the wanderer back alway, Safe nestled in her snowy arms.

From that soft nest the happy one Looked up at me and calmly smiled; Its hair shone golden in the sun, And made it seem a heavenly child.

Dear Hope's blue eyes smiled mildly down. And blest it with a love so deep, That, like a nursling of her own, It clasped her neck and fell asleep.



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

By GRACE E. SELLON

Down the street, about a mile from the center of Cambridge, Massachusetts, stands a square, three-story colonial dwelling house, sheltered by pines and great English elms and surrounded by flowering shrubs. In this home, for many years known as Elmwood, the great American poet and essayist was born February 22, 1819, and it was here that he lived during the greater part of his life. In the woods and meadows that lay about Elmwood in the poet's childhood he spent much time, for he liked especially to be out-of-doors; and so it was that in his earliest years he began to feel the great love for flowers, birds and trees that made him able in later life to show to the readers of his poems how much beauty there is in the very commonest things of nature.

However, all of the things he liked were not out-of-doors. In his father's library were more than three thousand books, and he began when only a small boy to choose for himself favorite authors. He seems to have been unusually fond of books, for in a little note written when he was eight years old,—his first letter, so far as any one knows,—he tells his brother, "I read French stories," and adds in a postscript, "I have got three books." The next year, in a letter to the same brother he writes, "I have got quite a library."

After learning his letters and other simple things at an elementary school, Lowell was sent when about nine years old to a higher school, where he was thoroughly taught Latin, and otherwise prepared for his entrance into Harvard College in 1834. He was then only fifteen years of age, yet he had such decided tastes in his studies that he was not always willing to give attention to the work required in his college courses, but would follow his own inclinations in his reading. The result was, that though he gained such a reputation among his class-mates for appreciation of literature and ability in original composition that he was made one of the editors of Harvardiana, the college paper, and was chosen in his senior year to write the class poem, yet he was looked upon with growing disapproval by his instructors, because of his irregular ways. At length, it is told, he completely disgraced himself, on the day he was chosen class poet, by rising at the close of the evening prayer service and bowing solemnly to right and left. As punishment for this and all preceding misconduct, he was sent to Concord to continue his studies under a private teacher, and was not allowed to return to Harvard until after classday. Nevertheless, he wrote his poem and later had it printed, for his friends, in a little pamphlet.



After receiving his degree from Harvard in 1838, Lowell decided upon the law as the profession most suitable for him to follow, for at that time a literary career in the United States held out no assurance of a living, even to the best writers. In the preceding year he had written to his intimate friend Shackford: "I thought your brother Charles was studying law. I intend to study that myself, and probably shall be Chief Justice of the United States." This modest prediction, however, was not to be fulfilled, for after completing a course at the Harvard Law School in 1840 and practicing with but slight interest and success for two years, he gave up the law for a more congenial occupation.

His letters to his confidants "Shack" and Loring during the years at college show his aspiration to become a poet. He reports from time to time his progress in verse making and comments more or less favorably on his "effusions." This writing of pottery—as it pleased him to call it—continued with more serious interest after his graduation, so that in 1840 he was ready to publish a volume of verse entitled "A Year's Life."

The same year was marked by another event of special importance,—his engagement to Maria White, a young woman who was herself a poet and who was deeply interested in all the movements of thought that were making toward freedom and justice before the Civil War. Her influence upon Lowell was to strengthen greatly his confidence in his own best powers as a man and a poet and to help develop in him the broad, kind democratic feeling for his fellow-men that most endears him to his readers. This growth of the poet's character seems the more remarkable when it is considered that his father, a Unitarian minister, was a man who, though most generous and well-meaning in his regard for others, was well enough content with conditions in his country to feel little sympathy with the reforms then being urged for securing fuller liberty and equality. In his new enthusiasm Lowell turned away from the influence of his younger days and became devoted to the cause of abolition.

In 1842, after abandoning the law, he founded a magazine, The Pioneer, which, however, was issued only three times. After this unsuccessful venture he went back to his poetry, and late in 1843 published a second volume of verse. In the following year appeared his first critical studies in prose, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets. This work, like most of the first book of poems, Lowell found in later life to be unworthy of reprinting.

The income from his writings, though small, was sufficient for him to marry in 1844; and not long after this event he became a regular contributor to the Anti-Slavery Standard. In this appeared the first series of the Biglow Papers, in which, through vigorous prose and verse, largely in the Yankee dialect of Hosea Biglow, he protested against the evils that brought on the Mexican War. The collected numbers of the series were published in 1848 and shared the popularity of two other of Lowell's greatest works, produced in the same year,—the Fable for Critics and The Vision of Sir Launfal, a beautiful narrative poem filled with the spirit of Christian brotherhood.

It was not long after this that Lowell began to feel that his work as a writer for the abolitionist cause was narrowing in its effect. For "red-hot" reform he had no liking. It seemed to him that the hope of his cause lay not so much in treating others harshly as in living according to the high principles that the reformers professed. "The longer I live," he wrote, "the more am I convinced that the world must be healed by degrees. I see why Jesus came eating meat and drinking wine and companying with publicans and sinners. He preached the highest doctrine, but he lived the life of other men.... Let us sow the best seed we have ... and convert other men by our crops, not by drubbing them with our hoes or putting them under our harrows." He decided, then, to take life in a more leisurely way and let the poetic power that he considered his best gift express itself freely.

In 1851, accompanied by his wife and his two children, Lowell visited Europe. The months spent abroad gave him much wished-for opportunities for study and observation, but they were darkened by the death of his son Walter. Close upon this sorrow came the death of Mrs. Lowell in the following year (1853), after the return of the family to Elmwood. From that time for many months the poet could find relief from his keen sense of loss only in his literary work, and in the companionship of his daughter Mabel, the only one of his four children who had lived.

Some lectures on the English poets given at the Lowell institute in 1854-55 found so much favor with the authorities at Harvard College that soon afterward he was appointed to succeed Longfellow as professor of foreign languages and literatures. After a period of study in Europe, he assumed charge of classes at Harvard in 1856, and for sixteen years continued in this work, bringing to it with most remarkable success all the warmth and sincerity and broad scope of his own interest in the subjects that he taught. Not many months afterward he was still further honored by being given the editorship of the newly founded Atlantic Monthly, a position that he held until 1861. The year 1857 was made memorable also by his marriage to Miss Frances Dunlap, a much-valued friend and the governess of his daughter. In 1864 he became joint editor of the North American Review, and in this magazine continued the second series of the Biglow Papers, begun in the Atlantic Monthly, the series in which is expressed his finest power as a poet-patriot. Of the same excellence is the famous Commemoration Ode written for memorial ceremonies held at Harvard College in honor of the students who had fallen during the war. Among other contributions to these periodicals were numerous studies of poets and poetry—essays that rank among the best of their kind. Thus did Lowell prove himself to possess a rare combination of the powers of original composition and of criticism.

So ably had he served the best interests of his country through his writings, that in 1877 he was appointed Minister of the United States to Spain, and served here until 1880, when he was sent as Minister to England. These high trusts, it proved, had not been wrongly placed. Lowell's devotion to the truest American principles, together with his large experience in public affairs, made him a most successful diplomat. He was given high honors by British universities, and he made many friends in England.

After his return to America in 1885 he withdrew gradually from his former active life. Occasionally he wrote and lectured, and several times he made trips to England where he always received a cordial welcome. It was in his much loved Elmwood that death came to him August 12, 1891.

Lowell was a man of wide learning, and has a prominent place in American literature for his exceptional critical ability and delightful wit, and for the artistic excellence of both his prose and poetry; but the secret of his power lies not so much in these things as in the sincerity and vigor of thought that rise above all bookishness, and in the warm human feeling that reached out for the love of his fellow-men rather than for fame and distinction. Probably that which most endears him to his countrymen is the quality he attributes to others in these words of admiration: "I am sure that both the President (Hayes) and his wife have in them that excellent new thing we call Americanism, which, I suppose, is that 'dignity of human nature' which the philosophers of the last century were always seeking and never finding, and which, after all, consists, perhaps, in not thinking yourself either better or worse than your neighbors by reason of any artificial distinction. As I sat behind them at the concert the other night, I was profoundly touched by the feelings of this kingship without mantle and crown from the property-room of the old world. Their dignity was in their very neighborliness, instead of in their distance." Certainly in the realm of American literature, there is no one better entitled than Lowell to this "kingship without mantle and crown."



A CHILD'S THOUGHT OF GOD

By ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

They say that God lives very high, But if you look above the pines You cannot see our God, and why?

And if you dig down in the mines You never see Him in the gold; Though, from Him, all that's glory shines.

God is so good, He wears a fold Of heaven and earth across His face— Like secrets kept, for love, untold.

But still I feel that His embrace Slides down by thrills, through all things made, Through sight and sound of every place.

As if my tender mother laid On my shut lids, her kisses' pressure, Half-waking me at night, and said, "Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser?"



ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

Round the young life of Elizabeth Barrett was so much of illness and dreariness, that we have accustomed ourselves to thinking joy came to her only with her marriage, and we forget, often, that her childhood was not unhappy. Few children, it would seem, were ever born with greater promise of a bright life. Her father was wealthy and generous; she had brothers and sisters near her in age and congenial in tastes, and she was, at least, a fairly strong, active child.

She was born on March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall, in the county of Durham, and when she was but three years old, her father removed to Hope End, in Herefordshire. The estate which he purchased there was a beautiful one, and the house, with its Turkish windows and Oriental-looking decorations, was most picturesque. That the scenery which surrounded her in her youth made on Elizabeth an impression which remained with her all her life is shown clearly in various passages in her poems:

"Green the land is where my daily Steps in jocund childhood played, Dimpled close with hill and valley, Dappled very close with shade; Summer-snow of apple-blossoms running up from glade to glade."

Of all the brothers and sisters, Elizabeth was her father's favorite, and he encouraged her constantly in her precocious studies and in her childish attempts at composition. Long before she was able to read Homer in the original, she came upon Pope's translation of the Iliad, and it took a rare hold upon her. She showed its influence and her own bent toward poetry by composing, before she was fourteen, an epic on the "Battle of Marathon," of which her father, to whom it was dedicated, thought so highly that he had it printed and circulated it among his friends. But she also showed the influence of her beloved Iliad in a much more childish way, of which she has written delightfully in a poem called Hector in the Garden. A great flower bed, roughly shaped like a man and bordered about with turf, was made for her, and this she named after Hector, the Trojan hero and her great favorite.

"Eyes of gentianellas azure, Staring, winking at the skies; Nose of gillyflowers and box; Scented grasses put for locks, Which a little breeze at pleasure Set a-waving round his eyes."

"Brazen helm of daffodillies, With a glitter toward the light; Purple violets for the mouth, Breathing perfumes west and south; And a sword of flashing lilies, Holden ready for the fight."

"And a breastplate made of daisies, Closely fitting, leaf on leaf; Periwinkles interlaced Drawn for belt about the waist; While the brown bees, humming praises, Shot their arrows round the chief."



It was natural enough that Elizabeth should have wanted to begin the study of Greek; and with the help of her father and of Mr. Boyd, a blind friend of her father's, she became a most proficient Greek scholar.

When she was fifteen years old she met with an accident which deprived her in part of the out-of-door life and rambles which she had loved, and threw her more than ever upon her books for company. Impatient because a horse which she desired to ride was not ready just when she wanted it, she went out into the field and attempted to saddle it herself. She fell, with the saddle on top of her; and while this did not leave her the invalid she later became, it weakened her and made her an easy prey to the troubles which afterward came upon her.

That Pope, as well as Homer, left his mark on Miss Barrett was shown by her first published volume, which was brought out when she was about twenty. It was entitled An Essay on Mind, and Other Poems, and the poem which gave its name to the book was quite after the manner of Pope. This poem, while remarkable for a girl of Miss Barrett's age, contained little freshness or originality, and she spoke of it afterwards as having been "long repented of as worthy of all repentance."

In 1828 Mrs. Barrett died, and left Elizabeth, the eldest of the ten children, with much of the responsibility of the family. Since her death came before her daughter reached fame or began that voluminous correspondence from which have been gathered most of the facts of her life, little can be known of the mother's character, or of her influence on her daughter. That Miss Barrett was devotedly attached to her mother, however, is to be seen from a sentence in one of her letters. "Her memory," she says, "is more precious to me than any earthly blessing left behind!"

The beloved home at Hope End was sold in 1832, owing, apparently to some fall in the family fortunes, and the Barretts removed to Sidmouth, in Devonshire. The life there was uneventful, as the life at Hope End had been. Miss Barrett, in writing later of herself, declared that "a bird in a cage would have as good a story." But she was by no means idle, for her Greek studies and her writing kept her busy and happy. While at Sidmouth, she brought out a translation of the Prometheus Bound of AEschylus, a version with which she was so dissatisfied that she later replaced it, in her collected works, with another.

For three years the Barretts lived at Sidmouth, and their removal to London, in 1835, made important changes in Elizabeth's life. Her health, never good since her fifteenth year, broke down, and from some date shortly after the arrival in London she became an apparently hopeless invalid, confined to her room and often to her bed. Some compensation for this confinement, however, she found in the new friends, few, indeed, but devoted and congenial, who were admitted to her sick room. Chief among these friends of her earlier London years were John Kenyon, a distant cousin, and Mary Russell Mitford, author of Our Village. Miss Mitford made the acquaintance of Miss Barrett in one of the latter's rare appearances in society, and she has left an account of the meeting and a description of Miss Barrett which is famous.

"She was certainly one of the most interesting persons that I had ever seen. Everybody who then saw her said the same; so that it is not merely the impression of my partiality or my enthusiasm. Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend ... that the translatress of the Prometheus of AEschylus, the authoress of the Essay on Mind, was old enough to be introduced into company,—in technical language, was 'out.'"

Although Miss Mitford was nineteen years older than Miss Barrett, the friendship which sprang up between them was most close, and lasted until Miss Mitford's death in 1855. Their correspondence was constant and voluminous, as was that, in fact, of Miss Barrett with all of her intimate friends. These letters of hers from her sick room are no more remarkable for number than for brightness and vivacity. Little mention is made of her ailments, except when her friends have specifically demanded news of her health, and the letters deal rather with literary than with other subjects. This was, of course, most natural; the invalid could have little news to communicate from her couch to her friends in the outer world. Her literary activity, too, increased, and she began to contribute to magazines poems of various kinds, which attracted much attention. Not all comment on them was favorable; the people declared that some of them were Sphinx-like—too difficult, if not impossible, of interpretation. But every one realized that here was a real poet, one of striking individuality, and, for a woman, most remarkable learning.

By the autumn of 1838, her health had become so much worse that the doctor ordered removal to a warmer climate, and she was taken to Torquay, where she remained for three years. Her father and her brothers and sisters visited her there from time to time, but her constant companion was her brother Edward, who had all her life been her favorite. What little good Torquay seemed to be doing her was more than overbalanced by a tragedy which occurred in the summer of 1840. Her brother, with two of his friends, went for a sail in a small boat, intending to be absent only until evening. When they did not return, inquiry was set on foot, and it was learned that a small boat had been seen to founder in Babbicombe Bay. The fears caused by this report became certainty three days later, on the recovery of the bodies. The effect on Miss Barrett may be partially imagined. Not only had she lost her best-loved companion, but she was haunted by the morbid feeling that she had caused his death, since he had come to Torquay only to be with her. Twelve years afterward she wrote: "I have lived heart to heart with my husband these five years. I have never yet spoken out, in a whisper even, what is in me; never yet could find heart or breath; never yet could bear to hear a word of reference from his lips."

Naturally her health suffered greatly from the shock, and it was thought that she could not possibly live more than a few months. Quite unexpectedly, however, she began to improve; it seemed that the desire to quit Torquay, which had grown unendurable to her since the tragedy, gave her strength of body. During the spring and summer of 1841 she was able to resume work on translations, compositions, plans for new poems. Indeed, it was this which saved her, for she wrote some time later to a friend—"I do believe I should be mad at this moment, if I had not forced back the current of rushing recollections by work, work, work."

After her return to London in the autumn of 1841, her life went on as before—or rather, stood still as before. From her couch she continued to send forth the poems which were bringing her ever-increasing fame, and the letters which were binding her friends closer to her. But an event was drawing nearer, which was from the first an event and not an episode in Miss Barrett's life. In January, 1845, we find her writing "And I had a letter from Browning the poet last night, which threw me into ecstasies—Browning, the author of Paracelsus, and the king of mystics;" and a little later she says, "I am getting deeper and deeper into correspondence with Robert Browning, poet and mystic, and we are growing to be the truest friends."

Robert Browning had felt and expressed great admiration for Miss Barrett's poems and an allusion to himself in her Lady Geraldine's Courtship gave him an excuse for addressing her. Their correspondence flourished, and they rapidly passed from regarding each other as mere acquaintances, to looking upon each other as friends. In fact, there seems to have been from the very first an almost mystical attraction between them. Miss Barrett might have contented herself all her life with this delightfully personal and literary correspondence, but Browning soon grew impatient and expressed his desire to see her. The admission of a new friend to Miss Barrett's room was at no time a thing to be undertaken lightly, so hedged about was she by the care of her family; and in this case she herself seems to have hesitated long before allowing Browning to call, for the very feminine reason that "there is nothing to see in me nor to hear in me." Had she known Browning better, she would have realized that his determination would carry him past all obstacles; and so, indeed, it did.

On May 20, 1845, they met for the first time, and within a short time his friendship for her had ripened into love, and he asked her to marry him. She herself told, in a letter to a friend after her marriage, the story of her courtship.

"He came, and with our personal acquaintance began his attachment for me, a sort of infatuation call it, which resisted the various denials which were my plain duty at the beginning, and has persisted past them all. I began with the grave assurance that I was in an exceptional position and saw him just in consequence of it, and that if he ever recurred to that subject again, I never could see him again while I lived; and he believed me and was silent. To my mind, indeed, it was a bare impulse—a generous man of quick sympathies taking up a sudden interest with both hands."

Browning was, as she said, silent, but he was not discouraged, and his letters, his visits, his flowers, at length convinced Miss Barrett that his feeling was something more than a "bare impulse."

"So then," she continued, "I showed him how he was throwing into the ashes his best affections—how the common gifts of youth and cheerfulness were behind me—how I had not strength, even of heart, for the ordinary duties of life—everything I told him and showed him. 'Look at this—and this—and this,' throwing down all my disadvantages. To which he did not answer by a single compliment, but simply that he had not then to choose, and that I might be right or he might be right, he was not there to decide; but that he loved me, and should to his last hour.* * * He preferred, he said, of free and deliberate choice, to be allowed to sit only an hour a day by my side, to the fulfilment of the brightest dream which should exclude me, in any possible world."

What Robert Browning wanted so much, it was a foregone conclusion that he would have; and Miss Barrett was at last brought to consent to an engagement. But the difficulties were just begun. Mr. Barrett, adored as he was by his daughter, was more than a little tyrannical, especially with his favorite daughter. His family all well knew that he would never under any circumstances be brought to consent to the marriage of any of his children; and he had, moreover, in the case of Elizabeth, the appearance of reason on his side, in that she was, in the opinion of her family and of most of her medical advisers, a hopeless invalid, unfit to be moved. "A life passed between a bed and a sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth." Browning believed otherwise, and events showed that he was right.

In the autumn of 1845, the doctors advised that Miss Barrett be taken to Italy, declaring, in fact, that her life depended upon it. Some of her brothers or sisters could easily have accompanied her; there was no lack of money, and the journey was actually planned. For no apparent reason, however, Mr. Barrett refused his consent—said that his daughter should not leave his house. In vain the family argued; in vain a generous friend offered to accompany Miss Barrett, paying all expenses. He was brutally firm. Much hurt by this selfishness and disregard for her life, Miss Barrett promised Browning that if she lived through the winter and were no worse in the following year, she would marry him without her father's consent, for which they knew it was useless to ask. Accordingly, on September 12, 1846, she walked out of her father's house, accompanied only by her maid, was married and returned home. One week later she joined her husband, and they set out for Italy, their future home. Mr. Barrett never forgave his daughter, and his unrelenting anger was a deep sorrow to her, in the midst of her great life happiness.

The Brownings went first to Pisa, and from there to Florence, which they afterward regarded as their home, though they made many excursions and spent seasons elsewhere. Mrs. Browning grew so much better that a friend said to her, "You are not improved, you are transformed;" and while she was never strong and was often very ill, she never again sank back to the state in which she had been before her marriage. The happiness which shows in her letters is wonderful. "As for me," she writes, "when I am so good as to let myself be carried upstairs, and so angelical as to sit still on the sofa, and so considerate, moreover, as not to put my foot into a puddle, why my duty is considered done to a perfection, which is worthy of all adoration." And again, "If I could open my heart to you in all seriousness, you would see nothing there but a sort of enduring wonder of happiness."

Mrs. Browning, like her husband, loved Italy, and especially Florence, and many of her poems, notably the Casa Guidi Windows, deal with Italian subjects. Of the poems published after her marriage, however, none are more exquisite than the series of Sonnets from the Portuguese. These sonnets, which are not translations, and to which the name From the Portuguese was given simply as a blind, describe her uncertainty and her joy in the love which was hers.

In 1849 another joy came to her. On March 9th of that year a son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning was born, and from that time on her letters, quite like the letters of any unliterary mother, are full of the wonderful doings of this child. Not that her interest in things literary flagged in the least; she read everything which the libraries of Italy afforded, or which her friends could send to her—novels, for which she confessed to a great liking; poems, political pamphlets, newspapers, all that came to her hand. Her longest and greatest poem, Aurora Leigh, was written during her Italian years. While the story of the poem is in no sense autobiographical, the heroine is in her beliefs and her ideals Mrs. Browning's self, and this was the poem by which she felt herself most willing to be judged.

Broken by several trips to England and by excursions to the most beautiful parts of Italy, the years slipped by in uneventful happiness. Many friends visited the Brownings, and all came away wondering and delighted at the perfect family life they had been allowed to witness. Frail always, Mrs. Browning was spoken of by acquaintances in her later years as seeming "scarce embodied at all."

In June, 1861, Mrs. Browning had an attack of bronchial trouble and on the night of the twenty-ninth, alone in the room with her husband, she died; and one writer says "none ever saw Browning upon earth again, but only a splendid surface." Mrs. Browning was buried at Florence, the city she had loved. Upon the wall of Casa Guidi, the building in which she had lived, the citizens, grateful for her love and understanding of them, placed a marble tablet in her memory.

The wonderful thing about Elizabeth Barrett Browning is that from her weakness should have come poems of such strength. There was nothing morbid in the words which came from her hushed, darkened sick room. Indeed, her spirit was never tamed, and she herself confessed that one of her faults was "head-longness;" that she snatched parcels open instead of untying the string, and tore letters instead of cutting them. In Browning's poems, which contain numerous beautiful allusions to her, there is nothing more beautiful and more descriptive than the lines—

"O lyric love, half angel and half bird, And all a wonder and a wild desire."



DON QUIXOTE

By CERVANTES

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Unlike many of his class, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the greatest of the old Spanish writers, was born to a changeful and busy life. The year 1547 marked his birth, and during the sixty-nine years of his life he was constantly in action.

He served as a soldier in the war against the Turks, and at the Battle of Lepanto, where he lost the use of his left hand, and in other battles in which he took part, he showed great bravery and won a reputation of the highest kind. While returning in 1575 from Italy to Spain, he was captured by Algerian pirates and was sold in Algiers as a slave. Throughout his five years' captivity, he was constantly threatened with torture, but at no time did his courage fail him. Finally his widowed mother and his sister, helped by some of their friends, none of whom were by any means wealthy, succeeded in getting together sufficient money to ransom him, and immediately on his return to Spain he rejoined his old regiment.

Cervantes had written verses before the beginning of his military career, but had won no name for himself. By 1583, however, he seems to have determined to devote the rest of his life to literature, and in that year he again began writing verses. For a number of years he earned his livelihood by writing for the stage, but few of his plays survive.

In 1605 there appeared the first part of the work which made Cervantes famous, and which has kept his name before the world ever since. This was the inimitable Don Quixote, which gives the burlesque adventures of the self-styled "Knight of the Rueful Countenance." This book was not intended to satirize knight-errantry itself, for that had long before died out in Spain. What it did aim to do was to make ridiculous the romances of chivalry over which all Spain at the time of Cervantes seemed to have gone mad. How well Cervantes succeeded in his aim may be known from the fact that after the appearance of his masterpiece, no new romance of chivalry was published in Spain.

The hero of this great work, Don Quixote, is presented as the most courteous and affable of gentlemen, wise on all points except those pertaining to chivalry. It was not only, however, the masterly drawing of the characters of Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza, which made the book popular; the inexhaustible fund of humor has made it to the present day a book which every one delights to read.

The following selections from Don Quixote describe some of the typical adventures of the gallant "Knight of the Rueful Countenance," and will serve to give the reader an idea of the book.

DON QUIXOTE PREPARES TO SET OUT ON HIS ADVENTURES

In a village of La Mancha there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing. An olla[433-1] of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most nights, scraps on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a pigeon or so extra on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income. The rest of it went in a doublet of fine cloth, and velvet breeches and shoes to match for holidays, while on week days he made a brave figure in his best homespun. He had in his house a housekeeper past forty, a niece under twenty, and a lad for the field and market-place, who used to saddle the hack as well as handle the bill-hook. The age of this gentlemen of ours was bordering on fifty, he was of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured, a very early riser and a great sportsman. They will have it his surname was Quixada or Quesada (for here there is some difference of opinion among the authors who write on the subject), although from reasonable conjectures it seems plain that he was called Quixana. This, however, is of but little importance to our tale; it will be enough not to stray a hair's breadth from the truth in the telling of it.

You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was at leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to reading books of chivalry with such ardor and avidity that he almost entirely neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the management of his property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillage-land to buy books of chivalry to read, and brought home as many of them as he could get.

* * * * *

In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honor as for the service of his country, that he should make a knight-errant of himself, roaming the world over in full armor and on horseback in quest of adventures, and putting in practice himself all that he had read of as being the usual practices of knights-errant; righting every kind of wrong, and exposing himself to peril and danger from which, in the issue, he was to reap eternal renown and fame. Already the poor man saw himself crowned by the might of his arm Emperor of Trebizond at least; and so, led away by the intense enjoyment he found in these pleasant fancies, he set himself forthwith to put his scheme into execution.

The first thing he did was to clean up some armor that had belonged to his great-grandfather, and had been for ages lying forgotten in a corner eaten with rust and covered with mildew. He scoured and polished it as best he could, but he perceived one great defect in it, that it had no closed helmet, nothing but a simple morion.[434-2] This deficiency, however, his ingenuity supplied, for he contrived a kind of half-helmet of pasteboard which, fitted on to the morion, looked like a whole one. It is true that, in order to see if it was strong and fit to stand a cut, he drew his sword and gave it a couple of slashes, the first of which undid in an instant what had taken him a week to do. The ease with which he had knocked it to pieces disconcerted him somewhat, and to guard against that danger he set to work again, fixing bars of iron on the inside until he was satisfied with its strength; and then, not caring to try any more experiments with it, he passed it and adopted it as a helmet of the most perfect construction.

He next proceeded to inspect his hack, which surpassed in his eyes the Bucephalus[435-3] of Alexander or the Babieca of the Cid.[435-4] Four days were spent in thinking what name to give him, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so as to indicate what he had been before belonging to a knight-errant, and what he then was; for it was only reasonable that, his master taking a new character, he should take a new name, and that it should be a distinguished and full-sounding one, befitting the new order and calling he was about to follow. And so, after having composed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names out of his memory and fancy, he decided upon calling him Rocinante, a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he was now, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.[436-5]

Having got a name for his horse so much to his taste, he was anxious to get one for himself, and he was eight days more pondering over this point, till at last he made up his mind to call himself Don Quixote, whence, as has been already said, the authors of this veracious history have inferred that his name must have been beyond a doubt Quixada, and not Quesada as others would have it. Recollecting, however, that the valiant Amadis[436-6] was not content to call himself curtly Amadis and nothing more, but added the name of his kingdom and country to make it famous, and called himself Amadis of Gaul, he, like a good knight, resolved to add on the name of his, and to style himself Don Quixote of La Mancha, whereby, he considered, he described accurately his origin and country, and did honor to it in taking his surname from it.

So then, his armor being furbished, his morion turned into a helmet, his hack christened, and he himself confirmed, he came to the conclusion that nothing more was needed now but to look out for a lady to be in love with; for a knight-errant without love was like a tree without leaves or fruit, or a body without a soul. As he said to himself, "If, for my sins, or by my good fortune, I come across some giant hereabouts, a common occurrence with knights-errant, and overthrow him in one onslaught, or cleave him asunder to the waist, or, in short, vanquish and subdue him, will it not be well to have some one I may send him to as a present, that he may come in and fall on his knees before my sweet lady, and in a humble, submissive voice say, 'I am the giant Caraculiambro, lord of the island of Malindrania, vanquished in single combat by the never sufficiently extolled knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, who has commanded me to present myself before your Grace, that your Highness dispose of me at your pleasure'?" Oh, how our good gentleman enjoyed the delivery of this speech, especially when he had thought of some one to call his Lady! There was, so the story goes, in a village near his own a very good-looking farm girl with whom he had been at one time in love, though, so far as is known, she never knew it nor gave a thought to the matter. Her name was Aldonza Lorenzo, and upon her he thought fit to confer the title of Lady of his Thoughts; and after some search for a name which should not be out of harmony with his own, and should suggest and indicate that of a princess and great lady, he decided upon calling her Dulcinea del Toboso—she being of El Toboso—a name, to his mind, musical, uncommon, and significant, like all those he had already bestowed upon himself and the things belonging to him.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE WINDMILLS

Upon the plain they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, "Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza,[438-1] where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth."

"What giants?" said Sancho Panza.

"Those thou seest there," answered his master, "with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long."

"Look, your worship," said Sancho, "what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go."

"It is easy to see," replied Don Quixote, "that thou art not used to this business of adventures: those are giants; and if thou art afraid, away with thee out of this and betake thyself to prayer while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat."



So saying, he gave the spur to his steed Rocinante, heedless of the cries his squire Sancho sent after him, warning him that most certainly they were windmills and not giants he was going to attack. He, however, was so positive they were giants that he neither heard the cries of Sancho, nor perceived, near as he was, what they were, but made at them shouting, "Fly not, cowards and vile beings, for it is a single knight that attacks you."

A slight breeze at this moment sprang up, and the great sails began to move, seeing which Don Quixote exclaimed, "Though ye flourish more arms than the giant Briareus,[440-2] ye have to reckon with me."

So saying, and commending himself with all his heart to his lady Dulcinea, imploring her to support him in such a peril, with lance in rest and covered by his buckler, he charged at Rocinante's fullest gallop and fell upon the first mill that stood in front of him; but as he drove his lance-point into the sail the wind whirled it round with such force that it shivered the lance to pieces, sweeping with it horse and rider, who went rolling over on the plain, in a sorry condition. Sancho hastened to his assistance as fast as his ass could go, and when he came up found him unable to move, with such a shock had Rocinante fallen with him.

"God bless me!" said Sancho, "did I not tell your worship to mind what you were about, for they were only windmills? and no one could have made any mistake about it but one who had something of the same kind in his head."

"Hush, friend Sancho," replied Don Quixote; "the fortunes of war more than any other are liable to frequent fluctuations; and moreover I think, and it is the truth, that some sage[440-3] turned these giants into mills in order to rob me of the glory of vanquishing them, such is the enmity he bears me; but in the end his wicked arts will avail but little against my good sword."

"God order it as he may," said Sancho Panza, and helping him to rise got him up again on Rocinante, whose shoulder was half out; and then, discussing the late adventure, they followed the road to Puerto Lapice, for there, said Don Quixote, they could not fail to find adventure, as it was a great thoroughfare.

Finally they passed the night among some trees, from one of which Don Quixote plucked a dry branch to serve him as a lance, and fixed on it the head he had removed from the broken one.

MAMBRINO'S HELMET

Rain fell in gentle drops, and Sancho was for going into the fulling mills,[441-1] but Don Quixote had taken such a disgust to them on account of the late joke that he would not enter them on any account; so turning aside to the right they came upon another road, different from that which they had taken the night before. Shortly afterwards Don Quixote perceived a man on horseback who wore on his head something that shone like gold, and the moment he saw him he turned to Sancho and said, "I think, Sancho, there is no proverb that is not true, all being maxims drawn from experience itself, the mother of all sciences, especially that one that says, 'Where one door shuts, another opens.' I say so because if last night fortune shut the door of the adventure we were looking for against us, cheating us with the fulling mills, it now opens wide another one for better and more certain adventure, and if I do not contrive to enter it, it will be my own fault, and I cannot lay it to my ignorance of fulling mills, or the darkness of the night. I say this because, if I mistake not, there comes toward us one who wears on his head the helmet of Mambrino,[442-2] concerning which I took the oath thou rememberest."

"Mind what you say, your worship, and still more what you do," said Sancho, "for I don't want any more fulling mills to finish off fulling and knocking our senses out."

"The devil take thee, man," said Don Quixote; "what has a helmet to do with fulling mills?"

"I don't know," replied Sancho, "but, faith, if I might speak as I used, perhaps I could give such reasons that your worship would see you were mistaken in what you say."

"How can I be mistaken in what I say, unbelieving traitor?" returned Don Quixote. "Tell me, seest thou not yonder knight coming towards us on a dappled gray steed, who has upon his head a helmet of gold?"

"What I see and make out," answered Sancho, "is only a man on a gray ass like my own, who has something that shines on his head."

"Well, that is the helmet of Mambrino," said Don Quixote; "stand to one side and leave me alone with him; thou shalt see how, without saying a word, I shall bring this adventure to an issue and possess myself of the helmet I have so longed for."

"I will take care to stand aside," said Sancho; "but God grant, I say once more, that it may not be fulling mills again."

"I have told thee, brother, on no account to mention those fulling mills to me again," said Don Quixote, "or I vow—and I say no more—I'll full the soul out of you."

Sancho held his peace in dread lest his master should carry out the vow he had hurled like a bowl at him.

The fact of the matter as regards the helmet, steed, and knight that Don Quixote saw, was this: In that neighborhood there were two villages, one of them so small that it had neither apothecary's shop, nor barber, which the other that was close to it had; so the barber of the larger served the smaller; and in it there was a sick man who required to be bled and another man who wanted to be shaved, and on this errand the barber was going, carrying with him a brass basin; but as luck would have it, as he was on the way it began to rain, and not to spoil his hat, which probably was a new one, he put the basin on his head, and being clean it glittered at half a league's distance. He rode upon a gray ass, as Sancho said, and this was what made it seem to Don Quixote to be a dapple-gray steed and a knight and a golden helmet; for everything he saw he made to fall in with his crazy chivalry and ill errant notions; and when he saw the poor knight draw near, without entering into any parley with him, at Rocinante's top speed he bore down upon him with the pike pointed low, fully determined to run him through and through, and as he reached him, without checking the fury of his charge, he cried to him, "Defend thyself, miserable being, or yield me of thine own accord that which is so reasonably my due."



The barber, who without any expectation or apprehension of it saw this apparition coming down upon him, had no other way of saving himself from the stroke of the lance but to let himself fall off his ass; and no sooner had he touched the ground than he sprang up more nimbly than a deer and sped away across the plain faster than the wind.

He left the basin on the ground, with which Don Quixote contented himself, saying that the pagan had shown his discretion and imitated the beaver, which finding himself pressed by the hunters bites and cuts off with its teeth that for which by its natural instinct, it knows it is pursued.

He told Sancho to pick up the helmet, and he, taking it in his hands, said, "By God the basin is a good one, and worth a piece of eight[445-3] if it is worth a maravedi," and handed it to his master, who immediately put it on his head, turning it round, now this way, now that, in search of the visor. Not finding it he said, "Clearly the pagan to whose measure this famous headpiece was first forged must have had a very large head; but the worst of it is half of it is wanting."

When Sancho heard him call the basin a headpiece he was unable to restrain his laughter, but remembering his master's wrath he checked himself in the midst of it.

"What art thou laughing at, Sancho?" said Don Quixote.

"I am laughing," said he, "to think of the great head the pagan must have had who owned this helmet, for it looks exactly like a regular barber's basin."

"Dost thou know what I suspect, Sancho?" said Don Quixote; "that this wonderful piece of this enchanted helmet must by some strange accident have come into the hands of some one who was unable to recognize or realize its value, and who, not knowing what he did, and seeing it to be of the purest gold, must have melted down one half for the sake of what it might be worth, and of the other made this which is like a barber's basin, as thou sayest; but be it as it may, to me who recognize it, its transformation makes no difference, for I will set it to rights at the first village where there is a blacksmith, and in such style that that helmet the god of smithies[446-4] forged for the god of battles shall not surpass it or even come up to it; and in the meantime I will wear it as well as I can, for something is better than nothing; all the more as it will be quite enough to protect me from any chance blow of a stone."

"Will your worship," said Sancho, "tell me what are we to do with this dapple-gray steed that looks like a gray ass, which that Martino[446-5] that your worship overthrew has left deserted here? for, from the way he took to his heels and bolted, he is not likely ever to come back for it; and by my beard but the gray is a good one."

"I have never been in the habit," said Don Quixote, "of taking spoil of those whom I vanquish, nor is it the practice of chivalry to take away their horses and leave them to go on foot, unless indeed it be that the victor have lost his own in the combat, in which case it is lawful to take that of the vanquished as a thing won in lawful war; therefore, Sancho, leave this horse, or ass, or whatever thou wilt have it to be; for when its owner sees us gone hence he will come back for it."

"God knows I should like to take it," returned Sancho, "or at least to change it for my own, which does not seem to me as good a one; verily the laws of chivalry are strict, since they cannot be stretched to let one ass be changed for another; I should like to know if I might at least change trappings."

"On that head I am not quite certain," answered Don Quixote, "and the matter being doubtful, pending better information, I say thou mayest change them, if so be thou hast urgent need of them."

"So urgent is it," answered Sancho, "that if they were for my own person I could not want them more;" and forthwith, fortified by this license, he effected the change, and rigged out his beast to the ninety-nines, making quite another thing of it. This done, they broke their fast on the remains of the spoils of war plundered from the sumpter mule, and drank of the brook that flowed from the fulling mills, without casting a look in that direction, in such loathing did they hold them for the alarm they had caused them; and, all anger and gloom removed, they mounted and, without taking any fixed road (not to fix upon any being the proper thing for true knights-errant), they set out, guided by Rocinante's will, which carried along with it that of his master, not to say that of the ass, which always followed him wherever he led, lovingly and sociably; nevertheless they returned to the high road, and pursued it at a venture without any other aim.

DON QUIXOTE'S ENCOUNTER WITH THE LIONS

When the author of this great history came to relate what is set down in this chapter he would have preferred to pass it over in silence, fearing it would not be believed, because here Don Quixote's madness reaches the confines of the greatest that can be conceived, and even goes a couple of bowshots beyond the greatest. But after all, though still under the same fear and apprehension, he has recorded it without adding to the story or leaving out a particle of the truth, and entirely disregarding the charges of falsehood that might be brought against him.

When Don Quixote called Sancho to bring his helmet, Sancho was buying some curds the shepherds agreed to sell him, and flurried by the great haste his master was in did not know what to do with them or what to carry them in; so, not to lose them, for he had already paid for them, he thought it best to throw them into his master's helmet, and acting on this bright idea he went to see what his master wanted with him. He, as he approached, exclaimed to him, "Give me that helmet, my friend, for either I know little of adventures, or what I observe yonder is one that will, and does, call upon me to arm myself."

He of the green gaban,[448-1] hearing this, looked in all directions, but could perceive nothing except a cart coming towards them with two or three small flags, which led him to conclude it must be carrying treasure of the King's, and he said so to Don Quixote. He, however, would not believe him, being always persuaded and convinced that all that happened to him must be adventures and still more adventures; so he replied to the gentleman, "He who is prepared has his battle half fought; nothing is lost by my preparing myself, for I know by experience that I have enemies, visible and invisible, and I know not when or where, or at what moment, or in what shapes they will attack me;" and turning to Sancho he called for his helmet; and Sancho, as he had no time to take out the curds, had to give it as it was.

Don Quixote took it, and without perceiving what was in it, thrust it down in hot haste upon his head; but as the curds were pressed and squeezed the whey began to run all over his face and beard, whereat he was so startled that he cried out to Sancho, "Sancho, what's this? I think my head is softening, or my brains are melting, or I am sweating from head to foot! If I am sweating it is not indeed from fear. I am convinced beyond a doubt that the adventure which is about to befall me is a terrible one. Give me something to wipe myself with, if thou hast it, for this profuse sweat is blinding me."

Sancho held his tongue, and gave him a cloth, and gave thanks to God at the same time that his master had not found out what was the matter. Don Quixote then wiped himself, and took off his helmet to see what it was that made his head feel so cool, and seeing all that white mash inside his helmet, he put it to his nose, and as soon as he had smelled it he exclaimed, "By the life of my lady Dulcinea del Toboso, but it is curds thou has put here, thou treacherous, impudent, ill-mannered squire!"

To which, with great composure and pretended innocence, Sancho replied, "If they are curds let me have them, your worship, and I'll eat them; but let the devil eat them, for it must have been he who put them there. I dare to dirty your worship's helmet! You have guessed the offender finely! Faith, sir, by the light God gives me, it seems I must have enchanters too, that persecute me as a creature and limb of your worship, and they must have put that nastiness there in order to provoke your patience to anger, and make you baste my ribs as you are wont to do. Well, this time, indeed, they have missed their aim, for I trust to my master's good sense to see that I have got no curds or milk, or anything of the sort; and that if I had, it is in my stomach I would put it and not in the helmet."