We have attempted to give a slight idea of the contents of these two volumes, in the compass of a few pages. We have called the reader's attention to various points of special interest, as we were going along. It remains to make such comments as suggest themselves to us, either in our character of "the scholiast," or in our own right as a freed citizen of the intellectual as well as the political republic.

WHENCE? WHY? WHITHER? These are the three great questions that arise in the soul of every race and of every thinking being. He who looks at either of them with the least new light, though he whisper what he sees ever so softly, has the world to listen to him. No matter how he got his knowledge nor what he calls it; it belongs to mankind. But "Science" has been mainly engaged with another question, in itself of very inferior interest, namely, How?

We must be permitted to speak of "Science" in our freest capacity, and will endeavor not to abuse our liberty. The study of natural phenomena for the sake of the pleasing variety of aspects they present, for the delight of collecting curious specimens, for the exercise of ingenuity in detecting the secret methods of Nature, for the gratification of arranging facts or objects in regular series, is an innocent and not a fruitless pursuit. Many persons are born with a natural instinct for it, and with special aptitudes which may even constitute a kind of genius. We should do honor to such power wherever we find it; honor according to its kind and its degree; but not affix the wrong label to it. Those who possess it acquire knowledge sometimes so extensive and uncommon that we regard them with a certain admiration. But knowledge is not wisdom. Unless these narrow trains of ideas are brought into relation with other and wider ranges of thought, or with the conduct of life, they cannot aspire to that loftier name.

We must go farther than this. The study of the How? in Nature, or the simple observation of phenomena, is often used as an opiate to quiet the higher faculties. There can be no question of the fact that many persons pass much of their lives working in the in-door or out-door laboratories of science, just as old women knit, just as prisoners carve quaintly elaborate toys in their dungeons. The product is not absolutely useless in either case; the fingers of the body or of the mind become swift and cunning, but the soul does not grow under such culture. We are willing to allow that many of those who browse in the sleepy meadows of aimless observation,—loving to keep their heads down as they gaze at and gather their narcotic herbs, rather than lift them to the horizon beyond or the heaven above,— act in obedience to the law of their limited natures. Still, let us recognize the limitation, and not forget that the pursuit which may be fitting and praiseworthy toil for one class of minds may be ignoble indolence for another. We must remember, on the other hand, that, however humble may be the intellectual position of the man of science or knowledge, in distinction from wisdom, the results of his labors may be of the highest importance. The most ignorant laborer may get a stone out of the quarry, and the poorest slave unearth a diamond. These intellectual artisans come to their daily task with hypertrophied special organs, fitted to their peculiar craft. Some of them are all eyes; some, all hands; some are self-recording microscopes; others, self-registering balances. If a man would watch a thermometer every hour of the day and night for ten years, and give a table of his observations, the result would be of interest and value. But the bulbous extremity of the instrument would probably contain as much thought at the end of the ten years as that of the observer.

Clearly, then, "Science" does not properly belong to "scientific" men, unless they happen also to be wise ones; not more to them than honey to bees, or books to printers. The bee may, certainly, feed on the honey he has made, and the printer read the books he has put in type. But Vos non vobis is the rule. "Science" is knowledge, it is true, but knowledge disarticulated and parcelled out among certain specialists, like Truth in Milton's glorious comparison. He who can restore each part to its true position, and orient the lesser whole in its relations to the universe, he it is to whom science belongs. He must range through all time and follow Nature to her farthest bounds. Then he can dissect beetles like Straus Derekheim, without becoming a myope. But even this is not enough. Let us see what qualities would go to make up the ideal model of the truly wise student of Nature.

He must have, in the first place, as the substratum of his faculties, the power of observation, with the passion that keeps it active and the skilful hand to serve its needs. Secondly, a quick eye for resemblances and differences. Thirdly, a wide range of mental vision. Fourthly, the coordinating or systematizing faculty. Fifthly, a large scholarship. Lastly, and without which all these gifts fall short of their ultimate aim, an instinct for the highest forms of truth,—a centripetal tendency, always seeking the idea behind the form, the Deity in his manifestations, and thence working outward again to solve those infinite problems of life and its destinies which are, in reality, all that the thinking soul most lives for.

It is as easy to find all these qualities separate as it is to turn beneath the finger one of the letters of a revolving padlock. But they must all be brought together in line before the grand portals of Nature's hypaethral temple will open to her chosen student. How incomplete the man of science is with only one or two of these endowments may be seen by a few examples.

The power and instinct of observation combined with the most consummate skill do not necessarily make a great philosophical naturalist. Leeuwenhoek had all these. They bore admirable fruits, too. We cannot but read the old man's letters to the Royal Society, written, if we remember right, after the age of eighty, with delight and admiration. Those little lenses in their silver mountings, all ground and set and fashioned by his own hand, showed him the blood-globules, and the "pipes" of the teeth, which Purkinje and Retzius found with their achromatic microscopes a century later. We honor his skill and sagacity as they deserve; but a little trick of Mr. Dollond's, applied to the microscopic object-glass, has left all his achievements a mere matter of curious history.

Few have been more remarkable for perceiving resemblances and differences than Oken. This is the poetical side of the scientific mind; and he shares with Goethe the honor of that startling and far-reaching discovery, the vertebral character of the bones of the cranium. At this very time the four vertebral cranial bones recognized by Owen are the same Oken has described. But notwithstanding the generous tribute of Mr. Agassiz to his great merits, the writer who assigns special colors to the persons in the Trinity, (red, blue, and green,) and then allots to Satan a constituent of one of these, (yellow,) has drifted away from the solid anchorage of observation into the shoreless waste of the inane, if not amidst the dark abysses of the profane.

If the widest range of mental vision, joined, too, with great learning, could make a successful student of Nature, Lord Bacon should have stood by the side of Linnaeus. But open the "Sylva Sylvarum" anywhere and see what Bacon was as a naturalist. "It was observed in the Great Plague of the last yeare, that there were scene in divers Ditches and low Grounds about London, many Toads that had Tailes, two or three inches long, at the least: Whereas Toads (usually) have no Tailes at all. Which argueth a great disposition to Putrefaction in the Soile and Aire." This in that "great birth of time," the "Instauration of the Sciences"!

The systematizing or coordinating power is worse than nothing, unless it be supported by the other qualities already mentioned. Darwin had it, and something of what is called genius with it; but where is now the "Zonomia"?

And what is erudition without the power to correct errors by appealing to Nature, to arrange methodically, to use wisely? It would be a shame to mention any name in illustration of its insignificance. Our shelves bend and crack under the load of unwise and learned authorship. There are two stages in every student's life. In the first he is afraid of books; in the second books are afraid of him. For they are a great community of thieves, and one finds the same stolen patterns in all their pockets. Though often dressed in sheep's clothing, they have the maw of wolves. When the student has once found them out, he laughs at the pretensions of erudition, and strides gayly up and down great libraries, feeling that the most blustering folio of them all will turn as pale as if it were bound in law-calf, if he only lay his hand on its shoulder.

Nor, lastly, can any elevation of aim, any thirst for the divine springs of knowledge, enable a man to dispense with the sober habits of observation and the positive acquirements that must give him the stamina to attempt the higher flights of thought. The eagle's wings are nothing without his pectoral muscles. It is not Swedenborg and his disciples that legislate for the scientific world; they may suggest truth, but they rarely prove it, and never bring it into such systematic forms as narrow-minded Nature will insist on laying down.

That all these qualities which go to make up our ideal should exist in absolute perfection in any single man of mortal birth is not to be expected. But there are names in the history of Science which recall so imposing a combination of these several gifts, that, comparing the men who bore them with the civilization of their time, we can hardly conceive that uninspired intellect should come nearer the imaginary standard. Such a man was Aristotle. The slender and close-shaven fop, with the showy mantle on his ungraceful person and the costly rings on his fingers, who hung on the lips of Plato for twenty years, and trained the boy of Macedon to whatever wisdom he possessed,—whose life was set by destiny between the greatest of thinkers and the greatest of conquerors,—seems to have borrowed the intellect of the one and the universal aspirations of the other. But because he invaded every realm of knowledge, it must not be thought he dealt with Nature at second-hand. He was a collector and a dissector. He could display the anatomical structure of a fish as well as write a treatise on the universe or on rhetoric, or government or logic, or music or mathematics. Dethroned we call him; and yet Mr. Agassiz quotes his descriptions with respect, and confesses that the systematic classification of animals makes but one stride from Aristotle to Linnaeus.

Cuvier was such a man. Alone, and unapproached in his own spheres of knowledge, his "Report on the Progress of the Natural Sciences" is only an index to the wide range of his intellect. In one point, however, we must own that he seems slow of apprehension or limited by preconceived opinions,—in his reception of the homologies pointed out by Oken and the Physiophilosophical observers.

In the same range of intellects we should reckon Linnaeus and Humboldt, and should have reckoned Goethe, had he given himself to science.

We do not assume to say where in the category of fully equipped intelligences Mr. Agassiz belongs. But if the union of the most extraordinary observing powers with an almost poetic perception of analogies, with a wide compass of thought, the classifying instinct and habit, large knowledge of books, and personal intimacy with the leaders in various departments of knowledge, and with this the upward-looking aspect of mind and heart, which is the crowning gift of all,—if the union of these qualities can give to the man of science a claim to the nobler name of wisdom, it is not flattery, but justice, to award this distinction to Mr. Agassiz.

To him, then, we listen, when, after having sounded every note in the wide gamut of Nature, after reading the story of life as it stands written in the long series of records reaching from Cambrian fossils to ovarian germs, after tracing the divine principle of order from the starlike flower at his feet to the flower-like circle of planets which spreads its fiery corolla, in obedience to the same simple law that disposes the leaves of the growing plant,—as our eminent mathematician tells us,—he relates in simple and reverential accents the highest truths he has learned in traversing God's mighty universe. For him, and such as him,—for us, too, if we read wisely,—the toiling slaves of science, often working with little consciousness of the full proportions of the edifice they are helping to construct, have spent their busy lives. All knowledge asserts its true dignity when once brought into relation with the grand end of knowledge,—a wider and deeper view of the significance of conscious and unconscious created being, and the character of its Creator.

We shall close this article with some remarks upon the great doctrines that dominate all the manifold subordinate thoughts which fill these crowded pages. The plan of creation, Mr. Agassiz maintains, "has not grown out of the necessary action of physical laws, but was the free conception of the Almighty Intellect, matured in his thought before it was manifested in tangible, external forms." Before Mr. Agassiz, before Linnaeus, before Aristotle, before Plato, Timaeus the Locrian spake; the original, together with the version we cite, is given with the Plato of Ficinus:—"Duas esse rerum omnium causas: mentem quidem, earum quae ratione quadam nascuntur, et necessitatem, earum quae existunt vi quadam, secundum corporum potentias et faculitates. Harrum rerum, id est, Natunae bonorum, optimum esse quoddam rerum optimarum principium, et Deum vocari.... Esse praeterea in hac Naturae universitate quiddam quod maneat et intelligible sit, rerum genitarum, quae quidem in perpetuo quodam mutationum fluxu versantur, exemplar, Ideam dici et mente comprehendi.... Permanet igitur mundus constanter talis qualis est creatus a Deo ... proponente sibi non exemplaria quaedam manuum opificio edita, sed illam Ideam intelligibilemque essentiam."—So taught the half-inspired pagan philosopher whom Plato took as his guide in his contemplations of Nature.

We trace the thought again in Dante, amidst the various fragments of ancient wisdom which he has embodied in the "Divina Commedia":

Ci che non muore e ci che pu morire Non se non splendor cli quella idea Che partorisco, amando, il nosfro Sire. ——Paradiso, XIII. 52-54.

Two thousand years after the old Greek had written, the Christian philosopher, Sir Thomas Browne, repeats the same doctrine in a new phraseology:—"Before Abraham was, I am, is the saying of Christ; yet it is true in some sense, if I say it of myself; for I was not only before myself, but Adam, that is, in the idea of God, and the decree of that Synod held from all eternity. And in this sense, I say, the World was before the Creation, and at an end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive; though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise; and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain."

The slender reed through which Philosophy breathed her first musical whisperings is laid by, and the sacred lyre of Theology is silent or little heeded. But the mighty organ of Modern Science with its hundred stops, each answering to some voice of Nature, takes up the pausing strain, and as we listen we recognize through all its mingling harmonies the simple, sublime, eternal melody that came from the lips of Timaeus the Locrian! The same doctrine reappears in various forms: in the popular works of Derham and Paloy and the Bridgewater Treatises; in the learned and thoughtful pages of Burdach, and in the mystical rhapsodies of Oken. But never, we believe, was it before enforced and illustrated by so imperial a survey of the whole domain of Natural Science as in the volumes before us.

We are not disposed to discuss at any length the opinion maintained by Mr. Agassiz, that life has not grown out of the necessary action of the physical laws. If we accept the customary definitions of the physical laws, we accede most cordially to his proposition. As opposed to the fancies of Epicurus and his poet, Lucretius, or to modern atheistic doctrines of similar character, we have no qualification or condition to suggest which might change its force or significance. When we remember that the genius of such a man as Laplace shared the farthest flight of star-eyed science only to "waft us back the tidings of despair," we are thankful that so profound a student of Nature as Mr. Agassiz has tracked the warm foot-prints of Divinity throughout all the vestiges of creation.

There is danger, however, that, in accepting this doctrine as a truth, we may be led into an inexact conception of the so-called physical laws, unless we closely examine the sense in which we use the expression. The forces which act according to these laws, and the various forms of the so-called matter, or concrete forces, are often spoken of as if they were blind agencies and existences, acting by an inherent fate-like power of their own. But if everything outside of our consciousness resolves itself, in the last analysis, into force, or something capable of producing change, and if force existing by the will of an omniscient and omnipresent Being, to whom time has no absolute significance, is simply God himself in action, then we shall find it impossible to limit the causal agency of the physical forces. All we can say is, that commonly they appear to move in certain rectilinear paths, in which they manifest a degree of uniformity and precision so amazing that we are lost in the infinite intelligence they display,—unless we become perfectly stupid to it, and think, as in the old fable, there is no music in it because we are made deaf by its continued harmony. No single leaf ever made a mistake in falling, though in so doing it solved more problems than were ever held in all the libraries that have changed or are changing into dust or ashes.

We are willing to accept the belief of Mr. Agassiz, "that matter does not exist as such, but is everywhere and always a specific thing, as are all finite beings." But we must extend the same idea to the physical forces, and believe them to be specific agencies, and their acts specific acts,—in other words, each one of them a Divine manifestation. Theology is close upon us in these speculations. "Perhaps," says Mr. Robertson, in the volume of admirable sermons just republished, "even the Eternal himself is more closely bound to his works than our philosophical systems have conceived. Perhaps matter is only a mode of thought." Looking, then, at our recognized forms of matter and physical force as expressions of a self-limiting omnipotence, we concede that the uniform lines of action in which human observation has hitherto traced them do not, and, so far as we can see, cannot, shape the curves of the simplest organism.

It is time for us to close these volumes, to which we cannot even hope to have done justice, and leave them to those graver tribunals that will in due season award their well-weighed decisions. We have taken the Master's hand, and followed Nature through all her paths of life. We have trod with him the shores of old oceans that roll no more, and traced the Providence that orders the creation of to-day engraved in every stony feature of their obsolete organisms. We have broken into that mysterious chamber, the chosen studio of the Infinite Artist, where, beneath its marble or crystalline dome, he fashions the embryo from its formless fluids. And as we turn reluctantly away, the accents we have once already heard linger with us: "In one word, all these facts in their natural connection proclaim aloud the One God, whom man may know, adore, and love; and Natural History must, in good time, become the analysis of the thoughts of the Creator of the Universe, as manifested in the animal and vegetable kingdoms."



TACKING SHIP OFF SHORE

I.

The weather leech of the topsail shivers, The bowlines strain and the lee shrouds slacken, The braces are taut, the lithe boom quivers, And the waves with the coming squall-cloud blacken.

II.

Open one point on the weather bow Is the light-house tall on Fire Island head; There's a shade of doubt on the captain's brow, And the pilot watches the heaving lead.

III.

I stand at the wheel and with eager eye To sea and to sky and to shore I gaze, Till the muttered order of "FULL AND BY!" Is suddenly changed to "FULL FOR STAYS!"

IV.

The ship bends lower before the breeze, As her broadside fair to the blast she lays; And she swifter springs to the rising seas, As the pilot calls, "STAND BY FOR STAYS!"

V.

It is silence all, as each in his place, With the gathered coils in his hardened hands, By tack and bowline, by sheet and brace, Waiting the watchword impatient stands.

VI.

And the light on Fire Island head draws near, As, trumpet-winged, the pilot's shout From his post on the bowsprit's heel I hear, With the welcome call of "READY! ABOUT!"

VII.

No time to spare! It is touch and go, And the captain growls, "DOWN HELM! HARD DOWN!" As my weight on the whirling spokes I throw, While heaven grows black with the storm-cloud's frown.

VIII.

High o'er the knight-heads flies the spray, As we meet the shock of the plunging sea; And my shoulder stiff to the wheel I lay, As I answer, "AYE, AYE, SIR! HA-A-R-D A-LEE!"

IX.

With the swerving leap of a startled steed The ship flies fast in the eye of the wind, The dangerous shoals on the lee recede, And the headland white we have left behind.

X.

The topsails flutter, the jibs collapse And belly and tug at the groaning cleats, The spanker slats, and the mainsail flaps, And thunders the order, "TACKS AND SHEETS!"

XI.

'Mid the rattle of blocks and the tramp of the crew, Hisses the rain of the rushing squall; The sails are aback from clew to clew, And now is the moment for "MAINSAIL, HAUL!"

XII.

And the heavy yards like a baby's toy By fifty strong arms are swiftly swung; She holds her way, and I look with joy For the first white spray o'er the bulwarks flung.

XIII.

"LET GO AND HAUL!" 'Tis the last command, And the head-sails fill to the blast once more; Astern and to leeward lies the land, With its breakers white on the shingly shore.

XIV.

What matters the reef, or the rain, or the squall? I steady the helm for the open sea; The first mate clamors, "BELAY THERE, ALL!" And the captain's breath once more comes free.

XV.

And so off shore let the good ship fly; Little care I how the gusts may blow, In my fo'castle-bunk in a jacket dry,— Eight bells have struck, and my watch is below.



MAMOUL.

THROUGH THE COSSITOLLAH KALEIDOSCOPE.

Under my window, in the street called Cossitollah, flows all the motliness of a Calcutta thoroughfare in two counter-setting currents;— one Chowriagee-ward, in the direction of Nabob magnificence and grace; the other toward the Cooly squalor and deformity of the Radda Bazaar;— and as, in the glare of the early forenoon sun, the shadows of the hither or thither passing throngs fall straight across the way, from the Parsee's godown, over against me, to the gate of the pucca house wherein my look-out is, I watch with interest the frequent eddies occasioned by the clear-steerings of caste,—Brahmin, Warrior, and Merchant keeping severely to the Parsee side, so that the foul shadow of Soodra or Pariah may not pollute their sacred persons. It is as though my window were a tower of Allahabad, and below me, in Cossitollah, were the shy meeting of the waters. Thus, looking up or down, I mark how the limpid Jumna of high caste holds its way in a common bed, but never mingling with the turbid Ganges of an unclean rabble.

Reader, should you ever "do" the City of Palaces, permit me to commend with especial emphasis to your consideration this same Cossitollah, as a representative street, wherein the European and Asiatic elements of the Calcutta panorama are mingled in the most picturesque proportions; for Cossitollah is the link that most directly joins the pitiful benightedness of the Black Town to the imposing splendors of Kumpnee Bahadoor,—the short, but stubborn chain of responsibility, as it were, whereby the ball of helpless and infatuated stock-and-stone-worship is fastened to the leg of British enlightenment and accountability.

From the Midaun, or Parade Ground, with its long-drawn arrays of Sepoy chivalry, its grand reviews before the Burra Lard Sahib, (as in domestic Bengalee we designate the Governor-General,) its solemn sham battles, and its welkin-rending regimental bands, by whose brass and sheepskin God saves the Queen twice a day; from Government House, with its historic pride, pomp, and circumstance, and its red tape, its aides-de-camp, and its adjutant-birds, its stirring associations, and its stupid architecture; from the pensioned aristocracy of Chowringhee the Magnificent; from the carnival concourse of the Esplanade, with its kaleidoscopic surprises; from the grim patronage of Fort William, with its in-every-department well-regulated fee-faw-fum; in fine, from Clive, and Hastings, and Wellington, and Gough, and Hardinge, and Napier, and Bentinck, and Ellenborough, and Dalhousie, and all the John Company that has come of them; from the tremendous and overwhelming SAHIB, to that most profoundly abject of human objects, the Hindoo PARIAH, (who approaches thee, O Awful Being! O Benign Protector of the Poor! O Writer in the Salt-and-Opium Office! on his hands and knees, and with a wisp of grass in his mouth, to denote that he is thy beast,)— from all those to this, the shortest cut is through Cossitollah.

And so, in the current of its passengers, partaking the characteristics of its contrasted extremities, fantastically blending the purple and fine linen of Chowringhee with the breech-cloths of the Black Town, Cossitollah is, as I have said, preminently the type street of Calcutta. Other localities have their peculiar throngs, and certain classes and castes are proper to certain thoroughfares;— Sepoys and dogboys to the Midaun; circars or clerks, and chowkeydars or private police, to Tank Square; a world of pampered women, fat civil servants, coachmen, ayahs or nurses, durwans or doorkeepers, cha-prasseys or messengers, kitmudgars or waiters, to Garden Reach; palanquin-bearers, the smaller fry of banyans or shopkeepers, and dandees or boatmen, to the Ghauts; together with no end of coolies, and bheestees or water-carriers, horse-dealers, and syces or grooms, to Durumtollah; sailors, British and American, Malay and Lascar, to Flag Street, the quarter of punch-houses;—but in Cossitollah all castes and vocations are met, whether their talk be of gold mohurs or cowries; here the Sahib gives the horrid leper a wide berth, and the Baboo walks carefully round the shadow of Mehtur, the sweeper. Therefore, reader, Cossitollah is by all means the street for you to draw profound conclusions from.

Come, let us sit in the window and observe; it is but forty puffs of a No. 3 cheroot, in a lazy palanquin, from one end of Cossitollah to the other; and from our window, though not exactly midway, but nearer the Bazaar, we can see from Flag Street wellnigh to the Midaun.

What is this? A close palkee, with a passenger; the bearers, with elbows sharply crooked, and calves all varicose, trotting to a monotonous, jerking ditty, which the sirdar, or leader, is impudently improvising, to the refrain of Putterum, ("Easy now!") at the expense of their fare's amour-propre.

"Out of the way there! Putterum. This is a Rajah! Putterum. Very small Rajah! Putterum. Sixpenny Rajah! Putterum. Holes in his elbows! Putterum. Capitan Slipshod! Putterum. Son of a sea-cook! Putterum. Hush! he will beat us! Putterum. Hush! he will kick us! Putterum. Kick us and curse us! Putterum. Not he, the greenhorn! Putterum. Don't understand us! Putterum. Don't know the lingo! Putterum. Let's shake the palkee! Putterum. Rattle the pig's bones! Putterum. Set down the palkee! Putterum. Call him a great lord! Putterum. Ask him for buksheesh! Putterum."

And the four consummate knaves do set down the palkee, and shift the pads on their shoulders; while the sirdar slips round to the sliding-door, and timidly intruding his sweaty phiz, at an opening sufficiently narrow to guard his nose against assault from within, but wide enough to give us a glimpse, through an out-bursting cloud of cheroot-smoke, of a pair of stout legs encased in white duck, with the neatest of light pumps at the end of them, says:—

"Buksheesh do, Sahib! buksheesh do! O favorite slave of the Lord! O tender shepherd of the poor! O sublime and beautiful Being, upon whose turban Prosperity dances and Peace makes her bed! Whose mother is twin-sister to the Sacred Cow, and whose grandmother is the Lotos of Seven Virtues! O Khodabund! buksheesh do! Bestow upon thy abject and self-despising slave wherewithal to commemorate the golden hour when, by a blessed dispensation, he was permitted to lay his trembling forehead against thy victorious feet!"

"Jou-jehennum, toom sooa!—Go to Gehenna, you pig! What are you bothering about, with your 'boxes,' 'boxes,' nothing but 'boxes'? Insatiable brutes! Jou! I tell you,—jeldie jou! or by Doorga, the goddess of awful rows, I'll smash the palkee and outrage all your religious prejudices! Jou!"

Evidently our varicose friends imagine they have caught a Tartar, and that the white ducks are not so recent an importation as they at first supposed; for now they catch up the pole of the palkee nimbly, and jou jeldie (that is, trot up smartly) to quite another song.

"Jeldie jou, jeldie!" Putterum. Carry him softly! Putterum. Swiftly and smoothly! Putterum. He is a Rajah! Putterum. Rich little Rajah! Putterum. Fierce little Rajah! Putterum. See how his eyes flash! Putterum. Hear how his voice roars! Putterum. He is a Tippoo! Putterum. Capitan Tippoo! Putterum. Tremble before him! Putterum. Serve him and please him! Putterum. Please him and serve him! Putterum. He will reward us! Putterum. He will protect us! Putterum. He will enrich us! Putterum. Charity Lord Sa'b! Putterum. Out of the way there! Putterum. Way for the great ... Putterum. Rajah of ten crores! Putter.... .... Ten crores!.. Putter.... Rajah.... .... Put.... .... Lard.... .. Putter.... .... ... Sa'b! .... rum.

And so they have turned down Flag Street.

But what now? Here is something more imposing,—a chariot-and-four,— four spanking Arabs in gold-mounted trappings,—a fat and elaborate coachman, very solemn,—two tall hurkarus, or avant-couriers, supporting the box, one on either side, with studied symmetry, like Siva and Vishnu upholding the throne of Brahma,—four syces running at the horses' heads, each with his chowree, or fly-flapper, made from the tail of the Thibet cow,—a fifth before, to clear the way,— a basket of Simpkin, which is as though one should say Champagne, behind, and our own banyan, our man of contracts and ready lakhs, that shrewd broker and substantial banker, the Baboo Kalidas Ramaya Mullick, on the back seat.

"Hi! Cliattak-wallah! Bheestee!—Hi! hi!—You chap with the umbrella, you fellow with the water, clear the way! This Baboo comes, this Baboo rides,—he stops not, he stays not,—he is rich, he is honored. Shall a pig impede him? Shall a pig delay him? Jump, sooa. Jump!"

And thus, amid much vociferation, and unceremonious dispersing of the common herd, who dodge with practised agility right and left, the fat and elaborate coachman pulls up the spanking Arabs at our godown gate, and the Baboo alights with the air of a gentleman of thirty lachs, to the manner born; to him all this outcry is but Mamoul,—usage, custom,—and Mamoul is to him as air.

As the Baboo steps through the wide swinging gate and enters the place that owns him master, let us mark his reception. The durwan first,—our grenadier doorkeeper, the man of proud port and commanding presence, to whom that portal is a post of honor,—our Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, in one, of courage, strength, and address enlisted with fidelity. The loyalty of Ramee Durwan is threefold, in this order: first, to his caste, next, to his beard, and then to his post; only for the two first would he abandon the last; his life he holds of less account than either.

As the Baboo passes, Ramee Durwan, you think, will be ready with profound and obsequious salaam. Not so; he draws himself up to the very last of his extraordinary inches, and touches his forehead lightly with the fingers of his right hand, only slightly inclining his head,—a not more than affable salute,—almost with a quality of concession,—gracious as well as graceful; he would do as much for any puppy of a cadet who might drop in on the Sahib. On the other hand, lowly louteth the Baboo, with eyes downcast and palm applied reverentially to his sleek forehead.

How now? This Baboo is a banyan of solid substance, and the Mullicks all are citizens of credit and renown; while Ramee Durwan gets five rupees a month, and makes his bed at the gate. Last year, they say, when little Dwarkanath Mullick, the Baboo's adopted son, nine years old, was married to the tender child Vinda, old Lulla Seal's darling, on her fifth birthday, the Baboo Kalidas Raniaya Mullick made the occasion famous by liberating fifty prisoners-for-debt, of the Soodra sort, with as many flourishes of his illustrious signature. Ramee Durwan has not a change of turbans.

And now the Baboo passes into the godown, and receives from a score of servile cicars, glibbest of clerks, their several reports of the day's business. Presently, from his low desk, in the lowliest corner, uprises, and comes forward quietly, Mutty Loll Roy, the head circar, venerable, placid, pensive, every way interesting; but he is only the Baboo's head circar, an humble accountant, on fifteen rupees a month. Do you perceive that fact in the style of his salutation? Hardly; for the Baboo piously raises his joined hands high above his head, and, louting lower than before, murmurs the Orthodox salutation, Namaskarum! Yet the Baboo contributed two thousand rupees in fireworks to the last Doorga Fooja, and sent a hundred goats to the altar; while only with many and trying shifts of saving could Mutty Loll afford gold leaf for one image, besides two tomtoms and a horn to march before it in procession. But behold the lordly beneficence in Mutty Loll's attitude and gesture, as with outstretched hands, palms upward, he greets the Baboo condescendingly with a gift of goodwill!

"Idhur ano, Sirdar, idhur ano!—Come hither, Karlee, my gentle bearer, thou of the good heart and gray moustache! Come hither, and enlighten this Sahib's ignorance; tell him why the Durwan is disdainful, as toward the Baboo, and the Circar solemn."

"Man, Sahib! That Durwan Ksutriye, Soldier caste, Rider caste,— feest-i-rat-i-man (first-rate man); that Durwan have got Rajpoot blood, ver-iproud, all same Sahib. Baboo, Merchant caste,— ver-i-good caste, plenty rich, but not so proud Durwan caste; Baboo not have Rajpoot blood, not have i-sharp i-sword, not have musiket. Durwan arm all same tiger; Durwan beard all same lion; Durwan plenty i-strong, plenty proud.

"That Circar,—ah! that Mutty Loll, too, high caste; that Circar Brahmin,—Kooleen Brahmin,—all same Swamy (god); that Circar foot all same Baboo head; that Circar shoe all same Baboo turban. 'Spose Baboo not make that Circar bhote-btote salaam, that Circar say curse, that Circar ispeak jou-jehannam (go to hell). Master und-istand i-me? I ispeak Master so Master know?"

"Very clear, Karlee,—and wholesome expounding. But here comes the Baboo to speak for himself.—Good-day, Baboo! Whither so fast with the spanking Arabs and the Simpkin?—to the garden-house?"

"To the garden-house, Sahib; and the Simpkin is for two young English friends of mine, who will do the garden-house the honor to make it their own for a day or two."

"Take care, Baboo! take care! I have my doubts as to the Simpkin. They do say the orthodoxy of 'Young Bengal' men is none the better for beefsteaks and Heidseck; such diet does not become the son of a strict and straightgoing heathen. Well may the Brahmins groan for the glaring scandals of the new lights; you'll be marrying widows next, and dining at clubs with fast ensigns."

"Sahib, Caste is God, and Mamoul is his prophet. The church of the Churruck post and the orgies of Hooly are in no danger from beef or Simpkin so long as steak or bottle costs a man his inheritance; and we of Young Bengal know too well how hard are the ways of the Pariah to try them for fun. Caste is God, and Mamoul is his prophet. The 'glad tidings of great joy' your missionaries bring fall upon ears stopped with family pride and the family jewels: you know that appropriate old saw in our proverbial philosophy, 'What is the news of the day to a frog in a well?'—Salaam, Sahib! I have but a few minutes to spare, and the supercargo is waiting with the indigo samples."

Presently, as the Cossitollah panorama flows on beneath our window, with all its bizarreness from the bazaars,—its boxwallahs, and its pawn-makers, its peddlers of toys, its money-changers and shopmen, its basket-makers and mat-weavers and chattah-menders, its perambulating cobblers and tailors, its jugglers, gymnasts, and match-girls,—its fellows who feed on glass bottles for the astonishment and delectation of the Sahibs, or who, if you have such a thing as a sheep about you, will undertake to slaughter and skin it with their teeth and devour it on the spot,—its conjure-wallahs, who, for a few pice, will run sharp foils through each other's bodies without for a moment disturbing either health or cheerfulness, or will make mangoes grow under table-cloths, "all fair and proper," while Master waits,—as the Brahmin still dodges the shadow of the Soodra, and the Soodra spits upon the footprint of the Pariah, the Baboo returns to his chariot; the fat and solemn coachman gathers up the reins, the burkarus assume their symmetrical attitudes on the box, the syces bawl, and the socas jump.

Just now a palkee-gharree, cheapest of one-horse vehicles, with but one half-naked syce running at the pony's head, and never a footman near, passes the spanking Arabs; the plain turban of a respectable accountant in the Honorable Company's coal office at Garden Reach shows between the Venetian slats of the little window, and lo! our fine Baboo steps out of his slippers, and standing barefoot in the common dust of Cossitollah,—dust that has been churned by all the pigs'-feet that ply that promiscuous thoroughfare,— humbly touches first the vulgar ground and then his elegant turban, murmuring a pious Namaskarum; for the respectable accountant in the Honorable Company's coal office is, like Mutty Loll, a Kooleen Brahmin,—only a little more so. Caste is God, and Mamoul is his prophet!

At the gate-lodge of the Baboo's garden-house on the Durumtollah Road, a gray and withered hag, all crippled and leprosied, sits durhna.

What may that be?

Be patient; you shall know.

When the Baboo was as yet a youth, his uncle Rajinda, the pride of the Mullicks, died of cholera, and the administration of the estate devolved upon our free-thinking Kalidas. Of course there were mortgages to foreclose, and delinquent debtors to stir up. A certain small shopkeeper of the China Bazaar was responsible to the concern for a few thousand rupees, wherewith he had been accommodated by Uncle Rajinda as a basis for certain operations in seersuckers and castor-oil, that had yielded no returns. So our Baboo, in a curt chit, (that is, note, or sheet of paper, as near as a Bengalee can come to the word,) bade the small speculator of China Bazaar come down forthwith with the rupees.

But, behold you now, "he had paid," he said. "By the Holy Ganges and the Blessed Cow! by the turban of his father and the veil of his mother! restitution had been made long ago," the old man said; "and the soul of Uncle Rajinda, the pride of the Mullicks, had no reason to be disquieted for the rupees, though the seersuckers had been but vanity, and the castor-oil vexation of spirit."

"Produce the documents," said the Baboo, with a business-like impassibility that in Wall Street would have made him a great bear;— "where are the receipts?"

"My Lord, I know not. Prostrating my unworthy turban beneath the lovely lilies of your feet, I swear to my gureeb purwar, the destitute-and-humble-protecting lord, by the Holy Water and the Blessed Cow, by the beard of my father and the veil of my mother, that I settled the little account long ago!"

That unhappy speculator in seersuckers and castor-oil died in prison, and a gooroo (that is, a spiritual teacher) feed by the Baboo, desolated his last hour with the assurance that he should transmigrate into the bodies of seven generations of gharree-horses, and drag feringhee sailormen, in a state of beer, from the ghauts to the punch-houses, all his miserable lives.

Now whether or not the unlucky little speculator had in good faith discharged the debt will, in all the probabilities of human rights and wrongs, never appear this side of the last trump; for the Holy Water and the Sacred Cow, his father's beard and his mother's veil, were not good in law, the documents not forthcoming.

But it is certain that his widow had faith in his integrity; for at once, with all her sorrows on her head, she sallied forth in quest of justice; and from Brahmin post to Sahib pillar she went crying, "See me righted! Against this hard and arrogant Baboo let my wrongs be redressed, or fear the evil eye of Dookhee the Sorrowful, of Haranu the Lost!"

But utterly in vain; for the clamor of the Hindoo widow, however bitterly aggrieved, is but a nuisance, and her accusation insolence. So in her pitiful outcasting, in all the forlorn loathsomeness of leprosy, and the shunned squalor of a cripple, she sat down at the Baboo's gate, to wait for justice till the gods should bestow it,— till Siva, the Avenger, should behold her, and ask, "Who has done this?"

And who shall challenge her? Who shall bid her move on? Mamoul has crowned her Queen of Tears, and her sublime patience and appealing have made a throne of the wayside stone on which she sits; there is no power so audacious that it would give the word to depose her; her matted gray locks and her furrowed cheeks, her sunken eyes and her hungry lips, are her "sacred ashes" of the high caste of Sorrow.

The Brahmin averts his face as he passes, and mutters, "She is as the flower which is out of reach,—she is dedicated to God." That insolent official, the Baboo's pampered durwan, sees in her only Mamoul; he would as soon think of shaving himself as of driving her away. So, as the Baboo passes in or out through the great gate, the solemn coachman whips up the spanking Arabs, and the syces bawl louder than ever, and Kalidas Ramaya Mullick turns away his eyes. But for all that, the durhna woman heaps dust upon her head, which he sees, and mutters a weird warning, which he hears; and though the lawn is wide, and the banian topes are leafy, and a gilded temple, the family shrine, stands between, and the marble veranda is spacious, and the state apartments are remote, they do say the shadow of the durhna woman falls on the iced Simpkin and the steaks, in spite of Young Bengal.

Mootrib i koosh nuw bigo, Tazu bu tazu, nou bu nou! Badu dil koosh bidoh, Tazu bu tazu, nou bu nou! Koosh biu sheen bu kilwul Chung nuwaz-a sa-ut, Bosu sitan bu kam uz o, Tazu bu tazu, nou bu nou!

"Songster sweet, begin the lay, Ever sweet and ever gay! Bring the joy-inspiring wine, Ever fresh and ever fine! With a heart-alluring lass Gayly let the moments pass, Kisses stealing while you may, Ever fresh and ever gay!"

Now surely she who thus sings should be beautiful, after the Hindoo type;—that is, she should have the complexion of chocolate and cream; "her face should be as the full moon, her nose smooth as a flute; she should have eyes like unto lotuses, and a neck like a pigeon's; her voice should be soft as the cuckoo's, and her step as the gait of a young elephant of pure blood." Let us see.

Alas, no! She entertains a set of lazy bearers, smoking the hubble-bubble around a palanquin as they wait for a fare; and her buksheesh may be a cowry or two. By no means is she of the nautch-maidens of Lucknow, who were wont to lighten the hours of debauched majesty between the tiger-fights and the games of leap-frog; by no means is she ringed as to her fingers or belled as to her toes; and though she carries her music wherever she goes, she also carries a shiny brown baby, slung in a canvas tray between her shoulders.

No excessively voluminous folds of gold-embroidered drapery encumber her supple limbs; but her skirts are of the scantiest, (what Miss Flora MacFlimsey would call skimped,) and pitifully mean as to quality. By no means have the imperial looms of Benares contributed to her professional costume a veil of wondrous fineness and a Nabob's price; but a narrow red strip of some poor cotton stuff crosses her bosom like a scarf, and leaves exposed too much of the ruins of once daintier beauties. A string of glass beads, black and red alternate, are all her jewels,—save one silver bodkin, all forlorn, in her hair, and a ring of thin gold wire piercing the right nostril, and, with an effect completely deforming, encircling the lips. Her teeth and nails are deeply stained, and the darkness of her eyes is enhanced by artificial shadows.

And so, while that baby-Tantalus, catching glimpses, over the unveiled shoulder, of the Micawberian fount he cannot reach, stretches his little brown arms, bites, kicks, and squalls,—while a small female apprentice, by way of chorus, in costume and gesture absurdly caricaturing her prima donna, (a sort of Cossitollah marchioness, indeed, for some Dick Swiveller of the Sahibs,) shuffles rheumatically with her feet, or impotently dislocates her slender arms, or pounds insanely on a cracked tomtom, or jangles her clumsy cymbals, while the squatting bearers cry, "Wah wah!" and clap their sweaty hands,—our poor old glee-maiden of Cossitollah strums her two-stringed guitar, letting the baby slide, and creaks corkscrewishly her Chota, chota natchelee:—

Badi sub choo boog zuree, Bar suri kove an puree, Qassu Hufiz ush bigo Tazu bu tazu, nou bu nou!

"Zephyrs, while you gently move By the mansion of my love, Softly Hafiz' strains repeat, Ever new and ever sweet!"

Heaven save the key!

"Ka munkta, Bearer?—What is it, my gentle Karlee?"

"Chittee, Sahib!—chittee for Master."

"Note, hey? from whom? let us see!"

Pink paper,—scented with sandal-wood, pah!—embossed, too, with cornucopias in the corners,—seal motto, Qui hi? ("Who waits?")— denoting that the bearer is to bring an answer. Now for the inside:

"DEVOTED AND RESPECTFUL SIR:—"

"Insured of your pitiful conduct, your obsequious suppliant, an elemosynary lady of decrepit widowhood, throws herself at your Excellency's mercy feet with two imbecile childrens of various denominations. For our Heavenly Father's sake, if not inconvenient,— which we have been beneficently bereaved of other paternal description,—we humbly present our implorations to your munificent Excellency, if any small change, to bestow the same, winch it will be eternally acceptable to said elemosynary widow of late Colonel with distinguished medal in Honorable Service, deceased of cholera, which it was suddenly attacks, and as pretty near destitute. Therefore, hoping your munificent and respectable Excellency will not order, being scornful, your pitiful Excellency's durwan to disperse us; but five rupees, which nothing to Excellency's regards, and our tenacious gratitude never forget; but kissing Excellency's hands on indifferent occasions, and throwing at mercy feet with two imbecile, offsprings of different denominations, I shall ever pray, &c."

"MRS. DIANA, THEODOSIA, COMFORT, GREEN."

"P.S. If not five rupees, two rupees five annas, in name of Excellency's exalted mother, if quite convenient."

There now! for an imposing structure in the florid style of half-caste begging-letters, Mrs. Diana Theodosia Comfort Green flatters herself that is hard to beat.

"'Qui hi?'—Karlee, who is at the gate?"

"Mem Sahib! one chee-chee woman wanch look see Master, ispeakee Master buksheesh give; paunch butcha have got."

"Paunch butcha!—five children! why, Karlee, there are but two here. But remembering, I suppose, that my Excellency has but two 'mercy feet,' and with an eye to symmetry in the arrangement of the grand tableau of which she proposes to make me the central figure, she has made it two 'imbecile offsprings' for the looks of the thing. Do you know her, Karlee?"

"Man, Sahib! too much quentence have got that chee-chee woman; that chee-chee woman all same dam iscamp; paunch butcha not have got,— one butcha not have got. Master not give buksheesh; no good that woman, Karlee think."

"Very well, old man; send her away; tell the durwan to disperse Mrs. Diana Theodosia Comfort Green; but let him not insult her decrepit widowhood, nor alarm her imbecile offsprings of various denominations. For the 'Eurasian' is a great institution, without which polkas at Coolee Bazaar were not, nor pic-nics dansantes at Chandernagore."

But now to tiffin. I smell a smell of curried prawns, and the first mangoes of the season are fragrant. Buxsoo, the khansaman, has cooled the isherry-shrob, as he calls the "green seal," and the kilmudgars are crying, "Tiffin, Sahib!" The Mamoul of meal-time knows no caste or country.

Bur zi hyat ky kooree! Gur nu moodum, mi kooree! Badu bi koor bu yadi o, Tazu bu tazu, nou bu nou!

"Gentle boy, whose silver feet Nimbly move to cadence sweet, Fill us quick the generous wine, Ever fresh and ever fine!"

* * * * *



BOOKS.

It is easy to accuse books, and bad ones are easily found, and the best are but records, and not the things recorded; and certainly there is dilettanteism enough, and books that are merely neutral and do nothing for us. In Plato's "Gorgias," Socrates says, "The ship-master walks in a modest garb near the sea, after bringing his passengers from Aegina or from Pontus, not thinking he has done anything extraordinary, and certainly knowing that his passengers are the same, and in no respect better than when he took them on board." So is it with books, for the most part; they work no redemption in us. The bookseller might certainly know that his customers are in no respect better for the purchase and consumption of his wares. The volume is dear at a dollar, and, after reading to weariness the lettered backs, we leave the shop with a sigh, and learn, as I did, without surprise, of a surly bank-director, that in bank parlors they estimate all stocks of this kind as rubbish.

But it is not less true that there are books which are of that importance in a man's private experience, as to verify for him the fables of Cornelius Agrippa, of Michael Scott, or of the old Orpheus of Thrace; books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative; books which are the work and the proof of faculties so comprehensive, so nearly equal to the world which they paint, that, though one shuts them with meaner ones, he feels his exclusion from them to accuse his way of living.

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.

We owe to books those general benefits which come from high intellectual action. Thus, I think, we often owe to them the perception of immortality. They impart sympathetic activity to the moral power. Go with mean people, and you think life is mean. Then read Plutarch, and the world is a proud place, peopled with men of positive quality, with heroes and demigods standing around us who will not let us sleep. Then, they address the imagination; only poetry inspires poetry. They become the organic culture of the time. College education is the reading of certain books which the common sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already accumulated. If you know that,—for instance, in geometry, if you have read Euclid and Laplace,—your opinion has some value; if you do not know these, you are not entitled to give any opinion on the subject. Whenever any skeptic or bigot claims to be heard on the questions of intellect and morals, we ask if he is familiar with the books of Plato, where all his pert objections have once for all been disposed of. If not, he has no right to our time. Let him go and find himself answered there.

Meantime, the colleges, whilst they provide us with libraries, furnish no professor of books; and, I think, no chair is so much wanted. In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,—some of them,—and are eager to give us a sign, and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them like battalions of infantry in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,—not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets, all alike. But it happens in our experience, that in this lottery there are at least fifty or a hundred blanks to a prize. It seems, then, as if some charitable soul, after losing a great deal of time among the false books, and alighting upon a few true ones which made him happy and wise, would do a right act in naming those which have been bridges or ships to carry him safely over dark morasses and barren oceans, into the heart of sacred cities, into palaces and temples. This would be best done by those great masters of books who from time to time appear,—the Fabricii, the Seldens, Magliabecchis, Scaligers, Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose eyes sweep the whole horizon of learning. But private readers, reading purely for love of the book, would serve us by leaving each the shortest note of what he found.

There are books, and it is practicable to read them, because they are so few. We look over with a sigh the monumental libraries of Paris, of the Vatican, and the British Museum. In the Imperial Library at Paris, it is commonly said, there are six hundred thousand volumes, and nearly as many manuscripts; and perhaps the number of extant printed books may be as many as these numbers united, or exceeding a million. It is easy to count the number of pages which a diligent man can read in a day, and the number of years which human life in favorable circumstances allows to reading; and to demonstrate, that, though he should read from dawn till dark, for sixty years, he must die in the first alcoves. But nothing can be more deceptive than this arithmetic, where none but a natural method is really pertinent. I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is already within the four walls of my study at home. The inspection of the catalogue brings me continually back to the few standard writers who are on every private shelf; and to these it can afford only the most slight and casual additions. The crowds and centuries of books are only commentary and elucidation, echoes and weakeners of these few great voices of Time.

The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a mechanical one of hours and pages. It holds each student to a pursuit of his native aim, instead of a desultory miscellany. Let him read what is proper to him, and not waste his memory on a crowd of mediocrities. As whole nations have derived their culture from a single book,—as the Bible has been the literature as well as the religion of large portions of Europe,—as Hafiz was the eminent genius of the Persians, Confucius of the Chinese, Cervantes of the Spaniards; so, perhaps, the human mind would be a gainer, if all the secondary writers were lost,—say, in England, all but Shakspeare, Milton, and Bacon, through the profounder study so drawn to those wonderful minds. With this pilot of his own genius, let the student read one, or let him read many, he will read advantageously. Dr. Johnson said, "Whilst you stand deliberating which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both: read anything five hours a day, and you will soon be learned."

Nature is much our friend in this matter. Nature is always clarifying her water and her wine. No filtration can be so perfect. She does the same thing by books as by her gases and plants. There is always a selection in writers, and then a selection from the selection. In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel, though they cannot say. There has already been a scrutiny and choice from many hundreds of young pens, before the pamphlet or political chapter which you read in a fugitive journal comes to your eye. All these are young adventurers, who produce their performance to the wise ear of Time, who sits and weighs, and ten years hence out of a million of pages reprints one. Again it is judged, it is winnowed by all the winds of opinion, and what terrific selection has not passed on it, before it can be reprinted after twenty years, and reprinted after a century!—it is as if Minos and Rhadamanthus had indorsed the writing. 'Tis therefore an economy of time to read old and famed books. Nothing can be preserved which is not good; and I know beforehand that Pindar, Martial, Terence, Galen, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Erasmus, More, will be superior to the average intellect. In contemporaries, it is not so easy to distinguish betwixt notoriety and fame.

Be sure, then, to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn without asking, in the street and the train. Dr. Johnson said, "he always went into stately shops"; and good travellers stop at the best hotels; for, though they cost more, they do not cost much more, and there is the good company and the best information. In like manner, the scholar knows that the famed books contain, first and last, the best thoughts and facts. Now and then, by rarest luck, in some foolish Grub Street is the gem we want. But in the best circles is the best information. If you should transfer the amount of your reading day by day in the newspaper to the standard authors,—but who dare speak of such a thing?

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are,

1. Never read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books. 3. Never read any but what you like; or, in Shakespeare's phrase,

"No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en; In brief, Sir, study what you most affect."

Montaigne says, "Books are a languid pleasure"; but I find certain books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was; he shuts the book a richer man. I would never willingly read any others than such. And I will venture, at the risk of inditing a list of old primers and grammars, to count the few books which a superficial reader must thankfully use.

Of the old Greek books, I think there are five which we cannot spare:— 1. Homer, who, in spite of Pope, and all the learned uproar of centuries, has really the true fire, and is good for simple minds, is the true and adequate germ of Greece, and occupies that place as history, which nothing can supply. It holds through all literature, that our best history is still poetry. It is so in Hebrew, in Sanscrit, and in Greek. English history is best known through Shakspeare; how much through Merlin, Robin Hood, and the Scottish ballads! the German, through the Nibelungen Lied; the Spanish, through the Cid. Of Homer, George Chapman's is the heroic translation, though the most literal prose version is the best of all.—2. Herodotus, whose history contains inestimable anecdotes, which brought it with the learned into a sort of disesteem; but in these days, when it is found that what is most memorable of history is a few anecdotes, and that we need not be alarmed, though we should find it not dull, it is regaining credit.—3. Aeschylus, the grandest of the three tragedians, who has given us under a thin veil the first plantation of Europe. The "Prometheus" is a poem of the like dignity and scope as the book of Job, or the Norse "Edda."—4. Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there should be no end. You find in him that which you have already found in Homer, now ripened to thought,—the poet converted to a philosopher, with loftier strains of musical wisdom than Homer reached, as if Homer were the youth, and Plato the finished man; yet with no less security of bold and perfect song, when he cares to use it, and with some harpstrings fetched from a higher heaven. He contains the future, as he came out of the past. In Plato, you explore modern Europe in its causes and seed,—all that in thought, which the history of Europe embodies or has yet to embody. The well-informed man finds himself anticipated. Plato is up with him, too. Nothing has escaped him. Every new crop in the fertile harvest of reform, every fresh suggestion of modern humanity is there. If the student wish to see both sides, and justice done to the man of the world, pitiless exposure of pedants, and the supremacy of truth and the religious sentiment, he shall be contented also. Why should not young men be educated on this book? It would suffice for the tuition of the race,—to test their understanding, and to express their reason. Here is that which is so attractive to all men,—the literature of aristocracy shall I call it?— the picture of the best persons, sentiments, and manners, by the first master, in the best times,—portraits of Pericles, Alcibiades, Crito, Prodicus, Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Socrates, with the lovely background of the Athenian and suburban landscape. Or who can overestimate the images with which he has enriched the minds of men, and which pass like bullion in the currency of all nations? Read the "Phaedo," the "Protagoras," the "Phaedrus," the "Timaeus," the "Republic," and the "Apology of Socrates." 5. Plutarch cannot be spared from the smallest library: first, because he is so readable, which is much; then, that he is medicinal and invigorating. The Lives of Cimon, Lycurgus, Alexander, Demosthenes, Phocion, Marcellus and the rest, are what history has of best. But this book has taken care of itself, and the opinion of the world is expressed in the innumerable cheap editions, which make it as accessible as a newspaper. But Plutarch's "Morals" is less known, and seldom reprinted. Yet such a reader as I am writing to can as ill spare it as the "Lives." He will read in it the essays "On the Daemon of Socrates," "On Isis and Osiris," "On Progress in Virtue," "On Garrulity," "On Love," and thank anew the art of printing, and the cheerful domain of ancient thinking. Plutarch charms by the facility of his associations; so that it signifies little where you open his book, you find yourself at the Olympian tables. His memory is like the Isthmian Games, where all that was excellent in Greece was assembled, and you are stimulated and recruited by lyric verses, by philosophic sentiments, by the forms and behavior of heroes, by the worship of the gods, and by the passing of fillets, parsley and laurel wreaths, chariots, armor, sacred cups, and utensils of sacrifice. An inestimable trilogy of ancient social pictures are the three "Banquets" respectively of Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch. Plutarch's has the least claim to historical accuracy; but the meeting of the Seven Wise Masters is a charming portraiture of ancient manners and discourse, and is as dear as the voice of a fife, and entertaining as a French novel. Xenophon's delineation of Athenian manners is an accessory to Plato, and supplies traits of Socrates; whilst Plato's has merits of every kind,—being a repertory of the wisdom of the ancients on the subject of love,—a picture of a feast of wits, not less descriptive than Aristophanes,— and, lastly, containing that ironical eulogy of Socrates which is the source from which all the portraits of that head current in Europe have been drawn.

Of course, a certain outline should be obtained of Greek history, in which the important moments and persons can be rightly set down; but the shortest is the best, and, if one lacks stomach for Mr. Grote's voluminous annals, the old slight and popular summary of Goldsmith or Gillies will serve. The valuable part is the age of Pericles, and the next generation. And here we must read the "Clouds" of Aristophanes, and what more of that master we gain appetite for, to learn our way in the streets of Athens, and to know the tyranny of Aristophanes, requiring more genius and sometimes not less cruelty than belonged to the official commanders. Aristophanes is now very accessible, with much valuable commentary, through the labors of Mitchell and Cartwright. An excellent popular book is J. A. St. John's "Ancient Greece"; the "Life and Letters" of Niebuhr, even more than his Lectures, furnish leading views; and Winckelmann, a Greek born out of due time, has become essential to an intimate knowledge of the Attic genius. The secret of the recent histories in German and in English is the discovery, owed first to Wolff, and later to Boeckh, that the sincere Greek history of that period must be drawn from Demosthenes, specially from the business orations, and from the comic poets.

If we come down a little by natural steps from the master to the disciples, we have, six or seven centuries later, the Platonists,— who also cannot be skipped,—Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Synesius, Jamblichus. Of Jamblichus the Emperor Julian said, "that he was posterior to Plato in time, not in genius." Of Plotinus, we have eulogies by Porphyry and Longinus, and the favor of the Emperor Gallienus,—indicating the respect he inspired among his contemporaries. If any one who had read with interest the "Isis and Osiris" of Plutarch should then read a chapter called "Providence," by Synesius, translated into English by Thomas Taylor, he will find it one of the majestic remains of literature, and, like one walking in the noblest of temples, will conceive new gratitude to his fellowmen, and a new estimate of their nobility. The imaginative scholar will find few stimulants to his brain like these writers. He has entered the Elysian Fields; and the grand and pleasing figures of gods and daemons and demoniacal men, of the "azonic" and the "aquatic gods," daemons with fulgid eyes, and all the rest of the Platonic rhetoric, exalted a little under the African sun, sail before his eyes. The acolyte has mounted the tripod over the cave at Delphi; his heart dances, his sight is quickened. These guides speak of the gods with such depth and with such pictorial details, as if they had been bodily present at the Olympian feasts. The reader of these books makes new acquaintance with his own mind; new regions of thought are opened. Jamblichus's "Life of Pythagoras" works more directly on the will than the others; since Pythagoras was eminently a practical person, the founder of a school of ascetics and socialists, a planter of colonies, and nowise a man of abstract studies alone.

The respectable and sometimes excellent translations of Bohn's Library have done for literature what railroads have done for internal intercourse. I do not hesitate to read all the books I have named, and all good books, in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable,—any real insight or broad human sentiment. Nay, I observe, that, in our Bible, and other books of lofty moral tone, it seems easy and inevitable to render the rhythm and music of the original into phrases of equal melody. The Italians have a fling at translators, i traditori traduttori, but I thank them. I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book in the original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

For history, there is great choice of ways to bring the student through early Rome. If he can read Livy, he has a good book; but one of the short English compends, some Goldsmith or Ferguson, should be used, that will place in the cycle the bright stars of Plutarch. The poet Horace is the eye of the Augustan age; Tacitus, the wisest of historians; and Martial will give him Roman manners, and some very bad ones, in the early days of the Empire: but Martial must be read, if read at all, in his own tongue. These will bring him to Gibbon, who will take him in charge, and convey him with abundant entertainment down—with notice of all remarkable objects on the way— through fourteen hundred years of time. He cannot spare Gibbon, with his vast reading, with such wit and continuity of mind, that, though never profound, his book is one of the conveniences of civilization, like the proposed railroad from New York to the Pacific,—and, I think, will be sure to send the reader to his "Memoirs of Himself," and the "Extracts from my Journal," and "Abstracts of my Readings," which will spur the laziest scholar to emulation of his prodigious performance.

Now having our idler safe down as far as the fall of Constantinople in 1453, he is in very good courses; for here are trusty hands waiting for him. The cardinal facts of European history are soon learned. There is Dante's poem, to open the Italian Republics of the Middle Age; Dante's "Vita Nuova," to explain Dante and Beatrice; and Boccaccio's "Life of Dante,"—a great man to describe a greater. To help us, perhaps a volume or two of M. Sismondi's "Italian Republics" will be as good as the entire sixteen. When we come to Michel Angelo, his Sonnets and Letters must be read, with his Life by Vasari, or, in our day, by Mr. Duppa. For the Church, and the Feudal Institution, Mr. Hallam's "Middle Ages" will furnish, if superficial, yet readable and conceivable outlines.

The "Life of the Emperor Charles V.," by the useful Robertson, is still the key of the following age. Ximenes, Columbus, Loyola, Luther, Erasmus, Melancthon, Francis I., Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and Henry IV. of France, are his contemporaries. It is a time of seeds and expansions, whereof our recent civilization is the fruit.

If now the relations of England to European affairs bring him to British ground, he is arrived at the very moment when modern history takes new proportions. He can look back for the legends and mythology to the "Younger Edda" and the "Heimrskringla" of Snorro Sturleson, to Mallet's "Northern Antiquities," to Ellis's "Metrical Romances," to Asser's "Life of Alfred," and Venerable Bede, and to the researches of Sharon Turner and Palgrave. Hume will serve him for an intelligent guide, and in the Elizabethan era he is at the richest period of the English mind, with the chief men of action and of thought which that nation has produced, and with a pregnant future before him. Here he has Shakspeare, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Bacon, Chapman, Jonson, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, Herbert, Donne, Herrick; and Milton, Marvell, and Dryden, not long after.

In reading history, he is to prefer the history of individuals. He will not repent the time he gives to Bacon,—not if he read the "Advancement of Learning," the "Essays," the "Novum Organon," the "History of Henry VII.," and then all the "Letters," (especially those to the Earl of Devonshire, explaining the Essex business,) and all but his "Apophthegms."

The task is aided by the strong mutual light which these men shed on each other. Thus, the Works of Ben Jonson are a sort of hoop to bind all these fine persons together, and to the land to which they belong. He has written verses to or on all his notable contemporaries; and what with so many occasional poems, and the portrait sketches in his "Discoveries," and the gossiping record of his opinions in his conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, has really illustrated the England of his time, if not to the same extent, yet much in the same way, as Walter Scott has celebrated the persons and places of Scotland. Walton, Chapman, Herrick, and Sir Henry Wotton write also to the times.

Among the best books are certain Autobiographies: as, St. Augustine's Confessions; Benvenuto Cellini's Life; Montaigne's Essays; Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Memoirs; Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz; Rousseau's Confessions; Linnaeus's Diary; Gibbon's, Hume's, Franklin's, Burns's, Alfieri's, Goethe's, and Haydon's Autobiographies.

Another class of books closely allied to these, and of like interest, are those which may be called Table-Talks; of which the best are Saadi's Gulistan; Luther's Table-Talk; Aubrey's Lives; Spence's Anecdotes; Selden's Table-Talk; Boswell's Life of Johnson; Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe; Coleridge's Table-Talk; and Hazlitt's Life of Northcote.

There is a class whose value I should designate as favorites; such as Froissart's Chronicles; Southey's Chronicle of the Cid; Cervantes; Sully's Memoirs; Rabelais; Montaigne; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas Browne; Aubrey; Sterne; Horace Walpole; Lord Clarendon; Doctor Johnson; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times; Lamb; Landor; and De Quincey;—a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilections. Indeed, a man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great prudencey in showing their books to a stranger.

The annals of bibliography afford many examples of the delirious extent to which book-fancying can go, when the legitimate delight in a book is transferred to a rare edition or to a manuscript. This mania reached its height about the beginning of the present century. For an autograph of Shakspeare one hundred and fifty-five guineas were given. In May, 1812, the library of the Duke of Roxburgh was sold. The sale lasted forty-two days,—we abridge the story from Dibdin,—and among the many curiosities was a copy of Boccaccio published by Valdarfer, at Venice, in 1471; the only perfect copy of this edition. Among the distinguished company which attended the sale were the Duke of Devonshire, Earl Spencer, and the Duke of Marlborough, then Marquis of Blandford. The bid stood at five hundred guineas. "A thousand guineas," said Earl Spencer: "And ten," added the Marquis. You might hear a pin drop. All eyes were bent on the bidders. Now they talked apart, now ate a biscuit, now made a bet, but without the least thought of yielding one to the other. "Two thousand pounds," said the Marquis. The Earl Spencer bethought him like a prudent general of useless bloodshed and waste of powder, and had paused a quarter of a minute, when Lord Althorp with long steps came to his side, as if to bring his father a fresh lance to renew the fight. Father and son whispered together, and Earl Spencer exclaimed, "Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds!" An electric shock went through the assembly. "And ten," quietly added the Marquis. There ended the strife. Ere Evans let the hammer fall, he paused; the ivory instrument swept the air; the spectators stood dumb, when the hammer fell. The stroke of its fall sounded on the farthest shores of Italy. The tap of that hammer was heard in the libraries of Rome, Milan, and Venice. Boccaccio stirred in his sleep of five hundred years, and M. Van Praet groped in vain amidst the royal alcoves in Paris, to detect a copy of the famed Valdarfer Boccaccio.

Another class I distinguish by the term Vocabularies. Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" is a book of great learning. To read it is like reading in a dictionary. 'Tis an inventory to remind us how many classes and species of facts exist, and, in observing into what strange and multiplex by-ways learning has strayed, to infer our opulence. Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion,— the raw material of possible poems and histories. Nothing is wanting but a little shuffling, sorting, ligature, and cartilage. Out of a hundred examples, Cornelius Agrippa "On the Vanity of Arts and Sciences" is a specimen of that scribatious-ness which grew to be the habit of the gluttonous readers of his time. Like the modern Germans, they read a literature, whilst other mortals read a few books. They read voraciously, and must disburden themselves; so they take any general topic, as, Melancholy, or Praise of Science, or Praise of Folly, and write and quote without method or end. Now and then out of that affluence of their learning comes a fine sentence from Theophrastus, or Seneca, or Bothius, but no high method, no inspiring efflux. But one cannot afford to read for a few sentences; they are good only as strings of suggestive words.

There is another class more needful to the present age, because the currents of custom run now in another direction, and leave us dry on this side;—I mean the Imaginative. A right metaphysics should do justice to the cordinate powers of Imagination, Insight, Understanding, and Will. Poetry, with its aids of Mythology and Romance, must be well allowed for an imaginative creature. Men are ever lapsing into a beggarly habit, wherein everything that is not ciphering, that is, which does not serve the tyrannical animal, is hustled out of sight. Our orators and writers are of the same poverty, and, in this rag-fair, neither the Imagination, the great awakening power, nor the Morals, creative of genius and of men, are addressed. But though orator and poet are of this hunger party, the capacities remain. We must have symbols. The child asks you for a story, and is thankful for the poorest. It is not poor to him, but radiant with meaning. The man asks for a novel,—that is, asks leave, for a few hours, to be a poet, and to paint things as they ought to be. The youth asks for a poem. The very dunces wish to go to the theatre. What private heavens can we not open, by yielding to all the suggestion of rich music! We must have idolatries, mythologies, some swing and verge for the creative power lying coiled and cramped here, driving ardent natures to insanity and crime, if it do not find vent. Without the great and beautiful arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him. Whilst the prudential and economical tone of society starves the imagination, affronted Nature gets such indemnity as she may. The novel is that allowance and frolic the imagination finds. Everything else pins it down, and men flee for redress to Byron, Scott, Disraeli, Dumas, Sand, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and Reade. Their education is neglected; but the circulating library and the theatre, as well as the trout-fishing, the Notch Mountains, the Adirondac country, the tour to Mont Blanc, to the White Hills, and the Ghauts, make such amends as they can.

The imagination infuses a certain volatility and intoxication. It has a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like planets, and, once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the music, they never quite subside to their old stony state. But what is the Imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the Reason. And books that treat the old pedantries of the world, our times, places, professions, customs, opinions, histories, with a certain freedom, and distribute things, not after the usages of America and Europe, but after the laws of right reason, and with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again, enable us to form an original judgment of our duties, and suggest new thoughts for to-morrow.

"Lucrezia Floriani," "Le Pch de M. Antoine," "Jeanne," of George Sand, are great steps from the novel of one termination, which we all read twenty years ago. Yet how far off from life and manners and motives the novel still is! Life lies about us dumb; the day, as we know it, has not yet found a tongue. These stories are to the plots of real life what the figures in "La Belle Assemble," which represent the fashion of the month, are to portraits. But the novel will find the way to our interiors one day, and will not always be the novel of costume merely. I do not think them inoperative now. So much novel-reading cannot leave the young men and maidens untouched; and doubtless it gives some ideal dignity to the day. The young study noble behavior; and as the player in "Consuelo" insists that he and his colleagues on the boards have taught princes the fine etiquette and strokes of grace and dignity which they practise with so much effect in their villas and among their dependents, so I often see traces of the Scotch or the French novel in the courtesy and brilliancy of young midshipmen, collegians, and clerks. Indeed, when one observes how ill and ugly people make their loves and quarrels, 'tis pity they should not read novels a little more, to import the fine generosities, and the clear, firm conduct, which are as becoming in the unions and separations which love effects under shingle roofs as in palaces and among illustrious personages.

In novels the most serious questions are really beginning to be discussed. What made the popularity of "Jane Eyre," but that a central question was answered in some sort? The question there answered in regard to a vicious marriage will always be treated according to the habit of the party. A person of commanding individualism will answer it as Rochester does,—as Cleopatra, as Milton, as George Sand do,—magnifying the exception into a rule, dwarfing the world into an exception. A person of less courage, that is, of less constitution, will answer as the heroine does,—giving way to fate, to conventionalism, to the actual state and doings of men and women.

For the most part, our novel-reading is a passion for results. We admire parks, and high-born beauties, and the homage of drawing-rooms, and parliaments. They make us skeptical, by giving prominence to wealth and social position.

I remember when some peering eyes of boys discovered that the oranges hanging on the boughs of an orange-tree in a gay piazza were tied to the twigs by thread. I fear 'tis so with the novelist's prosperities. Nature has a magic by which she fits the man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character. But the novelist plucks this event here, and that fortune there, and ties them rashly to his figures, to tickle the fancy of his readers with a cloying success, or scare them with shocks of tragedy. And so, on the whole, 'tis a juggle. We are cheated into laughter or wonder by feats which only oddly combine acts that we do every day. There is no new element, no power, no furtherance. 'Tis only confectionery, not the raising of new corn. Great is the poverty of their inventions. She was beautiful, and he fell in love. Money, and killing, and the Wandering Jew, and persuading the lover that his mistress is betrothed to another,—these are the mainsprings; new names, but no new qualities in the men and women. Hence the vain endeavor to keep any bit of this fairy gold, which has rolled like a brook through our hands. A thousand thoughts awoke; great rainbows seemed to span the sky; a morning among the mountains;—but we close the book, and not a ray remains in the memory of evening. But this passion for romance, and this disappointment, show how much we need real elevations and pure poetry; that which shall show us, in morning and night, in stars and mountains, and in all the plight and circumstance of men, the analogons of our own thoughts, and a like impression made by a just book and by the face of Nature.

If our times are sterile in genius, we must cheer us with books of rich and believing men who had atmosphere and amplitude about them. Every good fable, every mythology, every biography out of a religious age, every passage of love, and even philosophy and science, when they proceed from an intellectual integrity, and are not detached and critical, have the imaginative element. The Greek fables, the Persian history, (Firdousi,) the "Younger Edda" of the Scandinavians, the "Chronicle of the Cid," the poem of Dante, the Sonnets of Michel Angelo, the English drama of Shakspeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ford, and even the prose of Bacon and Milton,—in our time, the ode of Wordsworth, and the poems and the prose of Goethe, have this richness, and leave room for hope and for generous attempts.

There is no room left,—and yet I might as well not have begun as to leave out a class of books which are the best: I mean the Bibles of the world, or the sacred books of each nation, which express for each the supreme result of their experience. After the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, which constitute the sacred books of Christendom, these are, the Desatir of the Persians, and the Zoroastrian Oracles; the Vedas and Laws of Menu; the Upanishads, the Vishnu Purana, the Bhagvat Geeta, of the Hindoos; the books of the Buddhists; the "Chinese Classic," of four books, containing the wisdom of Confucius and Mencius. Also such other books as have acquired a semi-canonical authority in the world, as expressing the highest sentiment and hope of nations. Such are the "Hermes Trismegistus," pretending to be Egyptian remains; the "Sentences" of Epictetus; of Marcus Antoninus; the "Vishnu Sarma" of the Hindoos; the "Gulistan" of Saadi; the "Imitation of Christ," of Thomas Kempis; and the "Thoughts" of Pascal.

All these books are the majestic expressions of the universal conscience, and are more to our daily purpose than this year's almanac or this day's newspaper. But they are for the closet, and to be read on the bended knee. Their communications are not to be given or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart. Friendship should give and take, solitude and time brood and ripen, heroes absorb and enact them. They are not to be held by letters printed on a page, but are living characters translatable into every tongue and form of life. I read them on lichens and bark; I watch them on waves on the beach; they fly in birds, they creep in worms; I detect them in laughter and blushes and eye-sparkles of men and women. These are Scriptures which the missionary might well carry over prairie, desert, and ocean, to Siberia, Japan, Timbuctoo. Yet he will find that the spirit which is in them journeys faster than he, and greets him on his arrival,— was there already long before him. The missionary must be carried by it, and find it there, or he goes in vain. Is there any geography in these things? We call them Asiatic, we call them primeval; but perhaps that is only optical; for Nature is always equal to herself, and there are as good pairs of eyes and ears now in the planet as ever were. Only these ejaculations of the soul are uttered one or a few at a time, at long intervals, and it takes millenniums to make a Bible.

These are a few of the books which the old and the later times have yielded us, which will reward the time spent on them. In comparing the number of good books with the shortness of life, many might well be read by proxy, if we had good proxies; and it would be well for sincere young men to borrow a hint from the French Institute and the British Association, and, as they divide the whole body into sections, each of which sit upon and report of certain matters confided to them, so let each scholar associate himself to such persons as he can rely on, in a literary club, in which each shall undertake a single work or series for which he is qualified. For example, how attractive is the whole literature of the "Roman de la Rose," the "Fabliaux," and the gai science of the French Troubadours! Yet who in Boston has time for that? But one of our company shall undertake it, shall study and master it, and shall report on it, as under oath; shall give us the sincere result, as it lies in his mind, adding nothing, keeping nothing back. Another member, meantime, shall as honestly search, sift, and as truly report on British mythology, the Round Table, the histories of Brut, Merlin, and Welsh poetry; a third, on the Saxon Chronicles, Robert of Gloucester, and William of Malmesbury; a fourth, on Mysteries, Early Drama, "Gesta Romanorum," Collier, and Dyce, and the Camden Society. Each shall give us his grains of gold, after the washing; and every other shall then decide whether this is a book indispensable to him also.



THE DIAMOND LENS.

I.

THE BENDING OF THE TWIG.

From a very early period of my life the entire bent of my inclinations had been towards microscopic investigations. When I was not more than ten years old, a distant relative of our family, hoping to astonish my inexperience, constructed a simple microscope for me, by drilling in a disk of copper a small hole, in which a drop of pure water was sustained by capillary attraction. This very primitive apparatus, magnifying some fifty diameters, presented, it is true, only indistinct and imperfect forms, but still sufficiently wonderful to work up my imagination to a preternatural state of excitement.

Seeing me so interested in this rude instrument, my cousin explained to me all that he knew about the principles of the microscope, related to me a few of the wonders which had been accomplished through its agency, and ended by promising to send me one regularly constructed, immediately on his return to the city. I counted the days, the hours, the minutes, that intervened between that promise and his departure.

Meantime I was not idle. Every transparent substance that bore the remotest semblance to a lens I eagerly seized upon and employed in vain attempts to realize that instrument, the theory of whose construction I as yet only vaguely comprehended. All panes of glass containing these oblate spheroidal knots familiarly known as "bull's eyes" were ruthlessly destroyed, in the hope of obtaining lenses of marvellous power. I even went so far as to extract the crystalline humor from the eyes of fishes and animals, and endeavored to press it into the microscopic service. I plead guilty to having stolen the glasses from my Aunt Agatha's spectacles, with a dim idea, of grinding them into lenses of wondrous magnifying properties,—in which attempt it is scarcely necessary to say that I totally failed.

At last the promised instrument came. It was of that order known as Field's simple microscope, and had cost perhaps about fifteen dollars. As far as educational purposes went, a better apparatus could not have been selected. Accompanying it was a small treatise on the microscope,—its history, uses, and discoveries. I comprehended then for the first time the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments." The dull veil of ordinary existence that hung across the world seemed suddenly to roll away, and to lay bare a land of enchantments. I felt towards my companions as the seer might feel towards the ordinary masters of men. I held conversations with Xanure in a tongue which they could not understand. I was in daily communication with living wonders, such as they never imagined in their wildest visions. I penetrated beyond the external portal of things, and roamed through the sanctuaries. Where they beheld only a drop of rain slowly rolling down the window-glass, I saw a universe of beings animated with all the passions common to physical life, and convulsing their minute sphere with struggles as fierce and protracted as those of men. In the common spots of mould, which my mother, good housekeeper that she was, fiercely scooped away from her jam pots, there abode for me, under the name of mildew, enchanted gardens, filled with dells and avenues of the densest foliage and most astonishing verdure, while from the fantastic boughs of these microscopic forests hung strange fruits glittering with green and silver and gold.

It was no scientific thirst that at this time filled my mind. It was the pure enjoyment of a poet to whom a world of wonders has been disclosed. I talked of my solitary pleasures to none. Alone with my microscope, I dimmed my sight, day after day and night after night poring over the marvels which it unfolded to me. I was like one who, having discovered the ancient Eden still existing in all its primitive glory, should resolve to enjoy it in solitude, and never betray to mortal the secret of its locality. The rod of my life was bent at this moment. I destined myself to be a microscopist.

Of course, like every novice, I fancied myself a discoverer. I was ignorant at the time of the thousands of acute intellects engaged in the same pursuit as myself, and with the advantages of instruments a thousand times more powerful than mine. The names of Leeuwenhoek, Williamson, Spencer, Ehrenberg, Schultz, Dujardin, Schact, and Schleiden were then entirely unknown to me, or if known, I was ignorant of their patient and wonderful researches. In every fresh specimen of Cryptogamia which I placed beneath my instrument I believed that I discovered wonders of which the world was as yet ignorant. I remember well the thrill of delight and admiration that shot through me the first time that I discovered the common wheel animalcule (Rotifera vulgaris) expanding and contracting its flexible spokes, and seemingly rotating through the water. Alas! as I grew older, and obtained some works treating of my favorite study, I found that I was only on the threshold of a science to the investigation of which some of the greatest men of the age were devoting their lives and intellects.

As I grew up, my parents, who saw but little likelihood of anything practical resulting from the examination of bits of moss and drops of water through a brass tube and a piece of glass, were anxious that I should choose a profession. It was their desire that I should enter the counting-house of my uncle, Ethan Blake, a prosperous merchant, who carried on business in New York. This suggestion I decisively combated. I had no taste for trade; I should only make a failure; in short, I refused to become a merchant.

But it was necessary for me to select some pursuit. My parents were staid New England people, who insisted on the necessity of labor; and therefore, although, thanks to the bequest of my poor Aunt Agatha, I should, on coming of age, inherit a small fortune sufficient to place me above want, it was decided, that, instead of waiting for this, I should act the nobler part, and employ the intervening years in rendering myself independent.