In 1809, at the age of twenty-six, is published his "History of New York." There were a few punctilious Dutch families who were offended at its sallies; but cultivated people generally welcomed its fun, its spirit, its quiet satire, with heartiness and applause.

Shortly after he entered into a commercial partnership with his brothers, Peter and Ebenezer, of whom one was established in England, the other in New York. In the War of 1812 we find him acting as military aid to Governor Tompkins; and in 1815 he embarks again for Europe. He passes many years in England, in the course of which time the commercial firm, of which he is a member goes into bankruptcy. Upon this, he is of course thrown adrift. But through the influence of his friends at home he is offered the position of Chief Clerk of the Navy Department, with a salary of twenty-four hundred dollars a year. This, however, after some misgivings, he declines. He does not like the idea of being cramped by official routine of duty. He will try what he can do with his pen. And for months after making this decision (we have heard it with unction from his own lips) he can do nothing. His friend Allston is going back to America; Leslie is making a reputation; and he, a bankrupt, and having wantonly thrown up the chance for a lucrative position at home, is suddenly bereft of all capacity for literary work; he makes trial; but it is in vain. The "Sketch-Book" is floating in his thought; but he cannot commit its graces to paper.

The months roll on; something must be done; the secretaryship at home is abandoned; he must try again; he does try; he sends off "Sketch-Book No. I." to America. We know what came of it: success, delight. Number upon number followed. There was an early republication, under the author's auspices, in London. He was feted: it was so odd that an American should write with such control of language, with such a play of fancy, with such pathetic grace. There was a kind of social furor to meet and to see the man who, notwithstanding his Transatlantic birth, had conquered all the witchery of British speech, who knew its possible delicacies of expression, and who graced it with a humor that reminded of Goldsmith.

No American author had ever dreamed of such ovation before: an ovation not due to any incisive thought, not due to any novelty of his subject-matter,—but due to the fact that a man born overseas had suddenly appeared among British writers, who could lay hold upon their own resources of sentiment, and inwrap it in language which charmed them by its grace and provoked them by its purity.

Mr. Murray entered upon the publication of the "Sketch-Book" in 1820, Mr. Irving being at that time thirty-seven years of age. Of his pleasant intimacy with Sir Walter Scott, of his junketings in Paris, of his meeting with Tom Moore, of his unfortunate enlistment in a steamboat-enterprise upon the Seine, there is full and most lively account in the "Life and Letters" before us. "Bracebridge Hall," despatched from Paris in 1822, is received with the same favor which had attended the publication of the "Sketch-Book"; and the pecuniary returns are so liberal that he can lie upon his oars for a while, and (what pleases him more) can effectually aid his brother Peter, who was a party to the unfortunate steamboat-scheme.

After this comes a merry whirl through Europe. The Rhine, Heidelberg, Munich, Vienna, we visit again in his sparkling letters, dated forty odd years ago. His reputation, and the good offices of French and English friends, open an easy path for him; everywhere he finds hospitality and acquaintances, and everywhere, by that frank, genial manner of his, he transmutes even chance acquaintances into confidential friends. The winter of 1822-3 is passed in the delightful city of Dresden. He meets with a warm welcome at the little Saxon court; he has the entree of a pleasant English household, where he becomes fairly domesticated. Mrs. Foster, its accomplished mistress, is a lady of fortune, who has two "lovely daughters." Mr. Irving, in concert with two or three gentlemen-friends, organizes certain home-theatricals, in which the Misses Foster engage with ready zeal and a charming grace. There are Italian readings, and country-excursions, to all of which Mr. Irving is a delighted party. He hardly knows how to tear himself away from scenes so enchanting. To Miss Foster he writes, on the occasion of a little foray into Bohemia,—"I am almost wishing myself back already. I ought to be off like your bird, but I feel I shall not be able to keep clear of the cage." Mrs. Foster, with a womanly curiosity, is eager to know how a man so susceptible as Mr. Irving, and so domestically inclined, should have reached the mature age of forty as a bachelor. Mr. Irving amiably gratifies her curiosity by detailing to her the story of his early and unfortunate attachment, in the shape of the memorandum to which we have already alluded. He closes this confidential disclosure by saying,—"You wonder why I am not married. I have shown you why I was not long since.... My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims upon my thoughts, and upon my means, slender and precarious as they are. I feel as if I had already a family to think and provide for."

We have dwelt upon this little episode, not because it has any essential importance in itself, but because it has been the subject of a most unseemly interpolation in the British reprint of the biography. Mr. Bentley, "Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty," was, it appears, the purchaser, at a small sum, of the advance-sheets of the book; but, in order to secure English copyright, he conceived the idea of introducing extraneous matter of British origin. In prosecution of this design, he found as collaborateurs the two Misses Foster above alluded to, who are now wives of clergymen of the Church of England. Mrs. Fuller, the elder of the sisters, and the special favorite of the author, gives upon the whole a modest and pleasant account of their association with Mr. Irving, and closes with a few lines which, she says, he wrote in her scrap-book in 1832. "He declared it was impossible for him to be less in a writing-mood." And thereupon follow the well-known lines entitled "Echo and Silence." They certainly do not prove very much for the writing-mood of Mr. Irving,—whatever they may prove for Sir Egerton Brydges. The contribution of the younger sister, Mrs. Flora Dawson, is in a somewhat exaggerated and melodramatic vein, in the course of which she takes occasion to expend a great deal of pity upon "poor Irving," who is made to appear in the character of a rejected suitor for the hand of her sister. It is true that the testimony of Mr. Irving's biographer, and of his private papers, is largely against this absurdly romantic construction; but, although it had been perfectly authentic, it is almost incredible that a lady of delicacy should make such blazon of the affair, for the sake of securing a copyright to "Her Majesty's Publisher in Ordinary." We are sorry that Mrs. Dawson has not made a better debut in literature. As for Mr. Bentley, we can characterize his conduct in the matter only by the word—disgraceful. In the whole history of griping literary piracies (of which Americans must bear their share) we can recall no one which shows so bad a taste, and so bad a faith, as this of Mr. Bentley, the "Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty."

In the year 1824 we find Mr. Irving at work in Paris chambers upon the "Tales of a Traveller"; then follow three or four joyous and workful years in Spain, between Madrid, Seville, and the Alhambra. We have all tasted the fruit of that pleasant sojourn; "Columbus" is on every library-shelf; and we remember a certain dog's-eared copy of the "Conquest of Granada" which once upon a time set all the boys of a certain school agog with a martial furor. How we shook our javelins at some bewildered cow blundering into the play-ground! What piratical forays we made upon the neighbors' orchards, after the manner of the brave old Muley Aben Hassan! And as for the Alhambra, the tinkle of the water in the marble basins of its court is lingering on our ears even yet.

In Spain, as elsewhere, Mr. Irving makes a circle of friends about him whom it is hard to leave; but it must be. Accusing comrades at home say he has deserted his country; he turns his face Westward at last, and, full of honors, sails for New York once more, in the year 1832, at the ripe age of forty-nine. There never was a warmer welcome given to a returning citizen. A feast is made for him, at which all the magnates of the city of Manhattan assist; and the author's sensibility is so touched that he can make only stammering acknowledgments,—at which the cheers and the plaudits are heartier than ever.

After this comes the opening of that idyllic life at Sunnyside,—the building of the gables, the gilding of the weather-cocks, the planting of the ivies. "Astoria" and "Bonneville" and the "Tour on the Prairies" keep his hand active and his brain in play. Near and dear relatives relieve his bachelor home of all loneliness. Nine years or more have passed after his return, when he is surprised—and not a little shocked—by his appointment, at the instance of Mr. Webster, as Minister to Madrid.

He cannot resist the memories of the Alhambra, of Seville, of the Guadalquivir. Many pleasant associations are revived in England, in France, and not a few in the now revolutionary Spain. But it is plain to see that the official visit is not so enjoyable as the old untrammelled life in the Peninsula. No matter how light the duties, routine is a harness that galls him. We can almost hear his cheer of thanksgiving as he breaks away from it, and comes once more to his cherished home of Sunnyside. He is not an old man yet, though he counts well into the sixties. He contrives new additions to his cottage; he dashes off the charming "Life of Goldsmith" at a heat. His older books come pouring from the press, and are met with the cordial welcome of new ones.

His brothers, to whom he had been so fondly knit, are all gone save one; Brevoort is gone; Kemble is just above him, at his forge, under the lee of the Highlands. The river by quiet Tarrytown is strung up and down with new "gentlemen's places."

He puts himself resolutely at work upon the "Life of Washington." Frequently recurring illness, and a little shakiness in his step, warn him that his time is nearly up. He knows it. There is only one more task to make good. We hear of him at Mount Vernon, at Arlington, at Saratoga. Volume by volume the work comes forward. The public welcome it,—for they love the author, and they love the subject. Three volumes,—four volumes; and there are rumors that the old gentleman is failing. But whoever finds admission to that delightful home of Sunnyside meets the old smile, the old cheer. Seventy years have shaken the frame, but have not shaken the heartiness of the man. The jest leaps from his eye before his lip can clothe it, as it did twenty years before. There is a friendly pat for his little terrier, and a friendly word for his gardener, as in the old days.

The fifth volume is in progress; but there is a cough that distresses him sorely. He pushes on, however, through his task. The step is growing feebler and the cough more annoying. It is the year 1859, and the seventy-seventh of his age, when, upon a certain November evening, with one little sharp cry of pain, he falls upon his chamber-floor—dead.

* * * * *

There are men whose works we admire, but for whose lives we care nothing. Mr. Irving was not one of them. There is such a manly heartiness in him that we crave close contact: we cannot know him too well. Surely, this sympathy of readers, spontaneous, inevitable, will keep his name always green. There may come greater purists,—though they must con the language well; writers of more dramatic power we have now, possibly a quainter humor,—but one more tender, that puts us in such immediate sympathy with the author, hardly in our day, or in any day, shall we see again.

It is plain enough that Mr. Irving depended largely on his friendships,—that, unconsciously, his courage for meeting and conquering whatever of difficulty lay in his path was fed very much by the encouraging words of those he loved and respected. His were no brawny shoulders to push their way, no matter what points were galled by contact,—no self-asserting, irresistible press of purpose, which is careless of opinion. Throughout, we see in his kindly nature a longing for sympathy: if from those intellectually strong, so much the better; if from dear friends, better yet; if from casual acquaintances, still it is good and serviceable to him, and helps him to keep his poise.

He is a man, too, who clearly shuns controversy, who does not like to take blows or to give blows, and whose intellectual life and development find shape and color from this dread of the combative. Not that he is without a quiet power and exercise of satire,—not that follies which strike his attention do not get a thrust from his fine rapier; but they are such follies, for the most part, as everybody condemns. By reason of this quality in him, he avoids strongly controverted points in history; or, if his course lies over them, he gives a fairly adjusted average of opinion; he is not in mood for trenchant assertions of this or that belief. This same quality, again, makes him shun political life. He has a horror of its wordy wars, its flood of objurgation. Not that he is without opinions, calmly formed, and firmly held; but the entertainment of kindred belief he does not make the measure of his friendships. His character counted on the side of all charity, of forbearance, against harsh judgments; it was largely and Christianly catholic, as well in things political as literary. He never made haste to condemn.

There is a rashness in criminating this retirement from every-day political conflicts which is, to say the least, very short-sighted. Extreme radicalism spurns the comparative inactivity, and says, "Lo, a sluggard!" Extreme conservatism spurns it, and says, "Lo, a coward!" It is only too true that cowards and sluggards both may take shelter under a shield of indifference; but it is equally true that any reasonably acute mind, if only charitably disposed, can readily distinguish between an inactivity which springs from craven or sluggish propensity, and that other which belongs to constitutional temperament, and which, while passing calm and dispassionate judgment upon excesses of opinion of either party, contributes insensibly to moderate the violence of both.

But whatever may have been Mr. Irving's reluctance to ally himself intimately with political affairs, and to assume advocacy of special measures, it is certain that he never failed in open-hearted, outspoken utterance for the cause of virtue, of human liberty, and of his country. There were vulgar assailants, indeed, who alleged at one time that he had thoroughly denationalized himself by his long absences. The charge he always regarded as an affront, and met with scorn. There are those so grossly constituted as to measure a man's love of his own country by the sneers he flings at the country of others. It was not in Mr. Irving's nature to sneer at even an enemy; it was not his way of making conquest. He recognized fully the advantages of a foreign life (at his date) in following up that career of belles-lettres study which he had marked out for himself. The free entree of European libraries and galleries, and familiar association with a class of cultivated men of leisure, (in countries where such a class exists,) offered opportunity for refining his taste, for enlarging his stock of available material, and for stimulating his mental activity, of which he was not slow to perceive the value, and of which he has given ample account.

There is much that is interesting in the Life before us in regard to Mr. Irving's habit of work. He was, like most men of extreme sensitiveness, moody; at times his mind seemed all aglow; he wrote, on such occasions, with extraordinary rapidity, and with that cheery appreciation of his labor which to any author is an immense stimulant. But following upon these happy humors came seasons of wearisome depression; the stale manuscript of yesterday lost its charm; the fancy refused to be lighted; he has not the heart to hammer at the business with dull, lifeless blows, and flings down his pen in despair. There are successive months during which this mood hangs upon him like an incubus; then it passes suddenly, like a cloud, and the air (as at Seville) wooes him to his charmingest fancies.

We do not propose a critical estimate of the books of Mr. Irving. We have neither space nor present temper for this. The world has indorsed his great popularity with the heart, as much as with the brain. There are those who have objected that the last subject of his labor—the "Life of Washington"—was little suited to his imaginative tone of mind, and should have been worked up with a larger and more philosophic grasp of thought. It may well be that at some future time we shall have a more profound estimate of the relations which our great Leader held to his cause and to his time; but, however profound and just such a work may be, we feel quite safe in predicting that it will never supplant the graceful labor of Mr. Irving in the hearts of the American people. Precisely what was wanted Mr. Irving has given: such charming, faithful, truthful picture of the great hero of our Revolution as should carry knowledge of him, of the battles he fought, of his large, self-denying, unswerving patriotism, of the purity of his life, into every household. No man could have done this work better; nor do we think any other will ever do it as well.

And there is his "Sketch-Book,"—in blue and gold, in green and gold, in red and gold;—in what colors, and in what language, does it not appear? Yet the themes are of the simplest: a broken heart; a rural funeral; a Christmas among the hollies; an hour in the Abbey of Westminster: what is there new, or to care greatly for, in these things? Yet he touched them, and all the world are touched by them. Your critic says there is no serious insight, no deep probing; a pretty wind blows over,—that is all.

Yes, that is all; but how many are there who can set such sweet currents of wind aflow?

Only a bruised daisy, only a wounded hare, only Halloween,—and Burns, with all his fresh, healthy, hearty manhood, and only a peasant's pen, touches them in such way that his touch is making the nerves of men and women vibrate, where-ever our Saxon speech is uttered.

There is many a light thing that we cherish,—with which we will not easily part. That souvenir of some dear, dead one we do not value by its weight in gold; that sweet story of the Vicar we do not measure by its breadth of logic. And no American, no matter how late born he may be, but, if he wander in the Catskills, shall hear the rumble of the Dutch revellers at their bowling in the gorges of the mountains,—not one but shall read, and reading shall love, the story of Rip Van Winkle.

It was only a quiet old gentleman of six-and-seventy who was buried awhile ago from his home upon the Hudson: yet the village-shops were all closed; the streets, the houses, the station, were hung in black; thousands from the city thirty miles away thronged the high-road leading to the little church where prayers were to be said.

How shall we explain this? The author is dead, indeed, whose writings were admired by all; but there is something worthier to be said than this:—At the little church lay the body of the man whom all men loved.



THE RIM.

PART II.

Affairs went smoothly and noiselessly on for some three months. Mr. St. George had received the congratulations of the neighborhood, who, perceiving that Eloise still remained at The Rim, presumed all was satisfactory; and Eloise refused herself to all, the better by reason of her term of mourning. The slaves on the estate no longer infected others with the result of bad government; their association with the Blue-Bluffs people, a notoriously bad set, as well they might be, was broken up; they felt, though the reins hung freely and the burden was light, that there was a strong hand behind them that knew how to pull them up or put them in the dust, and they learned so much respect and even love for that hand as never to presume on the fact that it would not perhaps choose to exert its full power; work was well done; there was no further trespassing on other precincts; the world was in perfect order, so far as St. George's administration of it extended. He was, moreover, a man of distinction; serving, young as he was, four terms in Congress from a distant district, he was already spoken of again as the candidate of the immediate vicinity; his advice was sought in a hundred matters about which he knew nothing at all,—and always given, in spite of the last-mentioned circumstance; he had a careless, easy way of taking the life out of a man's mouth, so to speak, and disposing of it for that man's advantage as he himself pleased, so that the man felt under an infinite obligation; he had, too, an air with him of such superiority over the ills of life, such undoubted kingliness, that every one succumbed and rested gladly on so firm a precedent. Mr. St. George in this brief time had accepted much hospitality, had won a thousand friends, and by Christmas had made himself, through his genial strength to-day and his sardonic sarcasm to-morrow, as thoroughly the autocrat of all the region as ever Mr. Erne had been. For all that men want is a master; give them somebody that will lead, and glad enough are they to follow. But Mr. Erne's supremacy had merely been a matter of birth and of kindly feeling; Mr. St. George's was, first, because he choose to have it, and secondly, because nobody was able to refuse it. Marlboro's masterliness was quite another thing, affected no clusters of men, and was felt only by those whom he owned, body and soul.

In the mean time, the family seldom saw Mr. St. George, and when they did, he was so stately that they would have been quite willing to shut their eyes. They forgot, however, that, when you insist on being yourself an iceberg, you really cool the air about you. Once, indeed, or twice, there had been brief, but notable exceptions in his conduct.

A period of heavy rains had just elapsed, and Eloise, weary of confinement, had gone on the first clear day strolling round the place, as secure as in a drawing-room, since there was not one of her father's people but adored her.

"You are going out, Miss Changarnier?" Mr. St. George had remarked at the door; and, on being answered, he had added in a soliloquy, as if not deigning a second address for a second rebuff,—"It will be quite impossible to go far, for the freshet has swollen the brooks into rivers."

Eloise, however, took no notice of the information, and went on her way, strolled farther than she had intended, and forded a brook because Mr. St. George had said she could not. Then she sat down under a branching tree that dropped its leaves about her and into the brook, and began to read the "Romaunt of the Rose": at least, I fancy that was the book she had. While she remained, the brook swirling ever louder between the pauses, the sunset ran red in the sky and warned her to hasten home. But she disregarded the warning till purple shadows fell softly on the page, and stars and moon stole out to peer above her shoulder and see what it was that so entranced the maiden. Rising hurriedly, she moved away; and only when she had crossed two or three of the stepping-stones did she perceive, on looking down, that, while she had been reading, the water had risen above the next ones with a depth that the failing light forbade her to see. Standing there, and bending dizzily forward to guess the strength of the dark stream now so loudly and rapidly rushing by, there came a noise like a bursting water-spout; suddenly her waist was seized, and she was swept back to the shore. The next instant, with a seething sound, a great uprooted oak tore along the very spot on which she had stood.

"Seeking danger for the pleasure of escape?" said a cool voice in her ear, as her feet were planted on dry land. "A little excitement spices our still life so well!"

"Mr. St. George! how dare you?" cried Eloise, freeing herself.

"What would you have had me do? Should I have stood here, letting I dare not wait upon I would, like the cat i' the adage, while the oak caught and rushed you off to sea? Too big a broomstick for such a little witch!"

"You should not have been here at all, Sir!"

"There shall be thanks in all the churches, next Sunday, that I was."

"At least, Sir, I can spare further aid."

"Play Undine and the Knight on the island? It wouldn't be at all safe,—it wouldn't be proper, you know," said Mr. St. George, raising his eyebrows. "The dam that shuts up the irrigating waters broke an hour ago," added he, in the tone of another person. "I sent servants to find you, in every direction, and happened this way myself."

Eloise was a little sobered.

"I am much obliged to you, Sir," she said.

"So it seems," he replied, dryly. "I shall be forced to offend you again," he continued, "as further delay will render the stream entirely impassable."

And before she could utter a syllable of deprecation, she had swung a brief moment in the air, and was upon the other side, up which Mr. St. George, in his high seven-league boots, clambered so soon as he had set her down. Instead of venturing any new display of indignation, as St. George expected, Eloise walked on with him quietly a moment, and then, looking up, said,—

"You are very kind, and I am very ungracious."

Mr. St. George did not deny her assertion, only he glanced down at her from his height a second with an inexplicable expression, and immediately after the house became visible bowed low and left her.

"There's been such a tantrum, Miss," said the quadroon Hazel, combing out Eloise's hair that night, "and Massa St. George's horse waited two mortal hours to take him to Blue Bluffs. You ought to have heard him swear! He galloped off at last like mad."

And as Eloise gave no response, unless the cloud on her face spoke for her in the glass, the familiar girl added,—

"Not at you, Miss, not swearing at you,—oh, no, indeed!—but at all of us, to think we'd let you go alone."

"Mr. St. George is too solicitous. That will do, Hazel. Have you spoken to your master about buying Vane?"

"Laws, Miss, I never feels as if he was any master of mine, leastwise excep' one can't help minding him. 'S different from ole Massa,—we minded ole Massa for lub,—but I dunno if it's the music, when Massa St. George speaks, that makes you do what he says, when you just don't mean to,—as if you couldn't help it, and didn't want to help it?" suggested Hazel.

"Mr. St. George," said Eloise, "is very good to his people; they ought to wish to obey him."

"Yes, Miss. On'y he a'n't no business here."

"Don't let me hear you speak so again, Hazel," said Eloise, facing the suddenly cringing girl. "Now you can go."

But Hazel lingered still, over one and another odd trifle, and at length glancing up from where she stooped, with a scarlet on her young tawny cheek, she added, in a low voice,—

"You'll speak to Massa St. George now for me, won't you, Miss?"

"What? About Vane? You would do better yourself. Yes."

Two or three days passed away after this little promise to Hazel, before Eloise, at first forgetting it, and then dreading it, could gather courage to proceed in the negotiations for the handmaiden's suit. She was vaguely aware that she was the last person in the world whose past conduct harmonized with the asking of favors, and she silently offered slight propitiatory sacrifices. Yet she did this so haughtily, in order still not to compromise her own dignity, that they would quite as well have answered the purpose of belligerent signals.

It was one afternoon that Eloise sat at the drawing-room window, having recently finished her day's work, and letting herself linger now in a place which she very rarely so much as passed through. She sat erect, just then,—her head thrown far back, and the eyelids cast down along the pale face. Mr. St. George came into the room noiselessly, and laid down his riding-whip and gloves. Then he paused, struck by her appearance, and admired her motionless attitude for several minutes.

"One sits for Mnemosyne," he said then.

Eloise lifted her eyes, and a ghost of color flitted along her cheek. Here was a fortunate moment; the deity of it unbent and smiled. Her heart beat in her throat between the words of her thought; yet she recalled, for support, all the romances she had read, and their eloquent portraitures of love, and, remembering that just as Rebecca loved Ivanhoe, as Paolo loved Francesca, so Hazel and Vane loved each other, "I must! I must!" she kept saying chokingly to herself. Mr. St. George had taken up a book. How should she dare disturb him? At last a hesitating voice came sliding towards him,—

"Mr. St. George"——

"I beg your pardon,—did you speak?" he asked, closing his book.

"Mr. St. George, I want to ask you a favor," replied Eloise.

She rose, and unconsciously with such an air that he saw her effort, then came and sat on a lower seat directly before him.

"When papa, when my dear father was living," said she, "I had a maid, who was always mine, who grew up with me, being only a little younger, and I became attached to her"——

And before Eloise knew it she was lightly playing with Mr. St. George's riding-whip,—that being one of her warm traits just out of Nature, the appropriation of everything about her.

"And you have her no longer? That shall be attended to."

"Oh, yes, Sir, she waits on me still; that isn't it. She is only seventeen, she has been an atom wayward,—just, you know, as I might have been"——

Mr. St. George smiled so perceptibly that Eloise added, throwing back her head again,—

"Just as I am, Sir! But she has behaved very nicely for several——Why, this is Mrs. Arles's whip! the one her husband gave her. I knew it by the ivory vine-stem twining the ebony; and there are her initials in the lovely gold chasing. I used to want it to play with, when I was a little girl,—and she wouldn't let me have it, of course. Pretty initials!"

"Yes," said Mr. St. George, coldly.

Eloise put it down. And then she stared at him forgetfully, and, unthinkingly, with great disappointed eyes. Thereat Mr. St. George laughed.

"Don't Russian women present the knout to their bridegrooms?" asked Eloise then, mischievously.

But before he could have replied, she resumed,—

"Well, Sir, Hazel is very pretty"——

"It is Hazel, then? Would you like her to be made more distinctly yours, Miss Eloise?"

"Oh, dear, no, Sir, thank you. That isn't it at all. Hazel is in love."

"Indeed!"

"She is in love with Vane, a boy of Mr. Marlboro's: you may have seen him; he is here a good deal,—by stealth: and they want to be married. But Mr. Marlboro' is their terror, he may put an end to everything, and they are afraid, and—and—could you buy Vane, Mr. St. George?"

"I could, Miss Changarnier."

"And you will, then?" cried Eloise, springing up.

"If Mr. Marlboro' will sell him."

"Won't he?"

"It is a pride of the Marlboro's that there never was a hand sold off the place."

"Oh, I had forgotten. They would tell too shocking stories."

"Not here. Not unless they were sold off the Cuban plantation, where the vicious ones are transported."

"But perhaps he would give him to you."

"Miss Eloise, he would give him to you."

"Me? I have never seen him."

"That is of no consequence. He has seen you."

"I wonder where. Do you really suppose that Mr. Marlboro' would give Vane to me?"

"Miss Eloise, I will see what I can do about it first."

"How kind you are! Thank you!"

And Eloise was about to go.

"One moment, if you please," said the other.

And Mr. St. George remained in meditation. When he spoke, it was not in too assured a tone.

"I am quite aware," said he, "that you consider me in the light of an enemy. Perhaps it is a magnanimity that would be pleasant to you, should you in turn grant that enemy a favor."

"I should like to be able to serve you, Sir."

"Well, then,—I spoke very unwisely a few moments since,—promise me now, that, if Hazel and Vane do not marry till Doomsday, you will not ask Marlboro' for the gift. It places you, an unprotected girl, too much under the weather with such a man as Marlboro'. You promise me?"

And he rose opposite her, smiling and gazing.

"A whole promise is rash," said Eloise, laughing. "Half a one I give you."

"It is for yourself," said Mr. St. George, grimly; and he turned abruptly away, because he knew he lied, and was afraid lest she would know it too.

It was two or three weeks after this, that Mr. St. George, returning one chilly night from some journey, found Mrs. Arles asleep in her chair, a fire upon the hearth, and Eloise sitting on the floor before it with her box and brushes, essaying to catch the shifting play of color opposite her, and paint there one of the great cloven tongues of fire that went soaring up the chimney.

"In pursuit of an ignis-fatuus?" asked he, stooping over her an instant, and suddenly snatching himself erect, as she looked up with a certain sweetness in her smile, and pushed back the drooping tress, that, streaming along the temple and lying in one large curve upon the cheek, sometimes fell too low for order, though never for grace.

"And all in vain," she said, laughingly. "I've worked an hour, I can get the violet edges, I can get the changing bend,—but there 'a no lustre, no flicker,—I can't find out the secret of painting flame."

"It is a secret you found out long ago!" muttered Mr. St. George, unintelligibly, and strode out, banging the door behind him.

And Eloise, astonished and dismayed, abruptly put up her pencils, and went to bed.

So that, when Mr. St. George returned a half-hour afterward for a cheerful fireside-season over nuts and wine, there was nobody there but Mrs. Arles, who picked herself up out of her nap, and went placidly on with her tatting and contrivances.

Two stragglers on the ice-fields of the polar seas would have met each other with less frozen chill than St. George and Eloise did on the succeeding morning. And in that chill a long period elapsed, during which Mr. St. George attended to his affairs, and Eloise silently cast up her accounts.

* * * * *

One morning in the spring, after the last of the soft and balmy winter, Mr. St. George said to Mrs. Arles, at breakfast,—

"A dozen rooms, or more, can be ready by Wednesday? There will be guests at noon, for several weeks. That is the list. I rely on Miss Changarnier's assistance." And he handed her a paper, and went out.

"It will be useless for you to keep your room now," said Mrs. Arles to Eloise, on Wednesday morning. "It isn't like Mr. St. George's bachelor parties with Marlboro' and Montgomery and Mavoisie, when I like to see you keep to yourself as you do. These are all old friends."

"I shall still have my work to do," said Eloise; and she went into the cabinet and sharpened her pens with a vim.

It would doubtless have relieved Mr. St. George of much annoyance and perplexity, if Eloise would have assumed her old place in welcoming the guests; but that was not set down in her part, and Eloise rightly felt that it would be a preposterous thing for her to do. And though, when she heard their voices in the hall, she longed just to open the door and give one glance at Laura Murray sweeping by, or draw Lottie Humphreys in through the crack and indulge in one quick squeeze, she heroically bent herself upon the debit and credit beneath her eye, and tried to forget all about it,—succeeding only in remembering who had lived and who had died since the last time that hall had rung with their voices.

It was past noon when Eloise, having finished her task, and having remained for a long time with her arms upon the desk and her hands upon her eyes, suddenly glanced up and saw a gentleman entering the cabinet, where no gentleman but one was ever allowed to enter. He was in search of a book; and scanning the shelves, his eye fell on her.

He hesitated for a single atom of time, then stepped rapidly forward, and said,—

"Miss Changarnier, I am quite sure."

"Allow me," said quickly another voice at his shoulder, "to present to Miss Changarnier Mr. Marlboro'." For Mr. St. George had entered just in time.

Mr. Marlboro' was a slight man, hardly to be called tall. He wore black, of course, the coat fastened on the breast and letting out just a glimpse of ruffled linen and glancing jewel below, while the lofty brow, set in its fair curling hair, and the peaked beard curling and waving about the throat, gave him the appearance of a Vandyck stepped from the frame. He had the further peculiarity of eyes, dark hazel eyes, that would have glowed like fever, if they were not perpetually wrapped in dream. There was a certain air of careful breeding about him, different from Earl St. George Erne's high-bred bearing, inasmuch as he insisted upon his pedigree and St. George forgot his. Too fiery a Southerner to seek the advantages of Northern colleges, he had educated himself in England, and had contracted while at Oxford the habit of eating opium. Returning home at his majority, and remaining long enough to establish his own ideas, which were peculiarly despotic, upon his property,—through many subsequent travels, tasting in each an experience of all the folly and madness the great capitals of the world afford, through all his life, indeed, this habit was the only thing Marlboro' had not mastered. One other thing, albeit, there was, of which Marlboro' was the slave, and that was the Marlboro' temper.

Eloise returned his salutation cordially, and with a certain naughty pleasure, since Mr. St. George was looking on, and since that person, constituting himself her grim guardian, had in a manner warned her of the other. Then she displayed her pretty little ink-stained hands, and ran away.

Mr. Marlboro' looked after her, and then turned to survey St. George.

"Who would not be the Abelard to such an Eloise?" he said.

There was no answer. St. George was filling a pipe, and whistling the while a melancholy old tune.

"I'll tell you what, St. George"——

Here he paused, and thrummed on the book in time to the tune.

"You were about to impart some information?"

"Has your little nun taken the black veil?"

"It is no nun of my shriving."

"Are you King Ahasuerus himself, to have lived so long in the house with Miss Changarnier, may I ask, and to have thrown no handkerchief?"

"There is some confusion in your rhetoric. But it is not I who am tyrant,—it is she who stands for that;—I am only Mordecai the Jew sitting in the king's gate. As so many Jews do to-day," muttered St. George,—"ay, and on their thrones, too. I am afraid we are neither of us very well up in our Biblical history. She is the Grand Unapproachable."

"Tant mieux. My way is all the clearer."

"Your way to what?"

"To the altar!"

"Yes, you should have married long ago, Marlboro'," said Mr. St. George, the pipe being lighted, the face looming out of azure wreaths, and the heels taking an altitude.

"I came home," said Marlboro', "to marry Eloise Changarnier."

"That is exactly what I intend to do myself."

"You!"

Mr. Marlboro's eyes glistened like a topaz in the sun; but just then a new guest arriving demanded Mr. St. George's attention.

Meantime Eloise had found a feminine conclave assembled in her room, all having prepared their own toilets, and ready to inspect the preparation of hers; and as the work proceeded, Lottie Humphreys added herself to the group, in grand tenue, and pushed Hazel aside, that she might bind up Eloise's already braided hair, and indulge herself in the interim with sundry fervent ejaculations.

"Isn't he splendid?" whispered Lottie, while Laura compared bracelets with Emma Houghton. "Oh, there, isn't he splendid? It's like the king coming down from his throne, when he speaks to you; it puts my heart in a flutter. How do you dare ask him to pass the butter? Now just tell me. Are you engaged to him? Tell me truly, only shake your head, yes or no. No? I don't believe a word you say. Mean to be? Then, I declare——Suppose now, only just suppose, suppose he'd look at me?"

"Oh, what a silly little goose you are, Lottie Humphreys! And you've put geraniums in my hair, when I meant to wear those beautiful blue poison-bells!"

"I never saw any one so dark as you are wear so much blue."

"But it's becoming to me, isn't it?" said Eloise, turning with her smile, as radiant for Lottie as for Marlboro'.

"St. George," said Marlboro', with a beaming face bent over his shoulder, as he took Eloise out to dinner, "my intention was the earlier; it will succeed!"

"As being the eldest born and heir to the succession. Does the good general expose his campaign?"

"There we are quits. It is precisely as a good general that I exposed it."

"But did the Levites unveil the sacred ark?" said Mr. St. George, severely.

"We are talking freemasonry, Miss Changarnier," said Marlboro', and they moved on.

* * * * *

Whether she would or not, Eloise found herself in exactly the same position in the house as before her adopted father's death,—partly because almost all the company, being old friends, recognized no difference, partly because Mr. St. George silently chose it should be so. She soon forgot herself entirely in the pleasure of it, and was unconsciously, even towards Mr. St. George, so sweet and genial, so blithe and bewitching, that his scanning glance would suddenly have to fall, since an expression, he felt, entered it that he dared not have her see. There was always a certain disarray about the costume of Eloise; one tress of her hair was always drooping too low, or one thrust back behind the beautiful temple and tiny ear, or a bracelet was half undone, or a mantle dropping off,—trifles that only gave one the desire to help her; she constantly wore, too, a scarf or shawl, or something of the kind, and the drapery lent her a kind of tender womanliness, which only such things do; then, too, she garnished her hair with flowers always half falling away, somewhat faded with the warmth, and emitting strong, rich fragrances in dying. When she laughed, and the brilliant little teeth sparkled a contrast with the dark smooth skin, when she thought, and her eyes glowed like tear-washed stars, Mr. St. George was wont to turn abruptly away from the vision, unwilling to be so controlled. But of that Eloise never dreamed.

As for Marlboro', on the other hand, he was the moth in the candle. Of Mr. Marlboro's devotion Eloise was quite aware,—and whereas, playing with it the least bit in the world, she had at first enjoyed it, it grew to irk her sadly; she used to beg her friends, in all manner of pretty ways, to take him off her hands, and would resort from her own rooms to theirs, assisting at their awful rites, and endeavoring to get them up as charmingly as possible, that they might lure away her trouble. It was in vain that Marlboro' tried to reopen the subject of their mute warfare with St. George. St. George would not condescend, neither would he sully Eloise's name by bandying it about with another lover. If Marlboro' begged him to toss up for chances, St. George answered that he never threw up a chance; when he went further and offered to stake success or loss, St. George told him he had cast his last die; when he would have spoken her name to him directly, St. George withered him with flamy eyes, and let his manner become too rigid for one to dare more with him. But the ladies had already caught the spirit of the thing, and made little situations of it among themselves. Then when St. George became impregnable to his attacks, Marlboro' pulled his blonde moustache savagely, and grew sullen, and fortunately Eloise did not try to dispel the cloud. Nevertheless, Marlboro' fancied that he perceived victory hovering nearer to St. George than himself, and a rivalry begun in good-humor was likely to take a different cast. In his pique, Marlboro' bade his host farewell, and returned to Blue Bluffs; but it was idle riding, for every day found him again at The Rim, like the old riddle,—

"All saddled, all bridled, all fit for a fight,"

and constant as the magnet to its poles.

It was still the steps of Eloise that Marlboro' haunted. Yesterday, he brought songs to teach her, and among them the chant to which long ago they had once listened together in the old Norman cathedral; to-morrow, he would show her a singular deposit on the beach, of rare silvery shells underflushed with rose, kept there over a tide for her eyes; to-day, he treated her to politics condensed into a single phrase whose essence told all his philosophy:—"The great error in government," he said, "is also inversely the great want in marriage: in government, individuality should be supreme; in marriage, lost. In government, this error is a triple-headed monster: centralization, consolidation, union."

Mr. St. George heard him, and paused a moment before them, one evening, as Marlboro' thus harangued Eloise.

"Consolidation? Centralization?" said he. "The very things we all oppose."

"Nullification is a good solvent."

"A ghost that is laid. There's a redder phantom than that on the horizon, man!"

"What are you talking about, politics or marriage?"

"God forbid that I should soil a lady's ears with the first!" said Mr. St. George, bowing to Eloise; "and as to the last,—I'll none of it!"

And after Mr. Marlboro' had gone that night, as Eloise was about to ascend to her own rooms, Mr. St. George came along again, and, lightly taking the candle, held up the tiny flame before her face.

"What has that contrabandista been saying to you?" demanded Mr. St. George.

Eloise looked ignorantly up.

"Gilding hell? Do not believe him! Never believe anything any one says, when you know he is in love with you! Slavery is a curse! a curse that we inherit for the sins of those drunken Cavaliers, our forefathers! Let us make the best of it!"

"Ah, Mr. St. George," said she, gayly, "this from you, for whom the disciples claim Calhoun's mantle? For what, then, do you contend?"

"For the right of being a free man myself! for the right of enduring the dictation of no man in Maine or Louisiana! for the right to do as I have the mind!" exclaimed Mr. St. George, in a ponderous and suppressed under-voice that rang through her head half-way up-stairs.

Long before, Mr. St. George had very courteously begged Eloise to take a vacation during the stay of their friends, but she had so peremptorily and utterly refused to do so that it ended by his spending the long morning with her in the cabinet, either over certain neglected arrears, or while she wrote letters under his royal dictation, and Hazel sewed a laborious seam between them, as always. Here, at length, after sufficient tantalization by its means, Marlboro' venturously intruded himself every day. Too familiar for interruption, he took another seat, and watched her swift hand's graceful progress. If her pen delayed, she found another awaiting her,—her posture wearied, a footstool was rolled towards her feet,—her side cramped, behold, a cushion,—she looked for fresh paper, it fell before her: all somewhat slavish service, and which Hazel could have rendered as well. Used to slaves, would she have preferred a master? Whether Miss Changarnier relished these abject kindnesses better than Mr. St. George's imperious exactions was precisely the thing that puzzled the two gentlemen.

Meanwhile, during all this gay season, if Eloise had thought of once looking about her, which she never did, she would have seen, that, in whatever group she was, there, too, was Mr. St. George,—that, if they rode three abreast down the great park-avenues, though she laughed with Evan Murray, it was to Mr. St. George's horse that her bridle was secured,—and that, when she sang, it was St. George who jested and smiled and lightly talked the while,—not that her music was not sweet, but that its spell was too strong for him to endure beneath his mask. Yet Eloise drew no deductions; if at first she noticed that it was he who laid the shawl on her shoulders, if she remembered, that, when he fastened her dropping bracelet, biting his lip and looking down, he held the wrist an instant with a clasp that left its whitened pressure there, she remembered, too, that he never spoke to her, were it avoidable, that he failed in small politenesses of the footstool or the fan, and that, if once he had looked at her in an instant's intentness of singular expression, and let a smile well up and flood his eyes and lips and face, in a heart-beat it had faded, and he was standing with folded arms and looking sternly away beyond her, while she caught herself still sitting there and bending forward and smiling up at him like a flower beneath the sun;—to atone for her remissness, she was frowning and cool and curt to Earl St. George for days.

* * * * *

It was about this time, that, one night, when Hazel passed the tea, Eloise's eye, wandering a moment, suddenly woke from a little apathy and observed that there was no widow's cap on Mrs. Arles's hair, that it had refined away through various shades of lace till at last even the delicate cobweb on the back of the head was gone and the glossy locks lay bare, that the sables had become simply black gauze over a steely shine of silk, that the little Andalusian foot lay relieved on a white embroidered cushion, that its owner was glancing up and smiling at a gentleman who bent above her, and that that gentleman was Mr. St. George. When this change had taken place, and whether it had been abrupt or gradual, her careless eye could not tell; and, forgetting her own part momentarily in order to take in the whole of the drama in which they were all acting, Eloise spilled her tea and made some work for Hazel. As the girl rectified her mishap, it flashed on Eloise that she had done nothing more about her suit; she noticed, too, how pale Hazel was, and how subdued and still in all her movements; she remembered that probably Vane had found it impossible to see her and to elude his ever-present master; and she thereupon availed herself of his first disengaged moment to stand at Mr. St. George's side, and ask him if he had ever thought again of a request she had once made him.

"I was thinking of it at this moment," he replied, looking at her with something like sunshine suffusing the brown depth of his eyes; "but the truth is, I am not on such terms with Marlboro' that I may demand a favor."

"Then I shall."

"On your peril!" he cried, with hasty rigor.

But Eloise escaped, trailing one end of her scarf behind, looking back at him, laughing, and shaking her threatening fan as he stepped after her. And then Mr. St. George resumed his haughty silence.

Eloise went down the hall after Hazel. She found her in the empty dining-room, having just set down the salver; the last light, that, stealing in, illumined all the paintings of clusters of fruit and bunches of flowers upon the white panelling, had yet a little ray to spare for the girl where she crouched with her sobs, her apron flung above her head; and when Eloise laid her hand gently on her shoulder, she sprang as if one had struck her.

"Oh, Miss 'Loise! Miss 'Loise! I'm in such trouble!" she gasped.

It did not take long for the little story to find the air. Vane and Hazel, secure of Eloise's efforts, had married. It was one of the immutable Blue Bluffs laws that they had broken: there were no marriages allowed off the place there. Vane was expiating his offence no one knew where, and there were even rumors that he had already been sent away to the Cuban plantation of the Marlboro's, whither all refractory slaves were wont to journey.

Eloise went slowly back to the drawing-room, then out upon the piazza, and with her went that bending grace that accompanied her least motion, and always reminded you of a flower swaying on its stem. Mr. Marlboro' leaned there, listening to Miss Murray's singing within. Eloise went and took her place beside him, while his face brightened. He had been eating opium again, and his eyes were full of dreams. From where they stood upon the piazza they could see the creek winding, a strip of silvery redness, along the coast, and far in the distance where it met the sea, a film upon the sky, rose the dim castellated height of Blue Bluffs, like an azure mist.

"There is something there that I want," said Eloise, archly, looking at the Bluffs.

"There? you shall not wish twice."

Then Hazel approaching, as by signal, offered Mr. Marlboro' a cup, which he declined without gesture or glance, while there gleamed in her eye a subtle look that told how easy it would have been to brew poison for this man who had such an ungodly power over her fate.

"That is my little maid," said Eloise. "I have lent her to Mrs. Arles awhile, though. Is she not pretty,—Hazel?"

"That is Hazel, then? A very witch-hazel!"

"Yes."

"And you want Vane?"

"Yes, Mr. Marlboro'."

"I did not know she was your maid. But the offence of Vane, if overlooked, would be a breach of discipline entailing too hazardous effects. Authority should never relax. What creeps through the iron fingers once can creep again. The gentle dews distilling through the pores of the granite congeal in the first frost and rend the rock. I would have difficulty, Miss Eloise, in pardoning such an offence to you, yourself. Ah, yes, that would be impossible, by Heaven!"

Eloise laughed in her charming way, and said,—

"But, Mr. Marlboro', would it not be an admirable lesson to your people, if Vane were sold?"

"A lesson to teach them all to go and do likewise, eh, Marlboro'?" said St. George, passing, with Miss Humphreys on his arm.

"I have never sold, I never sell, a slave," replied Marlboro', in his placid tone; but St. George was out of hearing. "Yet, Miss Eloise,—if—if you will accept him"——

"Mr. Marlboro'! Indeed? Truly indeed? How happy you make me!"

"And you can make me as happy,—happier, by the infinity of heaven over earth!"

"But ought I to accept such a gift?" asked Eloise, oblivious of his last speech. "But can I?—may I?"—as St. George's warning stole into her memory.

"Most certainly you can! most certainly you shall! he is yours!" And before Eloise could pour forth one of her multitudinous thanks, he had moved away.

Marlboro's, however, was not that noble nature that spurns to beg at the moment when it grants. Directly, he had wheeled about, and with an eager air was again beside her.

"And, Eloise," he said, "if in response I might have one smile, one hope"——

Thoughtlessly enough, Eloise turned her smiling face upon him, and gave him her hand.

"And you give it to me at last, this hand, to crown my life!" he said,—for to his excited brain the trifling deed seemed the weighty event, and when he looked up Eloise still was smiling. Only for a second, though, for her processes of thought were not instantaneous, while to him it was one of Mahomet's moments holding an eternity, and she smiled while she was thinking, thinking simply of her little handmaiden's pleasure. She tried to release her hand. But Mr. Marlboro' did not know that his grasp upon it was that of a vice, for under an artificial stimulus every action is as intense as the fired fancy itself. And as she found it impossible to free it without visible violence, other thoughts visited Eloise. Why should she not give it to him? Who else cared for it? What object had her lonely life? Speak sweetly as they might, what one of her old gallants forgot her loss of wealth? Here was a man to make happy, here was a heart to rest upon, here was a slave of his own passions to set free. Why should she continue to live with Mr. St. George for her haughty master, when here was this man at her feet? Why, but that suddenly the conviction smote her that she loved the one and despised the other, that she adored the master and despised the slave? And she snatched away her hand.

Just then Mr. St. George was coming down the piazza again, on his promenade, his head bent low as he spoke to the clinging little lady on his arm. Passing Eloise, as he raised his face, their eyes met. She was doing, he thought, the very thing that he had disadvised, and, as if to warn her afresh, he looked long, a derisive smile curling his proud lip. That was enough. "He knows it!" exclaimed Eloise to herself. "He believes it! He thinks I love him! He never shall be sure of it!" And turning once more, her face hung down and away, she laid her hand in Marlboro's, without a word or a glance. He bent low over it in the shadow, pressing it with his fervent lips, murmuring, "Mine! mine at last! my own!" And St. George saw the whole.

Just then a little sail crept in sight from where they stood, winding down the creek at the foot of the lawn.

"Oh, how delightful to be on the water to-night!" cried Laura Murray.

"You have but to command," said Mr. St. George, with a certain gayety that seemed struck out like sparks against the flinty fact of the late occurrence,—and half the party trooped down the turf to the shore. The boats were afloat and laden before one knew it. Mr. Marlboro' and Eloise were just one instant too late. Laura Murray shook a triumphant handkerchief at them, and St. George feathered his oar, pausing a moment as if he would return, and then gave a great sweep and his boat fairly leaped over the water.

Mr. Marlboro' did not hesitate. There was the sail they had first seen, now on the point of being lowered beneath the alder-bushes by the young hunters who had sought shore for the night. Gold slipped from one hand to another, a word, a name, and a promise. Eloise was on board, expecting Mrs. Arles and Mrs. Houghton to follow. Marlboro' sprang upon the end, and drew in the rope behind him, waving the other ladies a farewell; the sails were stretched again, the rudder shipped, and wing and wing they went skimming down the channel, past the little fleet of wherries, ploughing the shallow current into foam and spray on their wild career.

"Marlboro' is mad!" said St. George, with a whitening cheek.

Marlboro', standing up, one arm about the mast, and catching the slant beam of the late-rising moon on his face, that shone awfully rapt and intent, saluted them with an ironical cheer, and dashed on. Eloise held the tiller for the moment, still pulsating with her late emotions, not above a trifling play of vanity, welcoming the exhilaration of a race, where she might half forget her trouble, and pleased with a vague anticipation of some intervention that might recall the word which even in these five dragging moments had already begun to corrode and eat into her heart like a rusting fetter. The oarsmen in the wherries bent their muscles to the strife, the boats danced over the tiny crests, the ladies sang their breeziest sea-songs to cheer them at the work. The sail-boat rounded a curve and was almost out of sight.

"Oars never caught sails yet," muttered St. George, and he put his boat to the shore. "There, Murray, try your lazy mettle, and take my oar. As for me, I'm off,"—and he sprang upon the bank, sending the boat spinning off into the current again from his foot. In ten minutes a horseman went galloping by on the high-road skirting the shore, with a pace like that of the Spectre of the Storm.

"Now, Mr. Marlboro'," said Eloise, "shall we not turn back, victorious?"

"Turn?" said Marlboro', shaking loose another fold of the linen. "I never turn! Look your last on the tiny tribe,—we shall see them no more!"

Eloise sprang to her feet. He caught her hand and replaced her; his face was so white that it shone, there was a wild glitter in his eye, and the smile that brooded over her had something in it absolutely terrific.

"We have gone far enough," said Eloise, resolutely. "I wish to rejoin my friends."

"You are with me!" said Marlboro', proudly.

She was afraid to say another word, for to oppose him now in his exultant rage might only work the mood to frenzy. The creek had widened almost to a river,—the sea was close at hand, with its great tumbling surf. She looked at the horizon and the hill for help, but none came; destruction was before them, and on they flew.

Marlboro' stood now, and steadied the tiller with his foot.

"This is motion!" said he. "We fly upon the wings of the wind! The viewless wind comes roaring out of the black region of the East, it fills the high heaven, it roars on to the uttermost undulation of the atmosphere, and we are a part of it! We are only a mote upon its breath, a dust-atom driven before it, Eloise,—and yet one great happiness is greater than it, drowns it in a vaster flood of viewless power, can whisper to it calm!"

How should Eloise contradict him? With such rude awakening, he might only snatch her in his arms and plunge down to death. Perhaps he half divined the fear.

"Yes, Eloise," he said. "They are both here, life and death, at our beck! I can take you to my heart, one instant the tides divide, then they close above us, and you are mine for ever and ever and only,—sealed mine beneath all this crystal sphere of the waters! We hear the gentle lapping of the ripples on the shore, we hear the tones of evening-bells swim out and melt above us, we hear the oar shake off its shower of tinkling drops,—up the jewel-strewn deeps of heaven the planets hang out their golden lamps to light our slumbers! Heart to heart and lip to lip, we are at rest, we are at peace, nothing comes between us, our souls have the eternities in which to mingle!"

He saw Eloise shudder, and turned from his dream, blazing full upon her. "Life, then, is best!" he cried. "But life together and alone, life where we count out its throbs in some far purple island of the main, prolonged who knows how far?—love shall make for us perpetual youth, there shall no gloom enter our Eden, perfect solitude and perfect bliss! Alone, we two in our pride and our joy can defy the powers of any other heaven, we shall become gods ourselves! Up helm and away! Life is best!"



THE NEVA.

I walk, as in a dream, Beside the sweeping stream, Wrapped in the summer midnight's amber haze: Serene the temples stand, And sleep, on either hand, The palace-fronts along the granite quays.

Where golden domes, remote, Above the sea-mist float, The river-arms, dividing, hurry forth; And Peter's fortress-spire, A slender lance of fire, Still sparkles back the splendor of the North.

The pillared angel soars Above the silent shores; Dark from his rock the horseman hangs in air; And down the watery line The exiled Sphinxes pine For Karnak's morning in the mellow glare.

I hear, amid the hush, The restless current's rush, The Neva murmuring through his crystal zone: A voice portentous, deep, To charm a monarch's sleep With dreams of power resistless as his own.

Strong from the stormy Lake, Pure from the springs that break In Valdai vales the forest's mossy floor, Greener than beryl-stone From fir woods vast and lone, In one full stream the braided currents pour.

"Build up your granite piles Around my trembling isles," I hear the River's scornful Genius say: "Raise for eternal time Your palaces sublime, And flash your golden turrets in the day!

"But in my waters cold A mystery I hold,— Of empires and of dynasties the fate: I bend my haughty will, Unchanged, unconquered still, And smile to note your triumph: mine can wait.

"Your fetters I allow, As a strong man may bow His sportive neck to meet a child's command, And curb the conscious power That in one awful hour Could whelm your halls and temples where they stand.

"When infant Rurik first His Norseland mother nursed, My willing flood the future chieftain bore: To Alexander's fame I lent my ancient name, What time my waves ran red with Pagan gore.

"Then Peter came. I laughed To feel his little craft Borne on my bosom round the marshy isles: His daring dream to aid, My chafing floods I laid, And saw my shores transfixed with arrowy piles.

"I wait the far-off day When other dreams shall sway The House of Empire builded by my side,— Dreams that already soar From yonder palace-door, And cast their wavering colors on my tide,—

"Dreams where white temples rise Below the purple skies, By waters blue, which winter never frets,— Where trees of dusky green From terraced gardens lean, And shoot on high the reedy minarets.

"Shadows of mountain-peaks Vex my unshadowed creeks; Dark woods o'erhang my silvery birchen bowers; And islands, bald and high, Break my clear round of sky, And ghostly odors blow from distant flowers.

"Then, ere the cold winds chase These visions from my face, I see the starry phantom of a crown, Beside whose blazing gold This cheating pomp is cold, A moment hover, as the veil drops down.

"Build on! That day shall see My streams forever free. Swift as the wind, and silent as the snow, The frost shall split each wall: Your domes shall crack and fall: My bolts of ice shall strike your barriers low!"

On palace, temple, spire, The morn's descending fire In thousand sparkles o'er the city fell: Life's rising murmur drowned The Neva where he wound Between his isles: he keeps his secret well.



ROBSON.

In the whole of London there is not a dirtier, narrower, and more disreputable thoroughfare than Wych Street. It runs from that lowest part of Drury Lane where Nell Gwyn once had her lodgings, and stood at her door in very primitive costume to see the milkmaids go a-Maying, and parallel to Holywell Street and the Strand, into the church-yard of St. Clements Danes. No good, it was long supposed, could ever come out of Wych Street. The place had borne an evil name for centuries. Up a horrible little court branching northward from it good old George Cruikshank once showed me the house where Jack Sheppard, the robber and prison-breaker, served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the carpenter; and on a beam in the loft of this house Jack is said to have carved his name. When the pavement of the Strand is under repair, Wych Street becomes, perforce, the principal channel of communication between the east and the west end; and Theodore Hook used to say that he never passed through Wych Street in a hackney-coach without being blocked up by a hearse and a coal-wagon in the van, and a mud-cart and the Lord Mayor's carriage in the rear. Wych Street is among the highways we English are ashamed to show to foreigners. We have threatened to pull it down bodily, any time these two hundred years, and a portion of the southern side, on which the old Lyons Inn abutted, has indeed been razed, preparatory to the erection of a grand metropolitan hotel on the American system; but the funds appear not to be forthcoming; the scheme languishes; and, on the other side of the street, another legal hostelry, New Inn, still flourishes in weedy dampness, immovable in the strength of vested interests. Many more years must, I am afraid, elapse before we get rid of Wych Street. It is full of quaint old Tudor houses, with tall gables, carved porches, and lattice-casements; but the picturesque appearance of these tenements compensates but ill for their being mainly dens of vice and depravity, inhabited by the vilest offscourings of the enormous city. Next to Napoli senza sole, Wych Street, Drury Lane, is, morally and physically, about the shadiest street I know.

In Wych Street stands, nevertheless, an oasis in the midst of a desert, a pretty and commodious little theatre, called the Olympic. The entertainments here provided have earned, for brilliance and elegance, so well-deserved a repute, that the Olympic Theatre has become one of the most favorite resorts of the British aristocracy. The Brahminical classes appear oblivious of the yellow streak of caste, when they come hither. On four or five nights in every week during the season, Drury Lane is rendered well-nigh impassable by splendid equipages which have conveyed dukes and marquises and members of Parliament to the Olympic. Frequently, but prior to the lamented death of Prince Albert, you might observe, if you passed through Wych Street in the forenoon, a little platform, covered with faded red cloth, and shaded by a dingy, striped awning, extending from one of the entrance-doors of the Olympic to the edge of the sidewalk. The initiated became at once aware that Her Most Gracious Majesty intended to visit the Olympic Theatre that very evening. The Queen of England goes to theatres no more; but the Prince of Wales and his pretty young wife, the stout, good-tempered Duke of Cambridge, and his sister, the bonny Princess Mary, are still constant visitors to Wych Street. So gorgeous is often the assemblage in this murkiest of streets, that you are reminded of the days when the French noblesse, in all the pride of hoops and hair-powder, deigned to flock to the lowly wine-shop of Ramponneau.

My business, however, is less with the Olympic Theatre, as it at present exists, than with its immediate predecessor. About fifteen years ago, there stood in Wych Street a queer, low-browed little building with a rough wooden portico before it,—not unlike such a portico as I have recently seen in front of a dilapidated inn at Culpepper, Virginia,—and with little blinking windows, very much resembling the port-holes of a man-of-war. According to tradition, the place had, indeed, a kind of naval origin. Old King George III., who, when he was not mad, or meddling with politics, was really a good-natured kind of man, once made Philip Astley, the riding-master, and proprietor of the circus in South Lambeth, a present of a dismantled seventy-four gun-ship captured from the French. With these timbers, some lath and plaster, a few bricks, and a little money, Astley ran up a theatre dedicated to the performance of interludes and burlettas,—that is, of pieces in which the dialogue was not spoken, but sung, in order to avoid interference with the patent-rights of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. In our days, this edifice was known as the Olympic. When I knew this theatre first, it had fallen into a state of seemingly hopeless decadence. Nobody succeeded there. To lease the Olympic Theatre was to court bankruptcy and invite collapse. The charming Vestris had been its tenant for a while. There Liston and Wrench had delighted the town with their most excellent fooling. There many of Planche's most sparkling burlesques had been produced. There a perfect boudoir of a green-room had been fitted up by Bartolozzi's beautiful and witty daughter; and there Hook and Jerrold, Haynes Bayley and A' Beckett had uttered their wittiest sayings. But the destiny of the Olympic was indomitable. There was nae luck about the house; and Eliza Vestris went bankrupt at last. Management after management tried its fortunes in the doomed little house, but without success. Desperate adventurers seized upon it as a last resource, or chose it as a place wherein to consummate their ruin. The Olympic was contiguous to the Insolvent Debtors' Court, in Portugal Street, and from the paint-pots of the Olympic scene-room to the whitewash of the commercial tribunal there was but one step.

It must have been in 1848 that the famous comedian, William Farren, having realized a handsome fortune as an actor, essayed to lose a considerable portion of his wealth by becoming a manager. He succeeded in the last-named enterprise quite as completely as he had done in the other: I mean, that he lost a large sum of money in the Olympic Theatre. He played all kinds of pieces: among others, he gave the public two very humorous burlesques, founded on Shakspeare's plays of "Macbeth" and "The Merchant of Venice." The authors were two clever young Oxford men: Frank Talfourd, the son of the poet-Judge,—father and son are, alas! both dead,—and William Hale, the son of the well-known Archdeacon and Master of the Charter-House. Shakspearian burlesques were no novelty to the town. We had had enough and to spare of them. W. J. Hammond, the original Sam Weller in the dramatized version of "Pickwick," had made people laugh in "Macbeth Travestie" and "Othello according to Act of Parliament." The Olympic burlesques were slightly funnier, and not nearly so coarse as their forerunners; but they were still of no striking salience. Poorly mounted, feebly played,—save in one particular,—they drew but thin houses. Gradually, however, you began to hear at clubs and in critical coteries—at the Albion and the Garrick and the Cafe de l'Europe, at Evans's and at Kilpack's, at the Reunion in Maiden Lane and at Rules's oyster-room, where poor Albert Smith used to reign supreme—rumors about a new actor. The new man was playing Macbeth and Shylock in Talfourd and Hale's parodies. He was a little stunted fellow, not very well-favored, not very young. Nobody—among the bodies who were anybody—had ever heard of him before. Whence he came, or what he was, none knew; but everybody came at last to care. For this little stunted creature, with his hoarse voice and nervous gestures and grotesque delivery, his snarls, his leers, his hunchings of the shoulders, his contortions of the limbs, his gleaming of the eyes, and his grindings of the teeth, was a genius. He became town-talk. He speedily grew famous. He has been an English, I might almost say a European, I might almost say a worldwide celebrity ever since; and his name was FREDERICK ROBSON.

Eventually it was known, when the town grew inquisitive, and the critics were compelled to ferret out his antecedents, that the new actor had already attained middle age,—that he had been vegetating for years in that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low comedian of a country-theatre,—that he had come timidly to London and accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the "Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked success, and almost without notice. He was a quiet, unassuming little man, this Robson, seemingly without vanity and without ambition. He had a wife and family to maintain, and drew his twenty-five or thirty shillings weekly with perfect patience and resignation.

A weary period, however, elapsed between his appearance at the Olympic and his realization of financial success. The critics and the connoisseurs talked about him a long time before the public could be persuaded to go and see him, or the manager to raise his salary. That doomed house with the wooden portico was in the way. At last the wretched remnant of the French seventy-four caught fire and was burned to the ground. Its ill-luck was consistent to the last. A poor actor, named Bender, had engaged the Olympic for a benefit. He was to pay twenty pounds for the use of the house. He had just sold nineteen pounds' worth of tickets, and trusted to the casual receipts at the door for his profits. At a few minutes before six o'clock, having to play in the first piece, he proceeded to the theatre, and entered his dressing-room. By half-past six the whole house was in a blaze. Bender, half undressed, had only time to save himself; and his coat, with the nineteen pounds in the pocket, fell a prey to the flames. After this, will you tell me that there is not such a thing as ill-luck?

The Olympic arose "like a phoenix from its ashes." To use language less poetical, a wealthy tradesman—a cheesemonger, I think—found the capital to build up a new theatre. The second edifice was elegant, and almost splendid; but in the commencement it seemed fated to undergo as evil fortune as its precursor. I cannot exactly remember whether it was in the old or the new Olympic—but I think it was in the new one—that the notorious Walter Watts ran a brief and sumptuous career as manager. He produced many pieces, some of them his own, in a most luxurious manner. He was a man about town, a viveur, a dandy; and it turned out one morning that Walter Watts had been, all along, a clerk in the Globe Insurance Office, at a salary of a hundred and fifty pounds a year; and that he had swindled his employers out of enormous sums of money. He was tried, nominally for stealing "a piece of paper, value one penny," being a check which he had abstracted; but it was understood that his defalcations were little short of ninety thousand pounds sterling. Watts was convicted, and sentenced to ten years' transportation. The poor wretch was not of the heroically villanous mould in which the dashing criminals who came after him, Robson and Redpath, were cast. He was troubled with a conscience. He had drunk himself into delirium tremens; and starting from his pallet one night in a remorseful frenzy, he hanged himself in the jail.

It was during the management of Alfred Wigan at the New Olympic that Frederick Robson began to be heard of again. An old, and not a very clever farce, by one of the Brothers Mayhew, entitled "The Wandering Minstrel," had been revived. In this farce, Robson was engaged to play the part of Jem Baggs, an itinerant vocalist and flageolet-player, who, in tattered attire, roams about from town to town, making the air hideous with his performances. The part was a paltry one, and Robson, who had been engaged mainly at the instance of the manager's wife, a very shrewd and appreciative lady, who persisted in declaring that the ex-low-comedian of the Grecian had "something in him," eked it out by singing an absurd ditty called "Vilikins and his Dinah." The words and the air of "Vilikins" were, if not literally as old as the hills, considerably older than the age of Queen Elizabeth. The story told in the ballad, of a father's cruelty, a daughter's anguish, a sweetheart's despair, and the ultimate suicide of both the lovers, is, albeit couched in uncouth and grotesque language, as pathetic as the tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet." Robson gave every stanza a nonsensical refrain of "Right tooral lol looral, right tooral lol lay." At times, when his audience was convulsed with merriment, he would come to a halt, and gravely observe, "This is not a comic song"; but London, was soon unanimous that such exquisite comicality had not been heard for many a long year. "Vilikins and his Dinah" created a furore. My countrymen are always going mad about something; and Englishmen and Englishwomen all agreed to go crazy about "Vilikins." "Right tooral lol looral" was on every lip. Robson's portrait as Jem Baggs was in every shop-window. A newspaper began an editorial with the first line in "Vilikins,"—

"It's of a liquor-merchant who in London did dwell."

A Judge of Assize absolutely fined the High Sheriff of a county one hundred pounds for the mingled contempt shown in neglecting to provide him with an escort of javelin-men and introducing the irrepressible "Right tooral lol looral" into a speech delivered at the opening of circuit. Nor was the song all that was wonderful in Jem Baggs. His "make-up" was superb. The comic genius of Robson asserted itself in an inimitable lagging gait, an unequalled snivel, a coat and pantaloons every patch on and every rent in which were artistic, and a hat inconceivably battered, crunched, and bulged out of normal, and into preternatural shape.

New triumphs awaited him. In the burlesque of "The Yellow Dwarf," he showed a mastery of the grotesque which approached the terrible. Years before, in Macbeth, he had personated a red-headed, fire-eating, whiskey-drinking Scotchman,—and in Shylock, a servile, fawning, obsequious, yet, when emergency arose, a passionate and vindictive Jew. In the Yellow Dwarf he was the jaundiced embodiment of a spirit of Oriental evil: crafty, malevolent, greedy, insatiate,—full of mockery, mimicry, lubricity, and spite,—an Afrit, a Djinn, a Ghoul, a spawn of Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog! How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you shuddered. He spoke in mere doggerel and slang. He sang trumpery songs to negro melodies. He danced the Lancashire clog-hornpipe; he rattled out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi of the incongruous and the outre, an unmistakably tragic element,—an element of depth and strength and passion, and almost of sublimity. The mountebank became inspired. The Jack Pudding suddenly drew the cothurnus over his clogs. You were awe-stricken by the intensity, the vehemence, he threw into the mean balderdash of the burlesque-monger. These qualities were even more apparent in his subsequent personation of Medea, in Robert Brough's parody of the Franco-Italian tragedy. The love, the hate, the scorn, of the abandoned wife of Jason, the diabolic loathing in which she holds Creuesa, the tigerish affection with which she regards the children whom she is afterwards to slay,—all these were portrayed by Robson, through the medium, be it always remembered, of doggerel and slang, with astonishing force and vigor. The original Medea, the great Ristori herself, came to see Robson, and was delighted with and amazed at him. She scarcely understood two words of English, but the actor's genius struck her home through the bull's-hide target of an unknown tongue. "Uomo straordinario!" she went away saying.

I have anticipated the order of his successes, but at this distance of time and places I can keep no chronological count of them. Robson has always alternated the serio-comic burlesque with pure farce, and after Jem Baggs his brightest hits have been in the deaf ostler in "Boots at the Swan" and the discharged criminal in "Retained for the Defence." In the burlesque of "Masaniello," he had an opportunity—which some thought would prove a magnificent one to him—of showing the grotesque side of insanity; but, for some reason or other, the part seemed distasteful to him. It may have been repugnant to his eminently sensitive spirit to exhibit the ludicrous aspect of the most dreadful of human infirmities. A peste, fame, bello, et dementia libera nos, Domine! Perhaps the piece itself was weak. At all events, "Masaniello" had but a brief run. A drunken man, a jealous man, a deaf man, a fool, a vagabond, a demon, a tyrant, Robson could marvellously depict: in the crazy Neapolitan fisherman he either failed or was unwilling to excel. I had been for a long period extremely solicitous to see Robson undertake the part of Sir Giles Overreach in "A New Way to pay Old Debts." You know that Sir Giles, after the discovery of the obliterated deed, goes stark staring mad. I should have wished to see him assume Edmund Kean's own character in the real play itself; but Robson was nervous of venturing on a purely "legitimate" role. I was half persuaded to write a burlesque on "A New Way to pay Old Debts," and Robson had promised to do his very best with Sir Giles; but a feeling, half of laziness, and half of reverence for the fine old drama, came over me, and I never got farther than the first scene.

By this time some of the foremost dramatists in London thought they could discern in Robson latent characteristics of a nature far more elevated than those which his previous performances had brought into play. It was decided by those who had a right to render an authoritative verdict, that he would shine best in that which we call the "domestic drama." Here it was thought his broad fun, rustic waggery, and curious mastery of provincial dialect might admirably contrast with the melodramatic intensity, and the homely, but touching pathos of which in so eminent a degree he was the master. Hence the dramas, written expressly and deliberately to his measure and capacity, of "Daddy Hardacre," "The Porter's Knot," and "The Chimney-Corner." When I say written, I mean, of course, translated. Our foremost dramatists have not yet ceased to borrow from the French; but, like the gypsies, they so skilfully mutilate the children they have stolen, that the theft becomes almost impossible to detect. Not one person in five hundred, for instance, would discover at first sight that a play so apparently English in conception and structure as the "Ticket-of-Leave Man" is, in reality, a translation from the French.

The success achieved by Robson in the dramas I have named was extended, and was genuine. In Daddy Hardacre, a skilful adaptation of the usurer in Balzac's "Eugenie Grandet," he was tremendous. It made me more than ever wishful to see him in the griping, ruthless Overreach, foiled at last in his wicked ambition and driven to frenzy by the destruction of the document by which he thought to satisfy his lust of gain. Moliere's Avare I thought he would have acted wonderfully; Ben Jonson's Volpone, in "The Fox," he would surely have understood, and powerfully rendered. In the devoted father of "The Porter's Knot" he was likewise most excellent: quiet, unaffected, unobtrusive, never forcing sentiment upon you, never obtaining tears by false pretences, but throughout solid, sterling, natural, admirable. I came at last, however, to the conviction, that, marked as was the distinction gained by this good actor in parts such as these, and as the lighthouse-keeper—the character originally sustained in private by Charles Dickens—in Wilkie Collins's play, domestic drama was not his forte; or, rather, that it was not his fortissimo. In fantastic burlesque, in the comic-terrible, he was unrivalled and inimitable. In the domestic drama he could hardly be surpassed, but he might be approached. Webster, Emery, Addison, could play Daddy Hardacre, or the father in "The Porter's Knot"; but none but himself could at once awe and convulse in Medea and the Yellow Dwarf. These domestic dramas interested, however, as much by their subject as by the excellence of his acting. Moreover, the public are apt sometimes to grow weary of burlesques,—their eternal grimacing and word-torturing and negro-singing and dancing. Themes for parody become exhausted, and, without long surcease, would not bear repetition. You may grow puns, like tobacco, until the soil is utterly worn out. The burlesque-writers, too, exhibited signs of weariness and feebleness. Planche retired into the Heralds' College. The cleverest of the Broughs died. His surviving brother was stupid. Talfourd went to the law before he found an early grave. Hale went to India. The younger generation were scarcely fit to write pantomimes, and it was not always Christmas. Besides, Robson had become a manager, and thought, perhaps, that weightier parts became him. In copartnership with Mr. Emden, he had succeeded Alfred Wigan as lessee of the Olympic, and there I hope he has realized a fortune. But whenever his brief vacations occurred, and actor-like he proceeded to turn them into gold by devoting to performances in country-theatres those days and nights which should properly have been given to rest and peace, he proved faithful to his old loves, and Jem Baggs and Boots at the Swan, Medea and the Yellow Dwarf, continued to be his favorite parts.