This woman's name was Vane. Who her father was no one knew but her mother. When a child, she had lived with the latter in what was at that time the remains of a wooden hut, that must have been among the very first buildings erected in the forest which covered the northwestern portion of what is now the suburbs of the great city around us. In this little obscure home the two lived entirely alone. They had neighbors, of course, but none of them could tell how they contrived to subsist. The mother did no work, except for herself and her child; she had but a small garden in front of the house, the embellishment of which was her particular care; and she was surrounded with books, in the reading of which she spent all her leisure time, having little intercourse with her neighbors. The gossips that exist everywhere in society, if curious about her affairs, could discover nothing as to how she lived so comfortably without any visible means.

When the daughter, Sabrina, grew up to sixteen, her beauty, the character she developed, and her general conduct were the topic of quite as much rural conversation and remark as had been the mystery that hung around the mother. Gradually drawn out into the neighboring society, her great personal attractions, added to her shrewdness and good sense, made her so much admired as to collect around her a train of suitors, who seemed to consider her being fatherless as of no more consequence to them than it was to herself.

But there was in her temperament an undercurrent of ambition so strong as to cause her to receive their advances toward tender acquaintance with a freezing coldness, while at the same time it rendered her positively unhappy. She felt superior to her condition, and she longed to rise above it. Her mind had attained to a premature development while feeding almost exclusively on its own thoughts,—for she had never been fond of books, though there were many around her. Her sole occupations had been the school, the needle, and assisting her mother in the management of their flower-garden. For this last she had a decided taste, and they had concealed the time-worn character of the old house they occupied by covering it with a luxuriance of floral wealth, so tastefully arranged, and so profuse and gorgeous, that travellers on the dusty highway on which it stood would stop to admire the remarkable blending of the climbing rose, the honeysuckle, and the grape.

Thus filled with indefinite longings, she grew up to womanhood without any proper direction from her mother. She had no sympathy with her uncultivated suitors. She sighed for something higher, an ideal that was far off, indistinct, and dim. Good offers of marriage from neighboring workmen of fair character and prospects she stubbornly declined, sometimes with a tartness that quite confounded the swain whom her well-known character had half-intimidated before he ventured on the dangerous proposal. Love had not yet unsealed the deep fountain of her singularly constituted heart. But I suppose that there must somewhere be a key to every woman's affections, and that it is generally found in but few hands,—sometimes in safe ones, sometimes in very dangerous ones. It was so with Sabrina.

One evening, at a party, she became acquainted with a young sprig of the medical profession, who was captivated by her beauty. The fellow was loquacious, prepossessing, and bold, with an air of high life and fashion about him to which Sabrina had not been accustomed. But though unsteady, insincere, and wholly unworthy of her, yet the glitter of his style and manner won her heart, and an engagement of marriage took place between them, which he, for some unexplained reason, required of her to keep secret. She was young and inexperienced, and so happy in her prospects as to give but little thought to the obligation to concealment. A future was opening to her such as she had longed for; her ambitious aspirations for a higher destiny were about to be realized.

Somehow the neighborhood became possessed of her secret,—not, however, from her, but by that intuition which reveals to lookers-on the sure finale of an intimacy such as every one saw had grown up between her and the young physician. Her future was said to be a brilliant one; she was to be rich, and a great lady. There were absurd and wide-spread exaggerations of an almost every-day occurrence. Some sneered while they repeated them, as if envious of her elevation, while others went so far as to suggest surmises unworthy of her virtue. But Sabrina heard nothing of what the little world around her said or thought. Happy in her own heart, she was unconcerned as to all beyond.

Months passed away, when all at once her lover ceased his visits. This, too, was immediately observed by all the gossips of the neighborhood. It was said that she had been cruelly deceived, even ruined. But she no more than others was able to account for this unexpected abandonment. The truth eventually came out, however. The father of her lover had heard the common rumor, that his son was about marrying an obscure and fatherless girl, questioned him, and warned him of the consequences. It was the first serious intimation the young man had received that his secret was known, and he resolved to cast off the poor girl, seeking to pacify the reproaches of his conscience by accusing her of having divulged it. There was not a manly impulse in his bosom; he gave her no opportunity for explanation, but forsook her on the instant.

For a time the victim of this faithlessness sunk under the weight of her disappointment. To her proud spirit the mortification was almost beyond endurance. And if Divine Providence had not mercifully given to us, to woman especially, strength according to our day, tempering the wind to the shorn lamb, the world would be peopled with perpetual mourners. But there is

"No grief so great but runneth to an end; No hap so hard but will in time amend."

She bore up bravely, and in time her strong mind recovered in a good degree its equilibrium. But she was now a subdued and thoughtful woman. Four years passed away, during which her former admirers gradually gathered around her again, solicitous, as before, to win her favor. To one of them she gave her hand,—her heart was yet another's. Years of an unhappy married life went over her, brightening no cloud above her head, admitting no sunshine into her heart. All her ambitious aspirations had been blasted, all her early hopes wrecked. Marriage had proved no blessing to a mind so ill-regulated. Her mother died, and then her husband. The secret source from which the mother had been supplied with means was unknown to the daughter, and she had still pride enough to refrain from all endeavor to solve the mystery. No one was able to do so during the lifetime of the former,—who was there to do it after her death?

Thus thrown upon herself when only twenty-six years of age, she went to work; and when we came to the factory, we found her there, the most industrious and skilful of all the operators. Employment gave a new turn to her thoughts. New associations opened other and more hopeful views to her mind. She became cheerful, sometimes animated, and, with my sister, intimate and confiding.

But if interested in what my sister thus learned of her history, I was to be still more surprised by the subsequent portion of it to which I was myself a witness.

One day a gentleman came into the room where we were at work, and obtained from the proprietor permission to examine the mode in which it was carried on. His age was probably fifty, and his dress and manner evinced polish and acquaintance with society: if dress was ever an index of wealth, his also indicated that. He went slowly round among the machines, stopping before each, and courteously addressing and entering into a brief conversation with the several operators in turn. Sabrina was working a machine between my sister and myself. When he came to her, he had more to say than to any of the others; and while conversing with her, the proprietor came up, and, speaking to her on some business matter, addressed her by name, "Sabrina."

The stranger heard it. He gazed on her long and silently. Sabrina was his own child, for whose discovery he had come among us! There could be no mutual recognition by face and feature, because neither had ever seen the other before,—the heartless parent had never kissed or fondled his own child!—they had lived total strangers. There was no excitement at the moment, nothing that could be called a scene,—no symptom of remorse on the part of the one, nor of affectionate recognition by the other. I could know nothing, therefore, of their relations to each other, even though I saw them at the very moment the parent was identifying his daughter. All these curious facts were communicated to us afterwards.

That very evening Sabrina quitted her employment at the factory, and was taken to her father's house, acknowledged as his child, her future to be made by him as cloudless as in the past his own shameless neglect had caused it to be gloomy.

If in such a refuge as this factory there were gathered many examples of the ups and downs of life, it was a blessing that such an establishment existed. Here was a certainty of employment at wages on which a woman could live. But, generally, such factories accommodated only what might be called the better order of workers,—that is, the least necessitous.

The press had been for years exalting the character and attainments of the working-women of New England, celebrating their thrift, their intelligence, their neatness, even their personal loveliness, until the fame of their numerous virtues has overshadowed, at least on paper, that of all others, extending even to European circles, and becoming a theme for foreign applause. But from what I have seen of the working-women of my native city, I am satisfied that their merits have been undervalued as much as their numbers have been underestimated. Both in the sewing-school and in the factory, there were girls who were patterns of all that is modest, beautiful, and womanly, many of them graduates of the public schools, and worthy to be wedded to the best among the other sex. No Lowell factory could turn out a larger or more interesting army of young and virtuous girls than some of the establishments here in which the sewing-machine is driven by steam.

Then, as regards numbers, this city has a female manufacturing population to which that of the largest manufacturing towns in New England can bear no comparison. To particularize.

The book-binderies reckon three thousand in their various establishments, who fold and sew the sheets, and work the ruling-machines. I have seen in one of these establishments a collection of young women whose manners and deportment could not be excelled in any assembly of their fashionable and wealthy sisters: the proprietor never came in among them without removing his hat. As the work they do is light and cleanly, so the dress of the workers is neat and tidy. These earn two dollars and upward per week. Some hundreds of others are employed in printing-offices, feeding the paper to book-presses: these are able to earn more. Another class are employed in coloring maps and prints, and among these are some who exhibit taste and skill fitted to a much higher department of the arts. Thus the business of publishing, in nearly all its branches, is largely aided by the labor of intelligent women,—and it might be still more so, if they were taught the truly feminine, as well as intellectual art, of type-setting.

Thousands among us are engaged in binding shoes, some by machinery, and some by hand; but the wages they receive are miserably small. The clothing-stores employ some six thousand, but also paying so little that every tailor's working-woman seeks the earliest opportunity of changing her employment for something better. The hat-trimmers probably number two thousand, while the cap-makers constitute a numerous body, whose wages average three dollars per week. Several hundred educated girls, possessed of a fine taste, are employed in making artificial flowers. The establishments in which umbrellas and parasols are made depend almost exclusively on the labor of women, while the millinery and straw-goods branches owe most of their prosperity and merit to the handiwork of female taste and skill. There are many who work for the dentists, manufacturing artificial teeth. Even at the repulsive business of cigar-making, in a close, unwholesome atmosphere continually loaded with tobacco-fumes, there are many hundred women who earn bread for themselves and their families.

There is a lower class of workers who find employment in the spinning-mills and power-loom factories that abound among us, and these number not less than two thousand. They are the children of weavers who came from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. They have been brought up from childhood to fill the bobbin or attend the spindle or the loom, and are therefore skilled hands, young as many of them are. I have known more than one affecting instance of aged parents having been comfortably maintained by daughters belonging to this class.

It has been one of the plumes in the cap of New England factory-girls, that they kept themselves genteel on factory-wages, educated their brothers, supported their parents, and yet had something over when they came to be married. I never could understand how such financial marvels could be accomplished on the wages of a mill-girl. But I have seen great things in the same line done among the untidy girls of foreign parentage who work in the cotton and woollen factories of our city. These, however, have toiled on silently and in obscurity, with no poet to celebrate their doings, no newspaper to sound their praises, no magazine to trumpet forth their devotion, their virtue, or even their beauty.

I cannot give, with either fulness or accuracy, the industrial statistics of a city like this; nor would I volunteer thus to increase the dulness of my narrative, if it were in my power to do so. But it will be seen, that, wherever a door stands open into which woman may enter and obtain the privilege to toil, she is sure to ask for admission. Wages are always a consideration, but employment of some kind, whether remunerative or not, is a greater one. Of the thousands thus toiling at all kinds of labor, some descriptions of which are necessarily unhealthy, there are many whose once robust frames have become attenuated and weary unto wearing out, whose midnight couch, instead of being one of repose, is racked with cough and restlessness and pain. The once brilliant eyes have lost their lustre, the once rosy cheeks their fresh and glowing bloom. The young girl fades under unnatural labor protracted far into the night. If she should fail to toil thus, some infirm parent would go without food. The sick widow, older in years, and farther travelled round the long circuit of human sorrow, dares not indulge in the rest that is necessary even to life, lest hungry children, as well as herself, should be even more severely pinched by famine. No wonder that they knock at every door where a little money may be had for a great amount of labor.

But it must be granted, that, if the employments to which American women are compelled to resort are often severe, and less remunerative than they ought to be, they are by no means so unsuited to the sex as some which women are forced into in other countries. Only a few years ago many thousands of females were working under-ground in the English coal-mines. When laws were enacted to abolish this unsuitable employment, they still continued to work at the mouth of the mine, and are thus employed at this moment. They labor in the coke-works and coal-pits; they receive the ores at the pit's mouth, and dress and sort them. The hard nature of the employment may not be actually injurious to health, yet it quite unsexes them. Their whole demeanor becomes as coarse and rude as their degrading occupation. As they labor at men's work, so they wear men's clothing. A stranger would feel sure that they were men, and it would be by their conversation alone that he could identify them as women. He would think it strange to hear persons dressed like men conversing together about their husbands, unless he had been informed who they were.

A celebrated English author speaks thus particularly of these unhappy women:—"Some few months since, happening to be in Wigan, my attention was directed to the, to me, unwonted spectacle of one of those female colliers returning homewards from her daily labor. It was difficult to believe that the unwomanly-looking being who passed before me was actually a female; yet such was the case. Clad in coarse, greasy, and patched fustian unmentionables and jacket, thick canvas shirt, great heavy hob-nailed boots, her features completely begrimed with coal-dust, her hard and horny hands carrying the spade, pick, drinking-tin, sieve, and other paraphernalia of her occupation, her not irregular features wearing a bold, defiant expression, and nothing womanly about her except two or three latent evidences of feminine weakness, in the shape of a coral necklace, a pair of glittering ear-rings, and a bonnet, which, as regards shape, size, and color, strongly resembled the fan-tail hat of a London coal-heaver,—she proceeded unabashed through the crowded streets, no one appearing to regard the degrading spectacle as being anything unusual."

Some work in the potteries at the laborious task of preparing the clay, and others in the brick-yards, in open weather, and on the wet clay with naked feet. At other times the same women are forced, by the nature of their employment, to walk over hot pipes, obliging them to wear heavy wooden shoes to protect their feet from being burned. Every stranger who sees these women at their work is shocked at the impropriety and dangerous nature of their occupation.

So far exceeding masculine strength and endurance are the tasks imposed on thousands of English dairy-women, that they constitute a special class of patients with the medical faculty,—pining and perishing under maladies arising entirely from over-fatigue and insufficient rest.

There are multitudes of women in Liverpool who work daily on the farms around that city. They walk four or five miles to the scene of their toil, where they are required to be by six in the summer months and seven in the winter. They work all day at the severest agricultural labor, wielding a heavy, clumsy hoe, digging potatoes, grubbing up stones from the soil, stooping on the ground in weeding, and compelled even to the unfeminine and offensive employment of spreading manure. For a day's work at what men alone should be required to do, they receive but a shilling! Then, worn out with fatigue, having eaten little more than the crust they brought with them,—for what more can be afforded by one who earns only a shilling a day?—they drag themselves back at nightfall over the increasingly weary miles which they traversed in the morning. What comforts can fall to the lot of such? What a domestic life must such unhappy creatures lead!

There are yet others, in that land which boasts of its high civilization, who live by carrying to the city immense loads of sand for sixpence a day,—harder work than carrying a hod. Other women may be daily seen collecting fresh manure along the streets and docks of Liverpool.

In certain rooms of the great English cotton-mills, the high temperature maintained there compels the women to work in a half-naked condition. This constant exposure of one half the body speedily destroys all feminine modesty. Added to this is an extreme, but unavoidable, filthiness of person. These poor creatures part with their health almost as quickly as with their modesty. They become hollow-cheeked and pale, while their coarse laugh and gestures indicate a deep demoralization.

There are many English women engaged in the occupation of nail-making. They work in glass-houses, glue-works, nursery-gardens, at ordinary farm-work. On some of the canals they manage the boats, open the locks, drive the horses, and sometimes even draw the boats with the line across their shoulders. In short, wherever the lowest and dirtiest drudgery is to be done, there they are almost invariably to be found. For wages, they sometimes get tenpence a day, sometimes only sixpence. If they perform overwork, they get a penny an hour,—a penny for the hauling of a canal-boat for an hour! Here is poverty in its most abject condition, and hard work in its most killing form. Their victims are necessarily toilworn, degraded, and hopelessly immoral.

It is such extreme destitution that drives women to crime. In an English paper-mill, where the girls worked at counting the sheets in a room by themselves, and made good wages, they were all well-behaved and respectable. In another department of the same mill, where the work was dirty and the wages only a shilling a day, they were almost uniformly of bad character. The base employment degraded them,—the starvation wages demoralized them. Philanthropy has not been deaf to the cries of these unhappy classes, and has made repeated and herculean efforts to improve their condition and reform their morals. But the stumbling-block of excessively low wages was always in the way. It was found, that, until the physical condition was improved, the ordinary wants of life supplied, the moral status was incapable of elevation.

I grant that no one item of this long catalogue of calamities has yet overtaken the women of our own country. It would seem that the fact must be, that in other lands the sex is not more degraded than it was centuries ago, but that it has never been permitted to rise to its true level. Once put down, it has always been kept down.

The contrast between the condition of women in foreign countries and their condition here is too striking to be overlooked. We have our hardships, our trials, our privations; but what are they to those of our European sisters? If we get low wages, they are in most cases sufficient to enable us to maintain a respectable position and a decent appearance. If the influence of caste is felt among us, if by some it is considered ungenteel to work, this prejudice is not of American growth, but was transferred to our shores from the very people with whom woman is degraded to the level of the brutes. The first settlers brought it with them, and it has descended to us as an inheritance. While it is our province to confront it, we should do so bravely.

But as yet, no woman here is compelled to engage in labor that involves the necessity of dressing like a man. The law itself forbids such change of dress; and when it was proposed, some years ago, to so alter our costume as to make it half male and half female, not for working purposes, but for mere personal convenience, the public sentiment of the nation ridiculed and frowned it down. The other sex has been educated to regard us with a respect and deference too sincere to permit these foreign degradations to overtake us; while the spirit of independence infused by the nature of our government, the unrestricted intercourse of all classes with each other, and that robust training of thought which it is impossible that any American woman should fail to receive, will forever place us above the shocking contingencies to which the poor laborious Englishwoman is exposed. If, in common with her, we are compelled to work, our labor will keep us respectable, though it fail to make us rich.

These are some of the compensations which fall to the lot of the American working-woman. There are many others,—too many, indeed, to be recited here. Chief among them is the respect and courtesy accorded to us by all classes. A public insult to a well-behaved woman is never heard of. We may travel unattended over the vast network of railroads that traverse our country, and passenger and conductor will vie with each other in paying us not only respect, but attention. The former instinctively rises from his seat that we may be accommodated. It is the same in all public places,—in the streets, in churches, and in places of public entertainment. At table we are served first. In short, as we respect ourselves, so will others respect us. The laws have been modified in our favor. The property of a woman is her own, whether married or single. It is subject to no invasion by her husband's creditors, yet her dower in his estate remains good.

These are substantial concessions to our sex, and they are prime essentials to personal comfort. For my part, I am content with them, asking no other I have never slept uneasily because the law did not permit me to vote or to become a candidate for office. The time was, as I have heard, when women voted, all who were eighteen years old being entitled to deposit their ballots. They mingled in the crowds about the polls, and became as violently agitated by partisan excitements as the men. Those who would have been quiet home bodies, had no such foolish liberty been allowed them, became zealous politicians; while others, to whom excitement of some kind was a necessity of life, turned to this, and became so wild with political furor as to unsex themselves,—if throwing aside all modesty be doing so. They carried placards in their hands among the crowd to influence voters, distributed handbills and tickets, entered into familiar conversation with total strangers, many of them persons of infamous character, and pleaded and wrangled with them to secure their votes. They obeyed literally the injunction of modern political managers to "vote early,"—so many mere girls swearing that they were of legal age, when they were in reality much younger, that the singular statistical dislocation became apparent, that there were no women in the country under eighteen years old. With so loose a morality on this point, it cannot be doubted that the other injunction, to "vote often," was as generally obeyed. I have no positive information as to how the married women who thus devoted themselves to electioneering managed their domestic concerns,—who prepared the dinner, who rocked the cradle, who tended the baby,—or whether these cards were thrust upon the husbands. History is silent on this subject; but the more practical minds of the men of this generation can readily conceive how inconvenient it would be for them to be transformed into cooks and dry-nurses.

I have had no ambition to parade in Bloomer costume, or to be otherwise eccentric, even where it happened to be more comfortable. Neither have I figured as the chairman or secretary of a woman's convention, nor had my name ringing through the newspapers as an impatient struggler after more rights than I now possess. I do not think that I should be happier by being permitted to vote, and am sure there is no office I can think of that I would have for the asking. But I was never one of the strong-minded of my sex. I know that there are such, and that even in this noisy world they have made themselves heard. How attentively they have been listened to I will not stop to inquire. I have always believed that the truest self-respect lies, not in the exaction of questionable prerogatives, but in seeking to attain that shining eminence to which the common sentiment of our fellow-beings will concede honor and admiration as its rightful due.

Yet the picture which represents the true condition of our working-women has undeniably its harsh and melancholy features. It shows a daily, constant struggle for adequate compensation. There is everywhere a discrimination against them in the matter of wages, as compared with those of men. It looks, in some cases, indeed, as if women were employed only because they can be had at cheaper rates.

Probably the gay ladies covered with brilliants that flash out accumulated lustre from the footlights of the theatres they nightly visit have no suspicion that the delicate and graceful girls they see upon the stage are victims of this same unjust discrimination as regards compensation. I have never been inside a theatre, and know nothing of the stage, or of the dancing-girls, except what I hear and read. But I can readily imagine how beautiful these young creatures must appear, dressed in light and graceful attire, bringing out by all the well-known artifices of theatrical costume the most captivating charms of face and figure. As they crowd upon the stage in tableaux, which without long and toilsome rehearsal would become more confused and aimless groupings of gayly dressed dancers, they take their appointed places, and with a symmetrical unity repeat the graceful combinations of attitude and movement they have so laboriously acquired in private. The crowded house is electrified by the complicated, yet truly beautiful display. All is fair and happy on the outside. No step in painful, no grief shows itself, no consciousness of wrong appears, no face but is wreathed in smiles. The show of perfect happiness is complete.

But do the crowd of rich men who occupy box and pit bestow a thought on the domestic life of these young girls? Do their wives and daughters, lolling on cushioned seats, clothed in purple and fine linen, and waited on by a host of obsequious fops, ever think whether the dancing-girls have a domestic life of any kind or not? They came to the theatre to be amused,—not to meditate; why should they permit their amusement to be clouded by a single thought as to whether any others but themselves are happy?

Sometimes, in the evolutions of the dance, the gossamer dresses of these ballet-girls are caught in the blaze of the footlights, instantly enveloping them in fire, and burning them to a crisp,—and they are borne from the theatre to the grave. Yet these girls, thus nightly exposed to so frightful a death, are paid a third to a half less than men employed in the same vocation, and who by dress are exempt from such hazards. Moreover, the wardrobe of the men is furnished by the theatrical manager,—while the girls, those even who receive but five dollars a week, are compelled out of this slender sum to supply their own. They must change it also at every caprice of fashion or of the manager, sometimes at very short notice, and are expected, no matter how heavy the heart or how light the purse, to come before the public the impersonation of taste and elegance and happiness. A single dress will at times consume the whole salary of a month; and to obtain it even at that cost, the ballet-girl must work on it with her own hands day and night. She must submit to these impositions, or give up her occupation, when perhaps she can find nothing better to do.

The star-actor, the strutting luminary of the theatre, whether native or imported,—he who receives the highest salary for the least work,—when the performance is closed, unrobes himself and departs, with no care or oversight of the drapery in which he charmed his audience. He leaves it in the dressing-room,—it is the manager's tinsel, not his,—and the owner may see to it or not. Not so the poor ballet-girl, whose elaborate performances have been an indispensable feature of the evening's entertainment. Her gossamer dress, her costly wreaths of flowers, her nicely fitting slippers, are carefully packed up,—for they are her own, her capital in trade, and must be taken care of. The well-paid actor goes to the most fashionable restaurant, gorges himself with rich dishes and costly wines, then seeks his bed to dream blissfully over his fat salary and his luxurious supper. The ballet-girl takes up her solitary walk for the humble home in which perhaps an infirm mother is anxiously waiting her return, exposed to such libertine insults as the midnight appearance of a young girl on the street is sure to invite. It is many hours since she dined; she is fatigued and hungry, but she sups upon a crust, or the cold remains of what was at best a meagre dinner, with possibly a cup of tea, boiled by herself at midnight,—then goes wearily to bed, and sleeps as well as one so hard-worked and so poorly paid may be able to.

The gay crowds who spend their evenings at the theatres are permitted to see but one side of this tableau. The curtain lifts upon the group of smiling ballet-girls, but it never unveils their private life. The theatre is intended to amuse, not to excite commiseration for the realities of every-day life around us. Why should anything disagreeable be allowed? If it sought to make people unhappy, it would soon become an obsolete institution.

With all these impositions, actresses and ballet-girls are proverbially more tractable than actors, less exacting, more uncomplaining, more unfailingly prompt in their attendance and in the discharge of their arduous duties. Why, then, are they subjected to such grinding injustice, except because of their weakness? And who will wonder, that, thus kept constantly poor, they should sometimes fall away from virtue? Their profession surrounds them with temptations sufficiently numerous and insidious; and when to these is added the crowning one of promised relief from hopeless penury, shall Pity refuse a tear to the unhappy victims?



CASTLES.

There is a picture in my brain That only fades to come again: The sunlight, through a veil of rain To leeward, gilding A narrow stretch of brown sea-sand; A light-house half a league from land; And two young lovers hand in hand A-castle-building.

Upon the budded apple-trees The robins sing by twos and threes, And even at the faintest breeze Down drops a blossom; And ever would that lover be The wind that robs the bourgeoned tree, And lifts the soft tress daintily On Beauty's bosom.

Ah, graybeard, what a happy thing It was, when life was in its spring, To peep through Love's betrothal ring At Fields Elysian, To move and breathe in magic air, To think that all that seems is fair!— Ah, ripe young mouth and golden hair, Thou pretty vision!

Well, well,—I think not on these two, But the old wound breaks out anew, And the old dream, as if 't were true, In my heart nestles; Then tears come welling to my eyes, For yonder, all in saintly guise, As 't were, a sweet dead woman lies Upon the trestles!



FAIR PLAY THE BEST POLICY.

It is said that Lord Eldon, the typical conservative of his day, shed tears of sincere regret on the abolition of the death-penalty for five-shilling thefts. The unfortunate Lord Eldons of our own day must be weeping in rivers. Slavery is dead, and the freedmen are its bequest. Through a Red Sea which no one would have dared to contemplate, we have attained to the Promised Land. By the sublimest revenge which history has placed on record, we have returned good for evil, and have punished those who wronged us by requiring them to cease from doing wrong. The grand poetic justice by which Maryland, the first State to shed her brothers' blood, has been the first to be transformed into a condition of happy liberty, only symbolizes a like severity of kindness in store for all. Five years of devastating war will have only rounded the sublime cycle of retribution predicted so tersely by Whittier long ago:—

"Have they chained our free-born men? Let us unchain theirs."

The time has come to put in practice that fine suggestion of the wise foreign traveller, Von Raumer, which some of us may remember to have read with almost hopeless incredulity twenty years ago. "The European abolition of the dependent relations between men of one and the same race was an easy matter, compared with the task which Americans have to perform. But if, on the one part, this task carries with it many cares, pains, and sufferings, on the other hand, the necessary instruction and guardianship of the blacks, and their final reconciliation with the whites, offer an employment so noble, influential, and sublime, that the Americans should testify with awe and humility their gratitude to Providence for intrusting them with this duty also, in addition to many others of the greatest importance to the progress of the race. Were its performance really impossible, it would not have been imposed."

In important periods, words are events; and history may be read in the successive editions of a dictionary. The transition from the word "serf" to the word "citizen" marked no European epoch more momentous than that revealed by the changes in our American vocabulary since the war began. In the newspapers, the speeches, the general orders, one finds, up to a certain time, a certain class recognized only as "slaves." Suddenly the slaves vanish from the page, and a race of "contrabands" takes their place. After another interval, these, too, gradually disappear, and the liberated beings are called "freedmen." The revolution is then virtually accomplished; and nothing remains but to rectify the details, and drop the d. When the freedmen are lost in the mass of freemen, then the work will be absolutely complete; and the retrospect of its successive stages will be matter for the antiquary alone.

Corresponding with these verbal milestones, one may notice successive stages of public sentiment as to the class thus variously designated. It was usually considered that the "slaves" were a vast and almost hopeless mass of imbruted humanity. It was generally feared that the "contrabands" would prove a race of helpless paupers, whose support would bankrupt the nation. It is almost universally admitted that the "freedmen" are industrious, intelligent, self-supporting, soldierly, eager for knowledge, and far more easily managed than an equal number of white refugees.

There is no doubt that these last developments were in some degree a surprise to Abolitionists, as well as to pro-slavery prophets. They compelled the admission, either that slavery was less demoralizing than had been supposed, or else that this particular type of human nature was less easy to demoralize. It is but a few years since anti-slavery advocates indignantly rejected the assertion that the English peasantry were more degraded than the slaves of South Carolina. Yet no dweller on the Sea Islands can now read a book like Kay's "Social Condition of the English People," without perceiving that the families around him, however fresh from slavery, have the best of the comparison. In the one class the finer instincts of humanity seem dead; in the lowest specimens of the other those instincts are but sleeping. I have seen men and women collected from the rice-fields by the hundred, at the very instant of transition from slavery to freedom. They were starved, squalid, ragged, and ignorant to the last degree; but I could not call them degraded, for they had the instincts of courtesy and the profoundest religious emotions. There was none of that hard, stolid, besotted dulness which seems to reduce the English peasant below the level of the brutes he tends.

And what is surprising, above all, in the freedman's condition, is, not that it shows a recuperative power, but that it has such a wonderful suddenness in the recoil. It is not a growth, but a spring. It reverses the nihil per saltum of the philosophers. In watching them, one is constantly reminded of those trances produced by some violent blow upon the head, from which the patient suddenly recovers with powers intact. One looks for a gradual process, and beholds a sudden illumination. This abates a little of one's wrath at slavery, perhaps, though the residuum is quite sufficient; but it infinitely enhances one's hopes for the race set free. It shows that they have simply risen to the stature of men, and must be treated accordingly.

And, indeed, when one thinks how unexampled in our tame experience is the event which has thus suddenly raised them from their low estate, one must expect to find something unexampled in the result. This is true even where liberty has come merely as a thing to be passively received; but in many cases the personal share of the freedman has been anything but passive. What can most of us know of the awful thrill which goes through the soul of a man, when, having come over a hundred miles of hourly danger out of slavery to our lines, with rifle-bullets whizzing round him and bloodhounds on the trail behind, he counts that for a preliminary trip only, and, having thus found the way, goes back through that hundred miles of peril yet again, and brings away his wife and child? As Hawthorne's artist flung his hopeless pencil into Niagara, so all one's puny literary art seems utterly merged and swept away in the magnificent flood of untaught eloquence with which some such nameless man will pour out his tale. Two things seem worth recording, and no third: the passionate emotions of the humblest negro, as they burst into language at such a time,—and the very highest triumph of the very greatest dramatic genius, if perchance some Shakespeare or Goethe could imagine a kindred utterance. Anything intermediate must be worthless and unavailing.

Now there is no doubt, that, under this great stimulus, the freedmen will do their part; the anxious question is, whether we of the North are ready to do ours. Our part consists not chiefly in money and old clothes, nor even in school-books and teachers. The essential thing which we need to give them is justice; for that must be the first demand of every rational being. Give them justice, and they can dispense even with our love. Give them the most exuberant and zealous love, and it may only hurt them, if it leads us to subject them to fatal experiments, and to fancy them exceptions to the universal laws.

Cochin well says,—"To have set men at liberty is not enough: it is necessary to place them in society." That American emancipation should be a success is more important to every one of us than the whole sugar-crop of Louisiana or the whole rice-crop of Georgia. Secure this result, and the future opens for this nation a larger horizon than the most impassioned Fourth-of-July orator in the old times dared to draw. Fail in this result, and the future holds endless disorders, with civil war reappearing at the end. If, therefore, there be any general principle to assert, any essential method to inculcate, its adoption is the most essential statesmanship. Twenty millions of white men, with ballots and school-houses, will be tolerably sure to thrive, whatever be the legislation: legislation for them is secondary, because they are assured in their own strength. But four millions of black men, just freed, and as yet unprovided with any of these tools,—the fate of the nation may hinge on a single error in legislating for them.

Now there are but two systems possible in dealing with an emancipated people. All minor projects are modifications of these two. There is the theory of preparation, under some form, and there is the theory of fair play. Preparation is apprenticeship, prescription,—the bargains of the freedman made for him, not by him. Fair play is to remove all obstructions, including the previous monopoly of the soil,—to recognize the freedman's right to all social and political guaranties, and then to let him alone.

There is undoubtedly room for an honest division of opinion on this fundamental matter, among persons equally sincere. Even among equally well-informed persons there may be room for difference, although it will hardly be denied that those who favor the theory of "preparation" are in general those who take a rather low view of the capacities of the emancipated race. The policy pursued in Louisiana, for instance, was undoubtedly based at the outset, whatever other reasons have since been adduced, on the theory that the freedmen would labor only under compulsion. I have seen an elaborate argument, from a leading officer in that Department, resting the whole theory on precisely this assumption. "The negro, born and reared in ignorance, could not for years be taught to properly understand and respect the obligations of a contract. His ideas of freedom were merged in the fact that he was to be fed and clothed and supported in idleness." Whatever excuses may since have been devised for the system, this was its original postulate. To suppose it true would be to reject the vast bulk of evidence already accumulated, all demonstrating the freedmen's willingness to work. Yet if the assumption be false, any system founded on it must be regarded by the freedmen as an insult, and must fail, unless greatly modified.

In organizing emancipation, one great principle must be kept steadily in mind. All men will better endure the total withholding of all their rights than a system which concedes half and keeps back the other half. This has been admirably elucidated by De Tocqueville in his "Ancien Regime," in showing that the very prosperity of the reign of Louis XVI. prepared the way for its overthrow. "The French found their position the more insupportable, the better it became.... It often happens that a people which has endured the most oppressive laws without complaint, and as if it did not feel them, throws them off violently the instant the burden is lightened,... and experience shows that the most dangerous moment to a bad government is usually that in which it begins to mend. The evil which one suffers patiently as inevitable seems insupportable as soon as he conceives the idea of escaping it. All that is then taken from abuses seems to uncover what remains, and render the feeling of it more poignant. The evil has become less, it is true, but the sensibility is keener."

Every one who is familiar with the freedmen knows that this could not be a truer description of their case, if every word had been written expressly for them. The most timid laborer on the remotest plantation will not bear from his superintendent or his teacher the injustice he bore from his master. The best-disciplined black soldier will not take from his captain one half the tyranny which his overseer might safely have inflicted. Freedom they understand; slavery they understand. When they become soldiers, they know that part of their civil rights are to be temporarily waived; and as soon as they can read, they study the "Army Regulations," to make sure that they concede no more. Neither as citizens nor as soldiers do they retain the faculty of dumb, dead submission which sustains them through every conceivable wrong while enslaved. Before a blow from his master the slave helplessly cowers, and takes refuge in silent and inert despair. He draws his head into his shell, like a turtle, and simply endures. Liberate him, he quits the shell forever, and the naked palpitating tissue is left bare. Afterwards, every touch reaches a nerve, and every nerve excites a whole muscular system in reflex action.

I remember an amusing incident which took place while I was on picket at Port Royal. Complaints began to come in against a certain neighboring superintendent, an ex-clergyman, whose demeanor was certainly not creditable to his cloth, but whose offences would have seemed slight enough in the old plantation times. Still they were enough to exasperate the people under his charge, and the ill feeling extended rapidly among the black soldiers, many of whom had been slaves on that very island. At last their captain felt it necessary to interfere. "Has it ever occurred to you, my dear Sir," he one day asked the superintendent, "that you are in some danger from these soldiers whom you meet every day with their guns in the picket paths?"—The official colored and grew indignant. "Do you mean to say, Sir, that your men are forming a conspiracy to murder me?"—"By no means," returned the courteous captain. "I trust you will find my soldiers too well disciplined for any such impropriety. But you may not have noticed that the regiment has at present exceedingly poor guns which often go off at half-cock, so that no one can be held responsible. It was but the other day that one of our own officers was shot dead by such an accident,"—which was unhappily true,—"and consider, my dear Sir, how very painful"——"I understand you, I understand you," interrupted the excited divine, putting spurs to his horse. It was a remarkable coincidence that we never heard another complaint from that plantation.

It was this new-born sensitiveness that brought to so sudden a close the attempted apprenticeship of the British West Indies. Cochin, the wisest recent critic, fully recognizes this connection of events. "Either the regulations were incomplete, or the masters failed in their observance, or such failures were not repressed, so that the slaves were in many places maltreated and mutinous. In proportion as the moment of freedom approached, some broke loose prematurely from their duties, others aspired prematurely to their rights. Patience long delayed is easier than patience whose end is approaching; it is at the last moment that one grows weary of waiting."

The best preparation for freedom is freedom. It is of infinite importance that we should avail ourselves of the new-born self-reliance of the freedmen while its first vigor lasts, and guard against sacrificing those generous aspirations which are the basis of all our hope. It is not now doubted (except, perhaps, in Louisiana) that the first eager desire of the emancipated slave is to own land and support his own household. I remember that one of the ablest sergeants in the First South Carolina Volunteers, when some of us tried to convince him that the colored people attached too much importance to the mere ownership of land, utterly refused all acquiescence in the criticism. "We shall still be slaves," he said, in an impassioned way, "until eb'ry man can raise him own bale ob cotton, and put him brand upon it, and say, Dis is mine." And it was generally admitted in the Department of the South, that the freedmen on Port Royal Island, who had mostly worked for themselves, had made more decided progress, and were more fitted for entire self-reliance, than those who had remained as laborers on the plantations owned by Mr. Philbrick and his associates upon St. Helena Island. Yet it would be impossible to try the system of tenant-industry more judiciously than it was tried under those circumstances; and if even that was found, on the whole, to retard the development of self-reliance in the freedmen, what must it be where this is a part of a great system of coercion, and where the mass of the employers are still slaveholders at heart?

It is a fact of the greatest importance, that King Cotton turns out to be a thorough citizen-king, and adapts himself very readily to changed events. The great Southern staple can be raised by small cultivators as easily as corn or potatoes; and difficulty begins only when sugar and rice are to be produced. Yet it will not be long before these also will come within reach of the freedmen, if they continue their present tendency towards joint-stock operations. In the colored regiments of South Carolina there are organizations owning plantations, saw-mills, town-lots, and a grocery or two: they even meditate a steamboat. A few of these associations no doubt will go to pieces, through fraud or inexperience. Indeed, I knew of one which was nearly broken asunder by the president's taking a fancy to send in his resignation: no other member knew the meaning of that hard word, and they were disposed to think it a declaration of hostilities from the presiding officer. But even if such associations all fail, for the present, the training which they give will be no failure; and when we consider that there are already individuals among the freedmen who have by profitable ventures laid up twenty or thirty thousand dollars within three years, it seems no extravagant ambition for a joint-stock company to aim at a rice-mill.

The Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, where, from the very beginning, under the limited authority of General Saxton, the most favorable results of emancipation have been attained, are now to be the scene of a larger experiment, still under the same wise care. The objections urged by General Butler, with his usual acuteness, against some details of the project of General Sherman, must not blind us to its real importance. Its implied exclusions can easily be modified; but the rights which it vests in the freedmen are a substantial fact, which, when once established, it will require a revolution to overthrow. The locality fixed for the experiment is singularly favorable. There is no region of the country where a staple crop can be grown so profitably by small landholders. There is no agricultural region so defensible, in a military aspect. So difficult is the navigation of the muddy tide-streams which endlessly intersect these islands,—so narrow are the connecting causeways,—so completely is every plantation surrounded and subdivided by hedges, ditches, and earthworks, long since made for agricultural purposes, and now most available for defence,—that nothing this side of the famous military region of La Vendee (which this district much resembles) can be more easily held by peasant proprietors.

The mere accidents of the war have often led to the experiment of leaving small bodies of colored settlers, in such favorable localities, to support and defend themselves. This was successfully done, for instance, on Barnwell Island, a tract two or three miles square, which lies between Port Royal Island and the main, in the direction of Pocotaligo, and is the site of the Rhett Plantation, described in Mr. W. H. Russell's letters. This region was entirely beyond our picket lines, and was separated from them by a navigable stream, while from the Rebel lines it was divided only by a narrow creek that would have been fordable at low water, but for the depth of mud beneath and around it. On this island a colony of a hundred or thereabouts dwelt, in peace, with no resident white man, and only an occasional visit from their superintendent. There were some twenty able-bodied settlers who did picket duty every night, by a system of their own, and for many months there was no alarm whatever,—the people raising their cotton and supporting themselves. This went on, until, by a fatal error of judgment, the men were all conscripted into the army. This was soon discovered by the Rebels, who presently began to make raids upon the island, so that ultimately the whole population had to be withdrawn.

Extend such settlements indefinitely, and we have the system adopted by General Sherman. It is a system which, like every other practicable method, must depend on military authority at last, and for which the army should therefore be directly responsible. The main argument for intrusting the care of the freedmen to a bureau of the War Department is, that it must come to be controlled by that Department, at any rate, and that it is best to have the responsibility rest where the power lies. On conquered territory there can be but one authority, and no conceivable ingenuity can construct any other system. If authority is apparently divided, then either the military commander does not understand his business, or he is hampered by impracticable orders and should ask to be relieved. This is what has paralyzed the action of every military governor, a title which implies a perfectly anomalous function, certain to lead to trouble. Almost all the great good effected by General Saxton has been achieved in spite of that function, not by means of it; and it was not until he was placed in military command of the post of Beaufort that he was able, even in that limited region, to establish any satisfactory authority. All else that he did was by sufferance, and often he could not even obtain sufferance.

While the war lasts, martial law must last. After martial law ceases, civil institutions, whatever they may then be, must resume control. It is therefore essential that all the rights of the freedmen should be put upon a sure basis during the contest; but, whatever method be adopted, the real control must inevitably rest with the War Department. It cannot be transferred to civilians; nor is there reason to suppose it desirable for the freedmen that it should. Whatever be the disorder resulting from military command, it has the advantage of being more definite and intelligible than civil mismanagement; there is always some one who can be held responsible, and the offender is far more easily brought to account. On this point I speak from personal experience. In South Carolina I have seen outrages persistently practised among the freedmen by civilians, for which a military officer could have been cashiered in a month. I have oftener been appealed to for redress against civilians than against officers or soldiers. I have been compelled to post sentinels to keep superintendents away from their own plantations, to prevent disturbance. I have been a member of a military commission which sentenced to the pillory an eminent Sunday-school teacher who had been convicted of the unlawful sale of whiskey,—and this in a community into which the majority of the civilians had come with professedly benevolent intent.

The truth is, that abuses, acts of oppression towards the freedmen, do not proceed from mere antecedent prejudice in the army or anywhere else. They proceed from the temptations of power, and from that impatience which one is apt to restrain among his equals and to indulge among his inferiors. The irritability of an Abolitionist may lead him to outrages as great as those which spring from the selfishness of a mere soldier. It is becoming almost proverbial, in colored regiments, that radical anti-slavery men make the best and the worst officers: the best, because of their higher motives and more elevated standard; the worst, because they are often ungoverned, insubordinate, impatient, and will sometimes venture on high-handed acts, under the fervor of their zeal, such as a mere soldier would not venture to commit. Yet in an army such aberrations, like all others, yield to discipline. But on a solitary plantation the temptations and immunities of the slave-driver recur; and I have seen men yield to these, who had safely passed the ordeal of persecution and mobs at home.

It was thus, perhaps, that General Sherman and his advisers felt justified in adopting the theory of absolute separation, on the Sea Islands,—seeing that the companionship of Southern white men would be an evil, and that of Northern men by no means an unmixed good. Yet it seems altogether likely that the system is so far wrong, and will be modified. Separation is better than "preparation," and is a good antidote to it. It is better to assume the freedmen too self-reliant than too feeble,—better to exclude white men than to give them the monopoly of power. Nevertheless, the principle of exclusion is wrong, though it is happily a wrong not fundamental to the system, and hence easily corrected. If the people of any village desire to introduce a white teacher, the prohibition would become an obvious outrage, which hardly any administration would risk the odium of maintaining. The injury, in a business point of view, done by separation would perhaps strike deeper, and be harder to correct. Here, for instance, is the flourishing negro village of Mitchellville, just outside of the fortifications of Hilton Head. All that is produced in the numerous garden-patches of the suburb is to be sold in the town; all the clothing that is to be worn in the suburb must be obtained in exchange for the garden-products. Yet, if newspaper correspondents tell truth, the temporary commander of that post has taken it on himself to forbid white men from trading in Mitchellville, or black men at Hilton Head. How, then, is business to be transacted? Are the inhabitants of the town to be allowed to come to the sally-port of the fortifications, hand out a yard of ribbon and receive two eggs in return? If the entire exchanges are to be intrusted to a few privileged favorites, black or white, then another source of fraud is added to those which lately, in connection with the recruiting bounties, have been brought to bear upon the freedmen of that Department, and, if the truth be told, under the same auspices from which this order proceeds. Be this as it may, it seems a pity that these poor people, who are just learning what competition means, and will walk five miles farther to a shop where dry goods are retailed a little cheaper, should be checked and hampered in their little commerce by an attempt to abolish all the laws of political economy in their favor.

If the freedmen were a race like the Indians, wasting away by unseen laws through the mere contact of the white man, the case would be very different. Or if they were a timid and dependent race, needing to be thrust roughly from the nest, like young birds, and made self-dependent, the difference would be greater still. But it is not so. The negro race fits into the white race, and thrives by its side; and the farther South, the greater the thriving. The emancipated slave is also self-relying, and, if fair play be once given, can hold his own against his former master, whether in trade or in war. He is improvident while in slavery, as is the Irishman in Ireland, because he has no opportunity to be anything else. Shift the position, and the man changes with it,—becoming, whether Irishman or negro, a shrewd economist, and rather formidable at a bargain. Almost every freedman is cheated by a white man once after his emancipation, and many twice; but when it comes to the third bargain, it is observed that mere Anglo-Saxon blood is not sufficient to secure a victory.

It is claimed that this principle of separation was adopted after consultation with the leading colored men of Savannah, and that the only dissenter was the Rev. James Lynch, a Northern colored man. But it also turns out that Mr. Lynch was the only man among them who had ever seen the experiment tried of the mingling of the races in a condition of liberty. He is a man of marked energy and ability, and has been for two years one of the most useful missionaries in the neighborhood of Port Royal. Some weight is, no doubt, to be attached to the opinions of those who had known white men only as masters; but we should not wholly ignore the judgment of the only delegate who had met them on equal terms. In restoring men from the trance of slavery, the instincts of the patient, though doubtless an important fact, are not the only point to be considered. It may be true, as Hippocrates said, that the second-best remedy will succeed better than the best, if the patient likes it best. But it is not safe to forget that those who have never known their brother-men except in the light of oppressors may have some crude notions on political economy which a milder experience might change. At any rate, the more exclusive features of General Sherman's project may be changed by a stroke of the pen; and so far as it tends to secure the freedmen in permanent possession of the Sea Islands, it is almost an unmingled good.

The truth is, that, in these changing days, none of these specific "systems" are very important. "Separation" is interesting chiefly because it is the last project reported; "preparation," because it was the last but one. What is needed is not so much a "system" as the settled resolution to do daily justice. Let any military commander merely determine to treat the emancipated black population precisely as he would treat a white population under the same circumstances,—to encourage industry, schools, savings-banks, and all the rest, but not interfere with any of them too much,—and he will have General Saxton's method and his success. The question what to do with the soil is far more embarrassing than what to do with the freedmen; and happily the soil also can be let alone, and the freedmen will take care of that and of themselves too. We must say to the cotton lords, as Horne Tooke said to Lord Somebody in England,—"If, as you claim, power should follow property, then we will take from you the property, and the power shall follow." And fortunately for us, the same logic of events points to the political enfranchisement of the black loyalists, as the only way to prevent Congress from being replenished with plotting and disloyal men. Fair play to them is thus fair play to all of us; and, like Tony Lumpkin, in Goldsmith's comedy, if we are indifferent as to disappointing those who depend upon us, we may at least be trusted not to disappoint ourselves.

The lingering caste-institutions in the Free States,—as the exclusive street-cars of Philadelphia, the separate schools of New York, the special gallery reserved for colored people in Boston theatres,—must inevitably pass away with the institution which they merely reflect. The perfect acquiescence with which abolition of these things is regarded, so soon as it takes effect, shows how little they are really sustained by public opinion. These are local matters, mere corollaries, and will settle themselves. They are not upheld by any conviction, and scarcely even by prejudice, but by an impression in each citizen's mind that there is some other citizen who is not prepared for the change. When it comes to the point, it is found that everybody is perfectly prepared, and that the objections were merely traditional. Who has ever heard of so much as a petition to restore any of the unjust distinctions which have thus been successively outgrown?

But in our vast national dealings with the freedmen, we still drift from experiment to experiment, and adopt no settled purpose. Did this proceed from the difficulty of wise solution, in so vast a problem, one could blame it the less. But thus far the greatest want has been, not of wisdom, but of fidelity,—not of constructive statesmanship, but rather of pains to discern and of honesty to observe the humbler path of daily justice. When we consider that the order which laid the basis for the whole colored army—the "Instructions" of the Secretary of War to Brigadier-General Saxton, dated August 25, 1862—was so carelessly regarded by the War Department that it was not even placed on file, but a copy had to be supplied, the year following, by the officer to whom it was issued, it is obvious in what a hap-hazard way we have stumbled, into the most momentous acts. A government that still repudiates a duty so simple as the payment of arrears due under its own written pledges to the South Carolina soldiers can hardly shelter itself behind the plea of any complicated difficulties in its problem. Let us hope that the freedmen, on their part, will be led by some guidance better than our example: that they will not neglect their duties as their rights have been neglected, and not wrong others as they have been wronged.



REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Autobiography, Correspondence, etc., of Lyman Beecher, D. D. Edited by CHARLES BEECHER. With Illustrations. In Two Volumes. New York. Harper & Brothers.

Reading this life of Dr. Beecher is like walking over an ancient battle-field, silent and grass-grown, but ridged with graves, and showing still by its conformation the disposition of the troops which once struggled there in deadly contest,—and while we linger, lo! the graves are graves no more. The dry bones come together,—sinew and flesh form upon them,—the skin covers them about,—the breath enters into them,—they live and stand upon their feet, an exceeding great and mighty army. Drums beat, swords flash, and the war of the Titans rages again around us.

The life of Dr. Beecher is closely inwoven with the ecclesiastical history of New England. Ecclesiastical, like civil history, is chiefly a military record; and through both these volumes a sound of battle is in the land, and of great destruction. We who have fallen on comparatively quiet days can hardly conceive the intensity and violence of the excitement that glowed at our theological centres, and flamed out even to their circumferences, when the great Unitarian controversy was at its height,—when Park-Street Church alone of the Boston churches stood firm in the ancient faith, and her site was popularly christened "Hell-Fire Corner,"—when, later, the Hanover-Street Church was known as "Beecher's Stone Jug" and the firemen refused to play upon the flames that were destroying it. There were giants on the earth in those days, and they wrestled in giant fashion.

All this conflict Dr. Beecher saw, and a large part of it he was. In Connecticut he had drawn his sword against intemperance, "Toleration," and other forms of what he considered evil, and had been recognized as a mighty man of valor in his generation; but it was in this Unitarian controversy that he leaped to the battlements of Zion, sounded the alarm through the land, and took his place henceforth as leader of the hosts of the elect. "I had watched the whole progress," he says, "and read with eagerness everything that came out on the subject. My mind had been heating, heating, heating. Now I had a chance to strike." And strike he did, blows rapid and vigorous, whose echoes ring even through these silent pages. It was to him a real warfare. His speech ran naturally to military phrase. He saw the foe coming in like a flood. "The enemy, driven from the field by the immortal Edwards, have returned to the charge, and now the battle is to be fought over again." "The time has at length fully come to take hold of the Unitarian controversy by the horns." "The enemies ... are collecting their energies and meditating a comprehensive system of attack, which demands on our part a corresponding concert of action." "Let the stand taken be had in universal and everlasting remembrance, and we shall soon get the enemy out of the camp." "Wake up, ministers, form conspiracies against error, and scatter firebrands in the enemy's camp." "A schism in our ranks, with the enemy before and behind us, would indeed be confusion in the camp." "It is the moment to charge as Wellington did at Waterloo." "Will Walker and his friends feel as if my gun was loaded deep enough for the first shot, and will the Orthodox think I have done so far sufficient execution?... As the game is out of sight, I must depend on those who are near to tell me what are the effects of the first fire." "My sermons on Depravity ... are point-blank shot."

Nor was the fight between Unitarian and Orthodox alone. Even within the ranks of the faithful dissensions arose, and many a time and oft had Dr. Beecher to defend himself against the charges, the insinuations, and the suspicions of his brethren. To the eyes of the more cautious or the more inert his adventurous feet seemed ever approaching the verge of heresy. Just where original sin ceases to be original and becomes acquired,—just where innate ill-desert meets voluntary transgression,—just where moral government raises the standard of rebellion against Absolutism,—just where New Haven theology branches off from ultra Orthodoxy on the debatable ground, the border-land of metaphysics and religion, Dr. Beecher and his brethren were engaged in perpetual skirmishing.

It is not our province to decide or even to discuss the points at issue. Uninitiated laymen may perhaps be pardoned for hearing in all this din of battle but the echo of the Schoolmen's guns. Whether the two-year-old baby who dashes his bread-and-butter on the floor, in wrath at the lack of marmalade, does it because of a prevailing effectual tendency in his nature, or in consequence of his federal alliance with Adam, or from a previous surfeit of plum-cake, is a question which seems to bear a general family likeness to the inquiry, whether there is such a thing as generic bread-and-butter, or only such specific slices as arouse infant ire and nourish infant tissue. But around both classes of questions strife has waxed hot. Both have called out the utmost strength of the ablest minds, and both, however finespun they may seem to the uninstructed eye, have contributed in no small measure to the mental and moral health of the world. But while we would not make so great a mistake as to look with a supercilious smile either upon the conflict between Nominalism and Realism or on that between the Old and the New School theology, (notwithstanding we might find countenance in Dr. Pond of Bangor, who writes to Dr. Beecher, "In Maine we do not sympathize very deeply in your Presbyterian squabbles, except to look on and laugh at you all!") it may be permitted us as laymen to confess a greater interest in the phenomena than in the event of the struggle. We leave it, therefore, to our ecclesiastical contemporaries to descend into the arena and fight their battles o'er again, content ourselves to stand without and give thanks for the Divine voice that rises above the clash of contending creeds, saying alike to wise and foolish, "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

Spite of all the truculence of his language, and through all his strenuous thrust and parry, Dr. Beecher's sincerity, integrity, and piety shine forth unclouded. Looking at this memorial in one aspect, he seems to have assumed a charge which Mr. Lincoln has professed himself unable to undertake, namely, to "run the churches." He evidently believed that the Lord had committed to the clergy, of whom he was chief, the building up of a great ecclesiastical edifice, whose foundation should be laid in New England, but whose wings should presently cover the whole land. Individual churches were the pillars of this edifice. Now in Boston, now in New Haven, now at Cincinnati, he watched its progress, noting a fault, praising an excellence, repairing mistakes, strengthening weaknesses. It was the business and the delight of his life. He had his agents throughout the country. The churches might be many, but the cause was one. Ever watchful, ever active, he spoke of his measures and his plans in just such terse, homely phrase as any house-carpenter would use. Doubtless the fragile reverence of many a clerical cumberer of the ground was shocked by his familiar use of their sacred edge-tools. One can imagine the thrill of horror with which the Reverend Cream Cheese, of the Church of the Holy (Self-) Assumption, would hear the assertion, that "it was as finely organized a church as ever trod shoe-leather." Our elegant Unitarian friends have probably quite forgotten, and will hardly thank us for reminding them, that there ever was a time when they "put mouth to ear, and hand to pocket, and said, St-boy!" Our decorous Calvinistic D.D.s would scarcely recognize their own dogmas at the inquiry-meeting, where "language of simplicity came along, and they'd see me talking 'way down in language fit for children.... And then the language of free agency and ability came along ... and they'd stick up their ears.... But next minute came along the plea of morality and self-dependence, and I took them by the nape of the neck and twisted their head off." There must have been great inertness in New England at the time of his first visit to Boston, when "nobody seemed to have an idea that there was anything but what God had locked up and frozen from all eternity. The bottom of accountability had fallen out. My first business was to put it in again." The coldness and indifference of the Church, which ministers usually employ the vivid language of the Bible regarding the ways of Zion to portray, he described in the equally vivid, but less dignified New England vernacular. "What did I do at Litchfield but to 'boost'? They all lay on me, and moved very little, except as myself and God moved them. I spent sixteen of the best years of my life at a dead lift in boosting." And we greatly fear that the reverend seigniors in Synod and Presbytery, notwithstanding their firm faith in Total Depravity, will be sadly scandalized at hearing it announced, "That was a scampy concern, that Old School General Assembly, and is still."

But he would make a great mistake who should infer, that, in thus busily and energetically building up the temple, Dr. Beecher forgot the glory of the Lord which was to dwell in it. He treated it, indeed, as a business matter, but it was the business of immortal souls and of the Most High God. No merely professional attachment bound him to it; there was no contemplating it from a public and a private point of view; but his whole inner and outer life was enlisted. Not only the religious public, but, what is even more rare, his own family, were vitalized with his spirit and drawn into his train. The doctrines that he preached from the pulpit had been discussed over the woodpile in the cellar. His public teachings had first been household words. The Epistles, death, a preexistent state, were talked over by the fireside. Theology took precedence even of the baby in the family letters. One breath announces that he could not find any trout at Guilford, and the next that he has preached his sermon on Depravity. Catharine writes, that the house needs paper and paint very much, father's afternoon sermon perfectly electrified her, and his last article will make all smoke again. Harriet records, with great inward exultation, that, on their Western journey, father preached, and gave them the Taylorite heresy on Sin and Decrees to the highest notch, and what was amusing, he established it from the "Confession of Faith," and so it went high and dry above all objections, and delighted his audience, who had never heard it christened heresy. He sets forth to attend the Synod, accompanied by his son Henry, with one rein in the right hand, and one in the left, and an apple in each, biting them alternately, and alternately telling Tom how to get the harness mended, and showing Henry the true doctrine of Original Sin. His fatherly heart yearned over his children; with voice and pen and a constant watchful tenderness, he knew no rest till the whole eleven had adopted the faith for which he so earnestly contended. The genius of Napoleon elicited almost a personal affection, and he read every memoir from St. Helena with the earnest desire of shaping out of those last conversations some hope for his future. He mourned for Byron as for a friend, lamenting sorely that wasted life, and was sure, that, if Byron "could only have talked with Taylor and me, it might have got him out of his troubles." Indeed, he evidently considered "Taylor and me," not to say me and Taylor, the two pillars of Orthodoxy,—in no wise from vanity, but in the simplicity of truth. He spoke of his own feats with an openness that could proceed only from a guileless heart. The work of the Lord was the one thing that absorbed him, to the oblivion of all lesser interests. He was as absolutely free from vanity on the one side as from envy on the other. Lyman Beecher as Lyman Beecher had no existence. Lyman Beecher as God's servant was the verity. He rejoiced in the prosperity of the sacred cause: if it was Beecher's hand that furthered it, he exulted; if another than Beecher's, it was all the same. There was no room in his mind for any petty personal jealousy. He stood in nobody's way. He enjoyed every man's success. So the building rose, it was of small moment who wielded the hammer. Ever on the watch for indications of the mind and will of God, it was from zeal, not ambition, that he waited for no precedence, but pushed through the opened door, opened it never so narrowly. In doubt as to what is the true meaning of some "providence," he advises "to take hold of the end of the rope that is put into your hand, and pull it till we see what is on the other end."

Yet, with all his electric enthusiasm, he was wise in his generation and beyond his generation, and in some respects beyond our own. He watched for souls as one that must give account. He adapted means to ends. He was careful not by fierce opposition to push doubt into error. When a drunkard died, he remembered that "his mother was an habitual drinker, and he was nursed on milk-punch, and the thirst was in his constitution"; so he hoped "that God saw it was a constitutional infirmity, like any other disease." He reduced the dogma of Total Depravity to the simple proposition, "that men by nature do not love God supremely, and their neighbor as themselves." He stoutly resisted the attempt to overawe belief, either his own or another's. He refused to expend his strength in contending with the friends of Christ, when there was so much to be done against his foes. Yet he was as far as possible from that narrow sectarianism, which sees no evil in its own ranks and no good in those of its adversaries. He denounced the faults of the Orthodox as heartily as those of the Unitarians. Standing in the forefront of Calvinism, he did not hesitate to say, "It is my deliberate opinion that the false philosophy which has been employed for the exposition of the Calvinistic system has done more to obstruct the march of Christianity, and to paralyze the saving power of the Gospel, and to raise up and organize around the Church the unnumbered multitude to behold and wonder and despise and perish, than all other causes beside.... Who of us are to suffer the loss of the most wood and hay by the process [of purging out this false philosophy] I cannot tell; but all mine is at the Lord's service at any time; and if all which is in New England should be brought out and laid in one pile, I think it would make a great bonfire."

Unfortunately, there was something worse in the Church than false philosophy, unless this book very grievously falsifies facts. Her bitterest foe would hardly dare charge upon Zion such iniquity as the friendly unbosoming in these pages reveals. Wily intrigue, reckless perversion of language, rule or ruin, such things as we regret to see even in a political caucus, are to be found in abundance in the counsels of men who profess to be working only for the glory of God and the good of souls. Insinuations of craft and cowardice are set on foot, where direct charges fail for want of evidence. Rumor is made to do the work which reason cannot accomplish. Private letters are surreptitiously published, the publication defended as done with the permission of the writer, and testimony to the contrary refused a hearing. Extracts are taken out of their connection and made to carry a different meaning from that which they originally bore. What cannot be put down by evidence is to be put down by odium. There is a "cool and deliberate determination on the part of one half the Presbyterian Church to inflict upon the other half all the injury possible." Dr. Beecher's son, himself a prominent clergyman, is forced to confess, that, "for a combination of meanness and guilt and demoralising power in equal degrees of intensity, I have never known anything to exceed the conspiracy in New England and in the Presbyterian Church to crush by open falsehood and secret whisperings my father and others, whom they have in vain tried to silence by argument or to condemn in the courts of the Church." And yet, as Dr. Beecher stands forth in this biography, in native honor clad, so, undoubtedly, does Brother Nettleton stand forth in his biography, and Brother Woods in his, and Brother Wilson in his, and all the brethren in theirs,—all honorable men. We venture to say that not one of these reverend traducers and mischief-makers was "dealt with" by his church for his evil-doing. We make no doubt he went through life without loss of prestige or diminution of sanctity, and was bewailed at his death by the sons of the prophets in tenderest phrase, "My father! my father! the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof."

We do not attribute these shameful proceedings to Orthodoxy, still less to Christianity. "Perhaps it is a fact of our fallen nature, as Dr. Beecher asserted, that "Adam and grace will do twice as much as grace alone." But surely all these things happened unto them for ensamples, and they are written for our admonition. Seeing how unlovely is the spectacle of bickering and bitterness, let Christians of every name look well to their steps, saying often one to another, and especially repeating in concert, at the opening of every council, conference, synod, and assembly,—

"Let dogs delight to bark and bite, For God hath made them so; Let bears and lions growl and fight, For 't is their nature, too.

"But bretheren, we will never let Our angry passions rise: Our little hands were never made To tear each other's eyes."

This biography, as the title-page asserts, is edited rather than written. By familiar talk and private letters, the subject is made, as far as possible, to tell his own story. What remains is supplied by the pens of different members of the family and of old friends. The result is a composite, the connections of whose parts we do not always readily discern. But what the book lacks in coherence is more than made up in accuracy and vividness. We obtain, by glimpses of the man, a far more exact knowledge of his character and work than we should by ever so steady a contemplation of some other man's symmetrical rendering of his life. We feel the beating of his great, fiery heart. We delight in his large, loving nature. We partake in his honest indignation. We smile, sometimes not without tears, at his childlike simplicity. We sit around the household hearth, join in the theological disputation, and share the naive satisfaction of the whole Beecher family with themselves and each other. We see how it was that the father set them all a-spinning each in his own groove, but all bearing the unmistakable Beecher stamp. We feel his irresistible energy, his burning zeal, his magnetic force yet thrilling through the land and arousing every sluggish power to come to the help of the Lord-against the mighty. For such a life there is indeed no death.

Engineer and Artillery Operations against the Defences of Charleston Harbor in 1863. Comprising the Descent upon Morris Island, the Demolition of Fort Sumter, the Reduction of Forts Wagner and Gregg. With Observations on Heavy Ordnance, Fortifications, etc. By L. A. GILLMORE, Major of Engineers, Major-General of Volunteers, and Commanding General of the Land Forces engaged. Published by Authority. New York: D. Van Nostrand.

Just after Major-General Hunter was removed—or, as the delicate military phrase went, "temporarily relieved"—from the command of the Department of the South, there was a report current in those parts of a conversation, perhaps imaginary, between President Lincoln and the relieved General, on his arrival at Washington. The gossip ran, that on General Hunter's inquiring the cause of his removal, the good-natured President could only say that "Horace Greeley said he had found a man who could do the job." The job was the taking of Charleston, and the "coming man" was Brigadier-General (now Major-General) Gillmore. The so-called "siege of Charleston," after being the nine-days'-wonder of two continents, dwindled to a mere daily item in the dingy newspapers of that defiant city,—an item contemptuously sandwiched between the meteorological record and the deaths and marriages. The "coming man" came and went, being in his turn "temporarily relieved," and consigned to that obscurity which is the Nemesis of major-generals. He is more fortunate, however, than some of his compeers, in experiencing almost at once the double resurrection of autobiography and reappointment. Whether his new career be more or less successful than the old one, the autobiography is at least worth printing, so far as it goes. Had an instalment of it appeared when the siege of Charleston was at its height, it would have been translated into a dozen European languages, and would have been read more eagerly in London and Paris than even in Washington. Even now it will be read with interest, and with respect to rifled ordnance will be a permanent authority.

The total impression left behind by General Gillmore, in his former career in the Department of the South, was that of an unwearied worker and an admirable engineer officer. Military gifts are apt to be specific, and a specialist seldom gains reputation in the end by being raised to those elevated posts which require a combination of faculties. If the object of General Gillmore's original appointment was to silence Fort Sumter and to throw shell into Charleston, he was undoubtedly the man who could "do the job." If the aim was to take Charleston with a small military force, or even a large one, the wisdom of the choice was less clear. If the intent was to govern an important Department, without reference to further conquests,—to regulate trade, organize industry, free the slaves, educate the freedmen,—then the selection was still more doubtful. For this sphere of action, which had seemed so important to Mitchell and to Hunter, was foreign to Gillmore's whole habits and temperament, and he never could galvanize himself into caring for it. His strong point, after all, was in dealing with metal rather than with men, white or black. And as (since the disaster at Olustee) he can hardly be charged with any squeamish unwillingness to throw upon others the chief responsibility of any seeming failures of his own, it is perhaps fortunate that in this book he is able to keep chiefly upon the ground where he is strongest.