It was dark before Flor had ceased her novel course of thinking, pursued through all her little tasks,—beautiful star-lighted dark, full of broken breezes, soft and warm, and loaded with passionate spices and flower-breaths; she was alone again, under the shadows of the trees, entirely surrendered to her whirling fancies. In these few hours she had lived to the effect of years. She was neither hungry nor tired; she was conscious of but a single thing,—her whole being seemed effervescing into one wild longing after liberty. It was not that she could no longer brook control and be at the beck of each; it was a natural instinct, awakened at last in all the strength of maturity, that would not let her breathe another breath in peace unless it were her own,—that made her feel as though her chains were chafing into the bone,—that taught her the unutterable vileness and loathliness of bonds,—that convicted her, in being a slave, of being something foul upon the fair face of creation. She sat casting about for ways of escape. It was absurd to think she could again blunder on that secure retreat of the swamp before being overtaken; no boats ever passed along down the foaming river; if she were some little mole to hide and burrow in the ground till danger were over,—but no, she would rather front fear and ruin than lose one iota of her newly recognized identity. But there was no other path of safety; she clutched the ground with both hands in her powerlessness; in all the heaven and earth there seemed to be nothing to help her.

So at last Flor rose; since she could not get away, she must stay; as for the next day's punishment, she could laugh at it,—it was not its weight, but its wickedness, that troubled her; but escape, some time, she would. Lying in wait for method, ambushed for opportunity, it would go hard, if all failed. Of what value would life be then? she could but throw that after. So at some time, that was certain, she would go,—when, it was idle to say; it might be years before affairs were more propitious than now,—but then, at last, one day, the place that had known her should know her no more. Nevertheless, despite all this will and resolution, the heart of the child had sunk like a plummet at thought of leaving everything, at fear of future fortune; this deferring, after all, was half like respite.

Flor drew near the out-door fire, where Zoe and one or two others busied themselves. Something excited them extremely, it was plain to see and hear. Flor, beyond the circle of the light, strained her ears to listen. It was only a crumb of comfort that she obtained, but one of those miraculous crumbs to which there are twelve baskets of fragments: the Linkum gunboats were down at the mouth of the river. Oh! heaven a boat's length off! A day and night's drifting and rowing; then climbing the side slaves, treading the deck freemen,—the shackles fallen, the hands loosened, the soul saved!

But the boat? There was not such a thing along these banks. Improvise one. That was not possible. Flor listened, and the wild gasps of hope died out again into the dulness of despair. Some other time,—not this. As she stood still, idly and hopelessly hearkening to the mutter of the old women, with the patches of flickering fire-light falling on their faces in strange play and revelation, there stole upon her ear a sweeter and distincter sound, the voice of Miss Agatha, as, leaning out upon the night, she sang a plaint that consorted with her melancholy mood, learned in her Northern home in happier hours, without a thought of the moment of misery that might make it real.

Sooner or later the storms shall beat Over my slumber from head to feet; Sooner or later the winds shall rave In the long grass above my grave.

I shall not heed them where I lie, Nothing their sound shall signify, Nothing the headstone's fret of rain, Nothing to me the dark day's pain.

Sooner or later the sun shall shine With tender warmth on that mound of mine; Sooner or later, in summer air, Clover and violet blossom there.

I shall not feel in that deep-laid rest The sheeted light fall over my breast, Nor ever note in those hidden hours The wind-blown breath of the tossing flowers.

Sooner or later the stainless snows Shall add their hush to my mute repose; Sooner or later shall slant and shift And heap my bed with their dazzling drift.

Chill though that frozen pall shall seem, Its touch no colder can make the dream That recks not the sweet and sacred dread Shrouding the city of the dead.

Sooner or later the bee shall come And fill the noon with his golden hum; Sooner or later on half-paused wing The blue-bird's warble about me ring,—

Ring and chirrup and whistle with glee, Nothing his music means to me, None of these beautiful things shall know How soundly their lover sleeps below.

Sooner or later, far out in the night, The stars shall over me wing their flight; Sooner or later my darkling dews Catch the white spark in their silent ooze.

Never a ray shall part the gloom That wraps me round in the kindly tomb; Peace shall be perfect for lip and brow Sooner or later,—oh, why not now!

Little of this wobegone song touched Flor even enough to let her know there was some one in the world more wretched than herself. The last word, the last phrase, rang in her ears like a command,—now, why not now?—waiting for times and chances, hesitating, delaying, since go she must,—then why not now? What more did she need than a board and two sticks? Here they were in plenty. And with that, a bright thought, a fortunate memory,—the old abandoned scow! And if, after all, she failed, and went to watery death, did not the singer tell in how little time all would be quiet and oblivious once again? Oh, why not now?

Perhaps Flor would never have been entirely subjected to this state of mind but for an injury that she had suffered. Miss Emma had been rendered ill by the night's exposure in the swamp. In consequence of her complicity in this crime, Flor had been excluded from her young mistress's room during her indisposition, and ever since had not only been deprived of her companionship, but had not even been allowed to look upon her from a distance. A single week of that made life a desert. Too proud to complain, Flor saw in this the future, and so recognized, it may be, that it would be easy to part from the place, having already parted with Miss Emma. She drew nearer to the group now, and stood there long, while they wondered at her, gazing into the fire, her head fallen upon her breast. There was only one thing more to do: her little squirrel; nothing but her front of battle had kept it safe this many a day; were she once gone, it would be at the mercy of the first gridiron. Nobody saw the tears, in the dark and the distance, fast falling over the tiny sacrifice; but the cook might have guessed at them, when Flor brought her last offering, and begged that it might be prepared and taken in to Miss Emma.

How many things there were to do that evening! One wanted water, and another wanted towels, and a third wanted everything there was to want. Last of all, little Pluto came running with his unkindled torch,—Mas'r Henry wanted dancing.

Flor rummaged for her castanets, her tambourine, her ankle-rings,—they had all been thrown hither and thither,—and at length, as Pluto's torch flared up, ran tinkling along the turf, into the glow; and her voice broke, as she danced, into high, clear singing, triumphant singing, that welled up to the very sky, and made the air echo with sweetness. As she sang, all her slender form swayed to the tune, posturing, gesturing, bending now, now almost soaring, while, falling in showers of twinkling steps, her fleet feet seemed to weave their way on air. What ailed the girl? all asked;—such a play of emotion of mingled sorrow and ecstasy, never before had been interpreted by measure; so a disembodied spirit might have danced, and her dusky hue, the strange glancing lights thrown upon her here and there by the torch, going and coming and glittering at pleasure, made her appear like a shadow disporting before them. At length and slowly, note by note, with wild lingering turns to which the movement languished, her tone fell from its lofty jubilance to a happy flute-like humming; she waved her arms in the mimic tenderness of repeated and passionate farewells; then, still humming, faint and low and sweet, tripped off again, through the glow, along the turf, into the shadow, and out of sight; and it seemed to the beholders as if a fountain of gladness had gushed from the sod, and, playing in the light a moment, had run away down to join the river and the breaking sea.

Mas'r Henry called after Flor to throw her a penny; but she failed to reappear, and he tossed it to Pluto instead, and forgot about her.

* * * * *

So, bailed out and stuffed with marsh-grass in its crazy cracks, the old scow was afloat, the rope was cut, and by midnight it went drifting down the river. Waist-deep in shoal water, its appropriator had dragged it round inside the channel's ledge of rocks, with their foam and commotion, to the somewhat more placid flow below, and now it shot away over the smooth, slippery surface of the stream, that gave back reflections of the starbeams like a polished mirror.

Terrified by the course along the rapid river, the little creature crouched in the bottom of the scow, now breathless as it sped along the slope, now catching at the edge as in some chance eddy or flow it swirled from side to side, or, spinning quite round, went down the other way. But by-and-by gathering courage, she took her station, kneeling where with the long poles, previously provided, she could best direct her galley and avoid the dangers of a castaway. Peering this way and that through the darkness, carried along without labor, spying countless dangers where none existed, passing safely by them all, coming into a strange region of the river, she began to feel the exhilaration of venturous voyagers close upon unknown shores; the rush of the river and the rustle of the forest were all the sounds she heard; she was speeding alone through the darks of space to find another world. But, with time, a more material sensation called her back,—her feet were wet. What if the scow should founder! She flew to the old sun-dried gourd, and bailed away again till her arms were tired. When she dared leave the gourd, she was more calmly floating along and piercing an avenue of mighty gloom; the river-banks had reared themselves two walls of stone, and over them a hanging forest showed the heavens only like a scarf of stars caught upon its tree-tops and shaking in the wind. The deep loneliness made Flor tremble; the water that upbuoyed her was blackness itself; the way before her was impenetrable; far up above her opened that rent of sky,—so far, that she, a little dark waif among such tremendous shadows, was all unguessed by any guardian eye.

But not for heaven itself bodily before her would she have turned about, she who was all but free. The thought of that rose in her heart like strong wings beating onward;—feverishly she followed.

Flor perceived now that the old scow was being borne along with a strong, steady-motion, unlike its first fitful drift; it brought her heart to her throat,—for just so, it seemed to her, would a torrent set that was hastening to plunge over the side of the earth. She remembered, with a start of cold horror, Zoe's dim tradition of a fall far off in the river. She had never seen one, but Zoe had stamped its terrors deeply. Still down in the gloom itself she could see nothing but the slowly lightening sky overhead, the drowning stars, the rosy flush upon the dark old tips feathering against a dewy grayness that was like powdered light. But gradually she heard what conquered all necessity of seeing,—heard a continuous murmurous sound that filled all the air and grew to be a sullen roar. It seemed like the dread murmur from the world beyond the grave, the roar in earthly ears of that awful silence. Flor's quick senses were not long at fault. She seized her poles, and with all her might endeavored to push in towards the side and out of the main channel. Straws would have availed nearly as much; far faster than she went in shore she drove down stream. It was getting to be morning twilight all below; a soft, damp wind was blowing in her face; in the distance she could see, like the changing outline of a phantom, a low cloud of mist, wavering now on this side, now on that, but forever rising and falling and hovering before her. She knew what it was. If she could only bring her boat to that bank,—precipice though it was,—there must be some broken piece to catch by! She toiled with all her puny strength, and the great stream laughed at her and roared on. Suddenly, what her wildest efforts failed to do, the river did itself,—dividing into twenty currents for its plunge, some one of the eddies caught the old scow in its teeth and sent it whirling along the inmost current of all, close upon the shore. The rock, whose cleft the river had primevally chosen, was here more broken than above; various edges protruded maddeningly as Flor skimmed by almost within reach. Twice she plucked at them and missed. One flat shelf, over which the thin water slipped like a sheet of molten glass, remained and caught her eye; she was no longer cold or stiff with terror, but frantic to save herself; it was the only chance, the last; shooting by, she sprang forward, pole in hand, touched it, fell, caught a ledge with her hands while the fierce flow of the water lifted her off her feet, scrambled up breathlessly and was safe, while the scow swept past, two flashing furlongs, poised a few moments after on the brink of the fall, went majestically over, and came up to the surface below in pieces.

Flor wrung her hands in dismay. She had not understood her situation before. There was no escape now, it seemed,—not even to return. Nothing was possible save starving to death on this ledge,—and after that, the vultures. She sat there for a little while in a kind of stupor. She saw the light falling slowly down, as it had fallen millions of mornings before, and bringing out all blue and purple shadows on the wet old rock; she saw the current ever hurrying by to join the tumult of the cataract; she heard the deep, sweet music of the waters like a noisy dream in her ears. With the shock of her wreck coming at the instant when she fancied herself so swiftly and securely speeding on towards safety and freedom, she felt indifferent to all succeeding fate. What if she did die? who was she? what was she? nothing but an atom. What odds, after all? The solution of her soliloquy was, that, before the first ray of sunshine reached down and smote the dark torrent into glancing emerald, she began to feel ravenously hungry, and found it a great deal of odds, after all. She rose to her feet, grasping cautiously at the slippery rock, and searched about her. There was another ledge close at hand, corresponding to the one on which she stood; she crept forward and transferred herself, with an infinitude of tremors, from this to that; there was a foothold just beyond; she gained it. Up and down and all along there were other projections, just enough for a hand, a foot: a wet and terrible pathway; to follow it might be death, to neglect it certainly was. What had she danced for all her days, if it had not made her sure and nimble footed? Under her the foam leaped up, the spectral mist crept like an icy breath, the spray sprinkled all about her, swinging herself along from ledge to ledge, from jag to jag, like a spider on a viewless thread. Now she hung just above the fall, looking down and longing to leap, with nothing but a shining laurel-branch between her and the boiling pits below; now, at last, a green hillside sloped to the water's edge, sparkling across all its solitude with ten thousand drops of dew, a broad, blue morning heaven bent and shone overhead, and having raced the river in the moment's light-heartedness of glee at her good hap, she sat some rods below, looking up at the fall and dipping her bleeding and blistered feet in and out of the cool and rapid-running river.

What was there now to do? To go back,—to go back,—not if she were torn by lions! That was as impossible for her as to reverse a fiat of creation. God had said to her,—"Let there be light." How could she, then, return to darkness? To keep along on land,—it might be weeks before she reached the quarter of the gunboats,—she would be seized as a stray, and lodged in jail, and sold for whom it might concern. But with her scow gone to pieces, what other thing was there to do? So she sat looking up at the spurting cascades, with their horns of silver leaping into the light, and all the clear brown and beryl rush of their crystalline waters, and longing for her scow. If she had so much as the bit of bark on which the squirrels crossed the river! She looked again about her for relief. The rainbow at the foot of all the falls, in its luminous, steady arch, seemed a bridge solid enough for even her little black feet, had one side of the stream been any surer haven than the other; and as she sought out its bases, her eye lighted on something curiously like a weed swaying up and down. She picked her way to it, and found it wedged where she could loosen it,—two planks still nailed to a stout crossbar. She floated it, and held it fast a moment. What if she trusted to it,—with neither sail nor rudder, as before, but now with neither oar nor pole? On shore, for her there were only ravening wolves; waterfalls were no worse than they, and perhaps there were no more waterfalls. She stepped gingerly upon the fragment, seated and balanced herself, paddled with her two hands, and thought to slip away. In spite of everything, a kind of exultation bubbled up within her,—she felt as if she were defying Destiny itself.

When, however, Flor intrusted herself to the stream, the stream received the trust and seemed inclined to keep it; for there she stayed: the planks tilted up and down, the water washed over her, but there were the falls at nearly the same distance as when she embarked, and there they stayed as well. The water, too, was no more fresh and sweet, but had a salt and brackish taste. The sun was nearly overhead, and she was in an agony of apprehension before she saw the falls slide slowly back, and in one of a fresh succession of wonders, understanding nothing of it, she found herself, with a strange sucking heave under her, falling on the ebb-tide as before she had fallen on the mountain-current.

Gentle undulations of friendly hills seemed now to creep by; and through their openings she caught glimpses of cotton-fields. There was a wicked relish in her thoughts, as she pictured the dusky laborers at work there, and she gliding by unseen in the idle sunshine. She passed again between high banks of red earth, scored by land-slides, with springs oozing out half-way up, and now and then clad in a mantle of vivid growth and color,—a thicket of blossoming pomegranate darkening on a sunburst of creamy dogwood, or a wild fig-tree sending its roots down to drink, with a sweet-scented and gorgeous epiphyte weaving a flowery enchantment about-them, and making the whole atmosphere reel with richness. But all this verdant beauty, the lush luxuriance of grape-vines, of dark myrtle-masses, of swinging curtains of convolvuli almost brushing her head as she floated by,—nothing of this was new to Flor, nothing precious; she could have given all the beauty of earth and heaven for a crust of bread just then. She thought of the plantation with a dry sob, but would not turn her face. She could not move much, indeed, her position was so ticklish; hardy wretch as she was, she had already become faint and famished: she contrived, resting her arms on the crossbar, at last, to lay her head upon them; and thus lying, perpetually bathed by the soft, warm dip and rise of the water, the pain of hunger left her, and she saw the world waft by like a dream.

Slowly the evening began to fall. Flor marked the bright waters dim and put on a bloomy purple along which rosy and golden shadows wandered and mingled, stars looked timidly up from beneath her, and just over her shoulder, as if all the daylight left had gathered in that one little curved line, lay the suspicion of the tenderest new moon, like some boatman of the skies essaying to encourage her with his apparition as he floated lightly down the west. Flor paid heed to the spectacle in its splendid quiet but briefly; her eyes were fixed on a great trail of passion-flowers that blew out a gale of sweetness from their broad blue disks. She had reached that hanging branch, lavishly blossoming here on the wilderness, and had hung upon the tide beneath it for a while, till she found herself gently moving back again; and now she swung slightly to and fro, neither making nor losing headway, and, fond of such sensuous delights, half content to lie thus and do nothing but breathe the delicious odor stealing towards her, and resting in broad airy swaths, it seemed, upon the bosom of the stream around her. By-and-by, when the great blue star, that last night at the zenith seemed to suspend all the tented drapery of the sky, hung there large and lovely again, Flor, gazing up at it with a confused sense of passion-flowers in heaven, half woke to find herself sliding down stream at last in earnest. Her brain was very light and giddy; all her powers of perception were momentarily heightened; she took notice of her seesawing upon the ebb and flow, and understood that washing up and down the shores, a mere piece of driftwood, life would long have left her ere she attained the river's mouth, if she were not stranded by the way. The branch of a cedar-tree came dallying by with that, brought down from above the falls; she half rose, and caught at it, and fell back, but she kept hold of it by just a twig, and, fatigued with the exertion, drowsed away awhile. Waking again, after a little, her fingers still fast upon it, she drew it over, fixed it upright as she could, and spread her petticoat about it at the risk of utter capsize. The soft sweet wind beat against the sail as happily as if it had been Cleopatra's weft of purple silk, and carried her on, while she lay back, one arm around her jury-mast, and half indifferently unconscious again. She had meant, on reaching the gunboats,—ah, inconceivable bliss!—to win her way with her feet; with willowy graces and eloquent pantomime, to have danced along the deck and into favor trippingly: now, if she should have strength enough left to fall on her knees, it would be strange. She clung to the crossbar in a little while from blind habit; the rest of her body seemed light and powerless. She was neither asleep nor awake now, suffering nothing save occasionally a wild flutter of hope which was joy and anguish together; but all things began mingling in her mind in a species of delirium while she gave them attention, afterwards slid by blank of all meaning but beauty. The lofty cypresses on the edge above loomed into obelisks, and stood like shafts of ebony against a glow of sunrise that stirred down deep in the night; dew-clouds, it seemed, hung on them, and lifted and lowered when their veils of moss waved here and there; the glistering laurel-leaves shivered in a network of light and shade like imprisoned spirits troubling to be free; but where the great magnolias stood were massed the white wings of angels fanning forth fragrances untold and heavenly, and one by one slowly revealing themselves in the dawn of another day. It seemed as if great and awful spirits must be leading this little being into light and freedom.

So the river lapsed along, and the sun blazed, and a torture of thirst came and went as it had come and gone before; and sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly, the veering winds and the pendulous tides carried the wreck and its burden along. Flor had planned, before she started, that all her progress should be made by night; by day she would haul up among the tall rushes or under the lee of some stump or rock, and so escape strange sail and spying eyes. But there had been no need of this, for no other boat had passed up or down the river since she sailed. If there had, she could no more have feared it. She stole by a high deserted garden, the paling broken half away. A tardy almond-tree was stirring its tower of bloom in the sunshine up there; oranges were reddening on an overhanging bough, whose wreaths of snowy sweetness made the air a passionate delight; a luscious fruit dropped, with all its royal gloss, into the river beside her, and she could not put out a hand to catch it. She saw now all that passed, but no longer with any afterthoughts of reference to herself; so sights might slip across the retina of a dead man's eye; her identity seemed fading from her, as from some substance on the point of dissolution into the wide universe. She felt like one who, under an aesthetic influence, seems to himself careering through mid-air, conscious only of motion and vanishing forms. Cultured uplands and thick woods peopled with melodies all stole by, mere picture; the long snake of the river crept through green meadowy shores haunted by the cluck and clutter of the marsh-hen; from a bluff of the bank broke a blaze of fire and a yelping roar, and something slapped and skipped along the water,—a ball from a Rebel battery to bring the strange craft to,—others followed and danced like demons through the hissing tide that rocked under her and plunged up and down, tilting and turning and half drowning the wreck. Flor looked at them all with wide eyes, at the battery and at the bluff, and went by without any more sensation than that dazed quiet in which, at the time, she would have gone down to death with the soft waters laying their warm weight on her head, not even thanking Fortune that in giving her a slippery plank gave her something to elude either canister or catapult. Occasionally she felt a pain, a strange parched pain; it burned awhile, and left her once more oblivious. She slept a little, by fits and starts; sometimes the very stillness stirred her. She listened and heard the turtle plumping down into the stream, now and then the little fishes leaping and plashing, the eels slipping in and out among the reeds and sedges at the side; far away in the broad marshes, that, bathed in dim vapor, now lay all about her, the cry of a bittern boomed; she saw a pair of herons flapping inland over the gray swell of the water; there were some great purple phantoms, darkly imagined monsters; looming near at hand:—all the phantasmagoria drifted by,—and then, caught in the currents playing forever by noon or night round the low edges of sand-bars and islets, she was sweeping out to sea like chaff.

The sun was going down, a mere redness in the curdling fleecy haze; the weltering seas rose and fell in broad sheets of burnished silver, the monotone of their music followed them, a cool salt wind blew over them and freshened them for storm. Flor rose on her arm and looked back,—the breeze roused her; pain and fear and hope rose with her and looked back too. Eager, feverish, fierce, recollecting and desiring and imprecating, her dry lips parted for a shriek that the dryer throat had at first no power to utter. In such wild longing pangs it seemed her heart would burst as it beat. The low land, the great gunboats, all were receding, and she was washing out to sea, a weed.—Well, then, wash!

* * * * *

The stem of the boat rose lightly, riding over the rollers; the sturdy arms kept flashing stroke; the great gulfs gaped for a life, no matter whose; night would darken down on them soon;—pull with a will!

They heard her voice as they drew near: she had found it again, singing, as the swan sings his death-song, loud and clear,—singing to herself some song of her old happy dancing-days, while the spray powdered over her and one broad wave lifted and tossed her on to the next,—no note of sorrow in the song, and no regret.

It was but brief delay beside her; then they pulled back, the wind piping behind them,—nearer to that purple cloud with its black plume of smoke, up the side and over; all the white faces crowding round her, pallid blots; one dark face smiling on her like Sarp's; friendship and succor everywhere about her; and over her, blowing out broadly upon the stormy wind, that flag whose starry shadow nowhere shelters a slave.



ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

SUMMER, 1865.

Dead is the roll of the drums, And the distant thunders die, They fade in the far-off sky; And a lovely summer comes, Like the smile of Him on high.

Lulled the storm and the onset. Earth lies in a sunny swoon; Stiller splendor of noon, Softer glory of sunset, Milder starlight and moon!

For the kindly Seasons love us; They smile over trench and clod, (Where we left the bravest of us,)— There's a brighter green of the sod, And a holier calm above us In the blessed Blue of God.

The roar and ravage were vain; And Nature, that never yields, Is busy with sun and rain At her old sweet work again On the lonely battle-fields.

How the tall white daisies grow Where the grim artillery rolled! (Was it only a moon ago? It seems a century old,)—

And the bee hums in the clover, As the pleasant June comes on; Aye, the wars are all over,— But our good Father is gone.

There was tumbling of traitor fort, Flaming of traitor fleet,— Lighting of city and port, Clasping in square and street.

There was thunder of mine and gun, Cheering by mast and tent,— When—his dread work all done, And his high fame full won— Died the Good President.

In his quiet chair he sate, Pure of malice or guile, Stainless of fear or hate,— And there played a pleasant smile On the rough and careworn face; For his heart was all the while On means of mercy and grace.

The brave old Flag drooped o'er him, (A fold in the hard hand lay,)— He looked, perchance, on the play,— But the scene was a shadow before him, For his thoughts were far away.

'Twas but the morn, (yon fearful Death-shade, gloomy and vast, Lifting slowly at last,) His household heard him say, "'Tis long since I've been so cheerful, So light of heart as to-day."

'Twas dying, the long dread clang,— But, or ever the blessed ray Of peace could brighten to-day, Murder stood by the way,— Treason struck home his fang! One throb—and, without a pang, That pure soul passed away.

Idle, in this our blindness, To marvel we cannot see Wherefore such things should be, Or to question Infinite Kindness Of this or of that Decree,

Or to fear lest Nature bungle, That in certain ways she errs: The cobra in the jungle, The crotalus in the sod, Evil and good are hers;— Murderers and torturers! Ye, too, were made by God.

All slowly heaven is nighing, Needs that offence must come; Ever the Old Wrong dying Will sting, in the death-coil lying, And hiss till its fork be dumb.

But dare deny no further, Black-hearted, brazen-cheeked! Ye on whose lips yon murther These fifty moons hath reeked,—

From the wretched scenic dunce, Long a-hungered to rouse A Nation's heart for the nonce,— (Hugging his hell, so that once He might yet bring down the house!)—

From the commons, gross and simple, Of a blind and bloody land, (Long fed on venomous lies!)— To the horrid heart and hand That sumless murder dyes,— The hand that drew the wimple Over those cruel eyes.

Pass on,—your deeds are done, Forever sets your sun; Vainly ye lived or died, 'Gainst Freedom and the Laws,— And your memory and your cause Shall haunt o'er the trophied tide

Like some Pirate Caravel floating Dreadful, adrift—whose crew From her yard-arms dangle rotting,— The old Horror of the blue.

Avoid ye,—let the morrow Sentence or mercy see. Pass to your place: our sorrow Is all too dark to borrow One shade from such as ye.

But if one, with merciful eyes, From the forgiving skies Looks, 'mid our gloom, to see Yonder where Murder lies, Stripped of the woman guise, And waiting the doom,—'tis he.

Kindly Spirit!—Ah, when did treason Bid such a generous nature cease, Mild by temper and strong by reason, But ever leaning to love and peace?

A head how sober! a heart how spacious! A manner equal with high or low; Rough, but gentle; uncouth, but gracious; And still inclining to lips of woe.

Patient when saddest, calm when sternest, Grieved when rigid for justice' sake; Given to jest, yet ever in earnest, If aught of right or truth were at stake.

Simple of heart, yet shrewd therewith; Slow to resolve, but firm to hold; Still with parable and with myth Seasoning truth, like Them of old; Aptest humor and quaintest pith! (Still we smile o'er the tales he told.)

And if, sometimes, in saddest stress, That mind, over-meshed by fate, (Ringed round with treason and hate, And guiding the State by guess,) Could doubt and could hesitate,— Who, alas! had done less In the world's most deadly strait?

But how true to the Common Cause! Of his task how unweary! How hard he worked, how good he was, How kindly and cheery!

How, while it marked redouble The howls and hisses and sneers, That great heart bore our trouble Through all these terrible years,—

And, cooling passion with state, And ever counting the cost, Kept the Twin World-Robbers in wait Till the time for their clutch was lost!

How much he cared for the State, How little for praise or pelf! A man too simply great To scheme for his proper self.

But in mirth that strong heart rested From its strife with the false and violent,— A jester!—So Henry jested, So jested William the Silent.

Orange, shocking the dull With careless conceit and quip, Yet holding the dumb heart full With Holland's life on his lip![D]

Navarre, bonhomme and pleasant, Pitying the poor man's lot, Wishing that every peasant A chicken had in his pot;

Feeding the stubborn bourgeois, Though Paris still held out; Holding the League in awe, But jolly with all about.

Out of an o'erflowed fulness Those deep hearts seemed too light,— (And so 'twas, murder's dulness Was set with sullener spite.)

Yet whoso might pierce the guise Of mirth in the man we mourn Would mark, and with grieved surprise, All the great soul had borne, In the piteous lines, and the kind, sad eyes So dreadfully wearied and worn.

And we trusted (the last dread page Once turned of our Doomsday Scroll) To have seen him, sunny of soul, In a cheery, grand old age.

But, Father, 'tis well with thee! And since ever, when God draws nigh, Some grief for the good must be, 'Twas well, even so to die,—

'Mid the thunder of Treason's fall, The yielding of haughty town, The crashing of cruel wall, The trembling of tyrant crown!

The ringing of hearth and pavement To the clash of falling chains,— The centuries of enslavement Dead, with their blood-bought gains!

And through trouble weary and long Well hadst thou seen the way, Leaving the State so strong It did not reel for a day;

And even in death couldst give A token for Freedom's strife,— A proof how republics live, And not by a single life,

But the Right Divine of man, And the many, trained to be free,— And none, since the world began, Ever was mourned like thee.

Dost thou feel it, O noble Heart! (So grieved and so wronged below,) From the rest wherein thou art? Do they see it, those patient eyes? Is there heed in the happy skies For tokens of world-wide woe?

The Land's great lamentations, The mighty mourning of cannon, The myriad flags half-mast,— The late remorse of the nations, Grief from Volga to Shannon! (Now they know thee at last.)

How, from gray Niagara's shore To Canaveral's surfy shoal,— From the rough Atlantic roar To the long Pacific roll,— For bereavement and for dole, Every cottage wears its weed, White as thine own pure soul, And black as the traitor deed!

How, under a nation's pall, The dust so dear in our sight To its home on the prairie passed,— The leagues of funeral, The myriads, morn and night, Pressing to look their last!

Nor alone the State's Eclipse; But how tears in hard eyes gather,— And on rough and bearded lips, Of the regiments and the ships,— "Oh, our dear Father!"

And methinks of all the million That looked on the dark dead face, 'Neath its sable-plumed pavilion, The crone of a humbler race Is saddest of all to think on, And the old swart lips that said, Sobbing, "Abraham Lincoln! Oh, he is dead, he is dead!"

Hush! let our heavy souls To-day be glad; for agen The stormy music swells and rolls Stirring the hearts of men.

And under the Nation's Dome, They've guarded so well and long, Our boys come marching home, Two hundred thousand strong.

All in the pleasant month of May, With war-worn colors and drums, Still, through the livelong summer's day, Regiment, regiment comes.

Like the tide, yesty and barmy, That sets on a wild lee-shore, Surge the ranks of an army Never reviewed before!

Who shall look on the like agen, Or see such host of the brave? A mighty River of marching men Rolls the Capital through,— Rank on rank, and wave on wave, Of bayonet-crested blue!

How the chargers neigh and champ, (Their riders weary of camp,) With curvet and with caracole!— The cavalry comes with thundrous tramp, And the cannons heavily roll.

And ever, flowery and gay, The Staff sweeps on in a spray Of tossing forelocks and manes; But each bridle-arm has a weed Of funeral, black as the steed That fiery Sheridan reins.

Grandest of mortal sights The sun-browned ranks to view,—- The Colors ragg'd in a hundred fights, And the dusty Frocks of Blue!

And all day, mile on mile, With cheer, and waving, and smile, The war-worn legions defile Where the nation's noblest stand; And the Great Lieutenant looks on, With the Flower of a rescued Land,— For the terrible work is done, And the Good Fight is won For God and for Fatherland.

So, from the fields they win, Our men are marching home, A million are marching home! To the cannon's thundering din, And banners on mast and dome,— And the ships come sailing in With all their ensigns dight, As erst for a great sea-fight.

Let every color fly, Every pennon flaunt in pride; Wave, Starry Flag, on high! Float in the sunny sky, Stream o'er the stormy tide! For every stripe of stainless hue, And every star in the field of blue, Ten thousand of the brave and true Have laid them down and died.

And in all our pride to-day We think, with a tender pain, Of those so far away, They will not come home again.

And our boys had fondly thought, To-day, in marching by, From the ground so dearly bought, And the fields so bravely fought, To have met their Father's eye.

But they may not see him in place, Nor their ranks be seen of him; We look for the well-known face, And the splendor is strangely dim.

Perished?—who was it said Our Leader had passed away? Dead? Our President dead?— He has not died for a day!

We mourn for a little breath, Such as, late or soon, dust yields; But the Dark Flower of Death Blooms in the fadeless fields.

We looked on a cold, still brow: But Lincoln could yet survive; He never was more alive, Never nearer than now.

For the pleasant season found him, Guarded by faithful hands, In the fairest of Summer Lands: With his own brave Staff around him, There our President stands.

There they are all at his side, The noble hearts and true, That did all men might do,— Then slept, with their swords, and died.

Of little the storm has reft us But the brave and kindly clay ('Tis but dust where Lander left us, And but turf where Lyon lay).

There's Winthrop, true to the end, And Ellsworth of long ago, (First fair young head laid low!) There 's Baker, the brave old friend, And Douglas, the friendly foe:

(Baker, that still stood up When 'twas death on either hand: "'Tis a soldier's part to stoop, But the Senator must stand.")

The heroes gather and form:— There's Cameron, with his scars, Sedgwick, of siege and storm, And Mitchell, that joined his stars.

Winthrop, of sword and pen, Wadsworth, with silver hair, Mansfield, ruler of men, And brave McPherson are there.

Birney, who led so long, Abbott, born to command, Elliott the bold, and Strong, Who fell on the hard-fought strand.

Lytle, soldier and bard, And the Ellets, sire and son, Ransom, all grandly scarred, And Redfield, no more on guard, (But Alatoona is won!)

Reno, of pure desert, Kearney, with heart of flame, And Russell, that hid his hurt Till the final death-bolt came.

Terrill, dead where he fought, Wallace, that would not yield, And Sumner, who vainly sought A grave on the foughten field

(But died ere the end he saw, With years and battles outworn). There's Harmon of Kenesaw, And Ulric Dahlgren, and Shaw, That slept with his Hope Forlorn.

Bayard, that knew not fear, (True as the knight of yore,) And Putnam, and Paul Revere, Worthy the names they bore. Allen, who died for others, Bryan, of gentle fame, And the brave New-England brothers That have left us Lowell's name.

Home, at last, from the wars,— Stedman, the staunch and mild, And Janeway, our hero-child, Home, with his fifteen scars!

There's Porter, ever in front, True son of a sea-king sire, And Christian Foote, and Dupont (Dupont, who led his ships Rounding the first Ellipse Of thunder and of fire).

There's Ward, with his brave death-wounds, And Cummings, of spotless name, And Smith, who hurtled his rounds When deck and hatch were aflame;

Wainwright, steadfast and true, Rodgers, of brave sea-blood, And Craven, with ship and crew Sunk in the salt sea flood.

And, a little later to part, Our Captain, noble and dear— (Did they deem thee, then, austere? Drayton!—O pure and kindly heart! Thine is the seaman's tear.)

All such,—and many another, (Ah, list how long to name!) That stood like brother by brother, And died on the field of fame.

And around—(for there can cease This earthly trouble)—they throng, The friends that had passed in peace, The foes that have seen their wrong.

(But, a little from the rest, With sad eyes looking down, And brows of softened frown, With stern arms on the chest, Are two, standing abreast,— Stonewall and Old John Brown.)

But the stainless and the true, These by their President stand, To look on his last review, Or march with the old command.

And lo, from a thousand fields, From all the old battle-haunts, A greater Army than Sherman wields, A grander Review than Grant's!

Gathered home from the grave, Risen from sun and rain,— Rescued from wind and wave, Out of the stormy main,— The Legions of our Brave Are all in their lines again!

Many a stout Corps that went, Full-ranked, from camp and tent, And brought back a brigade; Many a brave regiment, That mustered only a squad.

The lost battalions, That, when the fight went wrong, Stood and died at their guns,— The stormers steady and strong,

With their best blood that bought Scarp, and ravelin, and wall,— The companies that fought Till a corporal's guard was all.

Many a valiant crew, That passed in battle and wreck,— Ah, so faithful and true! They died on the bloody deck, They sank in the soundless blue.

All the loyal and bold That lay on a soldier's bier,— The stretchers borne to the rear, The hammocks lowered to the hold.

The shattered wreck we hurried, In death-fight, from deck and port,— The Blacks that Wagner buried, That died in the Bloody Fort!

Comrades of camp and mess, Left, as they lay, to die, In the battle's sorest stress, When the storm of fight swept by: They lay in the Wilderness,— Ah, where did they not lie?

In the tangled swamp they lay, They lay so still on the sward!— They rolled in the sick-bay, Moaning their lives away;— They flushed in the fevered ward.

They rotted in Libby yonder, They starved in the foul stockade,— Hearing afar the thunder Of the Union cannonade!

But the old wounds all are healed, And the dungeoned limbs are free,— The Blue Frocks rise from the field, The Blue Jackets out of the sea.

They've 'scaped from the torture-den, They've broken the bloody sod, They're all come to life agen!— The Third of a Million men That died for Thee and for God!

A tenderer green than May The Eternal Season wears,— The blue of our summer's day Is dim and pallid to theirs,— The Horror faded away, And 'twas heaven all unawares!

Tents on the Infinite Shore! Flags in the azuline sky, Sails on the seas once more! To-day, in the heaven on high, All under arms once more!

The troops are all in their lines, The guidons flutter and play; But every bayonet shines, For all must march to-day.

What lofty pennons flaunt? What mighty echoes haunt, As of great guns, o'er the main? Hark to the sound again! The Congress is all-ataunt! The Cumberland's manned again!

All the ships and their men Are in line of battle to-day,— All at quarters, as when Their last roll thundered away,— All at their guns, as then, For the Fleet salutes to-day.

The armies, have broken camp On the vast and sunny plain, The drums are rolling again; With steady, measured tramp, They're marching all again.

With alignment firm and solemn, Once again they form In mighty square and column,— But never for charge and storm.

The Old Flag they died under Floats above them on the shore, And on the great ships yonder The ensigns dip once more,— And once again the thunder Of the thirty guns and four!

In solid platoons of steel, Under heaven's triumphal arch, The long lines break and wheel; And the word is, "Forward, march!"

The colors ripple o'erhead, The drums roll up to the sky, And with martial time and tread The regiments all pass by,— The ranks of our faithful Dead, Meeting their President's eye.

With a soldier's quiet pride They smile o'er the perished pain, For their anguish was not vain,— For thee, O Father, we died! And we did not die in vain.

March on, your last brave mile! Salute him, Star and Lace, Form round him, rank and file, And look on the kind, rough face; But the quaint and homely smile Has a glory and a grace It never had known erewhile,— Never, in time and space.

Close round him, hearts of pride! Press near him, side by side,— Our Father is not alone! For the Holy Right ye died, And Christ, the Crucified, Waits to welcome his own.

FOOTNOTES:

[D] "His temperament was cheerful. At table, the pleasures of which in moderation were his only relaxation, he was always animated and merry; and this jocoseness was partly natural, partly intentional. In the darkest hours of his country's trial, he affected a serenity he was far from feeling; so that his apparent gayety at momentous epochs was even censured by dullards, who could not comprehend its philosophy, nor applaud the flippancy of William the Silent. He went through life bearing the load of a people's sorrows with a smiling face."—Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic.

Perhaps a lively national sense of humor is one of the surest exponents of advanced civilization. Certainly a grim sullenness and fierceness have been the leading traits of the Rebellion for Slavery; while Freedom, like a Brave at the stake, has gone through her long agony with a smile and a jest ever on her lips.



REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Letters to Various Persons, By HENRY D. THOREAU. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

The prose of Thoreau is daily winning recognition as possessing some of the very highest qualities of thought and utterance, in a degree scarcely rivalled in contemporary literature. In spite of whim and frequent over-refining, and the entire omission of many important aspects of human life, these wondrous merits exercise their charm, and we value everything which lets us into the workshop of so rare a mind. These letters, most of which were addressed to a single confidential friend, give us Thoreau's thoughts in undress, and there has been no previous book in which we came so near him. It is like engraving the studies of an artist,—studies many of which were found too daring or difficult for final execution, and which must be shown in their original shape or not at all. To any one who was more artist than thinker this exhibition would be doing wrong; but to one like Thoreau, more thinker than artist, it is an act of justice.

The public, being always eager for the details of personal life, and therefore especially hungry for private letters, will hardly make this distinction. All is held to be right which gives us more personality in print. One can fancy the exasperation of a gossip, however, on opening these profound and philosophic leaves. There is almost no private history in them; and even of Thoreau's beloved science of Natural History, very little. He does, indeed, begin one letter with "Dear Mother, ... Pray have you the seventeen-year locust in Concord?" which recalls Mendelssohn's birthday letter to his mother, opening with two bars of music. But even such mundane matters as these occur rarely in the book, which is chiefly made up of pure thought, and that of the highest and often of the most subtile quality.

Thoreau had, in literature as in life, a code of his own, which, if sometimes lax where others were stringent, was always stringent in higher matters, where others were lax. Even the friendship of Emerson could not coerce him into that careful elaboration which gives dignity and sometimes a certain artistic monotony to the works of our great essayist. Emerson never wilfully leaves a point unguarded, never allows himself to be caught in undress. Thoreau spurns this punctiliousness, and thus impairs his average execution; while for the same reason he attains, in favored moments, a diction more flowing and a more lyric strain than his teacher ever allows himself, at least in prose. He also secures, through this daring, the occasional expression of more delicate as well as more fantastic thoughts. And there is an interesting passage in these letters where he rather unexpectedly recognizes the dignity of literary art as art, and states very finely its range of power. "To look at literature,—how many fine thoughts has every man had! how few fine thoughts are expressed! Yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and ethereal, but that talent merely, with more resolution and faithful persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in distinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are the solidest facts that we know." The Italics are his own, and the glimpse at his literary method is very valuable.

One sees also, in these letters, how innate in him was that grand simplicity of spiritual attitude, compared with which most confessions of faith seem to show something hackneyed and second-hand. It seems the first resumption—unless here again we must link his name with Emerson's—of that great strain of thought of which Epictetus the slave and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus the sovereign were the last previous examples. Amid the general Miserere, here is one hymn of lofty cheer. There is neither weak conceit nor weak contrition, but gratitude for existence, and a sublime aim. "My actual life," he says, "is a fact in view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak. Every man's position is, in fact, too simple to be described.... I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that.... I know that I am. I know that another is who knows more than I, who takes interest in me, whose creature, and yet whose kindred, in one sense, am I. I know that the enterprise is worthy. I know that things work well. I have heard no bad news." (p. 45.)

"Happy the man," he elsewhere nobly says, "who observes the heavenly and the terrestrial law in just proportion; whose every faculty, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, obeys the law of its level; who neither stoops nor goes on tiptoe, but lives a balanced life, acceptable to Nature and to God." And then he manfully adds,—"These things I say; other things I do." Manfully, not mournfully; for his life, though in many ways limited, was never, in any high sense, unsuccessful; nor did he ever assume for one moment the attitude of apology.

These limitations of his life no doubt impaired his thought also, in certain directions. The letters might sometimes exhibit the record of Carlyle's lion, attempting to live on chicken-weed. Here is a man of vast digestive power, who, prizing the flavor of whortleberries and wild apples, insists on making these almost his only food. It is amazing to see what nutriment he extracts from them; yet would not, after all, an ampler bill of fare have done better? Is there not something to be got from the caucus and from the opera, which Thoreau abhorred, as well as from the swamps which he justly loved? Could he not have spent two hours rationally in Boston elsewhere than at the station-house of the railway that led to Concord? His habits suggest a perpetual feeling of privation and effort, and he has to be constantly on the alert to repel condolence. This one-sidedness of result is a constant drawback on the reader's enjoyment, and it is impossible to leave it out of sight. Yet all criticism seems like cavilling, when one comes upon a series of sentences like these:—

"Do what you love.... Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something. All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story. Let nothing come between you and the light. Respect men as brothers only. When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God,—none of the servants. In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions; know that you are alone in the world." (p. 46.)

This suggests those wonderful strokes in the "Indenture" in "Wilhelm Meister," and Goethe cannot surpass it.

His finest defence of his habitual solitude occurs in these letters also, and has some statements whose felicitousness can hardly be surpassed. "As for any dispute about solitude and society, any comparison is impertinent.... It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar; and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner, till there is none at all. It is either the tribune on the plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasy still higher up. We are not the less to aim at the summits, though the multitude does not ascend them. Use all the society that will abet you." (p. 139.)

And since the unsocial character of Thoreau's theory of life has been one of the most serious charges against it, his fine series of thoughts on love and marriage in this volume become peculiarly interesting. "Love must be as much a light as a flame." "Love is a severe critic. Hate can pardon more than love." "A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman." "It is not enough that we are truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about." These are sentences on which one might spin commentaries and scholia to the end of life; and there are many others as admirable.

His few verses close the volume,—few and choice, with a rare flavor of the seventeenth century in them. The best poem of all, "My life is like a stroll upon the beach," is not improved by its new and inadequate title, "The Fisher's Boy." The three poems near the end, "Smoke," "Mist," and "Haze," are marvellous triumphs of language; the thoughts and fancies are as subtile as the themes, and yet are embodied as delicately and accurately as if uttered in Greek.

France and England in North America. A Series of Historical Narratives. By FRANCIS PARKMAN, Author of "History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac," "Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life," etc. Part First. Pioneers of France in the New World. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co.

It has been known for nearly a score of years within our literary circles, that one of the richest and least wrought themes of our American history had been appropriated by the zeal and research of a student eminently qualified by nature, culture, and personal experience to develop its wealth of interest. While very many among us may have been aware that Mr. Parkman had devoted himself to the task of which we have before us some of the results, only a narrower circle of friends have known under what severe physical embarrassments and disabilities he has been restrained from maturing those results. He has fully and sadly realized, within his own different range, the experience which he so aptly phrases as endured by his hero, the adventurous and dauntless Champlain. When that great pioneer, midway in his splendid career, was planning one of his almost annual voyages hitherward, at one of the most emergent periods of his enterprise, he was seized on board his vessel in France with a violent illness, and reduced, as Mr. Parkman says, to that "most miserable of all conflicts, the battle of the eager spirit against the treacherous and failing flesh." Mr. Parkman has known well what these words mean. In his case, as in that of Champlain, it was not from the burden of years and natural decay, but from the touch of disease in the period of life's full vigor in its midway course, that mental activity was restrained. When, besides the inflictions of a racked nervous system, the author suffered in addition a malady of the eyes, which limited him, as he says, to intervals of five minutes for reading or writing, when it did not wholly preclude them, we may well marvel at what he has accomplished. And the reader will marvel all the more that the hindrances and pains under which the matter of these pages has been wrought have left no traces or transfer of themselves here. It may be possible that an occasional twinge or pang may have concentrated the terse narrative, or pointed the sharp and shrewd moralizings of these pages; for there is an amazing conciseness and a keen epigrammatic sagacity in them. But there is no languor, no feebleness, no sleepy prosiness, to indicate where vivacity flagged, and where an episode or paragraph was finished after the glow had yielded to exhaustion.

Mr. Parkman's theme is one of adventure on the grandest scale, with novel conditions and elements, and under the quickening of master passions of a sort to give to incidents and achievements a most romantic and soul-absorbing interest. Only incidentally, and then most slightly, does he have to deal with state affairs, with court intrigues, or with diplomatic complications. He has to follow men into regions and scenes in which there is so much raw material, and so much of the originality of human conditions and qualities, that no precedents are of avail, and it is even doubtful whether there are principles that have authority to guide or that may be safely recognized. Nor could he have treated his grand theme with that amazing facility and skill, which, as his work manifests them, will satisfy all his readers that the theme belongs to him and he to it, had not his native tastes, his training, and his actual experience brought him into a most intelligent sympathy with his subject-matter. Without being an adventurer, in the modern sense of the term, he has the spirit which filled the best old sense of the word. He has been a wide traveller and an explorer. Familiar by actual observation with the scenes through which he has to follow the track of the pioneers whom he chronicles, he has also acquainted himself by foot-journeys and canoe-navigation under Indian guides with scenes and regions still unspoiled of their wilderness features. He has crossed the Rocky Mountains by the war-path of the savages, and penetrated far beyond the borders of civilization in the direction of the northern ice on our continent. He is skilled in native woodcraft, in the phenomena of the forest and the lake, the winding river and the cataract. He has watched the aspects of Nature through all the seasons in regions far away from the havoc and the finish of culture. He has been alone as a white man in the squalid lodges of the Indians, has lived after their manner up to the edge of the restraints which a civilized man must always take with him, and has consented to forego all that is meant by the word comfort, that he might learn actually what our transcendentalists and sentimentalists are so taken with theoretically. He knows the inner make and furnishings of the savage brain and heart, the qualities of their thought and passions, their superstitions, follies, and vices; and while he deals with them and their ways with the right spirit and consideration of a high-toned Christian man, he yields to no silly inventiveness of fancy or romance in portraying them. They are barely human, and they are hideous and revolting in his pages, as they are in real life. Mr. Parkman knows them for just what they are, and as they are. Helped by natural adaptation and sympathy to put himself into communication with them sufficiently to analyze their composition and to scan their range of being, he has presented such a portraiture and estimate of them as will be increasingly valuable while they are wasting away, to be known to future generations only by the record.

It is through Mr. Parkman's keen observation and discernment, as a traverser of wild regions and a student of aboriginal life and character, that his pages are made to abound with such vivid and vigorous delineations. He has great skill in description, whether on a grand scale or in the minutest details of adventure or of scenery. He can touch by a phrase, most delicately or massively, the outline and the features of what he would communicate. He can strip from field, river-bank, hill-top, and the partially cleared forests all the things and aspects which civilization has superinduced, and can restore to them their primitive, unsullied elements. He gives us the aroma of the wild woods, the tints of tree, shrub, and berry as the autumn paints them, the notes and screams and howls of the creatures which held these haunts before or with man; and though we were reading some of his pages on one of the hottest of our dog-days, we felt a grateful chill come over us as we were following his description of a Canadian winter.

Mr. Parkman's subject required, for its competent treatment, a vast amount of research and a judicious use of authorities in documents printed or still in manuscript. Happily, there is abundance of material, and that, for the most part, of prime value. The period which his theme covers, though primeval in reference to the date of our own English beginnings here, opens within the era when pens and types were diligently employed to record all real occurrences, and when rival interests induced a multiplication of narratives of the same events, to the extent even of telling many important stories in two very different ways. The element of the marvellous and the superstitious is so inwrought with the documentary history and the personal narratives of the time, exaggeration and misrepresentation were then almost so consistent with honesty, that any one who essays to digest trustworthy history from them may be more embarrassed by the abundance than he would be by the paucity of his materials. Our author has spared no pains or expense in the gathering of plans, pamphlets, and solid volumes, in procuring copies of unpublished documents, and in consulting all the known sources of information. He discriminates with skill, and knows when to trust himself and to encourage his readers in relying upon them.

It has been with all these means for faithful and profitable work in his possession, gathered around him in aggravating reminders of their unwrought wealth, and with a spirit of craving ardor to digest and reproduce them, that Mr. Parkman has been compelled to suffer the discipline of a form of invalidism which disables without destroying or even impairing the power and will for continuous intellectual employment. Brief intervals of relief and a recent period of promise and hopefulness of full restoration have been heroically devoted to the production of that instalment of his whole plan which we have in the volume before us.

That plan, as his first and comprehensive title indicates, covers a narration of the initiatory schemes and measures for the exploration and settlement of the New World by France and England. As France had the precedence in that enterprise, this first volume is fitly devoted to its rehearsal. The French story is also far more picturesque, more brilliant and sombre, too, in its details. There is more of the wild, the romantic, and the tragic in it. Mr. Parkman briefly, but strikingly, contrasts the spirit which animated and the fortunes which befell the representatives of the two European nations,—the one of which has wrought the romance, the other of which has moulded the living development, of North America.

Under the specific title of this volume,—the "Pioneers of France in the New World,"—the author gives us historical narratives of stirring and even heroic enterprise in two localities at extreme points of our present territory: first, the story of the sadly abortive attempt made by the Huguenots to effect a settlement in Florida; and second, the adventures, undertakings, and discoveries of Champlain, his predecessors and associates, in and near Canada. The volume is touchingly dedicated to three near kinsmen of the author,—young men who in the glory and beauty of their youth, the joy and hope of parents who yielded the costly sacrifice, gave themselves to the deliverance of our country from the ruin plotted for it by a slave despotism.

Mr. Parkman mentions—allowing to it in his brief reference all the weight which it probably deserves—a vague tradition, which, had it been sustained by fact, would have introduced an entirely new element into the conditions involved in the rival claims to the right of colonizing and possessing America, as practically contested by European nations. The Pope's Bull which deeded the whole continent to Spain, as if it were a farm, reinforced the claim already conventionally yielded to her through right of discovery. For anything, however, to the knowledge of which Columbus came before his death, or even his immediate successors before their death, all the parts of America which he saw or knew might have been insulated spaces, like those in which he actually set up Spanish authority. What might have been the issue for this continent, or rather for the spaces which it covers, had it been really divided by the high seas into three immense islands like Australasia, so that Spain, France, and England might have made an amicable division between them, would afford curious matter for speculation. The tradition referred to is, that the continent had been actually discovered by a Frenchman four years before the first voyage of Columbus hitherward. A vessel from Dieppe, while at sea off the coast of Africa, was said to have been blown to sight of land across the ocean on our shores. A mariner, Pinzon, who was on board of her, being afterwards discharged from French service in disgrace, joined himself to Columbus, and was with him when he made his great discovery. It may have been so. But the story, slenderly rooted in itself, has no support. Spain was the claimant, and, so far as the bold and repeated attempt of the Huguenots to contest her claims in Florida was thwarted by a diabolical, yet not unavenged ruthlessness of resistance, Spain made good her asserted right.

Mr. Parkman sketches rapidly some preliminary details relating to Huguenot colonization in Brazil and early Spanish adventures. The zeal of the French Huguenots had anticipated that of the English Puritans in seeking a Transatlantic field for its development. A philosophical historian might find an engaging theme, in tracing to diversities of national character, to the aims which stirred in human spirits, and to fickle circumstances of date or place, the contrasted issues of failure and success in the different enterprises. To human sight or foresight, the Huguenots had the more hopeful omens at the start. But religious zeal and avarice, combined in a way most cunningly adapted to contravene, if that were possible, the Saviour's profound warning, "No man can serve two masters," were, after all, only combined in a way to bring them into the most shameful conflict. The Huguenot at the South shared with the Spaniard the lust for gold; and the backers alike of Roman and Protestant zeal in Canada divided their interest between the souls of the Indians and the furs and skins of wild animals.

The heroic and the chivalric elements in the spirit and prowess of these early adventurers give a charm even to the narratives which reveal to us their fearful sufferings and their atrocities. Physically and morally they must have been endowed unlike those who now hoe fields, make shoes, and watch the wheels of our thrifty mechanisms. Avarice and zeal, the latter being sometimes substituted by a daring passion for the romantic, nerved men, and women too, to undertakings and endurances which shame our enfeebled ways. The partners in these enterprises were never homogeneous in character, as were eminently the Colonists of New England. They were of most mixed and discordant materials. Prisons were ransacked for convicts and desperadoes; humble artisans and peasants were accepted as laborers; roving mariners, whose only sure port of rest would be in the abyss, were bribed for transient service, the condition always exacted being that they must be ready for the nonce to turn landsmen for fighting in swamp or bush. These, with a sprinkling of young and impoverished nobles, and one or two really towering and master spirits, in whom either of the two leading passions was the spur, and who could win through court patronage a patent or a commission, made in every case, either South or North, the staple material of French adventure.

After a graphic sketch of the line of Spanish notables in the New World,—of Ponce de Leon, of Garay, Ayllon, De Narvaez, and De Soto,—Mr. Parkman concisely reviews the successive attempts at a settlement in Florida by Frenchmen. His central figures here are Admiral De Coligny and his agents, Villegagnon, Ribaut, and Laudonniere. They had no fixed policy towards the Indians, and they followed the worst possible course with them. They wholly neglected tillage, and so were in constant peril of starvation. They were lawless and disorderly in their fellowship, and were always at the mercy of conspirators among themselves.

Beginning about the year 1550, and embracing the quarter of a century following, there transpired on the coast of Florida a series of acts of mingled heroism and barbarity not easily paralleled in any chapter of the world's history. Menendez, under his commission as Adelantado, having effected the first European settlement in North America at St. Augustine, and the French having established a river fort named Caroline, the struggle which could not long have been deferred was invited. We have here a double narrative. While the French commander, Ribaut, is shipwrecked in an enterprise by sea against St. Augustine, Menendez, by land, after a most harassing tramp through forest and swamp, successfully assails Fort Caroline. Though he has pledged his honor to spare those who surrendered to his mercy, he foully breaks his pledge, as no faith was to be kept with heretics. A brutal massacre, which shocked even his Indian allies, signalized his victory. An inscription on the trees under which he slaughtered his victims announced that vengeance was wreaked on them, "not as Frenchmen, but as heretics."

These atrocities were in their turn avenged, after a similar fashion and in the same spirit, by Dominique de Gourgues. It is doubtful whether he was a Huguenot; but he felt, as the French monarch and court did not, the rankling disgrace of this bloody catastrophe. An intense hater of the Spaniards, he gave his whole spirit of chivalry and prowess, in the approved fashion of the age, to avenge the insult to France. Providing himself with three small vessels, navigable by sail or oar, he gathered a fit company for his enterprise; but not till well on his way did he reveal to them his real purpose, in which they proved willing coadjutors. He found the Spaniards at their forts had alienated the Indians, who readily leagued with him. By a bold combination and a fierce onslaught he carries the Spanish works, and retaliates on his fiendish and now cowering prisoners by hanging them, "not as Spaniards, but as traitors, robbers, and murderers." De Gourgues came to do this, not to make another attempt for a permanent settlement in the interest of France. He therefore destroyed the forts, and with a friendly parting from his red allies, much to their sorrow, returned home. Thus closes one episode in the world's tragic history.

Turning now towards the North, Mr. Parkman takes a comprehensive review of the hazy period of history covered by traditions and imperfect records, with vague relations of adventure by Normans, Basques, and Bretons, on fishing expeditions to Newfoundland and the main coast. These were followed by three exploring enterprises and partial settlements, between 1506 and 1518. Verrazzano, with four ships, coasted along our shores, and was for fifteen days the guest of some friendly Indians at Newport, the centre of our modern fashionable summer-life. Jaques Cartier made two voyages in 1534-5, gave the name of St. Lawrence to the river, and visited the sites of Quebec and Montreal. A third voyage was planned for 1541, to be followed by a reinforcement by J. F. de la Roque, Sieur de Roberval. Its arrival being delayed, the famished settlers, wasted by the scurvy, and dreading another horrid winter of untold sufferings, returned home. Roberval renewed the occupancy of Quebec, and then there is a chasm and a broken story.

La Roche, in 1598, left forty convicts, adventurers in his crew, on Sable Island, merely for a temporary sojourn while he should coast on. Being blown back to France in his vessel, these forlorn exiles were left for five years on that dreary waste, and only twelve survivors then remained to be rescued. Some wild cattle that had propagated from predecessors left by luckless wanderers on a previous voyage, or which had swum ashore from a wreck, had furnished them a partial supply. Pontgrave and Chauvin attempted a settlement at Tadoussac, the dismal wilderness at the mouth of the Saguenay, thenceforward the rendezvous of European and Indian traders. All these were preliminary anticipations of the real occupancy of New France. Champlain, Poutrincourt, and Lescarbot, in 1607, established at Port Royal the first agricultural colony in the New World. Then began that series of futile and vexatious dealings on the part of the French court, in granting and withdrawing monopolies, conflicting commissions and patents, with confused purposes of feudalism and restricted privilege, which embarrassed all effective progress, and visited chagrin and disappointment on every devoted adventurer.

The great picture on Mr. Parkman's canvas is Champlain. That really noble-souled, heroic, and marvellous man, whom our author appreciates, yet with sagacious discrimination presents to the life, is a splendid subject for his admirable rehearsal. At the age of thirty-three he becomes the most conspicuous, and, on the whole, the most intelligent, agent of the French interest in these parts of the world. Dying at Quebec at the age of sixty-eight, and after twenty-seven years of service to the colony, he had probably drawn his life through more and a greater variety of perils than have ever been encountered by man. He was dauntless and all-enduring, fruitful in resource, self-controlled and persevering, and, though not wiser than his age, purer and more true. He was as lithesome as an Indian, and could outdo him in some physical efforts and endurance. His almost yearly voyages between France and Quebec led him through strange contrasts of court and wilderness life; but he was the same man in both. His discovery of the lake which bears his name, his journey to Lake Huron, under the lure of the impostor Vignau, encouraging his own dream of a passage through the continent to India, and his many tramps for Indian warfare or discovery, are most attractive episodes for our author.

Mr. Parkman relates incidentally the massacre in Frenchman's Bay, the efforts and cross purposes of the Recollets and the Jesuit missionaries, and furnishes a vivid sketch of the fortunes of the settlement under threatened assaults from Indians and in a temporary surrender to the English. He intimates the matter which he has yet in store. May we enjoy the coveted pleasure of reading it!

Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days. A Biography. From the German of J. P. Fr. Richter. Translated by CHARLES T. BROOKS. In Two Volumes. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

This romance, the first work of Jean Paul's which won the attention of his countrymen, is called "Hesperus," apparently for no reason more definite than that the heroine, like a fair evening-star, beams over the fortunes of the other personages, and becomes at length the morning-star of one. The supplementary title of "Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days" is a quaint subdivision of the volumes into as many chapters, each of which is a "Dog-Post-Day," because it purports to be dispatched in a bottle round a dog's neck to an island within the whimsical geography which the author loved to construct, and in which he pretended to dwell. Truly, the ordinary terra-firma was of little consequence for home-keeping purposes to Jean Paul, as the reader will doubtless confess before he has proceeded far through the maze of Extra Leaves, Intercalary Days, Extra Lines, Extra Shoots, and Extorted Anti-critique. And the divisions which are busied with the story, instead of carrying it forward, stray with it in all directions, like a genuine summer vagabond to whom direct travel is a crime against the season. Many charming things are gathered by the way; but if the reader is in haste to arrive, or thinks it would not be amiss at least to put up somewhere, his patience will be severely tried. We do not recommend the volumes for railway-reading, nor to clergymen for the entertainment of sewing-bees, nor to the devourer of novels, in whose life the fiction that must be read at one sitting forms an epoch. It is a good vade-mecum for a voyage round either Cape; its digressive character suits the listless mood of the sea-goer, and he can drop, we will not say the thread, but the entanglement, in whatever watch he pleases.

Let no one expect the critic to sketch the plot of this romance. It is a grouping of motives and temperaments under the names of men and women, concerning whom many subtile things are said and hinted; and they are pushed into and out of complicated situations, by stress of brilliant authorship, without lifting their fingers. There is no necessary development nor movement: the people are like the bits of glass which shake into the surprising patterns of the kaleidoscope. The relation of the parties to each other is a great mystification, bunglingly managed: we cannot understand at last how Victor, the hero of the chief love-passage, turns out to be the son of a clergyman instead of a lord, and Flamin the son of a lord in spite of the plain declaration on the first page that he belongs to a clergyman. No key-notes of expectation and surmise are struck; the reader is as blind as the old lord who is Victor's reputed father, and not a glimmer of light reaches him till suddenly and causelessly he is dazed. The author has emphasized his sentiments, but has not shaded and brought out the features of his story. It is plain, that, when he began to write, not the faintest notion of a denouement had dawned upon his fancy. The best-defined action in the book results from Flamin's ignorance that he is Clotilde's brother, for he is thus jealous of his friend Victor's love for her. How break off Flamin's love for his unknown sister? How rescue Victor from his self-imposed delicacy and win for him a bride? This is the substance of the story, hampered by wild, spasmodic interpolations and intrigues and didactic explanations.

The reader must also become inured, by a course of physical training, to resist the fiery onslaughts of a sentimentality which was the first ferment of Jean Paul's sincere and huge imagination. See, for instance, Vol. II. p. 229. And we cannot too much admire the tact which Mr. Brooks has brought to the decanting of these seething passages into tolerable vernacular limits. Sometimes, indeed, he misses a help which he might have procured for the reader, to lift him, with less danger of dislocation, to these pinnacles of passion, by transferring more of the elevated idiom of the style: for, in some of the complicated paragraphs, a too English rendering of the clauses gives the sentiment a dowdy and prosaic air. We should not object to an occasional inversion of the order, even where Jean Paul himself is more direct than usual; for this always appeared to us to lend a racy German flavor to the page. No doubt Jean Paul needs, first of all, to be made comprehensible; but if his style is too persistently Anglicized, many places will be reached where the sense itself must suffer for want of the picturesqueness of the German idiom. The quaintness will grow flat, the color of the sentiment will almost disappear, the rich paragraphs will run thinly clad, disenchanted like Cinderella at midnight. Some of Mr. Carlyle's translations from the German are invigorated by this Teutonicizing of the English, and by the sincerity of phrases transferred directly as they first came molten from the pen. This may be pushed to the point of affectation; but judiciously used, it is suited to Jean Paul's fervor and abandonment.

There is also a rhythm in his exalted moments, a delicate and noble swing of the clauses, not easy to transfer: as in the Eighth Dog-Post-Day, the paragraph commencing, "Wehe groeszere Wellen auf mich zu, Morgenluft!" "Thou morning-air, break over me in greater waves! Bathe me in thy vast billows which roll above our woods and meadows, and bear me in blossom clouds past radiant gardens and glimmering streams, and let me die gently floating above the earth, rocked amid flying flowers and butterflies, and dissolving with outspread arms beneath the sun; while all my veins fall blended into red morning-flakes down to the flowers," etc. But this may appear finical to Mr. Brooks. We certainly do not press it critically against his great and general success. Such a paragraph as, for instance, the closing one upon page 340 of Vol. II. is very trying to the resources of the translator. Here Mr. Brooks has sacrificed to literalness an opportunity to sort the confused clauses and stop their jostling: this may be done without diluting the sentiment, and is within the translator's liberty.

It always seemed to us that the finest part of "Hesperus," and one of the finest passages of German literature, is contained in the Ninth Dog-Post-Day and some pages of the Tenth. The Ninth, in particular, which is a perfect idyl, describes Victor's walk to Kussewitz: all the landscape is made to share and symbolize his rapture: the people in the fields, the framework of an unfinished house, the two-wheeled hut of the shepherd, are not only well painted, but turned most naturally to the help of interpreting his feeling. The chapter has also a direct and unembarrassed movement, which is rare in this romance. And it is beautifully translated.

The reader must understand that Victor is called by various names; so that, if he merely dips into the book, as we suspect he will until his sympathy is enlisted by some fine thought, his ignorance will increase the frantic and dishevelled state of the story. Victor is Horion, Sebastian, and Bastian; a susceptible youth, profoundly affected by the presence of noble or handsome women, and brought into situations that test his delicacy. He smuggles a declaration of love into a watch which he sells, in the disguise of an Italian merchant, to the Princess Agnola, on occasion of her first reception at the court of her husband. He is ashamed of this after he begins to know Clotilde, who is one of Jean Paul's pure and noble women; and he is at one time full of dread lest the Princess had read his watch-paper, and at another full of pique at the suspicion that she had not. Being court-physician and oculist, he has frequent opportunities to visit Agnola, and there is one rather florid occasion which the midnight cry of the street-watch man interrupts. But all this time, the inflammable Victor was indulging a kind of tenderness for Joachime, maid-of-honor and attractive female. As the love for Clotilde deepens, he must destroy these partialities for Agnola and Joachime. This is no easy matter; what with the watch-paper and various emphatic passages of something more than friendship, the true love does not at once stand forth, that he may find "the partition-wall between love and friendship with women to be very visible and very thick." But one day the accursed watch-paper flutters into Joachime's hand, who at once takes it for a declaration of love to herself, and beams with appropriate tenderness. Victor, seized with sudden coldness and resolution, confesses all to Joachime; and the story, released from its feminine embarrassments, would soon reach a honeymoon, if it were not for the difficulty of deciding the parentage and relationship of the various characters. A wise child knows its own father; but no endowment of wisdom in the reader will harmonize the genealogy of this romance. A birth-mark of a Stettin apple, which is visible only in autumn when that fruit is ripening, plays the part of Box's strawberry in the farce, and with as much perspicuity.

However, the characters are all respectably connected at last, and the reader does not care to understand how they were ever disconnected: for Lord Horion's motive in putting the children of the old Prince out of the way, and keeping up such an expensive mystification, can be justified only by an interesting plot. But American readers have learned by this time, much to their credit, not to apply to Jean Paul for the sensation of a cunningly woven narrative, like that of the English school, which furnishes verisimilitude to real life that is quite as improbable, though less glaringly so, than his departures from it. "Hesperus" is filled with pure and noble thought. The different types of female character are particularly well-defined; and if Jean Paul sometimes affects to say cynical things of women, he cannot veil his passionate regard for them, nor his profound appreciation of the elements of their influence in forming true society and refining the hearts of men. Notice the delicacy of the "Extra Leaf on Houses full of Daughters." It is chiefly with the women of his romances that Jean Paul succeeds in depicting individuals. And when we recollect the corrupt and decaying generation out of which his genius sprang, like a newly created species, to give a salutary shock to Gallic tastes, and lend a sturdy country vigor to the new literature, we reverence his faithfulness, his incorruptible humanity, his contempt for petty courts and faded manners, his passion for Nature, and his love of God. All these characteristics are so broadly printed upon his pages that the obsoleteness of the narrative does not hide them.

In view of a second edition, we refer to Mr. Brooks's consideration a few places, with wonder at his general accuracy in the translation of obscure passages and the explanation of allusions.

Vol. I. page 22. Sakeph-Katon (Zaqueph Qaton) is an occasional pause-accent of the Hebrew, having the sense of "elevator minor," and is peculiar to prose.

Page 68. The famous African Prince Le Boo deserves a note.

Page 111. Ripieno is an Italian musical term, meaning that which accompanies and strengthens.

Page 114. Graenswildpret does not mean "frontier wild-game," but game that, straying out of one precinct into another, gets captured: stray game, or impounded waif.

Page 139. The note gives the sense, but the corresponding passage in the text would stand clearer thus: "not a noble heart, by any means; for such things Le Baut's golden key, though bored like a cannon, could fasten rather."

Page 179. A note required: the passage of Shakspeare is, "Antony and Cleopatra," Act V., Scene 2:—

"His face was as the heavens; and therein stuck A sun and moon; which kept their course, and lighted The little O, the earth."

Territory of an old lady should be "prayer of an old lady." Gebet, not Gebiet.

Page 209. Eirunde Loch would be better represented by its anatomical equivalent, foramen ovale. It should be closed before birth; in the rare cases where it is left open after birth, the child lives half asphyxiated.

Page 224, note. Semperfreie is not from the Latin, but comes from sendbarfreie, that is, eligible, free to be sent or elected to offices, and consequently, immediately subject to the Reich, or Holy Roman Empire.

Page 235. An Odometer is an apparatus for measuring distances travelled by whatsoever vehicle.

Page 275. Incunabula means specimens of the first printed edition of a work; also the first impressions of the first edition, the firstlings of old editions.

Page 317. Wackelfiguren means figures made of Wacke, a greenish-gray mineral, soft and easily broken.

Page 322. The note is equivocal, since the phrase is used by fast women who keep some one in their pay.

Vol. II., page 122. Columbine is not equivalent to ballet-dancer; it is the old historical personage of the pantomime, confederate and lover of Harlequin, who protects her from false love.

THE END