I did not look at Edward again; I feared to betray him; and the green curtain fell, and my brother said, if I did not mind being left alone for a few minutes, he would go. He left me, and Edward came to me, and once more I saw him, and once more I heard his voice. He stayed only one moment, only long enough to make an appointment with me for the next morning, and then he left the theatre. The people around us thought probably that he was a casual acquaintance, if indeed they thought about it at all; and when my brother came back, he found me looking listless and bored, and apologized for having been detained.

I had—and still have, thank God!—a friend in whom I trusted; to her I had recourse, and it was by her help that I was enabled to keep my appointment. Only those who have known the pain of such a parting can ever hope to know the joy of such a meeting. I would like to make the rest of this as short as possible. Edward had run the blockade to see me; he had been to Washington, had stayed there three days, had heard of my absence, obtained my address, and followed me to New York; he had waited until twilight, when he had come to look at the house where I was staying; as he was walking slowly on the opposite side of the street, he had seen me come out with my brother, and had followed us to the theatre. He had trusted to his long beard and the cropping of his curly head as the most effectual disguise, and so far no one had recognized him. The only people who had known of his being in Washington were the friends with whom he stayed, the tailor who had sold him his clothes, who had a son with Stuart's cavalry, and the girl, my old school friend, who had given him my address, whom he went to see in the dusk hours of the afternoon, and who had hospitably received him in the coal cellar—which struck me, at the moment, as an infallible method of arousing suspicion. He wanted me to return with him, or to marry him and follow him by flag of truce; he was sure Providence had made his way smooth on purpose to effect our union. His arguments were perhaps not very logical, but they almost convinced me of what I wished to believe. I was willing to bear the anger of my family, but could not think of again undergoing the wear and tear of separation. I promised to let him know my decision early the next morning; I think I should have gone with him, but that evening we were telegraphed to return to Washington—my father had been stricken down by apoplexy; and my brother and I went home in the night train. Edward knew the reason, for he read my father's death in the morning's newspaper.

Three weeks afterward I had a letter from Edward Mayne by flag of truce; that was the week before Fredericksburg; and then the agony again began. It did not last very long. In the early spring came Chancellorsville, and there Edward was slightly wounded and taken prisoner; he was removed to the hospital at Point Lookout; his aunt went to nurse him, but I did not go; he was doing very well, and I thought it was wiser not. And one day in May—ah! that day!—I was looking out of my window, and I see now the blue sky, the little white clouds, the roses, and the ivied wall that I saw when my mother came in and said Mrs. Daingerfield had come to take me to Edward, who was very ill and anxious to see me. I remember how the blood seemed to sink away from my heart, and for a moment I thought I was going to die; but in another moment I knew that I should live. I was eager and excited, and not unhappy, from that time until the end was at hand.

I had never been in a hospital before, and there was a long ward full of men, who all looked to me as if they were dying, through which I passed to reach the room in which Edward Mayne lay alone. He heard me coming, and, as I opened the door, he raised himself in bed and put out his hand to me....

That night the dreadful pain left him, and his aunt said he seemed brighter and more hopeful; but when the surgeon saw him in the morning, he shook his head. When the sun set, Edward knew that he should never again see its evening glories. Into that dark, still room came a greater than Solomon, and as the dread shadow of his wings fell on my life, I hushed my prayers and tears. We sat and watched and waited; and there came back a feeble strength into the worn frame, and he told us what he wished. He said that perhaps he had been wrong, but he had thought himself right; at least, he had given his life for his faith, and soon, soon he would know all. Then he asked them to leave him alone with me for a little while, and when they came back into the room, nothing remained of him but the cast-off mortality. The sun was rising in the east, but his soul was far beyond it; and the sunlight came in and kissed the quiet pale face, that looked so peaceful and so happy there could be no lamentation over it.

That day came his parole; the parole which we had so exerted ourselves to obtain that he might go home to get well; and now it had found him far beyond the captivity of bar or flesh—a freed spirit, 'gone up on high.'

The kindness of the Government induced us to ask one more favor, which was granted us. They let us take him home to Washington and bury him in the place he had always wished to be buried in; and some Confederate prisoners were given permission to attend his funeral. So he was buried as a soldier should be buried, borne to the grave by his comrades, and mourned by the woman dearest to him. He lies now on the sunniest slope in that green graveyard, where the waters rush near his resting place, and the trees make a shade for the daisies that brighten above him.

He died as the sun rose on the first of June; we buried him early on the morning of the fifth. That night I left Washington, glad that it was to be no longer my place of residence, glad that my family would soon follow me to make another home where I could be stung by no associations. The old house passed into the hands of my elder sister, who is married to a Congressman from the West. But during this winter I have been so often homesick, and this early spring has been so chill and bleak compared with the May days of Washington, that I was fain to come back for a brief hour; and I have chosen to come in these last May days, that the first of June might find me here, true to the memory of the past.

There is nothing left of the old days; the place is changed from what it once was; the streets swarm with soldiers and strange faces; the houses are used by Government, or are dwelt in by strangers; there is scarcely a trace in this Sodom of the Sodom before the flood. No, there is nothing left for me now, of the things I used to know, except the little wren, whose song broke my heart this morning; and there is nothing here for me to care for, except that young grave in Georgetown, whose white cross bears but the initials and the date. I must now try to make myself a new life elsewhere, and to-morrow I go forth, shaking off the dust that soils my garments; hoping for the promise of the rainbow in this storm—and sure of the strength that will not fail me. O world! be better than thy wont to thy poor, weary child! O earth! be kindly to a bruised reed! O hope! thou wilt not leave me till the end—the end for which I wait.



WORD-STILTS

If the reader is so favored as to possess a copy of the 'Comparative Physiognomy' of Dr. James W. Redfield (a work long out of market, and which never had much of a sale), he may find in a chapter concerning the likeness between certain men and parrots some wise remarks on ridiculous eccentricities in literature. 'In inferior minds,' says the Doctor,'the love of originality shows itself in oddity.' 'There is many a sober innovator,' he continues, farther on,' whose delight it is to ponder

'O'er many a volume of forgotten lore,'

that he may not be supposed to make use of the humdrum literature of the day; who introduces obsolete words and coins new ones, and makes a patchwork of all languages; makes use of execrable phrases, and invents a style that may be called his own.' The Doctor compares these writers to parrots.

Now it is a well-known peculiarity of parrots that they have a passion for perching themselves in places where they will be on a level with the heads of the superior race whose utterances they imitate. The perch a parrot affects is almost always an altitude of about six feet, or the height of the tallest men. They feel their inferiority keenly if you leave them to hop about on the floor. It occurs to us that nothing could please a parrot more, if it could be, than a pair of stilts on which it could hop comfortably.

The literary parrot, more fortunate than his feathered fellow, finds stilts in words—obsolete words, such as men do not use in common intercourse with their fellows. Modern rhymesters more and more affect this thing. Every day sees some outre old word resurrected from its burial of rubbish, and set in the trochaics and spondees of love songs and sonnets. Dabblers in literature, who would walk unseen, pigmies among a race of giants, get on their word-stilts, and straightway the ear-tickled critics and the unconsciously nose-led public join in paeans of applause. Sage men, who do not exactly see through the thing, nod their heads approvingly, and remark: 'Something in that fellow!' And the delighted ladies, prone as the dear creatures often are to be pleased with jingle that they don't understand, exclaim: 'A'n't he delightful!'

The lamented Professor Alexander once produced a very excellent poem, which contained only words of a single syllable, forcibly illustrating the power of simple language. We should be glad to reproduce it here, by way of contrapose to our own accompanying poem, but cannot now recall it to memory in its completeness. Any child, who could talk as we all talk in our families, could read and understand fully the poem to which I refer. But ask any child to read the lines we have hammered out below, and tell you what they mean! Nay, ask any man to do it, and see if he can do it. Probably not one in a hundred usual readers, could 'read and translate' the word-stilts with which we have trammelled our poetic feet, except with the aid of patient and repeated communion with his English dictionary. There are, however, no words employed here which may not be found in the standard dictionaries of our tongue.

To it:

THE POET INVOKETH HIS MUSE.

Come, ethel muse, with fluxion tip my pen, For rutilant dignotion would I earn; As rhetor wise depeint me unto men: A thing or two I ghess they'll have to learn Ere they percipience can claim of what I'm up To, in macrology so very sharp as this; Off food oxygian hid them come and sup, Until, from very weariness, they all dehisce.

THE POET SEEKETH THE READER'S FORBEARANCE.

Delitigate me not, O reader mine, If here you find not all like flies succinous; My hand is porrect—kindly take't in thine, While modestly my caput is declinous; Nor think that I sugescent motives have, In asking thee to read my chevisance. I weet it is depectible—but do not rave, Nor despumate on me with look askance.

Existimation greatly I desire; 'Tis so expetible I have sad fears That, excandescent, you will not esquire My meaning; see, I madefy my cheek with tears, On my bent knees implore forbearance kind; Be not retose in haught; I know 'tis sad, But get your Webster down, and you will find That he's to blame, not I—so don't get mad!

THE POET COMMENCETH TO SING.

The morning dawned. The rorid earth upon, Old Sol looked down, to do his work siccate, My sneek I raised to greet the ethe sun, And sauntering forth passed out my garden gate. A blithe specht sat on yon declinous tree Bent on delection to its bark extern; A merle anear observed (it seemed to me) The work, in hopes to make owse how to learn.

A drove of kee passed by; I made a stond, For fast as kee how could my old legs travel? But—immorigerous brutes!—with feet immund They seemed to try my broadcloth garb to javel. The semblance of a mumper then I wore, Though a faldisdory before I might have graced; Eftsoons I found, when standing flames before, The mud to siccate, it was soon erased.

If we should turn our attention studiously to this line of literary effort, we feel encouraged to believe that our success in a field of late so popular would be marked, and that we should obtain a degree of fame herein, beside which that of the moat shining light in the stilted firmament would pale its ray. But so long as God gives us the glorious privilege of emulating the stars, we shall not seek to win a place among the 'tallow dips' of parrot-poetry.



A GREAT SOCIAL PROBLEM.

MY DEAR CONTINENTAL:

When the meteorological question was despatched, ladies have long had a habit of calling upon their servants to furnish them with small talk; high wages, huge appetites, daintiness, laziness, breakage, impertinence, are fruitful topics which they daily treat exhaustively; always arriving at the hopeless conclusion: 'Did you ever hear of anything like it?' and 'I wonder what we are coming to!'

Is it not possible that we may be coming to—no servants at all? To me the signs seem to point that way. Cobbett said that in America public servant means master: he might add, if he were writing now, and so does private servant. Each house is divided against itself into two camps; hostile, though perhaps not in open war with each other: and Camp Kitchen has the advantage of position. Above stairs uneasy sits the employer, timid, conciliating, temporizing; seeing as little as he can, and overlooking half he sees; ready to change his habits and to subdue his tastes to suit the whims of the enemigos pagados, as the Spaniards call them, he has under his roof. Below stairs lounge the lordly employes (a charming newspaper neologism for hotel waiters, street sweepers, and railway porters), defiant, aggressive, and perfectly aware that they are masters of the situation. Daily they become more like the two Ganymedes of Griffith's boarding house: he called them Tide and Tide—because they waited on no man. They have long ceased to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and yet they accomplish less than before the era of modern improvements. It appears to be a law of domestic economy that work is inversely as the increase of wages. Nowadays, if a housekeeper visits a prison, he envies the whiteness of the floors and the brightness of the coppers he sees there, and thinks, with a sigh, how well it might be for his subscalaneans, if they could be made to take a course of neatness for a few months in some such an institution.

Vain wish! The future is theirs, and they know it. Their services will become gradually more worthless, until we shall find them only in grand establishments: mere appendages kept for fashion and for show; as useless as the rudimental legs of a snake, which he has apparently only to indicate the distinguished class in animated nature he may claim to belong to. We shall live to say, as Perrault sang:

'J'apercus l'ombre d'un cocher Tenant l'ombre d'une brosse Nettoyant l'ombre d'un carrosse.'

Alas! I fear that even these shadows of servants will one day vanish and disappear from us altogether.

Time was when classes in society were as well defined as races still are. The currents ran side by side, and never intermingled. Some were born to furnish the blessings of life, and others to enjoy them. Some to wait, and others to be waited upon. The producing class accepted their destiny cheerfully, believed in their 'betters,' and were proud to serve them. The last eighty years have pretty much broken down these comfortable boundary lines between men. The feudal retainer, who was ready to give his life for his lord, the clever valet, who took kicks and caning as a matter of course when his master was in liquor or had lost at cards, even the old family servants, are species as extinct as the Siberian elephant, or the cave bear, or the dodo. And now the advance of the Union armies southward has destroyed the last lingering type of the servant post: the faithful black.

In this country there never was much distinction of classes. The unwillingness of New England help to admit of any superiority on the part of their masters has furnished many amusing stories. Later, when the Irish element penetrated into every kitchen, farmyard, and stable, floating off the native born into higher stations, service became limited to immigrants and to negroes. But the immigrant soon learned the popular motto, 'I'm as good as you are,' and only remained a serving man until he could save enough money to set up for himself: not a difficult matter in the United States; and never so easy as at this moment. The demands of the Government for soldiers and for supplies threaten us with a labor famine in spite of the large immigration. In Europe labor is scarce and in demand. Commerce, manufactures, colonization have outrun the supply. Wages have doubled in England and in France within the last twenty years, and are rising. With increase of wages comes always decrease of subordination. The knowledge of reading, now becoming general, and exercised almost exclusively in cheap and worthless newspapers, and the progress of the democratic movement, which for good or for evil is destined to extend itself over the whole earth, make the working classes restless and discontented. They chafe under restraints as unavoidable as illness or death. What floods of nonsense have we not seen poured out about the conflict between labor and capital? It is the old fable over again: the strife of the members against the belly.

Gradually has sprung up the feeling that it is degrading to be a servant; a terrible lion in the path of the quiet housekeeper in search of assistants. There may arise some day a purer and a wiser state of society, wherein the relation of master and man will be satisfactory to both. A merchant exercises a much sharper control over his clerk than over any servant in his house, and it is cheerfully submitted to. The soldier, who is worse paid and worse fed than a servant, is a mere puppet in the hands of his officers, obliged to obey the nod of twenty masters, and to do any work he may be ordered to, without the noble privilege of 'giving notice;' and yet there is never any difficulty in obtaining a reasonable supply of soldiers—because clerks and soldiers do not think themselves degraded by their positions, and servants do. It may be a prejudice, but it is one which drives hundreds of women, who might be fat and comfortable, to starve themselves over needlework in hovels; and often to prefer downright vice, if they can hope to conceal it, to virtue and a home in a respectable family. Any logic, you perceive, is quite powerless against a prejudice of this size and strength.

But is it altogether a prejudice? Is it not a sound view of that condition of life?

I confess that it has long been a matter of surprise to me that men should be found willing to hire themselves out for domestic service in a country where bread and meat may so easily be obtained in other ways, and where even independent manual labor is so often considered derogatory to the dignity of the native born. To do our dirty work that it disgusts us to do for ourselves, to stand behind our chairs at table, to obey our whims and caprices, to have never a moment they can call their own, to keep down their temper when we lose ours, to be compelled to ask for permission to go out for a walk, seems to me a sad existence even with good food and wages.

The fact is, my dear CONTINENTAL, that the relation between master and servant has to be readjusted to suit the times. Indeed it is readjusting itself. We see the signs, although we may not perceive their significance. Our life is a dream. I use this venerable saying in another sense than the one generally intended by it: I mean that we live half our lives, if not more, in the imagination; and that the imagination of every-day people is a dream made up of feelings brought together from the habits, theories, and prejudices of the past of all lands and all nations of men. The reality that was once in them has long since been out of them; yet these vague and shadowy fancies are all-powerful and govern our actions. So that morally we go about like maskers in the carnival, dressed in the old clothes of our ancestors. With this difference, that most of us do not see how shabby and threadbare they are, and how unsuited to our present wants. And the few who do see this have an inbred fondness for the old romantic rags, and wear some of them in spite of their better judgment. Our moneyed class cling in particular to the dream of an aristocracy, and love to look down upon somebody. The man who made his fortune yesterday calls to-day's lucky fellow a nouveau riche and a parvenu. The counter jumper who has snatched his thousands from a sudden rise in stocks, is sure to invest some of his winnings in the tatters of feudalism, sports a coat of arms on his carriage, has liveries, talks of his honor as a gentleman, and expects from his servants the same respect that a baron of the Middle Ages received from his hinds. It is a dream of most baseless fabric. John and Thomas, with their dislike of the word servant, their surliness and their impudence, swing too far, perhaps, in the other direction, but they are more in unison with the spirit of the age than their masters. I have seen an ardent democrat, who had roared equal rights from many a stump, furious with the impertinence of a waiter, whose answer, if it had come from an equal, he would scarcely have noticed. And was not the waiter a man and a fellow voter? What distinction of class have we in this country? It is true that the property qualification we have discarded in our political system we have retained as our test of social position. Indeed, no abstract rights of man can make up the difference between rich and poor. But Fortune is nowhere so blind nor so busy in twirling her wheel; and our two classes are so apt to change places, that frequently the only difference between the master and the footman who stands behind him, is the difference of capital. And Europe is treading the same democratic path as ourselves, limping along after us as fast as her old legs will carry her. The time will come when the class from which we have so long enlisted recruits for our batteries de cuisine will find some other career better suited to their expanded views.

What then? Do you suggest that we may lay a hand upon the colored element, after the example of our honored President? But

'While flares the epaulette like flambeau On Corporal Cuff and Ensign Sambo,'

can you expect either of these distinguished officers to leave the service of the United States for ours? What with intelligent contrabandism, emancipation, the right of suffrage, and the right to ride in omnibuses, we fear that their domestic usefulness will be sadly impaired.

Oh for machinery! automaton flunkies, requiring only to be wound up and kept oiled! What a housekeeping Utopia! Thomson foreshadowed a home paradise of this kind when he wrote the 'Castle of Indolence:'

'You need but wish, and, instantly obeyed, Fair ranged the dishes rose and thick the glasses played.'

But as yet invention has furnished no reapers and mowers for within doors. We have only dumb waiters; poor, creaking things, that break and split, like their flesh-and-blood namesakes, and distribute the smell of the kitchen throughout the house. Heine once proposed a society to ameliorate the condition of the rich. He must have meant a model intelligence office. I wish it had been established, for we may all need its aid.

What are we to do when we come to the last of the servants? Darwin says that the Formica rufescens would perish without its slaves; we are almost as dependent as these confederate ants. Our social civilization is based upon servants. Certainly, the refinements of life, as we understand it, could not exist Without them, and it is difficult to see how any business of magnitude could be carried on. Briareus himself could not take care of a large country place, with its stables, barns, horses, cattle, and crops, even if Mrs. B. had the same physical advantages, and was willing to help him. Must we tempt them back by still larger salaries, or increase their social consideration, telling them, as a certain clergyman once said of his order, that 'they are supported, and not hired'?—changing the word help, as we have servant, into household officer or assistant manager, or adopt a Chinese euphemism, such as steward of the table or governor of the kitchen? Fourier does something of this kind; in his system the class names of young scullions are cherubs and seraphs! Or shall we adopt the cooeperative plan of Mill and others, and offer John an interest in the family—say, possibly, the position of resident son-in-law after ten years of honesty, sobriety, and industry—with a seat at table in the mean while? Or must all the work be done by women, and a proprietor have to seal his Biddies more sanctorum in Utah? Or might not poor relations, now confessedly nuisances, be made useful in this way? Some marquis asked Sophie Arnould why she did not discharge her stupid porter? 'I have often thought of it,' she answered, 'mais que voulez vous, c'est mon pere.'

These resources failing, we must drop to the simplest form of existence: hut, hovel, or shanty; where my lord digs and is dirty, and her ladyship, guiltless of Italian, French, and the grand piano, cooks, scrubs, darns, and keeps the peace between the pigs and the children. Or else we must come to socialism, in the shape of Brook Farm communities, or phalansteres a la Fourier, or, worse than either, to mammoth hotels. American tastes incline that way. There we may live in huge gilded pens, as characterless as sheep in the flock, attended upon by waiters, chambermaids, and cooks, who will have a share in the profits, and consequently will be happy to do anything to increase the income of their house.

I see no other remedy, and I offer this great social problem to the serious thoughts of your readers.

Yours ever, G. V.



APHORISMS.—NO. XIII.

It was a frequent exclamation of Herder the Great: 'Oh, my life, that has failed of its ends!' and many of us, no doubt, find ourselves disposed to indulge in the same lament. But it deserves careful attention; no man's life fails of its true end unless through some grievous moral fault of his own.

The true end of life is that we may 'glorify God, and enjoy Him forever.' How this may be attained, as far as outward circumstances or activities are concerned, we can hardly judge for ourselves: but there is one sure test; and that is in the duties of our station. If we honestly perform them, and especially as under the teachings of the gospel of Christ, there can be no real and permanent failure. We shall have done what we were set to do upon the earth; and with this we may well be content.



OUR GREAT AMERICA.

The republican government of the United States, when first originated by the fathers of the commonwealth, was regarded by the old fossil despotisms with secret dread and a strange foreboding; and neither the ridicule which they heaped upon it, nor the professed contempt wherewith its name was bandied from throne to throne, could wholly mask their trepidation. They looked upon it, in the privacy of their chambers, as the challenge of a mighty rebellion of the people against all kingly rule and administration; they saw in it the embodiment of those popular ideas of freedom, equality, and self-government, which for so many centuries had been struggling for adequate utterance in England and France, and they knew that the success of this sublime experiment must eventually break asunder the colossal bones of the European monarchies, and establish the new-born democracy upon their ruins.

That they saw truly and judged wisely in these respects, the history of modern Europe, and the current revolutions of our time, bear ample testimony. There is no luck nor chance in human events, but all things follow each other in the legitimate sequences of law. The American republic is no bastard, but a true son and heir of the ages; and sprang forth in all its bravery and promise from the mammoth loins of the very despotism which disowns and denounces it.

We have a full and perfect faith in the mission of this republic, which breaks open a new seal in the apocalypse of government, and unfolds a new phase in the destiny of mankind. Feudalism has had a sufficient trial, and, on the whole, has done its work well. After the dismemberment of the Roman Empire, we do not see how it was possible for society to have assumed any other form than that of kings and princes for rulers, and the people for passive and more or less obedient subjects. It was a great problem to be resolved how society should exist at all, and history gives us the solution of it. Despotism in politics and authority in religion was the grand, primal, leading, and executive idea of it. What learning and culture existed was confined to the guild of the ecclesiastics, and they, for the most part, ruled the rulers as well as the people, by virtue of their intelligence. It required many centuries to usher in the dawn of unfettered thought, and generate the idea of liberty. And when at last the epoch of Protestantism arrived, and Luther, who was the exponent and historical embodiment of it, gathered to its armories the spiritual forces then extant in Europe, and overthrew therewith the immemorial supremacy of kings and priests over the bodies and souls of men, he made all subsequent history possible, and was the planter of nations, and the founder of yet undeveloped civilizations.[A]

[Footnote A: A doubtful assertion. We, the children of the Puritans, and educated in their views and prejudices, have still many lessons to learn in the school of charily. It was not 'Luther who rendered subsequent history possible,' but the ever onward growth of humanity itself. Luther had no broader views of liberty of conscience than the church with which he struggled. Mr. Hallam says: 'It has been often said that the essential principle of Protestantism and that for which the struggle was made, was something different from all we have mentioned: a perpetual freedom from all authority in religious belief, or what goes by the name of private judgment. But to look more nearly at what occurred, this permanent independence was not much asserted, and still less acted upon. The Reformation was a change of masters, a voluntary one, no doubt, in those who had any choice, and in this sense an exercise, for the time, of their personal judgment. But no one having gone over to the Confession of Augsburg or that of Zurich, was deemed at liberty to modify these creeds at his pleasure. He might, of course, become an Anabaptist or Arian, but he was not the less a heretic in doing so than if he had continued in the Church of Rome. By what light a Protestant was to steer, might be a problem which at that time, as ever since, it would perplex a theologian to decide: but in practice, the law of the land which established one exclusive mode of faith, was the only safe, as, in ordinary circumstances, it was, upon the whole, the most eligible guide.' Speaking, in another place, of the causes which brought about the decline of Protestantism, etc., Mr. Hallam says: 'We ought to reckon also among the principal causes of this change, those perpetual disputes, those irreconcilable animosities, that bigotry, above all, and persecuting spirit, which were exhibited in the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches. Each began with a common principle—the necessity of an orthodox faith. But this orthodoxy meant nothing more than their own belief as opposed to that of their adversaries; a belief acknowledged to be fallible, yet maintained as certain; rejecting authority with one breath and appealing to it in the next, and claiming to rest on sure proofs of reason and Scripture, which their opponents were ready with just as much confidence to invalidate.'

Luther was one of the many reformers who, feeling the necessity of freedom for themselves, never dream of according it to others. His self-hold, his 'me,' was masterful, and led him far astray from the inevitable logic of his perilous position. His 'I-ness' was so supreme that he mistook his own convictions for the truths of the Most High—a common mistake among reformers! He did not feel the sovereignty of man with regard to his fellow man, his positive inalienable right to deal with his God alone in matters of faith and religious conviction. The golden rule of our Master, 'Do as you would be done by,' seems simple and self-evident, and yet it is a late fruit in the garden of human culture. Mr. Roscoe says: 'When Luther was engaged in his opposition to the Church of Rome, he asserted the right of private judgment with the confidence and courage of a martyr. But no sooner had he freed his followers from the chains of papal domination, than he forget other in many respects equally intolerable: and it was the employment of his latter years to counteract the beneficial effects produced by his former labors.'

Any system which saps the foundation of religious liberty, which forces itself between man and his Maker, cannot guarantee to us one of the main objects of all free governments—security in the pursuit of happiness. The Reformation did not give us religious freedom, therefore it did not give or suggest to us our democratic institutions. All that is true and pure in them springs from the very heart of Christianity itself. 'Where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.' Much of the manifestation of the philosophy of freedom depends on individual character. Pope Alexander III., A.D. 1167, writes: 'Nature having made no slaves, all men have an equal right to liberty.' Luther, in 1524, says to the German peasants; 'You wish to emancipate yourselves from slavery, but slavery is as old as the world. Abraham had slaves, and St. Paul established rules for those whom the laws of nations reduced to that state.' Many of our modern priests reecho these sentiments! Guizot says: 'The emancipation of the human mind and absolute monarchy triumphed simultaneously.' The truth is we want a philosophical history of the Reformation, written neither from a Catholic, Protestant, nor infidel point of view, that we may rightly estimate what we lost, what gained in its wild storms. In judging this, we should not quite forget that it was the Catholic Lord Baltimore and Catholic colonists of Maryland who in 1648 first proclaimed on these shores the glorious principle of universal toleration, while the Puritans were persecuting in New England and the Episcopalians in Virginia. 'Nothing extenuate nor aught set down in malice,' should be the rule of our souls. Humanity means eternal Progress, and its path is onward.—ED. CON.]

It would, however, be by no means difficult, were it in accordance with our present design and purpose, to show that the first germ of republican liberty sprang into life amid the sedges and savage marshes of uncultivated ages, far remote even from the discovery of America, and trace it through successive rebellions, both of a political and religious character, from and before the times of Wycliffe, down to Oliver Cromwell and George Washington; for all through English history it has left a broad red mark behind it, like the auroral pathway of a conqueror. The first man who prayed without book, and denied the authority of the church over the human soul, as the brave Loilards did, was the pioneer of Protestantism and the father of all the births which ushered this mighty epoch upon the stage of the world; Protestantism, which means so much and includes so many vast emprises—establishing for freedom so grand a battle ground, and for philosophy and learning so wide and magnificent a dominion.

The same spirit which made nonconformists of the first seekers and worshippers of God apart from the churches and cathedrals of Rome, in the sublimer cathedrals of nature, when the Roman hierarchy was master of Europe—made republicans also of the first rebels who resisted the tyranny of kings. Political and religious liberty are the two sides of the democrat idea, and have always marched hand in hand together. They culminated in England during the Commonwealth, and became thenceforth the base and dome of popular government.

The republic of America was born of this idea, and is the last great birth of Protestantism, big already with the destinies of mankind. Here, upon this mighty platform, these destinies, as we believe, have to be wrought out by their final issues, and close the drama of human development. All things are possible for America under the beneficent institutions and laws of the republic, now that the hideous skeleton of black slavery is to pollute the soil no more nor make brother war against brother any more on account of it; and at no distant period the awful conflict which at present shakes the earth with the thunder of its clashing and embattled hosts, shall give lasting place to the interchanges of commerce and the peaceful enterprises of civil life.

It was impossible that American society could hold together with this accursed African vulture eating at its heart. Nor could the aristocratic idea of the South, which slavery had interwoven through every fibre of the people, through all the forms of its social condition, and into all its State laws and institutions, exist side by side with the democratic idea of the North, without an inevitable conflict sooner or later. The present war is but a renewal of the old battles which make up the sum of history, between liberty and despotism, civilization and barbarism. No one can doubt in whose hands will be the victory; and happy will the result be for future generations.

Hitherto we have exhibited to the world the amazing spectacle of a republic which, proclaiming the freedom and equality of every one of its subjects, holds four millions of men in a terrible and appalling bondage. So frightful a mockery of freedom, perpetrated in her great name, and sanctioned by tradition and the authority of law, could not, ought not, be suffered to grin its ghastly laughter in the face of the world. And when the hour was ripe, and the doomsday of the monstrous iniquity was proclaimed aloud by the dreadful Nemesis of God, the people of the free North clothed themselves in the majesty of the nation, and rose as one man to sweep it from the soil in whirlwinds of fire and wrath.

Slavery has been an unmitigated curse to America in every one of its aspects and especially to the South, out of which it has eaten, with its revengeful and retributive teeth, all the vitalities and grandeurs of character which belong to the uncorrupted Anglo-Saxon race. It has destroyed all the incentives to industry, all self-reliance, and enterprise, and the sterner virtues and moralities of life. It has put a ban upon trade and manufactures, and a premium upon indolence. The white population—the poor white trash, as the very negroes call them—are ignorant, brutal, and live in the squalor of savages. It has driven literature and poetry, art and science, from its soil, and robbed religion of all its humanity and beauty. Worse than this, if worse be possible, it has darkened with the shadow of its apparition the minds of the Southerners themselves, and defaced their highest attributes—confounding within them the great cardinal distinctions between right and wrong, until, abandoned by Heaven, they were given over to their own lusts, and to a belief in the lie which they had created under the very ribs of the republic.

We do not speak this as partisans, nor in any spirit of enmity against the South as a political faction. It is the fact which concerns us, and which we deal with as history, and not here and now in any other sense. Nor do we blame the Southern aristocracy for riding so long on the black horse, which has at last thrown and killed them. For proud and insolent as they have ever shown themselves in their bearing toward the North, they were in reality mere pawns on the chessboard of Fate, necessary tools in working out the game of civilization on this continent. Who can calculate the sum of the divine forces which the institution of slavery, and its blasphemous reversion of the commands of the Decalogue, and all its cruel outrages and inhuman crimes, have awakened in the souls of the freemen of the North? The loathsomeness of its example and the infernal malice of its designs against liberty and truth, righteousness and justice, and whatsoever holy principles in life and government the saints, martyrs, and apostles of the ages have won for us, by their agony and bloody sweat upon scaffolds and funeral pyres—regarding them as a cheap purchase, though paid for by such high and costly sacrifices—these appalling instances, we say, have at last produced so powerful a reaction in the national mind that millions of men have marshalled themselves into avenging armies to rid the earth of their presence.

That, too, was fated and necessary, and a part of the predestined programme. The nation could not progress with this corrupting monster in its pathway; and the battle between them has not come an hour too soon. The monster must be exterminated, and that, too, without mercy and without compassion, as the sworn and implacable enemy both of God and man. Otherwise this glorious country, which has so long worn the garland and surging robe of liberty, will become a dungeon of desolation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, resounding only with the shrieks of mandrakes and the clank of chains.

This obstruction removed, there is, as we said above, no height of greatness which the American people may not reach. Then, and then only, shall we begin to consolidate ourselves into a nation, with a distinct organon of principles, feelings, and loyalties, to which the mighty heart and brain of the people shall throb and vibrate in pulsations of sublime unity. At present we are only a people in the making, and very few there are calling themselves Americans who have any idea of what America is and means in relation to history. By and by we shall all apprehend the riddle more wisely, and be more worthy of the great name we bear.

In the meanwhile it is no marvel that we are not a homogeneous people. Our time has not come for that, and may yet lie afar off in the shadowy centuries. Consider how and through what alien sources we have multiplied the original population of the associated colonies as they existed when our fathers raised them to a nationality. There is not a nation in all Europe, to say nothing of Asia and the islands, which is not represented in our blood and does not form a part of our lineage. It is true that the old type predominates, and that we have the virtues and the vices of the Anglo-Saxons in us; but we are far too individual at present, Celt and Dane and Spaniard and Teuton, and all the rest of our motley humanities, will have to be fused into one great Anglo-American race, before we can call ourselves a distinct nation. It took England many centuries to accomplish this work, and fashion herself into the plastic form and comeliness of her present unity and proportion. We, who work at high pressure and make haste in our begettings and growth, can scarcely hope to make a national sculpture at all commensurate with the genius of the people and the continent, in one or two or even half a dozen generations; for we cannot coerce the laws of nature, although it is quite certain, from what we have done, that we can perform anything within the range of possible achievement.

We have all the elements within and around us necessary to constitute a great people. We started on our career with a long background of experience to guide and to warn us. We saw what Europe had done for civilization with her long roll of kings and priests, her despotic governments, and her unequal laws—the people in most cases ciphers, and in all cases ignorant and enslaved—with no room for expansion, and little or no hope of political or social betterment; every inch of liberty, in every direction, which they had gained, wrung from their oppressors piecemeal, in bloody throes of agony.

Our fathers had not the best materials out of which to build up a republic; neither, in all cases, were they themselves sufficiently ripe for the experiment. They had the old leaven of European prejudice largely intermingled in their minds and character. They could not help, it is true, their original make, nor the fashioning which their age, time, and circumstances had put upon them. All this has to be taken into the estimate of any philosophical judgment respecting their performances. But they had learned from the past to trust the present, and to span the future with rainbows of hope. They stood face to face with the people, and each looked into the others' eyes and read there the grounds and sureties of an immortal triumph. Instead, therefore, of resting the supreme power of government in the hands of a person, or a class, making the former a monarch, and creating the other an aristocracy, those grand magistrates and senators of human liberty who framed the Constitution of the new American Nation, made the nation its own sovereign, and clothed it with the authority and majesty of self-government.

A venture so daring, and of an audacity so Titanic and sublime, seemed at that time and long afterward to require the wisdom and omnipotence of gods to guide it over the breakers, and steer it into the calm waters of intelligent government. All the world, except the handful of thinkers and enthusiasts scattered here and there over Europe, was against it, mocked at its bravery and aspirations, and sincerely hoped and believed that some great and sudden calamity would dissolve it like a baleful enchantment. But the hope of the republic was in the people, and they justified the fathers and the institution.

Here, therefore, was opened in all the directions of human inquiry and action a new world of hope and promise. The people were no longer bound by old traditions, nor clogged by any formulas of state religions, nor hampered by the dicta of philosophical authority. Their minds were free to choose or to reject whatever propositions were presented to them from the wide region of speculation and belief. The Constitution was the only instrument which prescribed laws and principles for their unconditional acceptance and guidance; and this was a thing of their own choice, the charter and seal of their liberties, to which they rendered a cheerful and grateful obedience.

With this mighty security for a platform, they pursued their daily avocations in peace, trusting their own souls, and working out the problem of republican society, with a most healthy unconsciousness. Sincere and earnest, they troubled themselves with no social theories, no visions of Utopia, nor dreams of Paradise and El Dorados, leaving the spirit which animated them to build up the architecture of its own cultus, with an unexpressed but perfect faith in the final justice and satisfaction of results.

Religion, therefore, and politics—literature, learning, and art—trade, commerce, manufactures, agriculture—and the amenities of society and manners, were allowed to develop themselves in their own way, without reference to rule and preconcerted dogmas. Hence the peculiarities which mark the institutions of America—their utter freedom from cant and the shows and pageantry of state. Bank, titles, and caste were abolished; and the enormous gulfs which separate the European man from the European lordling were bridged over by Equality with the solid virtues of humanity.

What a stride was here taken over time and space, and the historic records of man, in the fossil formations of the Old World during the ante-American periods! It had come at last, this long-prophesied reign of Apollo and the Muses, of freedom and the rights of man. Afar off, on the summits of imaginative mountains, were beheld, through twilight vistas of night and chaos, the proud ruins of dead monarchies, and the cruel forms of extinct tyrannies and oppressions, crowned and mitred no more; whose mandates had once made the nations tremble, and before whose judgment seats Mercy pleaded in vain, and Justice muffled up her face and sat dumb and weeping in the dust. Over the wolds of their desolation hyenas prowled, snuffing the noisome air as for a living prey; ghouls and vampyres shrieked in hellish chorus, as they tore up forgotten graves; and all manner of hateful and obscure things crawled familiarly in and out of palaces and holy places, as if they were the ghosts of the former inhabitants; and, high above them all, in the bloody light of the setting sun, wheeled kites and choughs and solitary vultures; owls and dismal bats flitting, ever and anon, athwart the shadows of their grim processions.

No matter that this vision was in reality but the symbolism of imagination and poetry, that Europe was not dead, but alive with the struggling vitalities of good and evil, and all those contending forces out of which American freedom was born—the vision itself was not the less true, either as feeling or insight; for Europe was now literally cut adrift from America, and the hopes and aspirations of the young republic were entirely different from hers, and removed altogether from the plane of her orbit and action.

The liberalists and thinkers of the age expected great things from a people thus fortunately conditioned and circumstanced. For the first time in modern history a genuine democratic government was inaugurated and fairly put upon its trial. The horizon of thought was now to be pushed back far beyond the old frontiers into the very regions of the infinite; and a universal liberty was to prevail throughout the length and breadth of the land. No more dead formalities, nor slavish submissions, but new and fuller life, self-reliance, self-development, and the freest individuality. Gladly the people accepted the propositions and principles of their national existence. Not a doubt anywhere of the result; no faltering, no looking back; but brave hearts, everywhere, and bold fronts, and conquering souls. Before them, through the mists of the starry twilight, loomed the mountain peaks and shadowy seas of the unventured and unknown future; and thitherward they pressed with undaunted steps, and with a haughty and sublime defiance of obstructions and dangers; fearing God, doing their best, and leaving the issue in His hands.

We know now, after nearly a hundred years of trial, what that issue in the main is, and whitherward it still tends. During that little breathing time, which, compared with the life of other nations, is but a gasp in the record, what unspeakable triumphs have been accomplished! Nearly a whole continent has been reclaimed from the savage and the wild beasts, and the all-conquering American has paved the wilderness, east, west, north, and south, with high roads—dug canals into its hidden recesses, connected the great Gulf with the far-off West by a vast network of railways and telegraphs—planted cities and villages everywhere, and fashioned the routes of civilization; bound Cape Race to the Crescent City and the Atlantic to the Pacific, sending human thoughts, winged with lightning, across thousands of miles of plains and mountains and rivers, and making neighborly the most distant peoples and the most widely sundered States of the mighty Union. Let any man try to estimate the value of this immense contribution to human history and happiness; let him try to measure the vast extent of empire which it covers, and sum up the mighty expenditure of physical and intellectual labor which has conquered those savage wilds, and converted them into blooming cornfields and orchards; which has built these miraculous cities by the sea, and made their harbors populous with native ships and the marine of every nation under heaven; those busy inland cities, the hives of manufacturing industry and the marts of a commerce which extends over all the regions of civilization, from the rising to the setting sun; those innumerable towns of the great corn-growing districts; those pleasant hamlets and pastoral homes which fringe the forest, and girdle the mountains as with the arms of human affection and the passion of love; those mills on the far-off rivers, whose creaking machinery and revolving wheels are the prelude of a yet unborn, but rapidly approaching civility, and whose music, heard by the right ears, is of the divinest depth and diapason, and in full concord with the immeasurable orchestra of triumph and rejoicing which the nation celebrates in the perpetual marches of her starry progress.

No man can compass this vast dominion, and no intellect can plumb its soundings or prophesy of its upshot. Who could have foretold what has already happened on this continent, had he stood with the Pilgrim Fathers on Plymouth Rock, that memorable day of the landing? Looking back to that great epoch in American history, we have no dim regions of antiquity to traverse, no mythic periods as of Memnon and the Nile, but a mere modern landscape, so to speak, shut in by less than two centuries. And yet what unspeakable things are included in that brief period! If we have made such vast strides and so rapid a development in those few years of our national life, with the heterogeneous and unmalleable materials with which we had to deal, converting the filth of Europe into grass and flowers for the decoration of the republic, what may we not achieve hereafter, when this dreadful war is over, and the negro question is adjusted, and the sundered States are reunited, and the Western wilderness is clothed with the glory of a perfect cultivation, and the genius of the people, no longer trammelled by Southern despotism, shall have free room to wing its flight over the immeasurable future?

There will be no likeness, in any mirror of the past, to the American civilization that is to be. New manners, customs, thinkings, literature, art, and life, will mark our progress and attest the mission of the nation. We are fast outgrowing the ideas and influences of that brave company of Puritans out of whose loins our beginning proceeded; and already each man goes alone, insular, self-reliant, and self-sustained. We owe the Puritans a large debt, but it is altogether a pretty fiction to call them the founders of American civilization. They helped to lay in the foundation stones of that early society, and kept them together by cementing them with their love of religious truth and liberty, so far as they understood these primal elements of a state; and we are likewise their debtors for the integrity which they put into their laws and government. But it is too high a demand to claim for them that they were the founders of the republic, and the originators of those great ideas which are embodied in our institutions and literature.

They came to this country with no very enlarged notions, either of religion or freedom, although they were perfectly sincere in their professions of regard for both; and it was this very sincerity which gave solidity and permanence to their colonies. We suppose we may repeat what history has made notorious respecting them, that they were, both in belief and civil practice, very narrow and limited in their outlooks—by no means given to intellectual speculations—and with but little faith in the intellect itself—which, indeed, was proscribed as a sort of outlaw when it stood upon its own authority, outside the pale of their church. The religion which they established had its origin in the reign of Elizabeth, and was a sort of revived Lollardism, which last dated as far back as Wycliffe, long before the Reformation. They thought they could worship God in conventicles, and in the great open-air cathedrals of nature, with quite as much purity of motive and heavenly acceptance as in regularly consecrated churches, and that the right of praying and preaching was inalienable, and secured to all godly men by the charter and seal of Calvary.

They had no idea, however, of non-conformity which was not based upon an orthodox creed, upon their creed, as they subscribed it on Plymouth Rock. They fled from persecution themselves, and sought freedom for themselves in the barren regions of our dear and now hospitable New England; and they, in their simplicity and good faith before God, sought to organize a system of civil and religious polity which should incrust all future generations, and harden them into a fossil state of perpetual orthodoxy.

They were a stern, implacable race, these early fathers, in all that related to belief, and the discipline of moral conduct; and we owe many of the granite securities which lie at the bottom of our social life and government to this harsh and unyielding sternness. It held the framework of the colonies together until they were consolidated into the United States, and until the modern culture of the people relaxed it into a universal liberty of thought and worship.

The Puritans, however, had no notion of such a result to their teachings and labors; and would have looked with pious horror upon them if they could have beheld them in some Agrippa's mirror of the future.

The truth—unpalatable as it may be—is simply this about the Puritans: they were narrow-minded, bigoted, and furious at times with the spirit of persecution; sincerely so, it is true, and believing they did God service; but that does not alter the fact. They had no conception of the meaning of liberty—and especially of religious liberty as a development of Protestantism. Their idea of it was liberty for themselves—persecution to all who differed from them; and this, too, for Christ's sake, in order that the lost sheep might be brought back, if possible, to their bleak and comfortless folds. They could not help it; they meant no wrong by it, and the evil which they thus did was good in the making, and sprang from the bleeding heart of an infinite love.

We like them, nevertheless; and cannot choose but like them, thinking it generous and loving to invest them with as much poetry as we can command from the wardrobes of the imagination. But we can never forgive them—in critical moods—for their inhuman, although strictly logical persecution of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who represented in his person all the liberal-thoughts-men, both in religion and speculation, then existing on this continent.

This man of capacious intellect and most humane heart was hunted by them out of the associated colonies, as if he had been some ferocious beast of prey, because he differed from them in his religious opinions; and this drove him to found a state in accordance with the most liberal interpretation of Christianity. He had more than once, by his influence with the Indians, saved them from a general massacre; but their theological hate of him was so intense that they would not allow him to pass through their territories on a necessary journey; and once, on his return from England, where he had been negotiating with ministers for their benefit, they capped the climax of their bigoted ingratitude by refusing him permission even to land on their soil, lest his holy feet should pollute it.

It is a little too much, therefore, to say that all our ideas of liberty and religion have sprung from this stout race of persecutors. They were pioneers for us, bu nothing more. Our progress has been the untying of their old cords of mental oppression, and the undoing of many things which they had set up. This was so much rubbish to be moved out of the path of the nation, and by no means aids to its advancement, except as provocatives. What we now are, we have become by our own culture and development, and by the inflowing of those great modern ideas which have affected all the world, and helped to build up its civilization into such stately proportions.

Puritanism, as it then existed in its exclusive power, is, to all intents and purposes, dead upon this continent. The form of it still lingers in our midst, it is true, and in the Protestant parts of Europe its ritual survives, and pious hearts, which would be pious in spite of it, still cling to its dead corpse as if it were alive, and kindle their sacred fires upon the altar of its wellnigh forsaken sanctuaries. We should count it no gain to us, however—the extinction of this old and venerable faith—if we had no high and certain assurance that a nobler and sublimer religion was reserved for our consolation and guidance. We cannot afford, in one sense, to give up even the semblances and shows of religion, and these will survive until the new dayspring from on high shall supersede the necessity of their existence. 'Take care,' said Goethe, in some such words as these, 'lest, in letting the dead forms of religion go, you sacrifice all reverence and worship, and thus lose religion itself!' There is great danger of this in the transition state of human thought and speculation which marks the present crisis of American history. We are not a religious people, and shall not present any development of that sort until the intellectual reaction which has set in among us against the old modes and organons of belief has exhausted the tests of its crucibles, and reduced the dross to a residuum of gold which shall form the basis of a new and sacred currency, acceptable to all men for the highest interchanges.

In the mean while we must work out the problem of this religion of the future in any and all ways which lie open to us—doubting nothing of the final issues. The wildest theories of Millerites, Spiritists, Naturalists, and Supernaturalists, are all genuine products of the time, and of the spirit of man struggling upward to this solution—blindly struggling, it is true, but gradually approaching the light of the far-off truth, as the twilight monsters of geology gradually approached the far-off birth of man, who came at last, and redeemed the savage progressive, the apparent wild unreason of the terrestrial creation.

It is more than probable that this great fratricidal war with which we are now struggling, will prove, in its results, of the very highest service to the nation, and make us all both better and wiser men than we were before. We have already gained by it many notable experiences, and it has put our wisdom, and our foolishness also, to the test. It has both humbled and exalted our pride. It has cut away from the national character all those inane excrescences of vanity and brag which judicious people everywhere, who were friendly to us, could not choose but lament to see us exercise at such large discretion. It has brought us face to face with realities the most terrible the world has ever beheld. It has measured our strength and our weakness, and has developed within us the mightiest intellectual and physical resources. All the wit and virtue which go to make up a great people have been proven in a hundred times and ways during the war, to exist in us. Courage, forethought, endurance, self-sacrifice, magnaminity, and a noble sense of honor, are a few of the virtues which we have cropped from the bloody harvest of the battle field.

It is true that wicked men are among us—for when did a company, godly or otherwise, engage in any work, and Satan did not also fling his wallet over his shoulder and set out with them for evil purposes of his own?—but after all, these are but a small minority, and their efforts to ruin the republic and bring defeat and dishonor upon the Federal arms, have not yet proved to be of a very formidable nature. These, the enemies of America, though her native-born sons, the people can afford to treat with the contempt which they merit. For the rest, this war will make us a nation, and bind us together with bonds as strong as those of the old European nationalities. It will make us great, and loving patriots also; and root out from among us a vast amount of sham and political fraud, to the great bettering of society.

We shall have reason in many ways to bless its coming and its consequences. It was indeed just as necessary to our future national life and happiness as the bursting out of a volcano is to the general safety of the earth. It will destroy slavery for ever, and thus relieve us from the great contention which has so long and so bitterly occupied the lives of our public men and the thoughts of the world. In reality, we have never yet given republicanism a fair trial upon this continent. With that dreadful curse and crime of slavery tearing at its heart and brain, how was it possible for equality and self-government to be anything else but a delusion and a mockery? This cleared out of our pathway, and we have enough virtue, intelligence, and wealth of physical resources in the land to realize the prophecy and the hope of all noble thinkers and believes on the planet, and place America first and foremost among the nations—the richest, the wisest, the best, and the bravest.



LONGING

The corruption of a noble disposition is invariably from some false charm of fancy or imagination which has over-mastered the mind with its powerful magic and carried away the will captive. It is some perverted apprehension or illusory power of the infinite which causes a man who has once fallen a prey to any strong passion to devote all his energies, thoughts, and feelings to one object, or to surrender himself, heart and soul, to the despotic tyranny of some favorite pursuit. For man's natural longing after the infinite, even when showing itself in his passions and feelings, cannot, where genuine, be satisfied with any earthly object or sensual gratification or external possession. When, however, this pursuit, keeping itself free from all delusions of sense, really directs its endeavor toward the infinite, and only to what is truly such, it can never rest or be stationary. Ever advancing, step by step, it ever rises higher and higher. This pure feeling of endless longing, with the dim memories of eternal love ever surging through the soul, are the heavenward—bearing wings which bear it ever on toward God. Longing is man's intuition of enternity!—SCHLEGEL.



THE LESSON OF THE HOUR.

I.

Strong in faith for the future, Drawing our hope from the past, Manfully standing to battle, However may blow the blast: Onward still pressing undaunted, Let the foe be strong as he may, Though the sky be dark as midnight, Remembering the dawn of day.

II.

Strong in the cause of freedom, Bold for the sake of right, Watchful and ready always, Alert by day and night: With a sword for the foe of freedom, From whatever side he come, The same for the open foeman And the traitorous friend at home.

III.

Strong with the arm uplifted, And nerved with God's own might, In an age of glory living In a holy cause to fight: And whilom catching music Of the future's minstrelsy, As those who strike for freedom Blows that can never die.

IV.

Strong, though the world may threaten, Though thrones may totter down, And in many an Old World palace, Uneasy sits the crown: Not for the present only Is the war we wage to-day, But the sound shall echo ever When we shall have passed away.

V.

Strong—'tis an age of glory, And worth a thousand years Of petty, weak disputings, Of ambitious hopes and fears: And we, if we learn the lesson All-glorious and sublime, Shall go down to future ages As heroes for all time.

VI.

Strong—not in human boasting, But with high and holy will, The means of a mighty Worker His purpose to fulfil: O patient warriors, watchers— A thousandfold your power If ye read with prayerful purpose The Lesson of the Hour.



THE SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE: ITS CHARACTER AND RELATION TO OTHER LANGUAGES.

ARTICLE ONE.

THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH.

The CONTINENTAL for May contained an article, written by Stephen Pearl Andrews, entitled: A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE: ITS POSSIBILITY, SCIENTIFIC NECESSITY, AND APPROPRIATE CHARACTERISTICS. Although then treated hypothetically, or as something not impossible of achievement in the future, a Language constructed upon the method therein briefly and generally explained, is, in fact, substantially completed at the present time. It is one of the developments of a new and vast scientific discovery—comprising the Fundamental Principles of all Thought and Being, and the Law of Analogy—on which Mr. Andrews has bestowed the name of UNIVERSOLOGY. The public announcement of this discovery, together with a general statement of its character, has been recently made in the columns of a leading literary paper—The Home Journal.

Although the principle involved in the Language discussed in the article referred to is wholly different from that upon which all former attempts at the construction of a common method of lingual communication have been based; and although such merely mechanical inventions were therein distinguished from a Language discovered as existing in the nature of things; several criticisms, emanating from high literary quarters, indicate that there is still much misunderstanding as to the real nature of a Universal Language framed upon the principles of Analogy between Sense and Sound. This misunderstanding seems most prevalent in respect to the two points relating directly to the practical utility of such a Lingual Organ. It is assumed that a Language so constituted must be wholly different in its material and structure from any now existing, and that the latter would have to be abandoned as soon as the former was adopted. It is supposed, therefore, that in order to introduce the SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE, the people must be induced to learn something entirely new, and to forsake for it their old and cherished Mother-tongues. The accomplishment of such an undertaking is naturally regarded as highly improbable, if not impossible.

It is also supposed that every word of the Language is to be determined in accordance with exact scientific formulas;—a process which, if employed, would, as is conceived, give a stiff, inflexible, monotonous, and cramped character to the Language itself; and would be wanting in that profusion of synonymes which gives an artistic and life-like character to the lingual growths of the past.

Both of these objections arise, as we shall hereafter see, from an erroneous impression of the nature of Language based on Analogy, coupled with a misconception of the real character and constituents of existing Languages. It is the purpose of the present papers to correct these false notions. In order to do so—and, what is essential to this, to present a clear exposition of the true character of the Language under consideration, and of its relations to the Lingual Structures of the past and present—it is necessary to give a preliminary examination to the fundamental question of the Origin of Speech. By means of this examination we shall come to understand that the existence and general use of a Universal Language with the elements of which Nature has herself furnished us, would not involve the abrupt or total abandonment of the Tongues now commonly employed; but, on the contrary, while preserving all that is substantially valuable in each, would enable us to acquire a knowledge of them with a facility which Comparative Philology, as now developed, lays no claim to impart.

How, then, did Language originate? In setting out to answer this question, Professor Max Mueller says, in his Lectures on the Science of Language:[A]

[Footnote A: Lectures on the Science of Language, delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, in April, May, and June, 1861, by Max Mueller, M. A. From the second London edition, revised. New York: Charles Scribner, 124 Grand street. 1862.]

'If we were asked the riddle how images of the eye and all the sensations of our senses could be represented by sounds, nay, could be so embodied in sounds as to express thought and to excite thought, we should probably give it up as the question of a madman, who, mixing up the most heterogeneous subjects, attempted to change color and sound into thought. Yet this is the riddle we have now to solve.

'It is quite clear that we have no means of solving the problem of the origin of language historically, or of explaining it as a matter of fact which happened once in a certain locality and at a certain time. History does not begin till long after mankind had acquired the power of language, and even the most ancient traditions are silent as to the manner in which man came in possession of his earliest thoughts and words. Nothing, no doubt, would be more interesting than to know from historical documents the exact process by which the first man began to lisp his first words, and thus to be rid forever of all the theories on the origin of speech. But this knowledge is denied us; and, if it had been otherwise, we should probably be quite unable to understand those primitive events in the history of the human mind. We are told that the first man was the son of God, that God created him in His own image, formed him of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. These are simple facts, and to be accepted as such; if we begin to reason on them, the edge of the human understanding glances off. Our mind is so constituted that it cannot apprehend the absolute beginning or the absolute end of anything. If we tried to conceive the first man created as a child, and gradually unfolding his physical and mental powers, we could not understand his living for one day without supernatural aid. If, on the contrary, we tried to conceive the first man created full-grown in body and mind; the conception of an effect without a cause, of a full-grown mind without a previous growth, would equally transcend our reasoning powers. It is the same with the first beginnings of language. Theologians who claim for language a divine origin, ... when they enter into any details as to the manner in which they suppose Deity to have compiled a dictionary and grammar in order to teach them to the first man, as a schoolmaster teaches the deaf and dumb, ... have explained no more than how the first man might have learnt a language, if there was a language ready made for him. How that language was made would remain as great a mystery as ever. Philosophers, on the contrary, who imagine that the first man, though left to himself, would gradually have emerged from a state of mutism and have invented words for every new conception that arose in his mind, forget that man could not, by his own power, have acquired the faculty of speech, which is the distinctive character of mankind, unattained and unattainable by the mute creation. It shows a want of appreciation as to the real bearings of our problem, if philosophers appeal to the fact that children are born without language, and gradually emerge from mutism to the full command of articulate speech.... Children, in learning to speak, do not invent language. Language is there ready made for them. It has been there for thousands of years. They acquire the use of a language, and, as they grow up, they may acquire the use of a second and a third. It is useless to inquire whether infants, left to themselves, would invent a language.... All we know for certain is, that an English child, if left to itself, would never begin to speak English, and that history supplies no instance of any language having thus been invented....

'Speech is a specific faculty of man. It distinguishes man from all other creatures; and if we wish to acquire more definite ideas as to the real nature of human speech, all we can do is to compare man with those animals that seem to come nearest to him, and thus to try to discover what he shares in common with these animals, and what is peculiar to him, and to him alone. After we have discovered this we may proceed to inquire into the conditions under which speech becomes possible, and we shall then have done all that we can do, considering that the instruments of our knowledge, wonderful as they are, are yet too weak to carry us into all the regions to which we may soar on the wings of our imagination.'

As the result of a comparison of the human with the animal kingdom, Professor Mueller remarks that, 'no one can doubt that certain animals possess all the physical acquirements for articulate speech. There is no letter of the alphabet which a parrot will not learn to pronounce. The fact, therefore, that the parrot is without a language of his own, must be explained by a difference between the mental, not between the physical faculties of the animal and man; and it is by a comparison of the mental faculties alone, such as we find them in man and brutes, that we may hope to discover what constitutes the indispensable qualification for language, a qualification to be found in man alone, and in no other creature on earth.'

Of mental faculties, the author whose ideas we are stating, claims a large share for the higher animals. 'These animals have sensation, perception, memory, will, and intellect, only we must restrict intellect to the comparing or interlacing of single perceptions.' But man transcends in his mental powers the barriers of the brute intellect at a point which coincides with the starting-point of language. And in this coincidence Professor Mueller endeavors to find a sufficiently fundamental explanation of the problem of the origin of language.

In reference to this point of coincidence, he quotes Locke as saying that, 'the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain to,' and then adds:

'If Locke is right in considering the having of general ideas as the distinguishing feature between man and brutes, and, if we ourselves are right in pointing to language as the one palpable distinction between the two, it would seem to follow that language is the outward sign and realization of that inward faculty which is called the faculty of abstraction, but which is better known to us by the homely name of reason.

'Let us now look back to the result of former lectures. It was this: After we had explained everything in the growth of language that can be explained, there remained in the end, as the only inexplicable residuum, what we called roots. These roots formed the constituent elements of all languages.... What, then, are these roots?'

Two theories have been started to solve this problem: the Onomatopoetic, according to which roots are imitations of sounds; and the Interjectional, which regards them as involuntary ejaculations. Having discussed these theories, and taken the position that, although there are roots in every language which are respectively imitations of sounds and involuntary exclamations, it is, nevertheless, impossible to regard any considerable number of roots, and much less, all roots, as originating from these sources, the distinguished Philologist announces as the true theory, that every root 'expresses a general, not an individual, idea;' just the opposite of what he deems would be the case if the Onomatopoetic and Interjectional theories explained the origin of speech.

Some paragraphs are then devoted to the examination of the merits of a controversy which has existed among philosophers as to

'whether language originated in general appellations, or in proper names. It is the question of the primum cognitum, and its consideration will help us perhaps in discovering the true nature of the root, or the primum appellatum. Some philosophers, among whom I may mention Locke, Condillac, Adam Smith, Dr. Brown, and, with some qualification, Dugald Stewart, maintain that all terms, as at first employed, are expressive of individual objects. I quote from Adam Smith. 'The assignation,' he says, 'of particular names to denote particular objects, that is, the institution of nouns substantive, would probably be one of the first steps toward the formation of language.... The particular cave whose covering sheltered them from the weather, the particular tree whose fruit relieved their hunger, the particular fountain whose water allayed their thirst, would first be denominated by the words cave, tree, fountain, or by whatever other appellations they might think proper, in that primitive jargon, to mark them. Afterward, when the more enlarged experience of these savages had led them to observe, and their necessary occasions obliged them to make mention of, other caves, and other trees, and other fountains, they would naturally bestow upon each of those new objects the same name by which they had been accustomed to express the similar object they were first acquainted with.''

This view of the primitive formation of thought and language, is diametrically opposed to the theory held by Leibnitz, who maintained that 'general terms are necessary for the essential constitution of languages.' 'Children,' he says, 'and those who know but little of the language which they attempt to speak, or little of the subject on which they would employ it, make use of general terms, as thing, plant, animal, instead of using proper names, of which they are destitute. And it is certain that all proper or individual names have been originally appellative or general.'

Notwithstanding the contradictory and seemingly antagonistic nature of these positions, Professor Mueller shows that they are not irreconcilable.

'Adam Smith is no doubt right, when he says that the first individual cave which is called cave, gave the name to all other caves; ... and the history of almost every substantive might be cited in support of his view. But Leibnitz is equally right when, in looking beyond the first emergence of such names as cave, town, or palace, he asks how such names could have arisen. Let us take the Latin names of cave. A cave in Latin is called antrum, cavea, spelunca. Now antrum means really the same as internum. Antar, in Sanskrit means between or within. Antrum, therefore, meant originally what is within or inside the earth or anything else. It is clear, therefore, that such a name could not have been given to any individual cave, unless the general idea of being within, or inwardness, had been present in the mind. This general idea once formed, and once expressed by the pronominal root an or antar, the process of naming is clear and intelligible. The place where the savage could live safe from rain and from the sudden attacks of wild beasts, a natural hollow in the rock, he would call his within, his antrum; and afterward similar places, whether dug in the earth or cut in a tree, would be designated by the same name ... Let us take another word for cave, which is cavea or caverna. Here again Adam Smith would be perfectly right in maintaining that this name, when first given, was applied to one particular cave, and was afterward extended to other caves. But Leibnitz would be equally right in maintaining that in order to call even the first hollow cavea, it was necessary that the general idea of hollow should have been formed in the mind, and should have received its vocal expression cav ...

'The first thing really known is the general. It is through it that we know and name afterward individual objects of which any general idea can be predicated, and it is only in the third stage that these individual objects, thus known and named, become again the representatives of whole classes, and their names or proper names are raised into appellatives.'

The italics in the last paragraph are my own.

But the name of a thing, runs the argument, meant originally that by which we know a thing. And how do we know things? Knowing is more than perceiving by our senses, which convey to us information about single things only. 'To know is more than to feel, than to perceive, more than to remember, more than to compare. We know a thing if we are able to bring it, and [or?] any part of it, under more general ideas.' The facts of nature are perceived by our senses; the thoughts of nature, to borrow an expression of Oersted's, can be conceived by our reason only. The first step toward this real knowledge is the 'naming of a thing, or the making a thing knowable;' and it is this step which separates man forever from all other animals. For all naming is classification, bringing the individual under the general; and whatever we know, whether empirically or scientifically, we know it only by means of our general ideas. Other animals have sensation, perception, memory, and, in a certain sense, intellect; but all these, in the animal, are conversant with single objects only. Man has, in addition to these, reason, and it is his reason only that is conversant with general ideas.

'At the very point where man parts company with the brute world, at the first flash of reason as the manifestation of the light within us, there we see the true genius of language. Analyze any word you like, and you will find that it expressed a general idea peculiar to the individual to which the name belongs. What is the meaning of moon?—the measurer. What is the meaning of sun?—the begetter ...

'If the serpent is called in Sanskrit sarpa, it is because it was conceived under the general idea of creeping, an idea expressed by the word srip. But the serpent was also called ahi in Sanskrit, in Greek echis or echidna, in Latin anguis. This name is derived from quite a different root and idea. The root is ah in Sanskrit, or anh, which means to press together, to choke, to throttle. Here the distinguishing mark from which the serpent was named was his throttling, and ahi meant serpent, as expressing the general idea of throttler. It is a curious root this anh, and it still lives in several modern words. In Latin it appears as ango, anxi, anctum, to strangle, in angina, quinsy, in angor, suffocation. But angor meant not only quinsy or compression of the neck; it assumed a moral import, and signifies anguish or anxiety. The two adjectives angustus, narrow, and anxius, uneasy, both come from the same source. In Greek the root retained its natural and material meaning; in eggys, near, and echis, serpent, throttler. But in Sanskrit it was chosen with great truth as the proper name for sin. Evil no doubt presented itself under various aspects to the human mind, and its names are many; but none so expressive as those derived from our root anh, to throttle. Anhas in Sanskrit means sin, but it does so only because it meant originally throttling—the consciousness of sin being like the grasp of the assassin on the throat of his victim ... This anhas is the same word as the Greek agos, sin ... The English anguish is from the French angoisse, the Italian angoscia, a corruption of the Latin angustiae, a strait ... Ma in Sanskrit means to measure, from which we had the name of the moon. Man, a derivative root, means to think. From this we have the Sanskrit manu, originally thinker, then man. In the later Sanskrit we find derivatives, such as manava, manusha, manushya, all expressing man. In Gothic we find both man and mannisks, the modern German mann and mensch.'

And now we are brought by the author of The Science of Language to the great question to which the foregoing is merely preparatory, to the fundamental consideration of Philological research: 'How can sound express thought? How did roots become the signs of general ideas? How was the abstract idea of measuring expressed by ma, the idea of thinking by man? How did ga come to mean going, stha standing, sad sitting, da giving, mar dying, char walking, kar doing?' Here is his answer: