"I mean, if only one of us two could go to heaven, I had rather it

should be him than me," said Mary.

"Oh, child! child!" said Mrs. Scudder, with a sort of groan,--"has it

gone with you so far as this? Poor child!--after all my care, you _are_

in love with this boy,--your heart is set on him."

"Mother, I am not. I never expect to see him much,--never expect to

marry him or anybody else;--only he seems to me to have so much more

life and soul and spirit than most people,--I think him so noble and

grand,--that is, that he _could_ be, if he were all he ought to

be,--that, somehow, I never think of myself in thinking of him, and his

salvation seems worth more than mine;--men can do so much more!--they

can live such splendid lives!--oh, a real noble man is so glorious!"

"And you would like to see him well married, would you not?" said Mrs.

Scudder, sending, with a true woman's aim, this keen arrow into the

midst of the cloud of enthusiasm which enveloped her daughter. "I

think," she added, "that Jane Spencer would make him an excellent

wife."

Mary was astonished at a strange, new pain that shot through her at

these words. She drew in her breath and turned herself uneasily, as one

who had literally felt a keen dividing blade piercing between soul and

spirit. Till this moment, she had never been conscious of herself; but

the shaft had torn the veil. She covered her face with her hands; the

hot blood flushed scarlet over neck and brow; at last, with a

beseeching look, she threw herself into her mother's arms.

"Oh, mother, mother, I am selfish, after all!"

Mrs. Scudder folded her silently to her heart, and said, "My daughter,

this is not at all what I wished it to be; I see how it is;--but then

you have been a good child; I don't blame you. We can't always help

ourselves. We don't always really know how we do feel. I didn't know,

for a long while, that I loved your father. I thought I was only

curious about him, because he had a strange way of treating me,

different from other men; but, one day, I remember, Julian Simons told

me that it was reported that his mother was making a match for him with

Susan Emery, and I was astonished to find how I felt. I saw him that

evening, and the moment he looked at me I saw it wasn't true; all at

once I knew something I never knew before,--and that was, that I should

be very unhappy, if he loved any one else better than me. But then, my

child, your father was a different man from James;--he was as much

better than I was as you are than James. I was a foolish, thoughtless

young thing then. I never should have been anything at all, but for

him. Somehow, when I loved him, I grew more serious, and then he always

guided and led me. Mary, your father was a wonderful man; he was one of

the sort that the world knows not of;--sometime I must show you his

letters. I always hoped, my daughter, that you would marry such a man."

"Don't speak of marrying, mother. I never shall marry."

"You certainly should not, unless you can marry in the Lord. Remember

the words, 'Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For

what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what

communion hath light with darkness? and what concord hath Christ with

Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?'"

"Mother, James is not an infidel."

"He certainly is an _unbeliever_, Mary, by his own confession;--but

then God is a Sovereign and hath mercy on whom He will. You do right to

pray for him; but if he does not come out on the Lord's side, you must

not let your heart mislead you. He is going to be gone three years, and

you must try to think as little of him as possible;--put your mind upon

your duties, like a good girl, and God will bless you. Don't believe

too much in your power over him;--young men, when they in love, will

promise anything, and really think they mean it; but nothing is a

saving change, except what is wrought in them by sovereign grace."

"But, mother, does not God use the love we have to each other as a

means of doing us good? Did you not say that it was by your love to

father that you first were led to think seriously?"

"That is true, my child," said Mrs. Scudder, who, like many of the rest

of the world, was surprised to meet her own words walking out on a

track where she had not expected them, but was yet too true of soul to

cut their acquaintance because they were not going the way of her

wishes. "Yes, all that is true; but yet, Mary, when one has but one

little ewe lamb in the world, one is jealous of it. I would give all

the world, if you had never seen James. It is dreadful enough for a

woman to love anybody as you can, but it is more to love a man of

unsettled character and no religion. But then the Lord appoints all our

goings; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps;--I leave

you, my child, in His hands." And, with one solemn and long embrace,

the mother and daughter parted for the night.

It is impossible to write a story of New England life and manners for a

thoughtless, shallow-minded person. If we represent things as they are,

their intensity, their depth, their unworldly gravity and earnestness,

must inevitably repel lighter spirits, as the reverse pole of the

magnet drives off sticks and straws.

In no other country were the soul and the spiritual life ever such

intense realities, and everything contemplated so much (to use a

current New England phrase) "in reference to eternity." Mrs. Scudder

was a strong, clear-headed, practical woman. No one had a clearer

estimate of the material and outward life, or could more minutely

manage its smallest item; but then a tremendous, eternal future had so

weighed down and compacted the fibres of her very soul, that all

earthly things were but as dust in comparison to it. That her child

should be one elected to walk in white, to reign with Christ when earth

was a forgotten dream, was her one absorbing wish; and she looked on

all the events of life only with reference to this. The way of life was

narrow, the chances in favor of any child of Adam infinitely small; the

best, the most seemingly pure and fair, was by nature a child of wrath,

and could be saved only by a sovereign decree, by which it should be

plucked as a brand from the burning. Therefore it was, that, weighing

all things in one balance, there was the sincerity of her whole being

in the dread which she felt at the thought of her daughter's marriage

with an unbeliever.

Mrs. Scudder, after retiring to her room, took her Bible, in

preparation for her habitual nightly exercise of devotion, before going

to rest. She read and reread a chapter, scarce thinking what she was

reading,--aroused herself,--and then sat with the book in her hand in

deep thought. James Marvyn was her cousin's son, and she had a strong

feeling of respect and family attachment for his father. She had, too,

a real kindness for the young man, whom she regarded as a well-meaning,

wilful youngster; but that _he_ should touch her saint, her Mary, that

he should take from her the daughter who was her all, really embittered

her heart towards him.

"After all," she said to herself, "there are three years,--three years

in which there will be no letters, or perhaps only one or two,--and a

great deal may be done in three years, if one is wise";--and she felt

within herself an arousing of all the shrewd womanly and motherly tact

of her nature to meet this new emergency.

[To be continued.]

* * * * *

WHITE'S SHAKSPEARE[1]

(FIRST NOTICE.)

It may be doubted whether any language be rich enough to maintain more

than one truly great poet,--and whether there be more than one period,

and that very short, in the life of a language, when such a phenomenon

as a great poet is possible. It may be reckoned one of the rarest

pieces of good-luck that ever fell to the share of a race, that (as was

true of Shakspeare) its most rhythmic genius, its acutest intellect,

its profoundest imagination, and its healthiest understanding should

have been combined in one man, and that he should have arrived at the

full development of his powers at the moment when the material in which

he was to work--that wonderful composite called English, the best

result of the confusion of tongues--was in its freshest perfection. The

English-speaking nations should build a monument to the misguided

enthusiasts of the Plain of Shinar; for, as the mixture of many bloods

seems to have made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the

mingling of divers speeches given them a language which is perhaps the

noblest vehicle of poetic thought that ever existed.

Had Shakspeare been born fifty years earlier, he would have been

cramped by a book-language, not yet flexible enough for the demands of

rhythmic emotion, not yet sufficiently popularized for the natural and

familiar expression of supreme thought, not yet so rich in metaphysical

phrase as to render possible that ideal representation of the great

passions which is the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice

and general consent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to ease

and congruity of metrical arrangement. Had he been born fifty years

later, his ripened manhood would have found itself in an England

absorbed and angry with the solution of political and religious

problems, from which his whole nature was averse, instead of in that

Elizabethan social system, ordered and planetary in its functions and

degrees as the angelic hierarchy of the Areopagite, where his

contemplative eye could crowd itself with various and brilliant

pictures, and whence his impartial brain--one lobe of which seems to

have been Normanly refined and the other Saxonly sagacious--could draw

its morals of courtly and worldly wisdom, its lessons of prudence and

magnanimity. In estimating Shakspeare, it should never be forgotten,

that, like Goethe, he was essentially observer and artist, and

incapable of partisanship. The passions, actions, sentiments, whose

character and results he delighted to watch and to reproduce, are those

of man in society as it existed; and it no more occurred to him to

question the right of that society to exist than to criticize the

divine ordination of the seasons. His business was with men as they

were, not with man as he ought to be,--with the human soul as it is

shaped or twisted into character by the complex experience of life, not

in its abstract essence, as something to be saved or lost. During the

first half of the seventeenth century, the centre of intellectual

interest was rather in the other world than in this, rather in the

region of thought and principle and conscience than in actual life. It

was a generation in which the poet was, and felt himself, out of place.

Sir Thomas Browne, our most imaginative mind since Shakspeare, found

breathing-room, for a time, among the "_O altitudines!_" of religious

speculation, but soon descended to occupy himself with the exactitudes

of science. Jeremy Taylor, who half a century earlier would have been

Fletcher's rival, compels his clipped fancy to the conventional

discipline of prose, (Maid Marian turned nun,) and waters his poetic

wine with doctrinal eloquence. Milton is saved from making total

shipwreck of his large-utteranced genius on the desolate Noman's Land

of a religious epic only by the lucky help of Satan and his colleagues,

with whom, as foiled rebels and republicans, he cannot conceal his

sympathy. As purely poet, Shakspeare would have come too late, had his

lot fallen in that generation. In mind and temperament too exoteric for

a mystic, his imagination could not have at once illustrated the

influence of his epoch and escaped from it, like that of Browne; the

equilibrium of his judgment, essential to him as an artist, but equally

removed from propagandism, whether as enthusiast or logician, would

have unfitted him for the pulpit; and his intellectual being was too

sensitive to the wonder and beauty of outward life and Nature to have

found satisfaction, as Milton's could, (and perhaps only by reason of

his blindness,) in a world peopled by purely imaginary figures. We

might fancy his becoming a great statesman, but he lacked the social

position which could have opened that career to him. What we mean, when

we say Shakspeare, is something inconceivable either during the reign

of Henry the Eighth or the Commonwealth, and which would have been

impossible after the Restoration.

All favorable stars seem to have been in conjunction at his nativity.

The Reformation had passed the period of its vinous fermentation, and

its clarified results remained as an element of intellectual impulse

and exhilaration; there were signs yet of the acetous and putrefactive

stages which were to follow in the victory and decline of Puritanism.

Old forms of belief and worship still lingered, all the more touching

to Fancy, perhaps, that they were homeless and attainted: the light of

skeptic day was baffled by depths of forest where superstitious shapes

still cowered, creatures of immemorial wonder, the raw material of

Imagination. The invention of printing, without yet vulgarizing

letters, had made the thought and history of the entire past

contemporaneous; while a crowd of translators put every man who could

read in inspiring contact with the select souls of all the centuries. A

new world was thus opened to intellectual adventure at the very time

when the keel of Columbus had turned the first daring furrow of

discovery in that unmeasured ocean which still girt the known earth

with a beckoning horizon of hope and conjecture, which was still fed by

rivers that flowed down out of primeval silences, and which still

washed the shores of Dreamland. Under a wise, cultivated, and

firm-handed monarch also, the national feeling of England grew rapidly

more homogeneous and intense, the rather as the womanhood of the

sovereign stimulated a more chivalric loyalty,--while the new religion,

of which she was the defender, helped to make England morally, as it

was geographically, insular to the continent of Europe.

If circumstances could ever make a great national poet, here were all

the elements mingled at melting-heat in the alembic, and the lucky

moment of projection was clearly come. If a great national poet could

ever avail himself of circumstances, this was the occasion,--and,

fortunately, Shakspeare was equal to it. Above all, we esteem it lucky

that he found words ready to his use, original and untarnished,--types

of thought whose sharp edges were unworn by repeated impressions. In

reading Hakluyt's Voyages, we are almost startled now and then to find

that even common sailors could not tell the story of their wanderings

without rising to an almost Odyssean strain, and habitually used a

diction that we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost.

Those who look upon language only as anatomists of its structure, or

who regard it as only a means of conveying abstract truth from mind to

mind, as if it were so many algebraic formulae, are apt to overlook the

fact that its being alive is all that gives it poetic value. We do not

mean what is technically called a living language,--the contrivance,

hollow as a speaking-trumpet, by which breathing and moving bipeds,

even now, sailing o'er life's solemn main, are enabled to hail each

other and make known their mutual shortness of mental stores,--but one

that is still hot from the hearts and brains of a people, not hardened

yet, but moltenly ductile to new shapes of sharp and clear relief in

the moulds of new thought. So soon as a language has become literary,

so soon as there is a gap between the speech of books and that of life,

the language becomes, so far as poetry is concerned, almost as dead as

Latin, and (as in writing Latin verses) a mind in itself essentially

original becomes in the use of such a medium of utterance unconsciously

reminiscential and reflective, lunar and not solar, in expression and

even in thought. For words and thoughts have a much more intimate and

genetic relation, one with the other, than most men have any notion of;

and it is one thing to use our mother-tongue as if it belonged to us,

and another to be the puppets of an overmastering vocabulary. "Ye know

not," says Ascham, "what hurt ye do to Learning, that care not for

Words, but for Matter, and so make a Divorce betwixt the Tongue and the

Heart." _Lingua Toscana in bocca Romana_ is the Italian proverb; and

that of poets should be, _The tongue of the people in the mouth of the

scholar_. We intend here no assent to the early theory, or, at any

rate, practice, of Wordsworth, who confounded plebeian modes of thought

with rustic forms of phrase, and then atoned for his blunder by

absconding into a diction more Latinized than that of any poet of his

century.

Shakspeare was doubly fortunate. Saxon by the father and Norman by the

mother, he was a representative Englishman. A country-boy, he learned

first the rough and ready English of his rustic mates, who knew how to

make nice verbs and adjectives curtsy to their needs. Going up to

London, he acquired the _lingua aulica_ precisely at the happiest

moment, just as it was becoming, in the strictest sense of the word,

_modern_,--just as it had recruited itself, by fresh impressments from

the Latin and Latinized languages, with new words to express the new

ideas of an enlarging intelligence which printing and translation were

fast making cosmopolitan, words which, in proportion to their novelty,

and to the fact that the mother-tongue and the foreign had not yet

wholly mingled, must have been used with a more exact appreciation of

their meaning.[2] It was in London, and chiefly by means of the stage,

that a thorough amalgamation of the Saxon, Norman, and scholarly

elements of English was brought about. Already, Puttenham, in his "Arte

of English Poesy," declares that the practice of the capital and the

country within sixty miles of it was the standard of correct diction,

the _jus et norma loquendi_. Already Spenser had almost recreated

English poetry,--and it is interesting to observe, that, scholar as he

was, the archaic words which he was at first over-fond of introducing

are often provincialisms of purely English original. Already Marlowe

had brought the English unrhymed pentameter (which had hitherto

justified but half its name, by being always blank and never verse) to

a perfection of melody, harmony, and variety which has never been

surpassed. Shakspeare, then, found a language already to a certain

extent _established_, but not yet fetlocked by dictionary- and

grammar-mongers,--a versification harmonized, but which had not yet

exhausted all its modulations, or been set in the stocks by critics who

deal judgment on refractory feet, that will dance to Orphean measures

of which their judges are insensible. That the language was established

is proved by its comparative uniformity as used by the dramatists, who

wrote for mixed audiences, as well as by Ben Jonson's satire upon

Marston's neologisms; that it at the same time admitted foreign words

to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is in good

measure equally true. What was of greater import, no arbitrary line had

been drawn between high words and low; vulgar then meant simply what

was common; poetry had not been aliened from the people by the

establishment of an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move in

the stately ceremonials of verse, and privileged from arrest while they

forever keep the promise of meaning to the ear and break it to the

sense. The hot conception of the poet had no time to cool while he was

debating the comparative respectability of this phrase or that; but he

snatched what word his instinct prompted, and saw no indiscretion in

making a king speak as his country-nurse might have taught him.[3] It

was Waller who first learned in France that to talk in rhyme alone

comported with the state of royalty. In the time of Shakspeare, the

living tongue resembled that tree which Father Hue saw in Tartary,

whose leaves were languaged,--and every hidden root of thought, every

subtilest fibre of feeling, was mated by new shoots and leafage of

expression, fed from those unseen sources in the common earth of human

nature.

The Cabalists had a notion, that whoever found out the mystic word for

anything attained to absolute mastery over that thing. The reverse of

this is certainly true of poetic expression; for he who is thoroughly

possessed of his thought, who imaginatively conceives an idea or image,

becomes master of the word that shall most amply and fitly utter it.

Heminge and Condell tell us, accordingly, that there was scarce a blot

in the manuscripts they received from Shakspeare; and this is the

natural corollary from the fact that such an imagination as his is as

unparalleled as the force, variety, and beauty of the phrase in which

it embodied itself.[4] We believe that Shakspeare, like all other great

poets, instinctively used the dialect which he found current, and that

his words are not more wrested from their ordinary meaning than

followed necessarily from the unwonted weight of thought or stress of

passion they were called on to support. He needed not to mask familiar

thoughts in the weeds of unfamiliar phraseology; for the life that was

in his mind could transfuse the language of every day with an

intelligent vivacity, that makes it seem lambent with fiery purpose,

and at each new reading a new creation. He could say with Dante, that

"no word had ever forced him to say what he would not, though he had

forced many a word to say what _it_ would not,"--but only in the sense,

that the mighty magic of his imagination had conjured out of it its

uttermost secret of power or pathos. He himself says, in one of his

sonnets,--

"Why is my verse so barren of new pride,

So far from alteration and quick change?

Why, with the time, do I not glance aside

To new-found methods and to compounds strange?

Why write I still all one, ever the same,

And keep invention in a noted weed

That every word doth almost tell my name?"

When we say that Shakspeare used the current language of his day, we

mean only that he habitually employed such language as was universally

comprehensible,--that he was not run away with by the hobby of any

theory as to the fitness of this or that component of English for

expressing certain thoughts or feelings. That the artistic value of a

choice and noble diction was quite as well understood in his day as in

ours is evident from the praises bestowed by his contemporaries on

Drayton, and by the epithet "well-languaged" applied to Daniel, whose

poetic style is as modern as that of Tennyson; but the endless

absurdities about the comparative merits of Saxon and Norman-French,

vented by persons incapable of distinguishing one tongue from the

other, were as yet unheard of. The influence of the Normans in

Romanizing our language has been vastly overrated. We find a principle

of _caste_ established in certain cases by the relation of producer and

consumer,--in others by the superior social standing of the conquering

race. Thus, _ox_, _sheep_, _calf_, _swine_, indicate the thing

produced; _beef_, _mutton_, _veal_, _pork_, the thing consumed.[5] It

is the same with the names of the various grains, and the product of

the cheaper kinds when ground,--as _oat-meal_, _barley-meal_,

_rye-meal_; while the generic term for the crop becomes _grain_, and

the meal of the variety used by the higher classes is turned into

_flour_. To _bury_ remains Saxon, because both high and low must be

hidden under ground at last; but as only the rich and noble could

afford any pomp in that sad office, we get the word _funeral_ from the

Norman. So also the serf went into a Saxon _grave_, the lord into a

Norman _tomb_. All the parts of armor are naturally named from the

French; the weapons of the people, as _sword_, _bow_, and the like,

continued Saxon. So _feather_ is Saxon; but as soon as it changes into

a _plume_ for the knight, it turns Norman,--and Latin when it is cut

into a _pen_ for the _clerk_. _Book_ is Saxon; but a number of books

collected together, as could be done only by the rich, makes a

_library_. _Darling_ would be murmured over many a _cradle_ in Saxon

_huts_; but _minion_ came into the language down the back stairs of the

Norman _palace_. In the same way, terms of law are Norman, and of the

Church, Latin. These are familiar examples. But hasty generalizers are

apt to overlook the fact, that the Saxon was never, to any great

extent, a literary language. Accordingly, it held its own very well in

the names of common things, but failed to answer the demands of complex

ideas derived from them. The author of "Piers Ploughman" wrote for the

people, Chaucer for the court. We open at random and count the Latin[6]

words in ten verses of the "Vision" and ten of Chaucer's "Romaunt of

the Rose," (a translation from the French,) and find the proportion to

be seven in the former and five in the latter.

The organs of the Saxon have always been unwilling and stiff in

learning languages. He acquired only about as many British words as we

have Indian ones, and we believe that more French and Latin was

introduced through the pen and the eye than through the tongue and the

ear. For obvious reasons, the question is one that must be settled by

reference to prose-writers, and not poets; and it is, we think, pretty

well settled that more words of Latin original were brought into the

language in the century between 1550 and 1650 than in the whole period

before or since,--and for the simple reason, that they were absolutely

needful to express new modes and combinations of thought.[7] The

language has gained immensely by the infusion, in richness of synonyme

and in the power of expressing nice shades of thought and feeling, but

more than all in light-footed polysyllables that trip singing to the

music of verse. There are certain cases, it is true, where the vulgar

Saxon word is refined, and the refined Latin vulgar, in poetry,--as in

_sweat_ and _perspiration_; but there are vastly more in which the

Latin bears the bell. Perhaps there might be a question between the old

English _again-rising_ and _resurrection_; but there can be no doubt

that _conscience_ is better than _inwit_, and _remorse_ than

_again-bite_. Should we translate the title of Wordsworth's famous ode,

"Intimations of Immortality," into "Hints of Deathlessness," it would

hiss like an angry gander. If, instead of Shakspeare's

"Age cannot wither her,

Nor custom stale her infinite variety,"

we should say, "her boundless manifoldness," the sentiment would suffer

in exact proportion with the music. What homebred English could ape the

high Roman fashion of such togated words as

"The multitudinous sea incarnadine,"--

where the huddling epithet implies the tempest-tossed soul of the

speaker, and at the same time pictures the wallowing waste of ocean

more vividly than the famous phrase of AEschylus does its rippling

sunshine? Again, _sailor_ is less poetical than _mariner_, as Campbell

felt, when he wrote,

"Ye mariners of England,"

and Coleridge, when he preferred

"It was an ancient mariner"

to

"It was an elderly seaman";

for it is as much the charm of poetry that it suggest a certain

remoteness and strangeness as familiarity; and it is essential not only

that we feel at once the meaning of the words in themselves, but also

their melodic meaning in relation to each other, and to the sympathetic

variety of the verse. A word once vulgarized can never be

rehabilitated. We might say now a _buxom_ lass, or that a chambermaid

was _buxom_, but we could not use the term, as Milton did, in its

original sense of _bowsome_,--that is, _lithe, gracefully bending_.[8]

But the secret of force in writing lies not in the pedigree of nouns

and adjectives and verbs, but in having something that you believe in

to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it. It is

when expression becomes an act of memory, instead of an unconscious

necessity, that diction takes the place of warm and hearty speech. It

is not safe to attribute special virtues (as Bosworth, for example,

does to the Saxon) to words of whatever derivation, at least in poetry.

Because Lear's "oak-cleaving thunderbolts," and "the all-dreaded

thunder-stone" in "Cymbeline" are so fine, we would not give up

Wilton's Virgilian "fulmined over Greece," where the verb in English

conveys at once the idea of flash and reverberation, but avoids that of

riving and shattering. In the experiments made for casting the great

bell for the Westminster Tower, it was found that the superstition

which attributed the remarkable sweetness and purity of tone in certain

old bells to the larger mixture of silver in their composition had no

foundation in fact. It was the cunning proportion in which the ordinary

metals were balanced against each other, the perfection of form, and

the nice gradations of thickness, that wrought the miracle. And it is

precisely so with the language of poetry. The genius of the poet will

tell him what word to use (else what use in his being poet at all?);

and even then, unless the proportion and form, whether of parts or

whole, be all that Art requires and the most sensitive taste finds

satisfaction in, he will have failed to make what shall vibrate through

all its parts with a silvery unison,--in other words, a poem.

We think the component parts of English were in the latter years of

Elizabeth thus exquisitely proportioned one to the other. Yet Bacon had

no faith in his mother-tongue, translating the works on which his fame

was to rest into what he called "the universal language," and affirming

that "English would bankrupt all our books." He was deemed a master of

it, nevertheless; and it is curious that Ben Jonson applies to him in

prose the same commendation which he gave Shakspeare in verse, saying,

that he "performed that in our tongue which may be compared or

preferred either to _insolent Greece or haughty Rome_"; and he adds

this pregnant sentence:--"In short, within his view and about his time

were all the wits born that could honor a language or help study. Now

things daily fall: wits grow downwards, eloquence grows backwards." Ben

had good reason for what he said of the wits. Not to speak of science,

of Galileo and Kepler, the sixteenth century was a spendthrift of

literary genius. An attack of immortality in a family might have been

looked for then as scarlet-fever would be now. Montaigne, Tasso, and

Cervantes were born within the same fourteen years; and in England,

while Spenser was still delving over the _propria que maribus_, and

Raleigh launching paper navies, Shakspeare was stretching his baby

hands for the moon, and the little Bacon, chewing on his coral, had

discovered that impenetrability was one quality of matter. It almost

takes one's breath away to think that "Hamlet" and the "Novum Organon"

were at the risk of teething and measles at the same time. But Ben was

right also in thinking that eloquence had grown backwards. He lived

long enough to see the language of verse become in a measure

traditionary and conventional. It was becoming so, partly from the

necessary order of events, partly because the most natural and intense

expression of feeling had been in so many ways satisfied and

exhausted,--but chiefly because there was no man left to whom, as to

Shakspeare, perfect conception gave perfection of phrase. Dante, among

modern poets, his only rival in condensed force, says, "Optimis

conceptionibus optima loquela conveniet; sed optimae conceptiones non

possunt esse nisi ubi scientia et ingenium est;... et sic non omnibus

versificantibus optima loquela convenit, cum plerique sine scientia et

ingenio versificantur."[9]

Shakspeare must have been quite as well aware of the provincialism of

English as Bacon was; but he knew that great poetry, being universal in

its appeal to human nature, can make any language classic, and that the

men whose appreciation is immortality will mine through any dialect to

get at an original soul. He had as much confidence in his homebred

speech as Bacon had want of it, and exclaims,--

"Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

He must have been perfectly conscious of his genius, and of the great

trust which he imposed upon his native tongue as embodier and

perpetuator of it. As he has avoided obscurities in his sonnets, he

would do so _a fortiori_ in his plays, both for the purpose of

immediate effect on the stage and of future appreciation. Clear

thinking makes clear writing, and he who has shown himself so eminently

capable of it in one case is not to be supposed to abdicate

intentionally in others. The difficult passages in the plays, then, are

to be regarded either as corruptions, or else as phenomena in the

natural history of Imagination, whose study will enable us to arrive at

a clearer theory and better understanding of it.

While we believe that our language had two periods of culmination in

poetic beauty,--one of nature, simplicity, and truth, in the ballads,

which deal only with narrative and feeling,--another of Art, (or Nature

as it is ideally reproduced through the imagination,) of stately

amplitude, of passionate intensity and elevation, in Spenser and the

greater dramatists,--and that Shakspeare made use of the latter as he

found it, we by no means intend to say that he did not enrich it, or

that any inferior man could have dipped the same words out of the great

poet's inkstand. But he enriched it only by the natural expansion and

exhilaration of which it was conscious, in yielding to the mastery of a

genius that could turn and wind it like a fiery Pegasus, making it feel

its life in every limb. He enriched it through that exquisite sense of

music, (never approached but by Marlowe,) to which it seemed to be

eagerly obedient, as if every word said to him,

"_Bid me_ discourse, I will enchant thine ear,"--

as if every latent harmony revealed itself to him as the gold to

Brahma, when he walked over the earth where it was hidden, crying,

"Here am I, Lord! do with me what thou wilt!" That he used language

with that intimate possession of its meaning possible only to the most

vivid thought is doubtless true; but that he wantonly strained it from

its ordinary sense, that he found it too poor for his necessities, and

accordingly coined new phrases, or that, from haste or carelessness, he

violated any of its received proprieties, we do not believe. We have

said that it was fortunate for him that he came upon an age when our

language was at its best; but it was fortunate also for us, because our

costliest poetic phrase is put beyond reach of decay in the gleaming

precipitate in which it united itself with his thought.

We do not, therefore, agree with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that the

extravagance of thought and diction which characterizes much of our

modern poetry is traceable to the influence of Shakspeare. We see in it

only the futile effort of misguided persons to torture out of language

the secret of that inspiration which should be in themselves. We do not

find the extravagances in Shakspeare himself. We never saw a line in

any modern poet that reminded us of him, and will venture to assert

that it is only poets of the second class that find successful

imitators. And the reason seems to us a very plain one. The genius of

the great poet seeks repose in the expression of itself, and finds it

at last in style, which is the establishment of a perfect mutual

understanding between the worker and his material.[10] The secondary

intellect, on the other hand, seeks for excitement in expression, and

stimulates itself into mannerism, which is the wilful obtrusion of

self, as style is its unconscious abnegation. No poet of the first

class has ever left a school, because his imagination is

incommunicable; while, just as surely as the thermometer tells of the

neighborhood of an iceberg, you may detect the presence of a genius of

the second class in any generation by the influence of his mannerism,

for that, being an artificial thing, is capable of reproduction. Dante,

Shakspeare, Goethe, left no heirs either to the form or mode of their

expression; while Milton, Sterne, and Wordsworth left behind them whole

regiments uniformed with all their external characteristics. We do not

mean that great poetic geniuses may not have influenced thought,

(though we think it would be difficult to show how Shakspeare had done

so, directly and wilfully,) but that they have not infected

contemporaries or followers with mannerism.

That the propositions we have endeavored to establish have a direct

bearing in various ways upon the qualifications of whoever undertakes

to edit the works of Shakspeare will, we think, be apparent to those

who consider the matter. The hold which Shakspeare has acquired and

maintained upon minds so many and so various, in so many vital respects

utterly unsympathetic and even incapable of sympathy with his own, is

one of the most noteworthy phenomena in the history of literature. That

he has had the most inadequate of editors, that, as his own Falstaff

was the cause of the wit, so he has been the cause of the foolishness

that was in other men, (as where Malone ventured to discourse upon his

metres, and Dr. Johnson on his imagination,) must be apparent to every

one,--and also that his genius and its manifestations are so various,

that there is no commentator but has been able to illustrate him from

his own peculiar point of view or from the results of his own favorite

studies. But to show that he was a good common-lawyer, that he

understood the theory of colors, that he was an accurate botanist, a

master of the science of medicine, especially in its relation to mental

disease, a profound metaphysician, and of great experience and insight

in politics,--all these, while they may very well form the staple of

separate treatises, and prove, that, whatever the extent of his

learning, the range and accuracy of his knowledge were beyond precedent

or later parallel, are really outside the province of an editor.

That Shakspeare did not edit his own works must be attributed, we

suspect, to his premature death. That he should not have intended it is

inconceivable. That the "Tempest" was his latest work we have no doubt;

and perhaps it is not considering too nicely to conjecture a profound

personal meaning in it. Is it over-fanciful to think that in the master

Prospero we have the type of Imagination? in Ariel, of the

wonder-working and winged Fantasy? in Caliban, of the half-animal but

serviceable Understanding, tormented by Fancy and the unwilling slave

of Imagination? and that there is something of self-consciousness in

the breaking of Prospero's wand and burying his book,--a sort of sad

prophecy, based on self-knowledge of the nature of that man who, after

such thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live there for years,

only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre, lending money on

mortgage, and leaning over his gate to chat and bandy quips with

neighbors? His thought had entered into every phase of human life and

thought, had embodied all of them in living creations;--had he found

all empty, and come at last to the belief that genius and its works

were as phantasmagoric as the rest, and that fame was as idle as the

rumor of the pit? However this may be, his works have come down to us

in a condition of manifest and admitted corruption in some portions,

while in others there is an obscurity which may be attributed either to

an idiosyncratic use of words and condensation of phrase, to a depth of

intuition for a proper coalescence with which ordinary language is

inadequate, to a concentration of passion in a focus that consumes the

lighter links which bind together the clauses of a sentence or of a

process of reasoning in common parlance, or to a sense of music which

mingles music and meaning without essentially confounding them. We

should demand for a perfect editor, then, first, a thorough

glossological knowledge of the English contemporary with Shakspeare;

second, enough logical acuteness of mind and metaphysical training to

enable him to follow recondite processes of thought; third, such a

conviction of the supremacy of his author as always to prefer his

thought to any theory of his own; fourth, a feeling for music, and so

much knowledge of the practice of other poets as to understand that

Shakspeare's versification differs from theirs as often in kind as in

degree; fifth, an acquaintance with the world as well as with books;

and last, what is, perhaps, of more importance than all, so great a

familiarity with the working of the imaginative faculty in general, and

of its peculiar operation in the mind of Shakspeare, as will prevent

his thinking a passage dark with excess of light, and enable him to

understand folly that the Gothic Shakspeare often superimposed upon the

slender column of a single word, that seems to twist under it, but does

not,--like the quaint shafts in cloisters,--a weight of meaning which

the modern architects of sentences would consider wholly unjustifiable

by correct principle.

It would be unreasonable to expect a union of all these qualifications

in a single man, but we think that Mr. White combines them in larger

proportion than any editor with whose labors we are acquainted. He has

an acuteness in tracing the finer fibres of thought worthy of the

keenest lawyer on the scent of a devious trail of circumstantial

evidence; he has a sincere desire to illustrate his author rather than

himself; he is a man of the world, as well as a scholar; he comprehends

the mastery of imagination, and that it is the essential element as

well of poetry as of profound thinking; a critic of music, he

appreciates the importance of rhythm as the higher mystery of

versification. The sum of his qualifications is large, and his work is

honorable to American letters.

Though our own studies have led us to somewhat intimate acquaintance

with Elizabethan literature, it is with some diffidence that we bring

the criticism of _dilettanti_ to bear upon the labors of five years of

serious investigation. We fortify ourselves, however, with Dr.

Johnson's dictum on the subject of Criticism:--"Why, no, Sir; this is

not just reasoning. You _may_ abuse a tragedy, though you cannot make

one. You may scold a carpenter who has made a bad table, though _you_

cannot make a table; it is not your trade to make tables." Not that we

intend to abuse Mr. White's edition of Shakspeare, but we shall speak

of what seem to us its merits and defects with the frankness which

alone justifies criticism.

We have spoken of Mr. White's remarkable qualifications. We shall now

state shortly what seem to us his faults. We think his very acumen

sometimes misleads him into fancying a meaning where none exists, or at

least none answerable to the clarity and precision of Shakspeare's

intellect; that he is too hasty in his conclusions as to the

pronunciation of words and the accuracy of rhymes in Shakspeare's day,

and that he has been seduced into them by what we cannot help thinking

a mistaken theory as to certain words, as _moth_ and _nothing_, for

example; that he shows, here and there, a glimpse of Americanism,

especially misplaced in an edition of the poet whose works do more than

anything else, perhaps, to maintain the sympathy of the English race;

and that his prejudice against the famous corrected folio of 1632 leads

him to speak slightingly of Mr. Colier, to whom all lovers of our early

literature are indebted, and who alone, in the controversy excited in

England by the publication of his anonymous corrector's emendations,

showed, under the most shameful provocation, the temper of a gentleman

and the self-respect of a scholar. But after all these deductions, we

remain of the opinion that Mr. White has given us the best edition

hitherto published, and we do not like him the less for an occasional

crotchet. For though Shakspeare himself seemed to think with regret

that the dirge of the hobby-horse had been sung, yet, as we ourselves

have given evidence, it is impossible for any one to write on this

subject without taking an occasional airing on one or more of those

imaginary steeds that stand at livery with no risk of eating off their

own heads. We shall take up the subject again in our next number, and

by extracts justify both our commendation and our criticisms of Mr.

White.

[Footnote 1: _The Works of William Shakspeare_. Edited, etc., by

RICHARD GRANT WHITE. Vols. II., III., IV, and V. Boston: Little, Brown,

& Co. 1858.]

[Footnote 2: As where Ben Jonson is able to say,--"Men may securely

sin, but safely never."]

[Footnote 3: "Vulgarem locutionem appellamus eam quâ infantes

adsuefiunt ab adsistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt:

vel, quod brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus _quam sine

omni regulâ, nutricem imitantes, accepimus_." Dante, _de Vulg.

Eloquio_, Lib. I. cap. i.]

[Footnote 4: Gray, himself a painful corrector, told Nicholls that

"nothing was done so well as at the first concoction,"--adding, as a

reason, "We think in words." Ben Jonson said, it was a pity Shakspeare

had not blotted more, for that he sometimes wrote nonsense,--and cited

in proof of it the verse

"Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."

The last four words do not appear in the passage as it now stands, and

Professor Craik suggests that they were stricken out in consequence of

Jonson's criticism. This is very probable; but we suspect that the pen

that blotted them was in the hand of Master Heminge or his colleague.

The moral confusion in the idea was surely admirably characteristic of

the general who had just accomplished a successful _coup d'état_, the

condemnation of which he would fancy that he read in the face of every

honest man he met, and which he would therefore be forever indirectly

palliating.]

[Footnote 5: Scott, in _Ivanhoe_.]

[Footnote 6: We use the word _Latin_ here to express words derived

either mediately or immediately from that language.]

[Footnote 7: The prose of Chaucer (1390) and of Sir Thomas Malory

(translating from the French, 1470) is less Latinized than that of

Bacon, Browne, Taylor, or Milton. The glossary to Spenser's _Shepherd's

Calendar_ (1579) explains words of Teutonic and Romanic root in about

equal proportions. The parallel but independent development of Scotch

is not to be forgotten.]

[Footnote 8: We believe that for the last two centuries the Latin

radicals of English have been more familiar and homelike to those who

use them than the Teutonic. Even so accomplished a person as Professor

Craik, in his _English of Shakspeare_, derives _head_, through the

German _haupt_, from the Latin _caput_! We trust that its genealogy is

nobler, and that it is of kin with _coelum tueri_, rather than with the

Greek [Greek: kephalae], if Suidas be right in tracing the origin of

that to a word meaning _vacuity_. Mr. Craik suggests, also, that

_quick_ and _wicked_ may be etymologically identical, _because_ he

fancies a relationship between _busy_ and the German _böse_, though

_wicked_ is evidently the participial form of A.S. _wacan_, (German

_weichen_,) _to bend, to yield_, meaning _one who has given way to

temptation_, while _quick_ seems as clearly related to _wegan_, meaning

_to move_, a different word, even if radically the same. In the _London

Literary Gazette_ for Nov. 13, 1858, we find an extract from Miss

Millington's _Heraldry in History, Poetry, and Romance_, in which,

speaking of the motto of the Prince of Wales,--_De par Houmout ich

diene_,--she says, "The precise meaning of the former word [_Houmout_]

has not, I think, been ascertained." The word is plainly the German

_Hochmuth_, and the whole would read, _De par (Aus) Hochmuth ich

diene_,--"Out of magnanimity I serve." So entirely lost is the Saxon

meaning of the word _knave_, (A.S. _cnava_, German _knabe_,) that the

name _nauvie_, assumed by railway-laborers, has been transmogrified

into _navigator_. We believe that more people could tell why the month

of July was so called than could explain the origin of the names for

our days of the week, and that it is oftener the Saxon than the French

words in Chaucer that puzzle the modern reader.]

[Footnote 9: _De Vulgari Eloquio_, Lib. II. cap. i. _ad finem_. We

quote this treatise as Dante's, because the thoughts seem manifestly

his; though we believe that in its present form it is an abridgment by

some transcriber, who sometimes copies textually, and sometimes

substitutes his own language for that of the original.]

[Footnote 10: Pheidias said of one of his pupils that he had an

inspired thumb, because the modelling-clay yielded to its careless

sweep a grace of curve which it refused to the utmost pains of others.]

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_A History of Philip the Second, King of Spain_. By WILLIAM H.

PRESCOTT. Vol. III. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1858.

A cordial welcome from many quarters will greet this third instalment

of a work which promises, when completed, to be the most valuable

contribution to European history ever made by an American scholar. This

will in part be owing to the importance of the subject, which, though

professing to be the history of a single country and a single reign, is

in fact the great program of the politics of Christendom, and of more

than Christendom, during a period when the struggles of rival powers

and of hostile principles and creeds kept the world in agitation and

prolonged suspense,--when Romanism and Reform, the Crescent and the

Cross, despotic power and constitutional freedom, were contending for

mastery, and no government or nation could stand wholly aloof from a

contest in which the fate, not of empires alone, but of civilization,

was involved. Spain, during that period, was the bulwark of the Church

against the attacks of the Reformers, and the bulwark of Christendom

against the attacks of the Moslem. The power of Spain towered high

above that of every other monarchy; and this power was wielded with

absolute authority by the king. The Spanish nation was united and

animated by an intense, unwavering devotion to the ancient faith, which

was entwined with all the roots of the national life,--which was

Spanish, in fact, far more than it was Italian; and of this spirit

Philip the Second was the fitting representative, not merely from his

position, but from his education, his intellect, and his character.

Therefore it is that the historian of this single country and this

single reign, standing upon a central eminence, must survey and depict

the whole vast field of which we have spoken.

The materials for such a survey are abundant. But down to a very recent

period, the most valuable and authentic portion of them--letters of the

actors, records, written not from hearsay, but from personal knowledge,

documents of various kinds, private and official, that fill up the

hiatuses, correct the conjectures, establish the credibility, and give

a fresh meaning to the relations of the earlier writers--were neglected

or concealed, inaccessible, unexplored, all but unknown. Now these

hidden sources have been revealed. A flood of light streams back upon

that bygone age, filling every obscure nook, making legible and plain

what before could neither be read nor understood. Or rather, the effect

is such as when distant objects, seen dimly and confusedly with the

naked eye, are brought within the range of a powerful telescope, which

dissolves the seeming masses, and enables us to scrutinize each

separate form.

Glance for a moment through this instrument, so adjusted as to bear

upon a figure not undeserving of a closer study. Night has fallen on

the bleak and sombre scenery of the Sierra Guadarrama. The gray

outlines of the Escorial are scarcely distinguishable from those of the

dusky hills amid which it stands. No light is thrown forth from its

eleven thousand windows, save in this retreating angle formed by the

junction of the palace with the convent, or--to speak according to the

architect's symbolical design--of the "handle" with the "gridiron." The

apartment from which this feeble ray emerges is of small size,--not

more than sixteen feet square,--but having on two sides arched recesses

that somewhat increase its capacity. One of these alcoves contains a

bed, and a door opening into an adjoining oratory, which has immediate

communication with the chancel of the great church, so that an occupant

of the bed might, if supported in a sitting posture, have a view of the

high altar and witness the elevation of the host. This alcove is decked

with many little images of saints, which, with a few small pictures, of

rare beauty,--the subjects all of a religious character,--and two

cabinets of a curious, agate-colored marble, a product of the New

World,--are the only ornaments that relieve the extreme simplicity of

the apartment, with its plain white walls and floor of brick. The other

alcove is occupied by a writing-table, where sits, intent on the

employment that consumes by far the greater portion of his time, the

potent monarch of Spain, the "most pious and most prudent" Philip the

Second. A drowsy secretary, who waits for the completion of the

document which he is to copy, is his only attendant.

Does it not seem strange that ambassadors and nuncios should become

confused and lose all recollection of the addresses they had committed

to memory, in the presence of a prince whose exterior so ill accords

with the grandeur of his titles and the vastness of his power? His form

is below the middle height and very slender, the limbs having even an

attenuated look. The whole appearance is that of a man of delicate and

even feeble organization. The blonde complexion, the pale blue eyes,

and the light sandy hue--save where they are prematurely touched with

gray--of the hair, moustache, and short, pointed beard, all indicate

the Flemish origin of one who would fain be regarded as "wholly a

Spaniard." The protruding under-jaw is another proof of his descent

from the Burgundian rulers of the Netherlands. The expression of the

countenance, as we find on a closer inspection, is not so easy to

define. There is no variable play of light and shade upon the features,

no settled look of joy or sorrow, no trace of anger or of weariness. Is

it because the subject with which his pen is busied is too unimportant

to call forth any emotion in the writer? It may be a mere matter of

routine, connected with the regular business of his household or the

ordinary affairs of state. But if it be an answer to the dispatch from

Flanders giving information of the outburst of iconoclasm and

rebellion, or a subtly-conceived plan for the secret execution of

Montigny or the assassination of Escovedo, or an order for the

imprisonment--or the death--of the heir-apparent to the throne, you

shall perceive nothing in that face, unruffled as a mask, by which to

conjecture the sentiment or purpose of the mind. As little will he in

the presence of others exhibit any signs of agitation on the reception

of extraordinary news, or the occurrence of some great event. The fleet

which he sent out under his brother, John of Austria, in conjunction

with the Papal and Venetian armaments, to decide by a single blow the

long struggle with the Infidel,--all Europe awaiting the issue with

trembling anxiety and suspense,--has won a memorable and unexpected

victory, and destroyed forever the _prestige_ of the Moslem power. An

official, bursting with the intelligence, carries it to the king, who

is hearing a service in his private chapel. Without the slightest

change of countenance, Philip desires the priest, whose ear the

thrilling whisper has reached, and who stands open-mouthed, prepared to

burst forth at once into the _Te Deum_, to proceed with the service;

that ended, he orders appropriate thanks to be offered up.

As in triumph, so in disaster. The _armada_, which had been baptized

"Invincible," is destroyed. The great navy collected from many states,

equipped at the cost of an enormous treasure, manned with the choicest

troops of Spain and her subject dominions, lies scattered and wrecked

along the English shores, which it was sent forth to conquer. Again the

sympathies of Europe are excited to the highest pitch. Protestantism

triumphs; Catholicism despairs. He who had most at stake alone

preserves his calmness, on hearing that all is lost. He neither frowns

upon his unfortunate generals nor murmurs against Providence. Again he

orders thanks to be offered up, for those who have been rescued from

the general ruin,--for those, also, who in this holy enterprise have

lost their lives and joined eternal glory.

Neither does any private grief--the death of children, of a parent, or

of a wife--move him either to real or simulated agitation.[1] Nor will

intense physical suffering overpower this habitual stoicism. He has

seen unmoved the agony of many victims. He will himself endure the like

without any outward manifestation of pain. In yonder bed he will one

day suffer tortures surpassing those to which he has so often consigned

the heretic and the apostate Morisco; there he will expire amid horrors

that scarce ever before encompassed a death-bed;--but no groan will

reveal the weakness of the flesh; the soul, triumphant over nature,

will bear aloft her colors to the last, and plant them on the breach

through which she passes into the unknown eternity.

But while we have been thus discoursing, the king has finished his long

dispatch, and now hands it to the secretary. The latter, having vainly

struggled with his sleepiness, has at length begun to nod. Hearing his

name pronounced, he starts to his feet, takes the document, which is

not yet dry, to sand it, and, desirous to show by his alertness that he

has been all the time wide awake, empties over it--the contents of the

inkstand! Awkward individual!--there he stands, dumfounded and aghast.

His master quietly resumes his seat, procures fresh materials, and,

though it is long past midnight, begins his task anew with that

incomparable patience which is "his virtue."

The perfect equanimity on all occasions, which was the trait in

Philip's character that most impressed such of his contemporaries as

were neither his adherents nor his enemies,--for example, the Venetian

envoys at his court,--was not produced by a single stroke of Nature's

pencil, but had a three-fold origin. In the education which, from his

earliest years, had prepared him for the business of reigning, the

_alpha_, and the _omega_ of every lesson had been the word

"dissimulation." _Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare_. By this

maxim it was not intended--at least, openly or cynically--to impress on

youthful royalty the duty and propriety of lying. All it professed to

inculcate was the necessity of wearing an habitual veil before the

mind, through which no thought or feeling should ever be discernible.

Every politician, in the sixteenth century, had learned that lesson.

William of Orange, the best and purest statesman of the age, was the

greatest of all masters in the art of dissimulation. In vain might

Granvelle strive to pry into that bosom, to learn whether its designs

were friendly or hostile to the plans of tyranny. Not till it was

extorted by events could the secret be discovered.

In the second place, Philip, as a Spaniard, and one whose manners were

to furnish a model for the Spanish court, had, of course, been trained

to that demeanor which was regarded in Spain as the distinctive mark of

high breeding. "All the nobles of this court," writes an Italian

contemporary, "though amazingly ignorant and unlettered, maintain a

certain haughty tranquillity of manner which they term _sosiego_."

Foreigners found it difficult to define a quality which differed as

much from the composure and self-possession everywhere characteristic

of the gentleman as Spartan endurance or Stoical apathy from ordinary

fortitude or self-control. It was a glacier-like repose, incrusting a

mountain of pride. The beams, that gilded, might not thaw it; the storm

did but harden and extend it. It yielded only to the inner fires of

arrogance and passion, bursting through, at times, with irrepressible

fury.

These occasional outbreaks were never witnessed in Philip.[2] He was

exempted from them by the third element which we proposed to notice,

and which, as nature takes precedence of habit, ought perhaps to have

been the first. A Spaniard by birth and education, a Spaniard in his

sympathies and in his tastes, he had inherited, nevertheless, some of

the peculiarities, intellectual as well as moral, of the other race to

which by his origin, and, as we have already said, by his physical

characteristics, he belonged. He had none of the more pleasing

qualities of the Netherlander; but he had the sluggish temper, the slow

but laborious mind. "He is phlegmatic as well from natural disposition

as from will," remarks an Italian contemporary. "This king," says

another Venetian minister, "is absolutely free from every kind of

passion." The word "passion" is here used in a strict, if not the most

correct sense. Philip could, perhaps, love; that he could hate is what

no one has ever ventured to dispute; but never did either feeling,

strong, persistent, indestructible, though it might be, rise in

turbulent waves around his soul. In religion he was a bigot,--not a

fanatic. "The tranquillity of my dominions and the security of my

crown," he said, "rest on an unqualified submission in all essential

points to the authority of the Holy See." In the same deliberate and

impressive style, not in that of a wild and reckless frenzy, is his

famous saying, "Better not to reign at all than to reign over

heretics." His course in all matters of government was in conformity

with the only chart by which he had been taught to steer. He boasted

that he was no innovator,--that he did but tread in the footsteps of

his father. Nor, though he ever kept his object steadily in view, did

he press towards it with undue haste. He was content that time should

smooth away the difficulties in his path. "Time and myself against any

other two" was not the maxim of a man who looked to effect great

changes or who felt himself in danger of being driven from his course

by the gusts of passion.

To a person of this character it mattered little, as far as the

essentials of existence were concerned, whether his life were passed

upon a throne or at an attorney's desk. In the latter situation, his

fondness for using the pen would well have qualified him for the

drudgery, his admirable patience would have been sufficiently

exercised, and the mischief he was able to do would have been on a more

contracted scale. On the throne, his labors, as his admirers tell us,

were those of "a poor clerk earning his bread," while his recreations

were those of a Jeronymite monk. His intercourse with mankind was

limited to the narrowest range of which his position would allow. Even

with his ministers he preferred to communicate in writing. When he went

abroad, it was in a carriage so constructed as to screen him entirely

from view, and to shut out the world from his observation. He always

entered Madrid after nightfall, and reached his palace by streets that

were the least frequented. He had an equally strong aversion to bodily

exercise. Such was his love of quiet and seclusion, that it was

commonly believed he waited only for a favorable opportunity to follow

the example of his father, resign his power and withdraw to a

convent.[3]

In the volume before us are two chapters devoted to the character and

personal habits of Philip, a picture of his court, his method of

transacting business, his chief advisers, the machinery of his

government, and his relations with his subjects. As usually happens, it

is in details of a personal and biographical kind that the author's

investigations have been the most productive of new discoveries. It is

a question with some minds, whether such details are properly admitted

into history. The new luminary of moral and political science, the

Verulam of the nineteenth century, Mr. Henry Buckle, tells us that

biography forms no part of history, that individual character has

little or no effect in determining the course of the world's affairs,

and that the historian's proper business is to exhibit those general

laws, discoverable, by a strictly scientific process of investigation,

which act with controlling power upon human conduct and govern the

destinies of our race. We readily admit that the discovery of such laws

would exceed in importance every other having relation to man's present

sphere of existence; and we heartily wish that Mr. Buckle had made as

near an approach to the discovery as he confidently believes himself to

have done. But even had he, instead of crude theories, unwarranted

assumptions, and a most lively but fallacious train of reasoning,

presented us with a grand and solid philosophical work, a true _Novum

Organon_, he would still have left the department of literature which

he has so violently assailed in full possession of its present field.

Our curiosity in regard to the character and habits of the men who have

played conspicuous parts on the stage of history would have been not a

whit diminished. The interest which men feel in the study of human

character is, perhaps, the most common feeling that induces them to

read at all. It is to gratify that feeling that the great majority of

books are written. The mutual influences of mind upon mind--not the

influences of climate, food, the "aspects of Nature," thunder-storms,

earthquakes, and statistics--form, and will ever form, the great staple

of literature. Mr. Buckle's own book would not have been half so

entertaining as it is, if he had not, with the most natural

inconsistency, plentifully besprinkled his pages with biographical

details, some of which are not incorrect. Lord Macaulay, whom Mr.

Buckle is unable to eulogize with sufficient vehemence without a

ludicrous as well as irreverent application of Scriptural language, is

of all writers the most profuse in the description of individual

peculiarities, neatly doing up each separate man in a separate parcel

with an appropriate label, and dismissing half his personages, like

"ticket-of-leave men," with a "character," and nothing more.

In truth, while the office of the speculative philosopher is to explore

the principles that have the widest operation in the revolutions of

society, the office of the historian is to represent society as it

actually exists at any given period in all its various phenomena. The

_science_ of history has been first invented--at least, he tells us

so--by Mr. Buckle. The _art_ of history is older than Herodotus, older

than Moses, older than printed language. It is based, like every other

art, on certain truths, general and special, principles and facts; its

process, like that of every other art, is the Imagination, the creative

principle of genius, using these truths as its rules and its materials,

working by them and upon them, applying and idealizing them. That there

is such a thing as historical art has also, we know, been disputed. It

is one of the exceedingly strong convictions--he will not allow us to

call them opinions--entertained by the distinguished author of "Modern

Painters," and expressed by him in a lecture delivered at Edinburgh,

that past ages are to be studied only in the records which they have

themselves left,--letters, contemporary memoirs, and the like sources.

Works built upon these he calls "restorations," weak and servile

copies, from which the spirit of the original has fled. He accordingly

advises every one who would make himself really acquainted with the

manners and events of a former period to go at once to the

fountain-head and learn what that period said for itself in its own

dialect and style. It might be sufficient mildly to warn any person who

thinks of adopting this advice, that, unless the field of his intended

researches be very limited, or the amount of time which he proposes to

devote to the study very great, the result can scarcely be of a

satisfactory nature. But there is another answer to Mr. Ruskin, which

has more force when addressed to one so renowned as a critic and

exponent of Art. The eye of Genius seizes what escapes ordinary

observation. The province of Art is to _reveal_ Nature, to elucidate

her obscurities, to present her, not otherwise than as she _is_, but

more truthfully and more completely than she _appears_ to the common

eye. Of what use were landscape-painting, if it did not teach us how to

look for beauty in the real landscape? Who has not seen in a good

portrait an expression which he then for the first time recognized as

that which best represented the character of the original? When we

applaud the personations of a great actor, we exclaim, as the highest

praise, "How true to Nature!" We must, therefore, have seen before the

look and gesture, and heard the tone, which we thus acknowledge as

appropriate to the passion and the scene. And yet they had never

stamped themselves upon our minds, when witnessed in actual life, from

which the actor himself had copied them, with half that force and

vividness which they receive from his delineation. In like manner, the

historian--one to whom history is a genuine vocation--applies to the

facts with which he has to deal, to the evidence which he has to sift,

to the relations which he has to peruse, a faculty which shall detect a

meaning where the common reader would find none,--which shall conceive

a whole picture, a complete view, where another would see but

fragments,--which shall combine and reproduce in one distinct and

living image the relics of a past age, which lie broken, scattered, and

buried beneath the mounds of time. Such a work has Niebuhr performed

for early Roman history, and Michelet for the confused epochs of

mediaeval France. The spirit, instead of escaping in the process, was

for the first time made visible. The historian did not merely anatomize

the body of the Past, but with magic power summoned up its ghost.

It cannot be said that the claims of history have ever been disallowed

by the reading public. There is, indeed, no class of literature so

secure of receiving the attention which it demands. While the novelist

modestly confines himself to a brace of spare duodecimos, and, if his

story be somewhat extended, endeavors to conceal its length in the

smallness of the print, the historian unblushingly presents himself

with three, six, a dozen, nay, if he be a Frenchman or a German, with

forty huge tomes, and is more often taken to task for his omissions

than censured for the fulness of his narrative. It is respectable to

buy his volumes, and respectable to read them. We don't put them away

in corners, but give them the most conspicuous places on our shelves.

Strange to say, that kind of reading to which we were once driven as to

a task, which our fathers thought must be useful because it was so

dull, has of late outstripped every other branch in its attractiveness

to the mass. Nobody yawns over Carlyle; people set upon Macaulay as if

quite unconscious that they were about to be led into the labyrinths of

Whig and Tory politics; and gentlemen whirled along in railway-cars

bend over the pages of Prescott, and pronounce them as fascinating as

any romance. Stranger still, these modern historians excel their

predecessors as much in learning and depth of research as in dramatic

power, artistic arrangement and construction, and beauty and

picturesqueness of style. Compare the meagre array of references in the

foot-notes of Watson's "History of Philip the Second" with the

multitude of authorities cited by Mr. Prescott. It may be doubted,

whether any printed book, however rare or little known, which could

throw the least glimmer of light upon his subject, has been overlooked

or neglected by the last-mentioned author; while thousands of

manuscript pages, gathered from libraries and collections in almost

every part of Europe, have furnished him with some of his most curious

particulars and enabled him to clear up the mystery that shrouded many

portions of the subject.

We shall not attempt to determine the exact place that ought to be

assigned in an illustrious brotherhood to our American historian. The

country is justly proud of him, as one whose name is a household word

in many lands,--who has done more, perhaps, than any other of her

living writers, with the exception of Washington Irving, to obtain for

a still youthful literature the regard and attention of the world,--who

has helped to accomplish the prediction of Horace Walpole, that there

would one day be "a Thucydides at Boston and a Xenophon at New York"; a

prediction which seemed so fanciful, at the time it was made, (less

than two years before the declaration of Independence,) that the

prophet was fain to link its fulfilment with the contemporaneous visit

of a South American traveller to the deserted ruins of London.[4] His

writings have won favor with hosts of readers, and they have received

the homage of learned and profound inquirers, like Humboldt and Guizot.

They have merits that are recognizable at a glance, and they have also

merits that will bear the closest examination. They occupy a field in

which they have no compeers. They are the products of a fertile soil

and of laborious cultivation. The mere literary critic, accustomed to

dwell with even more attention on the form than on the substance of a

work, commends above all the admirable skill shown in the selection and

grouping of the incidents, the facile hand with which an obscure and

entangled theme is divested of its embarrassments, the frequent

brilliancy and picturesqueness of the narrative, the judicious mixture

of anecdote and reflection, and the harmony and clearness of the style.

These are the qualities which make Mr. Prescott's histories, with all

their solid learning and minute research, as pleasant reading as the

airiest of novels. And yet not these alone. A charm is felt in many a

sentence that has a deeper origin than in the intellect. No egotism

obtrudes itself upon our notice; but the subtile outflow of a generous

and candid spirit, of a genial and singularly healthy nature, wins for

the author a secure place in the affections of his readers.

The third volume of the "History of Philip the Second" is, we think,

superior to its predecessors. It contains, perhaps, no single scene

equal in elaborate and careful painting to the death of Count Egmont.

It has no chapter devoted to the elucidation of the darker passages in

Philip's personal history, like that which in a former volume traced to

a still doubtful end the unhappy career of Don Carlos, or such as will

doubtless, in a future volume, shed new light on that of Antonio Perez.

But there is a more continuous interest, arising from a greater unity

of subject. With the exception of the two chapters already referred to,

the narrative is taken up with the contest waged by the Spaniards

against those Moslem foes whom they hated with the hereditary hate of

centuries, the mingled hate that had grown out of diversity of

religion, an alien blood, and long arrears of vengeance. When that

contest was waged upon the sea or on a foreign soil, it was at least

mitigated by the ordinary rules of warfare. But on Spanish soil it knew

no restraint, no limitation but the complete effacement of the Moorish

population. The story of the Morisco Rebellion, which we remember to

have first read with absorbed attention in Dunham's meagre sketch, is

here related with a fulness of detail that exhausts the subject, and

leaves the mind informed both of causes and results. Yet the march of

the narrative is rapid and unchecked, from the first outbreak of the

revolt, when Aben-Farax, with a handful of followers, facing the

darkness of night and the blinding snow, penetrated into the streets of

Granada, shouting the cry so long unheard in air that had once been so

familiar with its sound, "There is no God but Allah, and Mahomet is the

prophet of God!"--through all the strange and terrible vicissitudes of

the deadly struggle that ensued, the frightful massacres, the wild

_guerrilla_ battles, the fiery onslaughts of the Spanish chivalry, the

stealthy surprises of the Moorish mountaineers,--down to the complete

suppression of the insurrection, the removal of the defeated race, the

overthrow and death of Aben-Aboo, "the little king of the Alpujarras,"

and the ghastly triumph in which his dead body, clothed in the robes of

royalty and supported upright on a horse, was led into the capital

where his ancestors had once reigned in peaceful splendor, after which

the head was cut off and set up in a cage above the wall, "the face

turned towards his native hills, which he had loved so well."

On such a theme, and in such localities, Mr. Prescott is more at home

than any other writer, American or European. His imagination, kindled

by long familiar associations, burns with a steady flame. The

characters are portrayed with a free and vigorous pencil, the contrast

between the Orientalism of the Spanish Arab and the sterner features of

the Spanish Goth being always strongly marked. The scenery, painted

with as much fidelity as truth, is sometimes brought before the eye by

minute description, and sometimes, with still happier effect, by

incidental touches,--an epithet or a simile, as appropriate as it is

suggestive. As we follow the route of Mundejar's army, the "frosty

peaks" of the Sierra Nevada are seen "glistening in the sun like

palisades of silver"; while terraces, scooped out along the rocky

mountain-side, are covered with "bright patches of variegated culture,

that hang like a garland round the gaunt Sierra." At their removal from

Granada, the remnant of what had once been a race of conquerors bid a

last farewell to their ancient homes just as "the morning light has

broken on the _red_ towers of the Alhambra"; and scattered over the

country in small and isolated masses, the presence of the exiles is

"sure to be revealed by the minute and elaborate culture of the

soil,--as the secret course of the mountain-stream is betrayed by the

brighter green of the meadow."

We had marked for quotation an admirable passage, in which our author

passes judgment on the policy of the Spanish government, its cruelty

and its mistakes. But want of space compels us here to take leave of a

book which we have not pretended to analyze, but to which we have

rendered sincere, though inadequate, praise.

[Footnote 1: "Sempre apparisce d'un volto e d'una temperatura medesima;

la qual cosa a chi, considerato gli accidenti che gli sono occorsi

delle morti dei figliuoli e delle mogli, ha fatto credere che fusse

crudele." _Relaz. Anon._ (1588.)]

[Footnote 2: None of the anecdotes in which Philip is represented as

giving way to violent bursts of anger will bear examination. Take, for

example, the story of his pent-up wrath having exploded against the

Prince of Orange, when he was quitting the Netherlands in 1559. The

Prince, it is said, who had accompanied him to the ship, endeavored to

convince him that the opposition to his measures, of which he

complained, had sprung from the Estates; on which the king, seizing

William's sleeve, and shaking it vehemently, exclaimed, "No, not the

Estates, but you,--you,--you!"--_No los Estados, ma vos,--vos,

--vos!_--using, say the original relator and the repeaters of

the story, a form of address, the second person plural, which in the

Spanish language is expressive of contempt. Now it is true that _vos_,

applied to an equal, would have been a solecism; but it is also true

that it was the _invariable_ form employed by the sovereign, even when

addressing a grandee or a prince of the Church. (See the _Papiers

d'État de Granvelle, passim_.) Moreover, the correspondence of the time

shows clearly that neither Philip nor Granvelle had as yet conceived

any deep suspicion of the Prince of Orange, much less had any of the

parties been so imprudent as to throw off the usual mask. The story is

first told by Aubéri, a writer of the seventeenth century, who had it

from his father, to whom it had been told by an anonymous eye-witness!]

[Footnote 3: _Relazione di Pigafetta._]

[Footnote 4: Walpole to Mason, Nov. 24, 1774.]

* * * * *

_The Courtship of Miles Standish_. By HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1858.

The introduction and acclimatization of the _hexameter_ upon English

soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was

first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre

remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel

Harvey,--a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,--whose chief claim to

remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was

the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his "Foure

Letters," (1592,) he says, "If I never deserve anye better

remembraunce, let mee rather be Epitaphed, the Inventour of the English

Hexameter, whome learned M. Stanihurst imitated in his Virgill, and

excellent Sir Phillip Sidney disdained not to follow in his Arcadia and

elsewhere." This claim of invention, however, seems to have been an

afterthought with Harvey, for, in the letters which passed between him

and Spenser in 1579, he speaks of himself more modestly as only a

collaborator with Sidney and others in the good work. The Earl of

Surrey is said to have been the first who wrote thus in English. The

most successful person, however, was William Webb, who translated two

of Virgil's Eclogues with a good deal of spirit and harmony. Ascham, in

his "Schoolmaster," (1570,) had already suggested the adoption of the

ancient hexameter by English poets; but Ascham (as afterwards Puttenham

in his "Art of Poesie") thought the number of monosyllabic words in

English an insuperable objection to verses in which there was a large

proportion of dactyles, and recommended, therefore, that a trial should

be made with iambics. Spenser, at Harvey's instance, seems to have

tried his hand at the new kind of verse. He says,--"I like your late

Englishe Hexameters so exceedingly well, that I also enure my penne

sometimes in that kinde.... For the onely or chiefest hardnesse, whych

seemeth, is in the Accente, which sometime gapeth, and, as it were,

yawneth ilfauouredly, coming shorte of that it should, and sometime

exceeding the measure of the Number, as in _Carpenter_; the middle

sillable being vsed shorte in Speache, when it shall be read long in

Verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling that draweth one legge after hir:

and _Heaven_, being used shorte as one sillable, when it is in Verse

stretched out with a _Diastole_, is like a lame dogge that holdes up

one legge. But it is to be wonne with Custome, and rough words must be

subdued with Vse. For why a God's name may not we, as else the Greekes,

have the kingdome of our owne Language, and measure our Accentes by the

Sounde, reserving the Quantitie to the Verse?" The amiable Edmonde

seems to be smiling in his sleeve as he writes this sentence. He

instinctively saw the absurdity of attempting to subdue English to

misunderstood laws of Latin quantities, which would, for example, make

the vowel in _debt_ long, in the teeth of use and wont.

We give a specimen of the hexameters which satisfied so entirely the

ear of Master Gabriel Harvey,--an ear that must have been long by

position, in virtue of its place on his head.

"Not the like _Discourser_, for Tongue and head: to be fóund out;

Not the like _resolute Man_, for great and serious áffayres;

Not the like _Lynx_, to spie out secretes and priuities óf States;

_Eyed_ like to _Argus, Earde_ like to _Mídas, Nosd_ like to _Naso_,

Wingd like to _Mercury_, fitist of a Thousand for to be émployed."

And here are a few from "worthy M. Stanyhurst's" translation of the

"AEneid."

"Laocoon storming from Princelis Castel is hastning,

And a far of beloing: What fond phantastical harebraine

Madnesse hath enchaunted your wits, you townsmen unhappie?

Weene you (blind hodipecks) the Greekish nauie returned,

Or that their presents want craft? is subtil Vlissis

So soone forgotten? My life for an haulf-pennie (Trojans)," etc.

Mr. Abraham Fraunce translates two verses of Heliodorus thus:--

"Now had fyery Phlegon his dayes reuolution ended,

And his snoring snowt with salt waues all to bee washed."

Witty Tom Nash was right enough when he called this kind of stuff,

"that drunken, staggering kinde of verse which is all vp hill and downe

hill, like the waye betwixt Stamford and Becchfeeld, and goes like a

horse plunging through the myre in the deep of winter, now soust up to

the saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes." It will be noticed that

his prose falls into a kind of tipsy hexameter. The attempt in England

at that time failed, but the controversy to which it gave rise was so

far useful that it called forth Samuel Daniel's "Defence of Ryme,"

(1603,) one of the noblest pieces of prose in the language. Hall also,

in his "Satires," condemned the heresy in some verses remarkable for

their grave beauty and strength.

The revival of the hexameter in modern poetry is due to Johann Heinrich

Voss, a man of genius, an admirable metrist, and, Schlegel's sneer to

the contrary notwithstanding, hitherto the best translator of Homer.

His "Odyssey," (1783,) his "Iliad," (1791,) and his "Luise," (1795,)

were confessedly Goethe's teachers in this kind of verse. The "Hermann

and Dorothea" of the latter (1798) was the first true poem written in

modern hexameters. From Germany, Southey imported that and other

classic metres into England, and we should be grateful to him, at

least, for having given the model for Canning's "Knifegrinder." The

exotic, however, again refused to take root, and for many years after

we have no example of English hexameters. It was universally conceded

that the temper of our language was unfriendly to them.

It remained for a man of true poetic genius to make them not only

tolerated, but popular. Longfellow's translation of "The Children of

the Lord's Supper" may have softened prejudice somewhat, but

"Evangeline," (1847,) though incumbered with too many descriptive

irrelevancies, was so full of beauty, pathos, and melody, that it made

converts by thousands to the hitherto ridiculed measure. More than

this, it made Longfellow at once the most popular of contemporary

English poets, Clough's "Bothie"--a poem whose singular merit has

hitherto failed of the wide appreciation it deserves--followed not long

after; and Kingsley's "Andromeda" is yet damp from the press.

While we acknowledge that the victory thus won by "Evangeline" is a

striking proof of the genius of the author, we confess that we have

never been able to overcome the feeling that the new metre is a

dangerous and deceitful one. It is too easy to write, and too uniform

for true pleasure in reading. Its ease sometimes leads Mr. Longfellow

into prose,--as in the verse

"Combed and wattled gules and all the rest of the blazon,"--

and into a prosaic phraseology which has now and then infected his

style in other metres, as where he says

"Spectral gleam their snow-white _dresses_,"--

using a word as essentially unpoetic as _surtout_ or _pea-jacket_. We

think one great danger of the hexameter is, that it gradually accustoms

the poet to be content with a certain regular recurrence of accented

sounds, to the neglect of the poetic value of language and intensity of

phrase.

But while we frankly avow our infidelity as regards the metre, we as

frankly confess our admiration of the high qualities of "Miles

Standish." In construction we think it superior to "Evangeline"; the

narrative is more straightforward, and the characters are defined with

a firmer touch. It is a poem of wonderful picturesqueness, tenderness,

and simplicity, and the situations are all conceived with the truest

artistic feeling. Nothing can be better, to our thinking, than the

picture of Standish and Alden in the opening scene, tinged as it is

with a delicate humor, which the contrast between the thoughts and

characters of the two heightens almost to pathos. The pictures of

Priscilla spinning, and the bridal procession, are also masterly. We

feel charmed to see such exquisite imaginations conjured out of the

little old familiar anecdote of John Alden's vicarious wooing. We are

astonished, like the fisherman in the Arabian tale, that so much genius

could be contained in so small and leaden a casket. Those who cannot

associate sentiment with the fair Priscilla's maiden name of Mullins

may be consoled by hearing that it is only a corruption of the Huguenot

Desmoulins,--as Barnum is of the Norman Vernon.

Indifferent poets comfort themselves with the notion that contemporary

popularity is no test of merit, and that true poetry must always wait

for a new generation to do it justice. The theory is not true in any

general sense. With hardly an exception, the poetry that was ever to

receive a wide appreciation has received it at once. Popularity in

itself is no test of permanent literary fame, but the kind of it is and

always has been a very decided one. Mr. Longfellow has been greatly

popular because he so greatly deserved it. He has the secret of all the

great poets,--the power of expressing universal sentiments simply and

naturally. A false standard of criticism has obtained of late, which

brings a brick as a sample of the house, a line or two of condensed

expression as a gauge of the poem. But it is only the whole poem that

is a proof of the poem, and there are twenty fragmentary poets, for one

who is capable of simple and sustained beauty. Of this quality Mr.

Longfellow has given repeated and striking examples, and those critics

are strangely mistaken who think that what he does is easy to be done,

because he has the power to make it seem so. We think his chief fault

is a too great tendency to moralize, or rather, a distrust of his

readers, which leads him to point out the moral which he wishes to be

drawn from any special poem. We wish, for example, that the last two

stanzas could be cut off from "The Two Angels," a poem which, without

them, is as perfect as anything in the language.

Many of the pieces in this volume having already shone as captain

jewels in Mana's carcanet, need no comment from us; and we should,

perhaps, have avoided the delicate responsibility of criticizing one of

our most precious contributors, had it not been that we have seen some

very unfair attempts to depreciate Mr. Longfellow, and that, as it

seemed to us, for qualities which stamp him as a true and original

poet. The writer who appeals to more peculiar moods of mind, to more

complex or more esoteric motives of emotion, may be a greater favorite

with the few; but he whose verse is in sympathy with moods that are

human and not personal, with emotions that do not belong to periods in

the development of individual minds, but to all men in all years, wins

the gratitude and love of whoever can read the language which he makes

musical with solace and aspiration. The present volume, while it will

confirm Mr. Longfellow's claim to the high rank he has won among lyric

poets, deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty

of epic narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth

century. In our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which

craves the red pepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present

generation are apt to overlook this almost obsolete and unobtrusive

quality; but we doubt if, since Chaucer, we have had an example of more

purely objective narrative than in "The Courtship of Miles Standish."

Apart from its intrinsic beauty, this gives the poem a claim to higher

and more thoughtful consideration; and we feel sure that posterity will

confirm the verdict of the present in regard to a poet whose reputation

is due to no fleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the

public of that which charms now and charms always,--true power and

originality, without grimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo,

is the artistic type of strength.

* * * * *

_Thoughts on the Life and Character of Jesus of Nazareth_. By W.H.

FURNESS, Minister of the First Congregational Unitarian Church in

Philadelphia. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1859.

Here is a book, written, not for "orthodox believers," but for those

whom the orthodox creeds have wholly repelled from its subject. It is

quite distinct from three other books on the same general theme, by the

same author. It has, indeed, some objects in view, at which neither of

those books directly aimed.

It will overwhelm with horror such readers as may stumble upon it, who

do not know, till they meet it, that there is any view of Jesus Christ

but that which is presented in the widely circulated issues of the

Tract Society and similar institutions. Our attention has already been

called to one very absurd and unjust attack upon it, in a Philadelphia

paper, intended to catch the prejudices of such persons. But the views

by which we found this attack accompanied, in the same journal, led us

to suspect that some political prejudice against the author's

anti-slavery had more to do with the onslaught than any deeply seated

love of Orthodox Christianity. To another class of readers, who have

been wholly repelled from any interest in Jesus Christ, by whatever

misfortune of temperament or training, the careful study of these

"Thoughts" would be of incalculable value. We suppose this class of

readers, through the whole extent of our country, to be quite as large

as the first class we have named. To a third class, which is probably

as large as both the others put together, who are neither repelled nor

attracted by the received ecclesiastical statements regarding the

Saviour, but are willing to pass, without any real inquiry or any firm

opinion, his presence in the world, and his influence at this moment on

every event in modern life, the book might also have an immense value,

if it could be conceived that any thunder-clap could wake them from

that selfish and comfortable indifference as to the central point of

all the history, philosophy, life, and religion, in which they live.

We have no intention of entering into a discussion of the remarkable

and very clear views presented in this volume. We have only to say that

the author does not do himself justice when he asserts that there is no

system in its arrangement. It is a systematic work, leading carefully

along from point to point in the demonstration attempted. One may read

it through in an afternoon, and he will then have a very clear idea of

what the author thinks, which does not always happen when one has read

a book through. If he be one of the class of readers for whom it was

written, he will have, at the very least, a deeper interest in the

study of the life of Jesus of Nazareth than he had when he began. He

will have read a reply to Dr. Strauss, Mr. Parker, Dr. Feuerbach, and

Mr. Hittel, which, he will confess, is written in an appreciative and

candid spirit, quite different from that of some of the _ex-cathedra_

works of controversy, which have failed to annihilate these writers,

although they have taken so arrogant a tone. As we have said, we do not

attempt to analyze the argument or the statement of which we thus

speak. We have only to say that it is positive, and not

negative,--constructive, and not destructive,--reverent, and not

flippant,--courteous to opponents, and never denunciatory. These are

characteristics of a work of theology of which those can judge who do

not affect to be technical theologians. Had we to give our own views of

the matters presented in so interesting a form, we should not, of

course, attempt to condense our assent or our dissent with the author

into these columns; but where we differed or where we agreed, we should

gladly recognize his eagerness to be understood, his earnest hope to

find the truth, and his sympathy with all persons seeking

it,--qualities which we have not always found in our study of

theologians by profession.

In making the suggestion, however, that these "Thoughts" would be of

special value to those who have fallen into the habit of disbelieving

the Gospels, they hardly know why, we know that there is no more

probability that they will read a book with this title than there is

that young men should read "Letters to Young Men," or young women

should read "Letters to Young Women." We suppose that the unconverted

seldom read "Hints to the Unconverted," and that undecided fools never

read "Foster on Decision of Character." Recurring, then, to Mr.

Everett's story of the Guava jelly, which was recommended to invalids,

but would "not materially injure those who are well," we may add to

what we have said, that all readers of this volume will find valuable

suggestions in it for the enlightenment of the gospel narratives.

Theologians who differed fundamentally from Dr. Furness have been eager

to express their sense of the value of his "Jesus and his Biographers,"

as affording some of the most vivid and scenic representations in all

literature of that life which he has devoted all his studies to

illustrating. It does not fall in the way of this book to attempt many

such illustrations; but it is full of hints which all readers will

value as lightening up and making fresh their notion of Scripture.

Critically speaking, the most prominent fault in the book is the

occasional interpolation of matter not connected directly with its

argument. That argument is simply laid out. In the first part is the

direct plea of the author for the gospel narrative as a whole,

earnestly and effectively sustained. The second part examines Mr.

Theodore Parker's arguments against the truth of parts of it. The third

book discusses other objections. So far as this is done from the

author's leading point of view, the book is coherent and effective. But

occasionally there comes in a little piece of fanciful criticism on the

text, or a comment on some side-view or transaction, or the suggestion

of a probability or a possibility, which remind one of the thin

puerilities of the commentators whom Dr. Furness despises more than of

the general drift of his own discussion.

* * * * *

_Vernon Grove; or Hearts as they are_. A Novel. New York: Rudd &

Carleton.

This volume makes a pleasant addition to the light reading of the day.

It is the more welcome as coming from a new field; for we believe that

the veil of secrecy with regard to its authorship has been so far blown

aside, that we shall be permitted to say, that, although it is written

by a lady of New England birth, it may be most properly claimed as a

part of the literature of South Carolina. It is a regular novel,

although a short one. It is an interesting story, of marked, but not

improbable incidents, involving a very few well-distinguished

characters, who fall into situations to display which requires nice

analysis of the mind and heart,--developed in graceful and flowing

narrative, enlivened by natural and spirited conversations. The

atmosphere of the book is one of refined taste and high culture. The

people in it, with scarce an exception, are people who mean to be good,

and who are handsome, polite, accomplished, and rich, or at least

surrounded by the conveniences and even luxuries of life. It is a

story, too, for the most part, of cultivated enjoyment. There are

sufferings and sorrows depicted in it, it is true; without them, it

would be no representation of real life, which it does not fail to be.

Some tears will undoubtedly be shed over it, but the sufferings and

sorrows are such that we feel they are, after all, leading to

happiness; and we are not made to dwell upon pictures of unnecessary

misery or unavailing misfortune. Let it not be supposed, however, that

we are speaking of a namby-pamby tale of the luxuries and successes of

what is called "high life," for this book has nothing of that

character. We mean only to point out, as far as we may, without

entering upon the story itself, that it tells of pleasant people, in

pleasant circumstances, among whom it is a pleasure to the reader for a

time to he. Many a novel "ends well" that keeps us in a shudder or a

"worry" from the beginning to the end. Here we see the enjoyment as we

go along. Indeed, a leading characteristic of "Vernon Grove" is the

extremely good taste with which it is conceived and written; and so we

no more meet with offensive descriptions of vulgar show and luxury than

we do with those of squalor or moral turpitude. It is a book marked by

a high tone of moral and religious as well as artistic and esthetic

culture. Without being made the vehicle of any set theories in

philosophy or Art, without (so far as we know) "inculcating" any

special moral axiom, it embodies much good teaching and suggestion with

regard to music and painting, and many worthy lessons for the mind and

heart. This is done, as it should be, by the apparently natural

development of the story itself. For, as we have said, the book is

really a novel, and will be read as a novel should be, for the story,

and not, in the first instance and with deliberation, with the critical

desire to find out what lessons it teaches or what sentiments it

inspires.

The narrative covers a space of several years, but is so told that we

are furnished with details rather than generalities; and particular

scenes, events, and conversations are set forth vividly and minutely.

The descriptions of natural scenery, and of works of Art, many of which

come naturally into the story, show a cultivated and observant eye and

a command of judicious language. The characters are well developed,

and, with an unimportant exception, there is nothing introduced into

the book that is not necessary to the completion of the story. "Vernon

Grove" will commend itself to all readers who like works of fiction

that are lively and healthy too; and will give its author a high rank

among the lady-novelists of our day and country.

* * * * *

_Arabian Days' Entertainments_. Translated from the German, by HERBERT

PELHAM CORTIS. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1858.

In this famous nineteenth century of ours, which prides itself on being

practical, and feeds voraciously on facts, and considers itself almost

above being amused, we for our part rejoice to greet such a book as

this. Our great-great-grandfathers, when they were boys, were happy in

having wise and good grandfathers who told them pleasant stories of

what never happened,--and who loved well to tell them, because they

were truly wise men, and knew what the child's mind relished and

fattened upon,--nay, and because, like all truly good men, they

themselves indulged a fond, secret, half-belief that these child's

stories of theirs were, if the truth could be got at, more than half

true. We should be sorry to believe that this good old life of

story-telling and story-hearing had utterly gone out. It belonged to an

age that only very foolish men and very vulgar men laugh at without

blushing.

"We of the nineteenth century" have a certain way of our own, however,

of enjoying that most rarely fascinating class of literary productions

known as _stories_,--a critical, perhaps over-intellectual, way,--but

still sufficing, it is comfortable to know, to keep the story at very

near its ancient dignity in the realm of letters. Perhaps it is a true

sign of the perfect story, that it ministers at once to these two

unsympathizing mental appetites, and pleases completely, not only the

man, but his--by this aide--ever-so-great-grandfather, the child.

Everybody thinks first of the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments," when we

fall into such remarks as these,--that marvellous treasure, from which

the dreams of little boys have been furnished forth, and the pages of

great scholars gemmed with elegant illustration, ever since it was

first opened to Western eyes. With this book the title which Mr. Curtis

has so happily selected for his translation invites us to compare it;

and it is not too much praise to say that it can well stand the

comparison,--we mean as a selection of stories fascinating to old and

young. As to the matter of translation itself, the versions we have of

the "Arabian Nights" are notoriously bad. These stories, which Mr.

Curtis has laid all good children and all right-minded grown people

under perpetual obligation by thus collecting and presenting to them,

are the productions of a single German writer, and, with the exception

of three or four separately published in magazines, have, we believe,

never before been translated into English. They present some very

interesting points of contrast with the ever-famous book of Eastern

stories,--such as open some very tempting cross-views of the German and

the Eastern mind, which, for want of opportunity, we must pass by now.

The scenes of most of them are laid in the East,--of a few in Germany;

but the robust _method_ of the German story-writer is apparent in each.

We wish we could quote from one or two which have particularly charmed

us; but though this is impossible within any decent limits, we can at

least provoke the appetite of readers of all ages by the mere

displaying of such titles as these:--"The History of Caliph Stork";

"The Story of the Severed Hand"; "The Story of Little Muck"; "Nosey the

Dwarf"; "The Young Englishman"; "The Prophecy of the Silver Florin";

"The Cold Heart," etc. What prospects for winter evenings are here! And

while we can assure the adult reader that the promise which these

titles give of burlesque or humorous description, and bold, romantic

narrative, shall be more than kept, it may be well also to say, for the

comfort of those whom we hope to see buy the book for their children's

sake, that the stories in it are entirely free from certain objections

which may be fairly urged against the "Arabian Nights" as reading for

young people. The "Arabian Days" have nothing to be ashamed of in the

nature of their entertainments.

The translation itself is a performance in a high degree creditable,

not only to the German, but to the English, scholarship of Mr. Curtis.

We perceive scarcely any of that peculiar stiffness of style which

makes so many otherwise excellent translations painful to read,--the

stiffness as of one walking in new boots,--the result of dressing the

words of one language in the grammatical construction of another. Mr.

Curtis gives us the sentiment and wit and fancy and humor and oddity of

the German's stories, but in an English way. Indeed, his is manly and

graceful English, such as we hope we are not now by any means seeing

the last of.

To the right sort of reader, as _we_ consider him, of the "Arabian

Days," a word about the pictures (for observe, that the proper name for

the illustrations of a story-book is _pictures_) may be fitly spoken.

There are no less than sixteen very nice pictures to this

story-book,--well done, even for Mr. Hoppin, artistically, and well

conceived for the refreshing of the inner eye of him, her, or _it_ that

reads. And we must be permitted, also, who have read this book by

candle-light, as only such a book should be read, to congratulate the

readers who come after us upon the good type and good paper in which

the publishers have very properly produced it.

We hope and believe this publication will before long be given as a

boon to the rising generation, our second-cousins, across the water.

They, however, cannot have it (as we fully intend that certain small

bodies, but huge feeders on fiction, among our acquaintance, shall have

it) on Christmas morning,--the dear old festival, that, as we write, is

already near enough to warm our hearts with anticipation.

* * * * *

_The Stratford Gallery: or the Shakspeare Sisterhood_. Comprising

Forty-five Ideal Portraits, described by HENRIETTA LEE PALMER.

Illustrated. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

This book is what it purports to be,--not a collection of elaborate

essays devoted to metaphysical analysis or to conjectural emendations

of doubtful lines,--but a series of ideal portraits of the women of

Shakspeare's plays. The reader may fancy himself led by an intelligent

cicerone who pauses before each picture and with well-chosen words

tells enough of the story to present the heroine, and then gives her

own conception of the character, with such hints concerning manners and

personal peculiarities as a careful study of the play may furnish. The

narrations are models of neatness and brevity, yet full enough to give

a clear understanding of the situation to any one unacquainted with it.

The creations of Shakspeare have a wonderful completeness and vitality;

and yet the elements of character are often mingled so subtilely that

the sharpest critics differ widely in their estimates. Nothing can be

more fascinating than to follow closely the great dramatist, picking

out from the dialogue a trait of form here, a whim of color there, and

at last combining them into an harmonious whole, with the truth of

outline, hue, and bearing preserved. Often as this has been done, there

is room still for new observers, provided they bring their own eyes to

the task, and do not depend upon the dim and warped lenses of the

commentators.

It is very rarely that we meet with so fresh, so acute, and so

entertaining a student of Shakspeare as the author of this volume. Her

observations, whether invariably just or not, are generally taken from

a new stand-point. She is led to her conclusions rather by instinct

than by reason. She makes no apology for her judgments.

"I have no reason but a woman's reason;

I think her so because I think her so."

And it would not be strange, if womanly instinct were to prove

oftentimes a truer guide in following the waywardness or the apparent

contradictions of a woman's nature than the cold logical processes of

merely intellectual men.

To the heroines who are most truly _women_ the author's loyalty is pure

and intense. Imogen, the "chaste, ardent, devoted, beautiful"

wife,--Juliet, whose "ingenuousness and almost infantile simplicity"

endear her to all hearts,--Miranda, that most ethereal creation, type

of virgin innocence,--Cordelia, with her pure, filial devotion,--are

painted with loving, sympathetic tenderness.

Altogether, this is a book which any admirer of the poet may read with

pleasure; and especially to those who have not ventured to think wholly

for themselves it will prove a most useful and agreeable companion.

It is a matter of regret that the characters of the greatest of

dramatists should not have been embodied by the greatest of painters.

But no Michel Angelo, or Raphael, or Correggio, has illustrated these

wonderful creations; and the man who is capable of appreciating

Miranda, or Ophelia, or Desdemona, finds the ideal heads of the

painters, of our day at least, tame, vapid, and unsatisfactory. The

heroine, as imaged in his mind, is arrayed in a loveliness which limner

never compassed. We cannot promise our readers that the engravings in

this beautifully printed and richly bound volume will prove to be

exceptions to the usual rule. They are from designs by English

artists,--"Eminent Hands," in the popular phrase; the faces are often

quite striking and expressive, and, up to a certain point,

characteristic; moreover, they are smoothly finished, and will compare

favorably with those in fashionable gift-books. Without being in the

least degree examples of a high style of Art in its absolute sense,

they answer well the purpose for which they were designed. Indeed, if

they were more truly ideal, and, at the same time, more truly human,

they would doubtless be far less popular.

* * * * *

_Ernest Carroll, or Artist-Life in Italy_. A Novel, in Three Parts.

Boston; Ticknor & Fields. 1858.

This book is not strictly of the kind which the Germans call the

Art-Novel, and yet we know not how else to class it. The author has

spun a somewhat improbable story as the thread for his reflections on

Art and his reminiscences of artists and travel. We confess that we

should have liked it better, had he made his book simply a record of

experience and reflection. But there are many admirable things in this

little volume, which is evidently the work of a person of refined

artistic culture and clear intelligence. Of especial value we reckon

the reminiscences of Allston and his methods; and it seems a little

singular, since the scene is laid chiefly in Florence and in 1847, that

we get nothing more satisfactory than a single anecdote about the elder

Greenough, whose life and works and thoroughly emancipated style of

thought have done more to honor American Art than those of any other

man, except Allston.

We rather regret that the author had not made his book more of a

journal, and recorded directly his own impressions, because he shows a

decided ability in bringing scenes before the eye of the reader. The

sketches of Doney's _Caffè_ and the Venetian _improvvisatore_ are

especially vivid; so is that of the old picture-dealer; though in all

we think some of the phrases might have been softened with advantage.

We enter our earnest protest also against the Ruskin chapter. The

scenes at Graefenberg are fresh, lively, and interesting. The book is

also enlivened by many entertaining anecdotes of living American

artists and _savans_, which are told with the skill of a practised

_raconteur_. We hope to hear from the author again, and in a form which

shall enable his knowledge and experience in matters of Art to have

freer play than the exigencies of a novel allow them, and in which his

abilities in the discussion of aesthetics shall have more scope given

them than that of the _obiter dicta_ in a story.

* * * * *

_Hymns of the Ages_. Being Selections from the Lyra Catholica,

Apostolica, Germanica, and other Sources, with an Introduction by PROF.

F.D. HUNTINGTON. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1859. Square 8vo. pp.

300.

In this exquisitely-printed volume the editors have collected specimens

of the devotional poetry of the Christian Church, including

translations from the Roman Breviary, as well as from German hymns,

with a few from English sources. There has been no attempt, evidently,

to conform to the requirements of any creed; the devout Catholic, as

well as the Episcopalian Churchman, will find here the favorite

aspirations, penitential strains, and ascriptions of praise, which have

been consecrated by generations of worshippers. To American readers the

collection will be substantially new, since hardly a dozen of the hymns

are to be found in the volumes in use in our churches. If it had been

the purpose of the editors to gather all the classic religious poetry,

to form a sacred anthology, it would have been necessary to print a

great number of the hymns in modern collections; and the volume would

in that case have lost in novelty what it gained in completeness.

Those who like to go back to the ancient forms of worship for

inspiration, who feel the force of association in the lyrics which have

come down from almost apostolic times, will find in this book an aid to

devotion and religious contemplation. With a little more care in

excluding strongly-marked doctrinal stanzas, the "Hymns of the Ages,"

if less characteristic, would have been more truly _catholic_, and

therefore acceptable to a larger portion of the Church Universal.