Mr. Beecher openly accused certain "important organs" of deliberately

darkening the truth and falsifying the facts. The audience thereupon

gave three groans for a paper called the "Times," once respectably

edited, now deservedly held as cheap as an epigram of Mr. Carlyle's or a

promise to pay dated at Richmond. He showed the monstrous absurdity of

England's attacking us for fighting, and for fighting to uphold a

principle. "On what shore has not the prow of your ships dashed? What

land is there with a name and a people where your banner has not led

your soldiers? And when the great resurrection-_reveille_ shall sound,

it will muster British soldiers from every clime and people under the

whole heaven. Ah! but it is said this is war against your own blood. How

long is it since you poured soldiers into Canada, and let all your yards

work day and night to avenge the taking of two men out of the Trent?"

How ignominious the pretended humanity of England looked in the light of

these questions! And even while Mr. Beecher was speaking, a lurid glow

was crimsoning the waters of the Pacific from the flames of a great

burning city, set on fire by British ships to avenge a crime committed

by some remote inhabitant of the same country,--an act of wholesale

barbarity unapproached by any deed which can be laid to the charge of

the American Union in the course of this long, exasperating conflict!

Mr. Beecher explained that the people who sympathized with the South

were those whose voices reached America, while the friends of the North

were little heard. The first had bows and arrows; the second have

shafts, but no bows to launch them.

"How about the Russians?"

Everybody remembers how neatly Mr. Beecher caught this envenomed dart,

and, turning it end for end, drove it through his antagonist's shield of

triple bull's-hide. "Now you know what we felt when you were flirting

with Mr. Mason at your Lord Mayor's banquet." A cleaner and straighter

"counter" than that, if we may change the image to one his audience

would appreciate better, is hardly to be found in the records of British

pugilism.

The orator concluded by a rather sanguine statement of his change of

opinion as to British sentiment, of the assurance he should carry back

of the enthusiasm for the cause of the North, and by an exhortation to

unity of action with those who share their civilization and religion,

for the furtherance of the gospel and the happiness of mankind.

The audience cheered again, Professor Newman moved a warm vote of

thanks, and the meeting dissolved, wiser and better, we hope, for the

truths which had been so boldly declared before them.

What is the net result, so far as we can see, of Mr. Beecher's voluntary

embassy? So far as he is concerned, it has been to lift him from the

position of one of the most popular preachers and lecturers, to that of

one of the most popular men in the country. Those who hate his

philanthropy admire his courage. Those who disagree with him in theology

recognize him as having a claim to the title of Apostle quite as good as

that of John Eliot, whom Christian England sent to heathen America two

centuries ago, and who, in spite of the singularly stupid questionings

of the natives, and the violent opposition of the sachems and powwows,

or priests, succeeded in reclaiming large numbers of the copper-colored

aborigines.

The change of opinion wrought by Mr. Beecher in England is far less easy

to estimate; indeed, we shall never have the means of determining what

it may have been. The organs of opinion which have been against us will

continue their assaults, and those which have been our friends will

continue to defend us. The public men who have committed themselves will

be consistent in the right or in the wrong, as they may have chosen at

first. To know what Mr. Beecher has effected, we must not go to Exeter

Hall and follow its enthusiastic audience as they are swayed hither and

thither by his arguments and appeals; we must not count the crowd of

admiring friends and sympathizers whom he, like all personages of note,

draws around him: the fire-fly calls other fire-flies about him, but

the great community of beetles goes blundering round in the dark as

before. Mr. Cobden has given us the test in a letter quoted by Mr.

Beecher in the course of his speech at the Brooklyn Academy. "You will

carry back," he says, "an intimate acquaintance with a state of feeling

in this country among what, for [want of] a better name, I call the

ruling class. Their sympathy is undoubtedly strongly for the South, with

the instinctive satisfaction at the prospect of the disruption of the

great Republic. It is natural enough." "But," he says, "our masses have

an instinctive feeling that their cause is bound up in the prosperity of

the States,--the United States. It is true that they have not a particle

of power in the direct form of a vote; but when millions in this country

are led by the religious middle class, they can go and prevent the

governing class from pursuing a policy hostile to their sympathies."

This power of the non-voting classes is an idea that gives us pause. It

is one of those suggestions, like Lord Brougham's of the "unknown

public," which, in a single phrase, and a sentence or two of

explanation, tell a whole history. This is the class John Bunyan wrote

for before the bishops had his Allegory in presentable calf and

gold-leaf,--before England knew that her poor tinker had shaped a

pictured urn for her full of such visions as no dreamer had seen since

Dante. This is the class that believes in John Bright and Richard Cobden

and all the defenders of true American principles. It absorbs

intelligence as melting ice renders heat latent; there is no living

power directly generated with which we can move pistons and wheels, but

the first step in the production of steam-force is to make the ice

fluid. No intellectual thermometer can reveal to us how much ignorance

or prejudice has melted away in the fire of Mr. Beecher's passionate

eloquence, but by-and-by this will tell as a working-force. The

non-voter's conscience will reach the Privy Council, and the hand of the

ignorant, but Christianized laborer trace its own purpose in the letters

of the royal signature.

We are living in a period, not of events only, but of epochs. We are in

the transition-stage from the miocene to the pliocene period of human

existence. A new heaven is forming over our head behind the curtain of

clouds which rises from our smoking battle-fields. A new earth is

shaping itself under our feet amidst the tremors and convulsions that

agitate the soil upon which we tread. But there is no such thing as a

surprise in the order of Nature. The kingdom of God, even, cometh not

with observation.

The visit of an overworked clergyman to Europe is not in appearance an

event of momentous interest to the world. The fact that he delivered a

few speeches before British audiences might seem to merit notice in a

local paper or two, but is of very little consequence, one would say, to

the British nation, compared to the fact that Her Majesty took an airing

last Wednesday, or of much significance to Americans, by the side of the

fact that his Excellency, Governor Seymour, had written a letter

recommending the Union Fire Company always to play on the wood-shed when

the house is in flames.

But, in point of fact, this unofficial visit of a private citizen--in

connection with these addresses delivered to miscellaneous crowds by an

envoy not extraordinary and a minister nullipotentiary, for all that his

credentials showed--was an event of national importance. It was much

more than this; it was the beginning of a new order of things in the

relations of nations to each other. It is but a little while since any

graceless woman who helped a crowned profligate to break the

commandments could light a national quarrel with the taper that sealed

her _billets-doux_ to his equerries and grooms, and kindle it to a war

with the fan that was supposed to hide her blushes. More and more, by

virtue of advancing civilization and easy intercourse between distant

lands, the average common sense and intelligence of the people begin to

reach from nation to nation. Mr. Beecher's visit is the most notable

expression of this movement of national life. It marks the _nisus

formativus_ which begins the organization of that unwritten and only

half spoken public opinion recognized by Mr. Cobden as a great

underlying force even in England. It needs a little republican

pollen-dust to cause the evolution of its else barren germs. The fruit

of Mr. Beecher's visit will ripen in due time, not only in direct

results, but in opening the way to future moral embassies, going forth

unheralded, unsanctioned by State documents, in the simple strength of

Christian manhood, on their errands of truth and peace.

The Devil had got the start of the clergyman, as he very often does,

after all. The wretches who have been for three years pouring their

leperous distilment into the ears of Great Britain had preoccupied the

ground, and were determined to silence the minister, if they could. For

this purpose they looked to the heathen populace of the nominally

Christian British cities. They covered the walls with blood-red

placards, they stimulated the mob by inflammatory appeals, they filled

the air with threats of riot and murder. It was in the midst of scenes

like these that the single, solitary American opened his lips to speak

in behalf of his country.

The danger is now over, and we find it hard to make real to our

imagination the terrors of a mob such as swarms out of the dens of

Liverpool and London. We know well enough in this country what Irish

mobs are: the Old Country exports them to us in pieces, ready to put

together on arriving, as we send houses to California. Ireland is the

country of shillalahs and broken crowns, of Donnybrook fairs, where men

with whiskey in their heads settle their feuds or work off their

sprightliness with the arms of Nature, sometimes aided by the least

dangerous of weapons. But England is the land of prize-fights, of

scientific brutality, which has flourished under the patronage of her

hereditary legislators and other "Corinthian" supporters. The pugilistic

dynasty came in with the House of Brunswick, and has held divided empire

with it ever since. The Briton who claims Chatham's language as his

mother-tongue may appropriate the dialect of the ring as far more truly

indigenous than the German-French of his every-day discourse. Of the

three Burkes whose names are historical, the orator is known to but a

few hundred thousands. The prize-fighter, with his interesting personal

infirmity, is the common property of the millions, and would have headed

the list in celebrity, but for that other of the name who added a new

invention to the arts of industry and enriched the English language with

a term which bids fair to outlive the reputation of his illustrious

namesake. Around the professors and heroes of the art of personal

violence are collected the practitioners of various callings less

dignified by the manly qualities they demand. The Gangs of Three that

waylay the solitary pedestrian,--the Choker in the middle, next the

victim who is to be strangled and cleaned out,--the larger guilds of

Hustlers who bonnet a man and beat his breath out of him and empty his

pockets before he knows what is the matter with him,--the Burglars, with

their "jimmies" in their pockets,--the fighting robbers, with their

brass knuckles,--the whole set in a vast thief-constituency, thick as

rats in sewers,--these were the disputants whom the emissaries of the

Slave Power called upon to refute the arguments of the Brooklyn

clergyman.

It was not pleasant to move in streets where such human rattlesnakes and

cobras were coiling and lying in wait. Great cities are the

poison-glands of civilization everywhere; but the secretions of those

hideous crypts and blind passages that empty themselves into the

thoroughfares of English towns are so deadly, that, but for her penal

colonies, England, girt by water, as the scorpion with flame, would

perish, self-stung, by her own venom. The legates of the great

Anti-Civilization have colonized England, as England has colonized

Botany Bay. They know the venal ruffianism of the fist and bludgeon, as

well as that of the press. Fortunately, they are short of funds, or Mr.

Beecher might have disappeared after the manner of Romulus, and never

have come to light, except in the saintly fashion of relics,--such as

white finger-rings and breastpins, like those which some devotees of the

Southern mode of worship are said to have been fond of wearing.

From these dangers, which he faced like a man, we welcome him back to a

country which is proud of his courage and ability and grateful for his

services. The highest and lowest classes of England cannot be in

sympathy with the free North. No dynasty can look the fact of

successful, triumphant self-government in the face without seeing a

shroud in its banner and hearing a knell in its shouts of victory. As to

those lower classes who are too low to be reached by the life-giving

breath of popular liberty, we cannot reach them yet. A Christian

civilization has suffered them, in the very heart of its great cities,

to sink almost to the level of Du Chaillu's West-African quadrumana. But

the thoughtful, religious middle class of Great Britain, with their

enlightened leaders and their conscientious followers among the laboring

masses, have listened and will always listen to the voice of any true

and adequate representative of that new form of human society now in

full course of development in Republican North America. They have never

listened to a nobler and more thoroughly national speaker than the

minister, clothed with full powers from Nature and bearing the authentic

credentials from his Divine Master, to whom, on his return from his

successful embassy, we renew our grateful welcome.

* * * * *

THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

A GREETING FOR THE NEW YEAR.

We are at the close of the third year of the Secession War. It is

customary to speak of the contest as having been inaugurated by the

attack on Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861; but, in strictness, it was begun

in December, 1860, when the Carolinians formally seceded from the Union,

which was as much an act of war as that involved in firing upon the

national flag that waved over the strongest of the Federal forts at

Charleston. Even those who insist that there can be no war without the

use of weapons must admit that the act of firing upon the Star of the

West, which vessel was seeking to land men and stores at Sumter, was an

overt act, and as significant of the purpose of the Secessionists as

anything since done by them. That occurred in January, 1861; and because

our Government did not choose to accept it as the beginning of those

hostilities which had been resolved upon by the Southern ultras, it does

not follow that men are bound to shut their eyes to the truth. But we

all took the insults that were offered to the flag in President

Buchanan's time as coolly as if that were the proper course of things,

while the attack on Sumter had the same effect on us that the

acknowledgment of the Pretender as King of Great Britain and Ireland by

Louis XIV. had on the English. War was then promptly accepted, and has

ever since been waged, with that various fortune which is known to all

contests, and which will be so known while wars shall be known on

earth,--in other words, while our planet shall be the abiding-place of

men. We have had victories, and we have had defeats, which is the

common lot; but, taken as a whole, we have but little reason to complain

of results, if we compare our situation now with what it was at the

close of 1862. Great things have been done in 1863, such as place the

military result of the war beyond all doubt, and permitting us to hope

for the early restoration of peace, provided the people shall furnish

their Government with the human material necessary to inflict upon the

enemy that grace stroke which shall put them out of their pain by

putting an end to their existence; and that Government itself shall not

be wanting in that energy, without which men and money are worse than

useless in war,--for then they would be but wasted.

The year opened darkly for us; for not even the success of General

Rosecrans on the well-contested field of Murfreesboro'--a success

literally extorted from a brave and stubborn and skilful foe--could

altogether compensate for the Union defeat at Fredericksburg, a defeat

that gave additional force to the gloomy words of those _grognards_ who

had adopted the doctrine that it was impossible for the Army of the

Potomac to accomplish anything worthy of its numbers, and of the

position and purpose assigned to it in the war. Months rolled on, and

little was done, the mere military losses and gains being not far from

equally shared by the two parties; but that was positively a loss to the

enemy, whose position it has been from the first, that they must have so

large a proportion of the successes as should tend to encourage their

people at home and their advocates abroad, and so compensate for their

inferiority in numbers and in property. Nothing has tended more, all

through the war, to show the vast difference in the parties to it, than

the little effect which serious reverses have had on the Unionists in

comparison with the effect of similar reverses on the Confederates. No

blow that we have received--and many blows have been dealt upon us--has

been followed by any loss of territory, any decrease of the means of

warfare, or any diminution of our purpose to carry on the contest to the

last piece of gold and the last greasy greenback. The enemy have taken

of our men, our cannon, our stores, and our money, more than once, but

not one of their victories produced any "fruit" beyond what was gleaned

from the battle-field itself. Our victories, on the contrary, have been

fruitful, as the position of our forces on the enemy's coast, and on

much of their territory, and in many of their ports, most satisfactorily

proves. As an English military critic said, the Rebels might gain

battles, but all the solid advantages were with their opponents. A Union

victory was so much achieved toward final and complete success; a

Confederate victory only operated to postpone the subjugation of the

Rebels for a few days, or perhaps weeks. We could afford to blunder,

while they could not; and the prospect of the gallows made the brains of

Davis and Lee uncommonly clear, and caused them to plan skilfully and to

strike boldly, in order that they might get out and keep out of the road

that leads to it,--the road to ruin.

The movement in April, under General Hooker, which led to the Battle of

Chancellorsville, was a failure, and for some time the country was much

depressed in consequence; but our failure, there and then, proved to be

really a great gain. Had General Hooker succeeded in defeating General

Lee in battle, the latter would, it is altogether probable, have

succeeded in retreating to Richmond, behind the defences of which he

would have held our forces at bay, and the Peninsular campaign of 1862

might have been repeated; for we had not men enough to render the

capture of Richmond certain through the effect of regular and steady

operations. The death of Stonewall Jackson, one of the incidents of the

April advance, was a severe loss to the enemy, and promises to be as

fatal to their cause as was that of Dundee to the hopes of the House of

Stuart. General Lee's success was really fatal to him. It compelled him

to make a movement in his turn, in June, and at Gettysburg we had ample

compensation for Chancellorsville; and the capture of Morgan and his

men, in Ohio, following hard upon Lee's retreat from Pennsylvania, put

an end to all attempts at invasion on the part of the Rebels, while we

continued to hold all that we had acquired of their territory, and soon

added more of it to our previous acquisitions. At the same time that

General Meade was disposing of the main Rebel army, General Grant was

taking Vicksburg, and General Banks was triumphing at Port Hudson.

Generals Pemberton and Gardner had defended those Southern strongholds

with a skill and a gallantry that do them great credit, considering them

merely as military operations; but the superior generalship of General

Grant at and near Vicksburg compelled them to surrender, and to place in

Union hands posts the possession of which was necessary to maintain the

integrity of the Confederacy. General Grant's least merit was the taking

of Vicksburg. The operations through the success of which he was enabled

to shut up a large force of brave men in Vicksburg, and to cut them off

from all hope of being relieved, were of the highest order of military

excellence, and justly entitle him to be called a great soldier, and no

man can be only a great soldier, for that intellectual rank implies in

its possessor qualities that fit him for any department of his country's

service. General Grant was admirably seconded and supported by his

lieutenants and their subordinates and men, or he must have failed

before such courageous and stubborn foes. He was also supported by the

naval force commanded by Admiral Porter, whose heroic exploits and

scientific services added new lustre to a name that already stood most

high in our naval history. He commanded men worthy of himself and the

service, and whose deeds must be ever remembered. General Banks and his

associates were not less successful in their undertaking, and had been

as well seconded as General Grant. The Mississippi was placed at our

control, and the enemy were deprived of those supplies, both domestic

and foreign, which they had drawn in so large quantities from the

trans-Mississippi territory. Through Texas, which had contrived to keep

up a great commerce, the supplies of foreign _matériel_ had been very

large; and from the same rich and extensive State came thousands of

beeves, sheep, and hogs, that were consumed by Southern soldiers in

Virginia and the Carolinas. Generals Grant and Banks put an end to this

mode of supplying the Rebels with food and other articles; and at a

later period the success of General Banks near the Rio Grande was hardly

less useful in putting an end to much of the Texan foreign trade,

whereby the Rebels beyond the Mississippi must find their powers to do

mischief very materially lessened.

In the mean time, Charleston, whence rebellion had spread over the

South, had been assailed by a large force, military and naval, commanded

by General Gillmore and Rear-Admiral Dahlgren. General Gillmore had

become famous as the captor of Fort Pulaski, under circumstances that

had seemed to render success impossible; and hence it was expected that

he would quickly take Charleston. It is not believed that that very able

and modest officer ever said a word to give rise to the popular

expectation. He knew the gravity of the task he had undertaken, and we

believe, that, if all the facts connected therewith could be published,

it would be found that he has accomplished all that he ever promised to

do or expected to do. He has done much, and done it admirably; and not

the least of the effects of his deeds is this,--that the report of his

guns reached to Europe, and caused the intelligent military men of that

dominating quarter of the world to doubt whether their respective

countries were militarily prepared to support intervention, even if to

intervention there existed no moral or political objections. He has

demolished Sumter, and that fortress which was the scene of our first

failure has ceased to exist. He has completed the blockade of

Charleston, which was almost daily violated before he brought his

batteries into play. We have the high authority of no less a personage

than Mr. Jefferson Davis himself,--a gentleman who never "speaks out"

when anything is to be made by reticence,--that Wilmington is now the

only port left to the Confederacy; and this is the highest possible

compliment that could be paid to the excellence of General Gillmore's

operations, and to the value of his services. Since he arrived near

Charleston, that port has been as hermetically sealed as Cronstadt in

December; whereas, until he began his scientific and most useful labors,

Charleston was one of the most flourishing seaports in the whole circle

of commerce. As to the taking of Charleston, our opinion is, and has

been from the first, that the history of the War of the American

Revolution demonstrates that the Carolina city can be had only as the

result of extensive land-operations, carried on by a power which has

command of the sea. Sir Henry Clinton failed before the place in 1776,

his attack being naval in its character; and he succeeded in taking it

in 1780, when he had control of the main-land, and made his approaches

regularly. Even after he had obtained command of the harbor, and Fort

Moultrie had been first passed and then taken, and no American maritime

force remained to oppose his fleet, he had to depend upon the action of

his army for success. We fear that the event will prove that we can

succeed at Charleston only by following Sir Henry's wise course. "The

things which have been are the things which shall be."

Late in the summer, General Rosecrans resumed operations, and marched

upon Chattanooga, while General Burnside moved into East Tennessee, and

obtained possession of Knoxville. General Burnside's march was one of

the most difficult ever made in war, and tasked the powers of his men to

the utmost; but all difficulties were surmounted, and the loyal people

of the country which he entered and regained were gladdened by seeing

the national flag flying once more over their heads. Both these

movements were at first brilliantly successful; but the enemy were

impressed with the importance of the points taken or threatened by our

forces, and they concentrated great masses of troops, in the hope of

being able to defeat our armies, regain the territory lost, and transfer

the seat of war far to the north. The Battle of Chickamauga was fought,

and a portion of General Rosecrans's army was defeated, while another

portion, under General Thomas, stubbornly maintained its ground, and

inflicted great damage on the enemy. The effect of General Thomas's

heroic resistance was, that the enemy's grand purpose was baffled. Their

loss was so severe, and their men had been so roughly handled, that they

could not advance farther, and the time thus gained was promptly turned

to account, by General Rosecrans in the first instance, and by

Government. The Union army was soon reorganized by its energetic leader,

and placed in condition to make effectual resistance to the enemy,

should they endeavor to advance. The Government's action was rapid and

useful. General Grant was placed in immediate command of the army, which

was largely reinforced, and preparations were quickly made for the

resumption of offensive operations. In the mean time, General Bragg had

sent General Longstreet to attack General Burnside; and as Longstreet

has been looked upon, since the death of Jackson, as the best of the

Rebel fighting generals, great hopes were entertained of his success.

Apparently taking advantage of the absence of so large a body of Rebel

troops under so good a leader, General Grant resumed the offensive on

the twenty-third of November, and during three days' hard fighting

inflicted upon General Bragg a series of defeats, in which Generals

Thomas, Hooker, and Sherman were the active Union commanders. The

Unionists were completely victorious at all points, taking several

strong positions, forty-six pieces of cannon, five thousand muskets,

valuable stores, and seven thousand prisoners, besides killing and

wounding great numbers. All these successes were gained at a cost of

only forty-five hundred men. The skill of General Grant and his

lieutenants, and the valor of their troops, were signally displayed in

these operations, the first assured intelligence of which reached the

North in time to add to the pleasures of the National Thanksgiving, as

the first news of Gettysburg had come to us on the Fourth of July.

The November victories put an end to all fear that the enemy might be

able to carry out their original project, while it seemed to be certain

that the scene of active operations would be transferred from East

Tennessee to Northern Georgia. General Burnside still held Knoxville,

and it was supposed that General Longstreet would find it difficult to

escape destruction. General Bragg had retreated to Dalton, which is

about a hundred miles from Atlanta, and is reported to have summoned

General Longstreet to rejoin him. The Army of the Potomac, which had

borne itself very gallantly in some of the autumnal operations

consequent on Lee's advance, had followed the army commanded by this

General when it retreated, inflicting on it considerable loss, and

crossing the Rapid Ann.[C]

Victories have been gained by the Unionists in other quarters,--in

Missouri, in Arkansas, in Louisiana, and in Mississippi,--whereby the

enemy's numbers have been diminished, and territory brought under the

Union flag that until recently was held by the Rebels, and from which

they drew means of subsistence now no longer available to them.

The effects of all the successes which have been mentioned are various.

We have deprived the enemy of extensive portions of territory, in most

of their States. Tennessee is rescued; Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri

are placed beyond all danger of being taken by the Rebels; in Arkansas,

Louisiana, and Texas we hold places of much political and military

importance; Mississippi is practically ours; Alabama yields little to

our foe; Georgia is invaded, instead of remaining the basis of a grand

attack on Tennessee and Kentucky; the Carolinas, greatly favored by

geographical circumstances, are barely able to hold out against attacks

that are _not_ made in force, and portions of their territory are ours;

Virginia is exhausted, and there the enemy cannot long remain, even

should they meet with no reverses in the field; and, finally, as General

Grant's successes at Vicksburg halved the Confederacy, so have his

Chattanooga successes quartered it. The Rebels are no longer one people,

but are divided into a number of communities, which cannot act together,

even if we could suppose their populations to be animated by one spirit,

which certainly they are not. Of the inhabitants of the original

Confederacy probably two-fifths are no longer under the control of the

Richmond Government; and of the remainder a very large proportion are

said to be massed in Georgia, a State that has hitherto suffered little

from the war, but which now seems about to become the scene of vast and

important operations, which cannot be carried on without causing

sweeping devastation. The public journals state that there are two

million slaves in Georgia, most of whom have been taken or sent thither

by their owners, inhabitants of other States. This must tend greatly to

increase the difficulties of the enemy, whose stores of food and

clothing are not large in any of the Atlantic or Gulf States.

Much stress has been placed on "the starvation-theory," and it is

probable that there is much suffering in the Confederacy; but this does

not proceed so much from the positive absence of food as from other

causes. The first of these causes is undoubtedly the loss of all faith

in the Southern currency. That currency has not yet fallen so low as the

Continental currency fell, when it required a bushel of it to pay for a

peck of potatoes, but it is at a terrible discount, and the day is fast

coming when it will be regarded as of no more value than so many pieces

of brown paper; and its depreciation, and the prospect of its soon

becoming utterly worthless, are among the chief consequences of the

triumphs of our arms. Men see that there will be no power to make

payment, and they will not part with their property for rags so rotten.

They may wish success to the Confederate cause, but "they must live,"

and live they cannot on paper that is nothing but paper. The journal

that is understood to speak for Mr. Davis recommends a forced loan, the

last resort of men the last days of whose power are near at hand.

Another cause of the scarcity of food in the South is to be found in the

condition of Southern communications. If all the food in the Confederacy

could be equally distributed, now and hereafter, we doubt not that every

person living there would get enough to eat, and even have something to

spare,--civilians as well as soldiers, blacks as well as whites; but no

such distribution is possible, because there are but indifferent means

for the conveyance of food from places where it is abundant to places

where famine's ascendency is becoming established. The Southern railways

have been terribly worked for three years, and are now worn out, with no

hope of their rails and rolling-stock being renewed. Our troops have

rendered hundreds of miles of those ways useless, and they have

possession of other lines. Southern harbors and rivers are held or

commanded by Northern ships or armies. The Mississippi, which was once

so useful to the Rebels, has, now that we control it, become a "big

ditch," separating their armies from their principal source of supply.

It is that "last ditch" in which they are to die. That wide extent of

Southern territory, which has so often been mentioned at home and abroad

as presenting the leading reason why we never could conquer the Rebels,

now works against them, and in our favor. Food may be abundant to

wastefulness in some States, while in others people may be dying for the

want of it. The Secessionists are now situated as most peoples used to

be, before good roads became common. The South is becoming reduced to

that state which was known to some parts of England before that country

had made for itself the best roads of Christendom, and when there would

be starvation in one parish, while perhaps in the next the fruits of the

earth were rotting on its surface, because there were no means of

getting them to market. With a currency so debased that no man will

willingly take it, while all men readily take Union greenbacks,--with

railways either worn out or held by foes,--with but one harbor this side

of the Mississippi that is not closely shut up, and that harbor in

course of becoming closed completely,--with their rivers furnishing

means for attack, instead of lines of defence,--with their territory and

numbers daily decreasing,--with defeat overtaking their armies on almost

every field,--with the expressed determination of the North to prosecute

the war, be the consequences what they may,--with the constant increase

of Union numbers,--and with the steady refusal of foreign powers to

recognize the Confederacy, or to afford it any countenance or open

assistance,--the Rebels must be infatuated, and determined to provoke

destruction, if they do not soon make overtures for peace.

It is all very well for the "chivalrous classes" at the South, whoever

they may happen to be, to talk about "dying in the last ditch," and of

imitating the action of Pelayo and his friends; but common folk like to

die in their beds, and to receive the inevitable visitant with decorum,

to an exhibition of which ditches are decidedly unfavorable. As to

Pelayo, he lived in an age in which there were neither railways nor

rifled cannon, neither steamships nor Parrott guns, neither Monitors

nor greenbacks,--else he and his would either have been routed out of

the Asturian Mountains, or have been compelled to remain there forever.

The conditions of modern life and society are highly unfavorable to

those heroic modes of resistance and existence in which alone gentlemen

of Pelayo's pursuits can hope to flourish. We Saracens of the North

would ask nothing better than to have Pelayo Davis lead all his valiant

ragamuffins into the strongest range of mountains that could be found in

all Secessia, there to establish the new Kingdom of Gijon. We should

deserve the worst that could befall us, if we failed to vindicate the

common American idea, that this country is no place for lovers of crowns

and kingdoms.

As to the guerrillas, we know that they are an exasperating set of

fellows, but they must soon disappear before the advance of the Union

armies. A guerrillade on an extensive scale and of long continuance is

possible only while it is supported by the presence of large and

successful regular armies. Had Wellington been driven out of the

Peninsula, the Spanish guerrillas would have given little trouble to the

intrusive French king at Madrid. Defeat Lee, and Mosby will vanish.

After all, the Southern guerrillas are not much worse than other

Southrons were at no very remote period. It is within the memory of even

middle-aged persons, that the southwestern portion of our country was in

as lawless a state as ever were the borders of England and Scotland, and

with no Belted Will to hang up ruffians to swing in the wind. As those

ruffians were mostly removed by time, and the scenes of their labors

became the seats of prosperous and well-ordered communities, so will the

guerrillas of to-day be made to give way by that inexorable reformer and

avenger. Order will once more prevail in the Southwest, and cotton,

tobacco, and rice again yield their increase to regular industry,--an

industry that shall be all the more productive, because exercised by

free men.

The political incidents of 1863 are as encouraging as the incidents of

war. The discontent that existed toward the close of 1862--a discontent

by no means groundless--led to the apparent defeat of the war-party in

many States, and to the decrease of its strength in others. But it was

an illogical conclusion that the people were dissatisfied with the war,

when they only meant to express their dissatisfaction with the manner in

which it was conducted. Their votes in 1863 truly expressed their

feeling. In every State but New Jersey the war-party was successful, its

majority in Ohio being 100,000, in New York 30,000, in Pennsylvania

15,000, in Massachusetts, 40,000, in Iowa 32,000, in Maine 22,000, in

California 20,000. And so on throughout the country. The popular voice

is still for war, but for war boldly, and therefore wisely, waged.

The improvement that has taken place in our foreign relations is even

greater than that which has come over our domestic affairs; and for the

first time since the opening of the civil war, it is possible for

Americans to say that there is every reason for believing that they are

to be left to settle their own affairs according to their own ideas as

to the fitness of things. This change, like all important changes in

human affairs, is due to a variety of causes. In part it is owing to

what we considered to be among our greatest misfortunes, and in part to

those successes which changed the condition of affairs. Our failure at

Fredericksburg, at the close of 1862, strengthened the general European

impression that the Rebels were to succeed; and as their defeat at

Murfreesboro was not followed by an advance of our forces, that

impression was not weakened by General Bragg's failure, though that was

more signal than was the failure of General Burnside. If the Rebels were

to succeed, why should European governments do anything in aid of their

cause, at the hazard of war with us? Our defeat at Chancellorsville,

last May, tended still further to strengthen foreign belief that the

Secessionists were to be the winning party, and that they were competent

to do all their own work; but if it had not soon been followed by signal

reverses to the Rebel arms, it is certain that the Confederacy would

have been acknowledged by most European nations, on the plausible ground

that its existence had been established on the battle-field, and that we

could not object to the admission of a self-evident fact by foreign

sovereigns and statesmen, who were bound to look after the welfare of

their own subjects and countrymen, whose interests were greatly

concerned with the trade of our Southern country. Fortunately for all

parties but the Rebels, those reverses came suddenly and with such

emphasis as to create serious doubts in the European mind as to the

superiority of the South as a fighting community. In an evil hour for

his cause, General Lee abandoned that wise defensive system to which he

had so long and so successfully adhered, and made a movement into the

Free States. What was the immediate cause of his change of proceeding

will probably never be accurately known to the existing generation. On

the face of things no good political reason appears for that change

being made; and on military grounds it was sure to lead to disaster,

unless the North had become the most craven of countries. So bad was

Lee's advance into the North, militarily speaking, that it would have

been the part of good policy to allow him to march without resistance to

a point at least a hundred miles beyond that field on which he was to

find his fate. A Gettysburg that should have been fought that distance

from the base of Southern operations could have had no other result than

the destruction of the main Southern army; and that occurring at about

the same time that Port Hudson and Vicksburg surrendered, the war could

have been ended by a series of thunder-strokes. Not a man of Lee's army

could have escaped. But the pride of the country prevented the adoption

of a course that promised the most splendid of successes, and compelled

our Government and our commander to forego the noblest opportunity that

had presented itself to effect the enemy's annihilation. Gettysburg was

made immortal, and Lee escaped, not without tremendous losses, yet with

the larger part of his army, and with much booty, that perhaps

compensated his own loss in _matériel_. He was beaten, on a field of his

own choosing, and with numbers in his favor; and his previous victories,

the almost uniform success that had attended his earlier movements, made

his Pennsylvania reverses all the more grave in the estimation of

foreigners. Immediately after news was sent abroad of his defeat and

retreat, tidings came to us, and soon were spread over the world, that

the Rebels had experienced the most terrible disasters in the Southwest,

whereby the so-called Confederacy had been cut in two. These facts gave

pause to those intentions of acknowledgment which had undoubtedly been

entertained in European courts and cabinets; and nothing afterward

occurred, down to the day of Chickamauga, which was calculated to effect

a change in the minds of the rulers of the Old World. But when

intelligence of Chickamauga reached Europe, England had taken a position

so determinedly hostile to intervention in any of its many forms and

stages that even a much greater disaster than that could have produced

no evil to our cause abroad. For it is to be remembered that the whole

business of intervention has lain from the beginning in the bosom of

England, and that, if she had chosen to act against us in force, she

could have done so with the strongest hope of success, if merely our

humiliation, or even our destruction, had been her object, and without

any immediate danger threatening herself as the consequence of her

hostile action. The French Government, not France, or any considerable

portion of the French people, has been ready to interfere in behalf of

the Rebels for more than two years, and would have entered upon the

process of intervention long since, if it had not been held back by the

obstinate refusal of England to unite with her in that pro-slavery

crusade which, it is with regret we say it, the French Emperor has so

much at heart; and without the aid and assistance of England, the ruler

of France could not and durst not move an inch against us. Not the

least, nor least strange, of the changes of this mutable world is to be

seen in the circumstance that France should be restrained from undoing

the work of the Bourbons and of Napoleon I. by England's firm opposition

to the wishes and purposes of Napoleon III. The Bourbon policy, as well

in Spain as in France, brought about the early overthrow of England's

rule over the territory of the old United States; and the first Napoleon

sold Louisiana to us for a song, because he was convinced, that, by so

doing, he should aid to build up a formidable naval rival of England.

The man who seeks to undo all this, to destroy what Bourbon and

Bonaparte sacrificed so much to effect, is the heir of Bonaparte, and

the expounder and illustrator of Napoleon's ideas; and the power that

places herself resolutely across his path, and will not join in his plot

to erase us from the list of nations is--England! In a romance such a

state of things would be pronounced too absurd for invention; but in

this every-day world it is nothing but a commonplace incident,

extraordinary as it may seem at the first thought that is bestowed upon

it.

That England governs France in this matter of intervention in our

quarrel is clear enough, as also are the reasons why Paris will not move

to the aid of the Rebels unless London shall keep even step with her.

France asked England to unite with her in an offer of mediation, which

would have been an armed mediation, had England fallen into the Gallic

trap, but which amounted to nothing when it proceeded from France alone.

England withdrew from the Mexican business as soon as she saw that

France was bent upon a course that might lead to trouble with the United

States, and left her to create a throne in that country. As soon as

England put the broad arrow upon the rams of that eminent pastoral

character, Laird of Birkenhead, France withdrew the permission which she

had formally bestowed upon MM. Arman and Vorney to build four powerful

steamships for the Rebels at Nantes and Bordeaux. France would

acknowledge the Confederacy to-day, and send a minister to Richmond, and

consuls to Mobile and Galveston and Wilmington, if England would but

agree to be to her against us what Spain was to her for us in the days

of our Revolution. But England will not join with her ancient enemy to

effect the ruin of a country of the existence of which she should be

proud, seeing that it is her own creation.

Why, then, is it that there is so much ill-feeling in America toward

England, while none is felt toward France,--England being, as it were,

our shield against that French sword which is raised over our head, upon

which its holder would bring it down with imperial force? Principally

the difference is due to that peculiarity in the human character which

leads men to think much of insults and but little of injuries. We doubt

if any strong enmity was ever created in the minds of men or nations

through the infliction of injuries, though injuring parties have an

undoubted right to hate their victims; and we are sure that an insult

was never yet forgiven by any nation, or by any individual, whose

resentment was of any account. Now, England has poured insults upon us,

or rather Englishmen have done so, until we have become as sore as bears

who have been assailed by bees. English statesmen and politicians have

told us that we were wrong in fighting for the restoration of the Union,

violating our own principles, and literally committing the grossest, of

crimes,--taking care to add, that our sins would provide their own

punishment, for we could not put down the Rebels. Even moderate-minded

men in England have not hesitated to condemn our course, while admitting

that our conduct was natural, on the ground that we had no hope of

success, and that useless wars are simply horrible. Our English enemies

have been fierce and vindictive blackguards,--as witness Roebuck,

Lyndsay, and Lord R. Cecil,--while most of our friends there have deemed

it the best policy to make use of very moderate language, when speaking

of our cause, or of the conduct of our public men. Englishmen of

distinction, some of whom have long been held in high esteem here, have

not hesitated to express a desire for our overthrow, because we were

becoming too strong, though our free population is not materially

different, as regards numbers, from that of the British Islands, and is

as nothing when compared with the number of Queen Victoria's subjects.

They were not ashamed to be so thoroughly un-English as to admit the

existence of fear in their minds of a people living three thousand miles

from their country: a circumstance to be noted; for your Englishman is

apt to err on the side of contempt for others, and as a rule he fears

nobody. Others have so wantonly misrepresented the character of our

cause,--Mr. Carlyle is a notable member of this class,--that it is

impossible not to be offended, when listening to their astounding

falsehoods. But it is the British press that has done most to array

Americans against England. That press is very ably conducted, and the

most noted of its members have displayed a degree of hostility toward us

that could not have been predicted without the prophet being suspected

of madness, or of diabolical inspiration. All its articles attacking us

are reproduced here, and are read by everybody, and the effect thereof

can be imagined. Toward us British journalists are playing the same part

that was played by their predecessors toward France sixty years since,

and which converted what was meant to be a permanent peace into the mere

truce of Amiens. Insolent and egotistical as a class, though there are

highly honorable exceptions, those journalists have done more to make

their country the object of dislike than has been accomplished by all

other Englishmen. Their deeds show that the pen _is_ mightier than the

sword, and that its conquests are permanent. It has been said that

France has been as unfriendly to us as England, and that, therefore, we

ought to feel for her the same dislike as that of which England is the

object. But, admitting the assertion to be true, we know little of what

the French have said or written concerning us. The difference of

language prevents us from taking much offence at Gallic criticism. Not

one American in a hundred reads French; and of those who do read it, not

one in a thousand, journalists apart, ever sees a French quarterly,

monthly, weekly, or daily publication. Occasionally, an article from a

French journal is translated for some one of our newspapers, but it is

oftener of a friendly character than otherwise. The best French

publications support the Union cause, at their head standing the

"Débats," which is not the inferior of the "Times" in respect to

ability, and is far its superior in all other respects. Besides, judging

from such articles from the French presses devoted to Secession

interests as have come under our observation, they are neither so able

nor so venomous as those which appear in British Secession journals and

magazines. Most of them might be translated for the purpose of showing

that the French have no wish for our destruction, while the language of

the British articles indicates the existence of an intense personal

hostility, and an eager desire to see the United States partitioned like

Poland. We should be something much above, or as much below, the

standard of humanity, if we were not moved deeply by such evidences of

fierce hatred, expressed in the fiercest of language.

In assuming a strictly impartial position, England follows a sense of

interest, which is proper and praiseworthy. She cannot, supposing her to

be wise, be desirous of our destruction; for, that accomplished, she

would be more open than ever to a French attack. Let Napoleon III.

accomplish those European purposes to which his mind is now directed,

and he would be impelled to quarrel with England by a variety of

considerations, should this Republic be broken up into half a dozen

feeble and quarrelsome confederacies. But with the United States in

existence, and powerful enough to command respect, he would not dare to

seek the overthrow of the British Empire. We could not permit him to

head a crusade for England's annihilation, no matter what might be our

feeling toward the mother-land. A just regard for our own interests

would impel us to side with her, should she be placed in serious danger.

Such was, substantially, President Jefferson's opinion, sixty years ago,

when the first Napoleon was so bent upon the conquest of England; and we

think that his views are applicable to the existing circumstances of the

world. Where should we have been now, if England had quarrelled with and

been conquered by Napoleon III.? We must distinguish between the English

nation and Englishmen,--between the English Government, which has,

perhaps, borne itself as favorably toward us as it could, and that

English aristocracy which has, as a rule, exhibited so strong a desire

to have us extinguished, even while it has repeatedly refused to take

steps preparatory to war; and the two countries should be persuaded to

understand that neither can perish without the life of the other being

placed in great danger. The best answer to be made to the wordy attacks

of Englishmen is to be found in success. That answer would be complete;

and if it cannot be made, what will it signify to us what shall be said

of us by foreigners? The bitterest attacks can never disturb the dead.

One cause of the change of England's course toward us is to be found in

our own change of moral position. The President's Emancipation

Proclamation went into effect on the first of January, 1863; and from

that time the anti-slavery people of England have been on our side; and

their influence is great, and bears upon the supporters of the

Palmerston Ministry with peculiar force. Had our Government persisted in

the pro-slavery policy which it favored down to the autumn of 1862, it

is not at all unlikely that the English intervention party would have

been strong enough to compel their country to go with France in her

mediation scheme,--and the step from mediation to intervention would

have been but a short one; but the committal of the North to

anti-slavery views, and the union of their cause with that of

emancipation, threw the English Abolitionists, men who largely represent

England's moral worth, on our side. The Proclamation, therefore, even if

it could be proved that it had not led to the liberation of one slave,

has been of immense service to us, and the President deserves the thanks

of every loyal American for having issued it. He threw a shell into the

foreign Secession camp, the explosion of which was fatal to that

"cordial understanding" that was to have operated for our annihilation.

* * * * *

Such was the year of the Proclamation, and its history is marvellous in

our eyes. It stands in striking contrast to the other years of the war,

both of which closed badly for us, and left the impression that the

enemy's case was a good one, speaking militarily. Our improved condition

should be attributed to the true cause. When, in the Parliament of 1601,

Mr. Speaker Croke said that the kingdom of England "had been defended by

the mighty arm of the Queen," Elizabeth exclaimed from the throne, "No,

Mr. Speaker, but rather by the mighty hand of God!" So with us. We have

been saved "by the mighty hand of God." Neither "malice domestic" nor

"foreign levy" has prevailed at our expense. Whether we had the right to

expect Heaven's aid, we cannot undertake to say; but we know that we

should not have deserved it, had we continued to link the nation's cause

to that of oppression, and had we shed blood and expended gold in order

to restore the system of slavery and the sway of slaveholders.

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, Minister of the

Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, Boston_. By JOHN WEISS.

In Two Volumes. 8vo. London.

Such a life of Theodore Parker as Mr. Parton has written of Andrew

Jackson would be accepted as an American classic. For such a life,

however, it is manifestly unreasonable to look. Not until the present

generation has passed away, not until the perilous questions which vex

men's souls to-day shall rest forever, could any competent biographer

regard the "iconoclast of the Music Hall" as a subject for complacent

literary speculation or calm judicial discourse. For us, this life of

Parker must be interpreted by one of the family. He shall best use these

precious letters and journals who is spiritually related to their

writer, if not bound to him by the feebler tie of blood. And assuming

the necessity of a partisan, or, as it might more gently be expressed,

wholly sympathetic biographer, there is little but commendation for Mr.

Weiss. With admirable clearness and strength he rings out the full tone

of thought and belief among that earnest school of thinkers and doers of

which Theodore Parker was the representative. Full as are these goodly

octavos with the best legacies of him whose life is written, we have

returned no less frequently to the deeply reflective arguments and acute

criticisms of Mr. Weiss. Let the keen discrimination of a passage taken

almost at random justify us, if it may.

"Some people say that they are not indebted to Mr. Parker for a single

thought. The word 'thought' is so loosely used that a definition of

terms must precede our estimate of Mr. Parker's suggestiveness and

originality. Men who are kept by a commonplace-book go about raking

everywhere for glittering scraps, which they carry home to be sorted in

their æsthetic junk-shop. Any portable bit that strikes the fancy is a

thought. There are literary rag-pickers of every degree of ability; and

a great deal of judgment can be shown in finding the scrap or nail you

want in a heap of rubbish. Quotable matter is generally considered to be

strongly veined with thought. Some people estimate a writer according to

the number of apt sentences imbedded in his work. But who is judge of

aptness itself? What is apt for an epigram is not apt for a revolution:

the shock of a witty antithesis is related to the healthy stimulus of

creative thinking, as a small electrical battery to the terrestrial

currents. Well-built rhetorical climaxes, sharp and sudden contrasts,

Poor Richard's common-sense, a page boiled down to a sentence, a fresh

simile from Nature, a subtle mood projected upon Nature, a swift

controversial retort, all these things are called thoughts. The pleasure

in them is so great, that one fancies they leave him in their debt. That

depends upon one's standard of indebtedness. Now a penny-a-liner is

indebted to a single phrase which furnishes his column; a clergyman near

Saturday night seizes with rapture the clue of a fine simile which spins

into a 'beautiful sermon'; for the material of his verses a rhymester is

'indebted' to an anecdote or incident. In a higher degree all kinds of

literary work are indebted to that commerce of ideas between the minds

of all nations, which fit up interiors more comfortably, and upholster

them better than before. And everything that gets into circulation is

called a thought, be it a discovery in science, a mechanical invention,

the statement of a natural law, comparative statistics, rules of

economy, diplomatic circulars, and fine magazine-writing. It is the

manoeuvring of the different arms in the great service of humanity,

solid or dashing, on a field already gained. But the thought which

organizes the fresh advance goes with the pioneer-train that bridges

streams, that mines the hill, that feels the country. The controlling

plan puts itself forth with that swarthy set of leather-aproned men

shouldering picks and axes. How brilliantly the uniforms defile

afterward, with flashing points and rhythmic swing, over the fresh

causeway, to hold and maintain a position whose value was ideally

conceived! So that the brightest facings do not cover the boldest

thought."

By omissions here and there,--in all not amounting to ten pages of

printed matter,--these literary remains of Theodore Parker might have

been made less offensive to believers in the Christian Revelation, as

well as to the not small class of gentlemanly skeptics who go through

whatever motions the best society esteems correct. In these days, many

worthy people, who are not quite sound upon Noah's ark, or even the

destruction of the swine, will wince perceptibly at hearing the Lord's

Supper called "a heathenish rite." And it would be unfair to the

memories of most noted men to stereotype for ten thousand eyes the rough

estimates of familiar letters, or the fragmentary ejaculations of a

private journal. But Mr. Parker never scrupled to exhibit before the

world all that was worst in him. There are few chapters that will not

recall defects publicly shown by the preacher and author. The reader can

scarcely miss a corroboration of a shrewd observation of Macaulay, that

there is no proposition so monstrously untrue in politics or morals as

to be incapable of proof by what shall sound like a logical

demonstration from admitted principles. Theodore Parker was a strong and

honest man. Yet few strong men have so lain at the mercy of some narrow

bit of logic; few honest ones have so warped facts to match opinions. We

speak of exceptional instances, not of ordinary habits. He seemed unable

to persuade himself that a scheme of faith which was false to him could

be true to others of equal intelligence and virtue. He fell too easily

into the spasmodic vice of the day, and said striking things rather than

true ones. He assumed a basis of faith every whit as dogmatic as special

revelation, and sometimes grievously misrepresented the creeds which he

assailed. Strangers might go to the Music Hall to breathe the free air

of a catholic liberality, and find nothing but the old fierceness of

sectarianism broken loose against the sects. Let us make every deduction

which a candid criticism is compelled to claim, and Theodore Parker

stands a noble representative of Republican America. His place is still

among the immortals who are not the creatures of an age, but its

regenerators. For it is not the life of a great skeptic, but the work of

a great believer, which is brought before us in these volumes. This

uncompromising enemy of the creeds was the ally of their highest uses.

His soul never lacked that dear and personal object of worship which is

offered by the Christian Revelation in its common acceptance. He could

have lived in no more jubilant confidence of immortality, had he enjoyed

the tactual satisfactions of Thomas himself. No Catholic nun feels more

delicious assurance of the protection of the Virgin, no Protestant

maiden knows a more blissful consciousness of the Saviour's marital

affection towards her particular church, than felt this Theodore Parker

in the fatherly and motherly tenderness of the Great Cause of All.

Certainly, few doubters have ever doubted to so much purpose as he. Men

who are skeptical through the intellect in the Christian creeds seldom

live so sturdily the Christian life. Yet we cannot think that the

fervent faith with which he wrought came from what was exceptional in

his belief; it was rather a good gift of native and special sort. For it

is a true insight which leads Tennyson to warn him whose faith does not

trust itself to form, that his sister is "quicker unto good" from the

hallowed symbol through which she receives a divine truth. Many who

flatter themselves that they have outgrown the need of a human

embodiment of the Father's love have only induced a plasticity of mind

which prevents the life from taking shape in any positive affirmation.

"It is a strong help to me," writes a Congregational minister, "to find

a man, standing on the extreme verge of liberal theology, holding so

firmly, so tenaciously, to the one true religion, love to God and man."

But may all men stand there, and cling to it as resolutely as he did?

The ancestors of Theodore Parker seem to have been creditable offshoots

from the Puritan stock. They were men and women of thrift and sagacity.

Of his mother there are very sweet glimpses. He describes her as

"imaginative, delicate-minded, and poetic, yet a very practical woman."

She appears to have been thoroughly religious, but without taste for the

niceties of dogmatic theology. Piety did not have to be laboriously put

into her, before it could generously come out. "I have known few,"

writes her son, "in whom the religious instincts were so active and

profound, and who seemed to me to enjoy so completely the life of God in

the soul of man." And again he says, "Religion was the inheritance my

mother gave,--gave me in my birth,--gave me in her teachings. Many sons

have been better born than I, few have had so good a mother. I mention

these things to show you how I came to have the views of religion that I

have now. My head is not more natural to my body, has not more grown

with it, than my religion out of my soul and with it. With me religion

was not carpentry, something built up of dry wood, from without; but it

was growth,--growth of a germ in my soul." Thus we see that Parker was

not singular in his sources of goodness and nobility: here also have the

strong and worthy men of all time received their inspiration. The

mother's sphere is never confined to the household, but expands for joy

or bitterness through the world at large. A youth of farm-work, snatches

of study, and school-teaching, seem to be the appointed _curriculum_ for

our trustworthy men. In addition to this, Theodore achieves a slight

connection with Harvard,--insufficient for a degree, yet enough for him,

if not for the College. Then he teaches a private class in Boston, and

presently opens school in Watertown. Here, for the first time, comes a

modest success after the world's measurement. He has soon thirty-five,

and afterwards fifty-four scholars. And now occurs an incident which is

unaccountably degraded to the minion type of a note. It is, however,

just what the reader wants to know, and deserves Italics and

double-leading, if human actions are ever sufficiently noteworthy for

these honors. The Watertown teacher receives a colored girl who has been

sent to him, and then consents to dismiss her in deference to the

prejudices of Caucasian patrons. Simon Peter denied the Saviour for whom

he was afterwards crucified with his head hanging down. One day we shall

find this schoolmaster leaving most cherished work, and braving all

social obloquies, that he may stand closer than a brother to the

despised and ignorant of the outcast race. The colored girl was amply

avenged. But the teacher is here, as ever after, a learner, and his

leisure is filled with languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Spanish,

and French. During his subsequent stay at the Cambridge Divinity School,

there are added studies in Italian, Portuguese, Icelandic, Chaldaic,

Arabic, Persian, and Coptic. Of his proficiency in this Babel of tongues

the evidence is not very conclusive. Professor Willard is said to have

applied to the young divinity-student for advice in some nice matters of

Hebrew and Syriac. Theology there can be no doubt that he thoroughly

mastered. After a brief season of itinerancy through Massachusetts

pulpits, he is settled at West Roxbury. And here begins that agony of

doubt dismal and unprofitable to contemplate, when it is not redeemed by

a manly ardor which searches on for attainable grounds of trust. But in

this young minister the faith of a little child cannot be superseded by

the advents of geology and carnal criticism. Some of the Biblical

conceptions of the Deity may be found inadequate, but Nature and the

human soul are full of His presence and glow with His inspirations.

Within the limits of capacity and obedience, every man and woman may

receive direct nourishment from God. At length the South-Boston sermon

of 1841 separates the position of Theodore Parker from that of his

Unitarian brethren. After this, his life belongs to the public. He is

known of men as an assailant of respectable and sacred things, a bitter

critic of political and social usages. That these manifestations were

but small portions of the total of his life, the public may now discern.

We can recall no published correspondence of the century which combines

more excellent and diverse qualities than this with which Mr. Weiss has

plentifully filled his pages. Occasions for which the completest of

Complete Letter-Writers has failed to provide are met by Mr. Parker with

consummate discretion. His letters are to Senators, Shakers, Professors,

Doctors, Slaveholders, Abolitionists, morbid girls, and heroic women:

they are all equally rich in spontaneity, simplicity, and point. Keen

criticisms of noted men, speculations upon society, homely wisdom of the

household, estimates of the arts, and consolations of religion, all

packed in plain and precise English, seem to have been ever ready for

delivery. If Mr. Parker had not chosen the unpopularity of a great man,

he could have had the abundant popularity of a clever one. Let us see

how he outlines the Seer of Stockholm for an inquiring correspondent:--

"Swedenborg has had the fate to be worshipped as a half-god, on the one

side; and on the other, to be despised and laughed at. It seems to me

that he was a man of genius, of wide learning, of deep and genuine piety

But he had an abnormal, queer sort of mind, dreamy, dozy, clairvoyant,

Andrew-Jackson-Davisy; and besides, he loved opium and strong coffee,

and wrote under the influence of those drugs. A wise man may get many

nice bits out of him, and be the healthier for such eating; but if he

swallows Swedenborg whole, as the fashion is with his followers,--why,

it lays hard in the stomach, and the man has a nightmare on him all his

natural life, and talks about 'the Word,' and 'the Spirit,'

'correspondences,' 'receivers.' Yet the Swedenborgians have a calm and

religious beauty in their lives which is much to be admired."

The deeply affectionate nature of Theodore Parker glows warmly through

the Correspondence and Journal. His friends were necessities, and were

loved with a devotion by no means characteristic of Americans. He could

give his life to ideas, but his heart must be given to persons, young

and old. Turning from his task of opposition and conflict, he would

yearn for the society of little children, whose household loves might

dull the noise and violence and passion through which he daily walked.

"The great joy of my life," he writes, "cannot be _intellectual action_,

neither _practical work_. Though I joy in both, it is the affections

which open the spring of mortal delight. But the object of my

affections, dearest of all, is not at hand. How strange that I should

have no children, and only get a little sad sort of happiness, not of

the affectional quality! I am only _an old maid in life_, after all my

bettying about in literature and philanthropy." And in a letter to Dr.

Francis there comes an exclamation of which the arrangement is very

pathetic in its significance,--"I have no child, and the worst

reputation of any minister in all America!"

We are in no position to estimate with any exactness either the

adaptation of Theodore Parker to our national well-being or his positive

aid to the mental and moral progress of New-England society. Violent

denunciations in the interest of the various sects and policies that he

attacked will for the present be levelled against him. Neither will

there be wanting extravagant eulogiums from personal friends,

fellow-religionists, and zealous reformers. Only the distant view of a

generation yet to be can see him in just relation to the men of this

time. In judging the weight and work of a contemporary, we attach an

over-importance to the number and social position of his nominal

adherents; while, in estimating the utility of an historic leader, we

instinctively feel that these things are almost the last to be

considered. For the greatest influence for good has come from men who

have struggled in feeble minorities,--ever alienating would-be friends

by an invincible honesty, or even by an invincible fanaticism. Not to

the excellences or extravagances of a handful of persons who precisely

agree with his views of Christianity may we look for the influence of

Theodore Parker which to-day works among us. We might find it in greater

power in Brownson's Catholic Review, in the humane magnetism of orthodox

Mr. Beecher, in the Episcopal ministrations of Dr. Tyng. For any

intelligent Christian must allow that those claiming to represent the

Church of Christ have too often sided with the oppressor, fettered human

thought in departments foreign to religion, and inculcated degrading

beliefs, which scholars eminent in orthodoxy declare indeducible from

any Biblical precept. It is not the incredibleness of a metaphysical

belief, but a laxity or cowardice of the practice connected with it,

which can point the reformer's gibe and wing his sarcasm. Theodore

Parker virtually told the Christian minister that he must reprove

profitable and popular sins, or else stand at great disadvantage in the

trial between Rationalism and Supernaturalism which is vexing the age.

In rich and prosperous communities Christianity has been too prone to

degenerate into a mere credence of dogma; it must reassert itself as the

type of ethics. It is also good that the clergy, intrusted with the

defence of the faith delivered to saints, be compelled to place

themselves on a level with the ripest scholarship of the day. For ends

such as these the life of this critic and protester has abundantly

wrought. If he has pulled down a meeting-house here and there, we are

confident that he has been instrumental in building up many more to an

effective Christianity.

_Peculiar. A Tale of the Great Transition_. By EPES SARGENT.

New York: G.W. Carleton. 12mo.

There seems to be an element of luck in the production of highly

successful plays and novels. To succeed in this department of

imaginative writing, it is not enough that the author has literary

power and skill. Else why do the failures of every great novelist and

playwright almost always outnumber the successes? Even Shakspeare offers

no exception to the fact. What a descent from "Hamlet" to "Titus

Andronicus," from "Othello" to "Cymbeline"! Miss Bronté writes "Jane

Eyre," and fails ever afterwards to come up to her own standard. Bulwer

delights us with "The Caxtons," and then sinks to the dulness of "The

Strange Story." Dickens gives us "Oliver Twist," and then tries the

patience of confiding readers in "Martin Chuzzlewit." We will not

undertake to analyze all the reasons for these startling discrepancies;

but one obvious reason is _infelicity in the choice of a subject_. A

subject teeming with the right capabilities will often enable an

ordinary playwright to produce a drama that will rouse an audience to

wild enthusiasm; whereas, if the subject is un-pregnant with dramatic

issues, not even genius can invest it with the charm that commands the

sympathy and attention of the many. Watch a large, miscellaneous

audience, as it listens, rapt, intent, and weeping, to Kotzebue's

"Stranger," and see the same audience as it tries to attend to

Talfourd's "Ion." Yet here it is the hack writer who succeeds and the

true poet who fails. Why? Because the former has hit upon a subject

which gives him at once the advantage of nearness to the popular heart,

while the latter has selected a theme remote and unsympathetic.

In "Peculiar" Mr. Sargent has had the luck, if we may so call it, of

finding the materials for his plot in incidents which carry in

themselves so much of dramatic power that a story is evolved from them

with the facility and inevitableness of a fate. When the United States

forces under General Butler occupied New Orleans, certain developments

connected with the workings of "the peculiar institution" were made,

which showed a state of social degradation of which we had not supposed

even Slavery capable. It appeared that women, so white as to be

undistinguishable from the fairest Anglo-Saxons, were held as slaves,

lashed as slaves, subjected to all the indignities which irresponsible

mastership involves.

"Peculiar" derives its title from one of the characters of the novel, an

escaped negro slave, who has received from his sportive master the name

of "Peculiar Institution." The great dramatic fact of the story lies in

the kidnapping of the infant child of wealthy Northern parents who have

been killed in a steamboat-explosion on the Mississippi. The child, a

girl, is saved from the water, but saved by two "mean whites," creatures

and hangers-on of the Slave Power, who take her to New Orleans, and

finally, being in want of money, sell her with other slaves at auction.

In a very graphic and truthful scene, the "vendue" is depicted. About

this little girl, Clara by name, the intensest interest is thenceforth

made to centre. Her every movement is artfully made a matter of moment

to the reader.

Antecedent to the introduction of Clara, the true heroine of the novel,

we have the story of Estelle, also a white slave. At first this story

seems like an episode, but it is soon found to be inextricably

interwoven with the plot. The author has shown remarkable dexterity in

preserving the unity of the action so impressively, while dealing with

such a variety of characters. Like a floating melody or _tema_ in a

symphony or an opera, the _souvenirs_ of Estelle are introduced almost

with the effect of pathetic music. Indeed, to those accustomed to look

at plots as works of art, the constructive skill manifest in this novel

will be not the least of its attractive features.

One word as to the characters. These are drawn with a firm, confident

pencil, as if they were portraits from life. Occasionally, from very

superabundance of material, the author leaves his outline unfilled. But

the important characters are all live and actual flesh and blood. In

Pompilard, a capitally drawn figure, many New-Yorkers will recognize an

original, faithfully limned. In Colonel Delancy Hyde, "Virginia-born,"

we have a most amusing representative of the lower orders of the

"Chivalry." Estelle is a charming creation, and we know of few such

touching love-stories as that through which she moves with such

naturalness and grace. In the cousins Vance and Kenrick we have strongly

marked and delicately discriminated portraits. The negro "Peculiar" is

made to attract much of our sympathy and respect. He is not the buffoon

that the stage and the novel generally make of the black man. He belongs

rather to the class of which Frederick Douglas is a type. It is no more

than poetic justice that from "Peculiar" the book should take its name.

We should say more of the plot, did we not purposely abstain from

marring the reader's interest by any indiscreet foreshadowing. Everybody

seems to be reading or intending to read the book; and its success is

already so far assured that no hostile criticism can gainsay or check

it. Not the least of the merits of "Peculiar" is the healthy patriotic

spirit which runs through it, vivifying and intensifying the whole. The

style is remarkably animated, often eloquent, and would of itself impart

interest to a story far less rich than this in incident, and less

powerful in plot.

_The Life of William Hickling Prescott_. By GEORGE TICKNOR.

Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

The third edition of Mr. Ticknor's "History of Spanish Literature" was

noticed with due commendation in our number for November last. That was

a work drawn exclusively from the region of the intellect, and written

by the "dry light" of the understanding. The author appeared throughout

in a purely judicial capacity. His task was to summon before his

literary tribunal the writers of a foreign country, and mostly of past

generations, and pronounce sentence upon their claims and merits.

Learning, method, sound judgment, and good taste are displayed in it;

but the subject afforded no chance for the expression of those personal

traits which are shown in daily life, and make up a man's reputation in

the community where he dwells.

But the Life of Prescott is a book of another mood, and drawn from other

fountains than those of the understanding. It glows with human

sympathies, and is warm with human feeling. It is the record of a long

and faithful friendship, which began in youth and continued unbroken to

the last. It is the elder of the two that discharges this last office of

affection to his younger brother. Mr. Ticknor could not write the life

of Mr. Prescott without showing how worthy he himself was of having so

true, so loving, and so faithful a friend. But he has done this

unconsciously and unintentionally. For it is one of the charms of this

delightful book--one of the most attractive of the attractive class of

literary biography to which it belongs that we have ever read--that the

biographer never intrudes himself between his subject and the reader.

The story of Mr. Prescott's life is told simply and naturally, and as

far as possible in Mr. Prescott's own words, drawn from his diaries and

letters. Whatever Mr. Ticknor has occasion to say is said with good

taste and good feeling, and he has shown a fine judgment in making his

portraiture of his friend so life-like and so true in detail, and yet in

never overstepping the line of that inner circle into which the public

has no right to enter. We have in these pages a record of Mr. Prescott's

life from his cradle to his grave, sufficiently minute to show what

manner of man he was, and what influences went to make up his mind and

character; and it is a record of more than common value, as well as

interest.

For the last twenty years of his life Mr. Prescott was one of the most

eminent and widely known of the residents of Boston. He was universally

beloved, esteemed, and admired. He was one of the first persons whom a

stranger coming among us wished to see. His person and countenance were

familiar to many who had no further acquaintance with him; and as he

walked about our streets, many a glance of interest was turned upon him

of which he himself was unconscious. The general knowledge that his

literary honors had been won under no common difficulties, owing to his

defective sight, invested his name and presence with a peculiar feeling

of admiration and regard. The public at large, including those persons

who had but a slight acquaintance with him, saw in him a man very

attractive in personal appearance, and of manners singularly frank and

engaging. There was the same charm in his conversation, his aspect, the

expression of his countenance, that was felt in his writings. Everything

that he did seemed to have been done easily, spontaneously, and without

effort. There were no marks of toil and endurance, of temptations

resisted and seductions overcome. His graceful and limpid style seemed

to flow along with the natural movement of a running stream, and to

those who saw his winning smile and listened to his gay and animated

talk he appeared like one who had basked in sunshine all his days and

never known the iron discipline of life.

But this was not true; at least, it was not the whole truth. Besides

this external, superficial aspect, there was an inner life which was

known only to the few who knew him intimately, and which his biography

has now revealed to the world. This memoir sets the author of "Ferdinand

and Isabella" before the public, as Mr. Ticknor says in his preface, "as

a man whose life for more than forty years was one of almost constant

struggle,--of an almost constant sacrifice of impulse to duty, of the

present to the future." Take Mr. Prescott as he was at the age of

twenty-five, and see what the chances are, as the world goes, of his

becoming a laborious and successful man of letters. He was handsome in

person, attractive in manners, possessed of a competent property, very

happy in his domestic relations, with one eye destroyed and the other

impaired by a cruel accident; what was more probable, more natural, than

that he should become a mere man of wit and pleasure about town, and

never write anything beyond a newspaper-article or a review? And we

should remember that defective sight was not the only disability under

which he labored. His health was never robust, and he was a frequent

sufferer from rheumatism and dyspepsia,--the former a winter visitor,

and the latter a summer. And not only this, but there was yet another

lion in his path. His temperament was naturally indolent. He was fond of

social gayety, of light reading, of domestic chat. He had that love of

lounging which Sydney Smith said no Scotchman but Sir James Mackintosh

ever had. But there was a stoical element in him, lying beneath this

easy and pleasure-loving temperament, and subduing and controlling it.

He had a vigilant conscience and a very strong will. He had early come

to the conclusion that not only no honor and no usefulness, but no

happiness, could be secured without a regular and daily recurring

occupation. He made up his mind, after due reflection and consideration,

to make literature his profession; and not only that, but he further

made up his mind to toil in this, his chosen and voluntary vocation,

with the patient and uninterrupted industry of a professional man whose

daily bread depends upon his daily labor.

And the biography before us reveals that inner life of struggle and

conquest which, while Mr. Prescott was living, was known only to his

most intimate friends. We see here how resolutely and steadily he

contended, not only against defective sight and indifferent health, but

also against the love of ease and the seductions of indolence. We see

with what strenuous effort his literary honors were won, as well as with

what gentleness they were worn. And thus the work has a distinct moral

value, and is full of encouragement to those who, under similar or

inferior disabilities, have determined to make the choice of Hercules,

and prefer a life of labor to a life of pleasure. And this moral lesson

is conveyed in a most winning and engaging way. The interest of the

narrative is kept up to the end with the freshness of a well-constructed

work of fiction. It is an interest not derived from stirring adventures,

for Mr. Prescott's life was very uneventful, but from its happy

portraiture of those delightful qualities of mind and character of which

his life was a revelation. Though it tells of constant struggle and not

a little suffering, the tone of the book is genial, sunny, and cheerful,

as was the temperament of the historian himself. For it is a remarkable

fact that Mr. Prescott's bodily infirmities never had any effect in

making his mind or his character morbid. His spiritual nature was

eminently healthy. His leading intellectual trait was sound good sense

and the power of seeing men and things as they were. He had no whims, no

paradoxes, no prejudices. His histories reflect the aggregate judgment

of mankind upon the personages he describes and the events he narrates,

without extravagance or overstatement in any direction. And it was the

same with his character, as shown in daily life; it was frank, generous,

cordial, and manly. No man was less querulous, less irritable, less

exacting than he. His social nature was warm; discriminating, but not

fastidious. He liked men for the good there was in them, and his taste

in friendship was wide and catholic. He was rich in friends, and this

book proves how just a title to such wealth he could show. We shall be

surprised, if this biography does not attain a popularity as wide and

as enduring as that enjoyed by any of Mr. Prescott's historical works.

It is largely made up of extracts from his letters and private journals,

which are full of the playful humor, the ready sympathy, the sunny

temper, the kindly judgment of men and things, which made the historian

so dear to his friends and so popular among his acquaintances.

We cannot dismiss this book without saying a word or two in praise of

its externals. Handsome books are, happily, no longer so rare a product

of the American press as to require heralding when they do appear, but

this is so beautiful a specimen of the art of book-manufacturing that it

deserves special commendation. The type, paper, press-work, and

illustrations are all admirable, and the whole is a result not easily to

be surpassed in any part of the world.

_My Farm of Edgewood. A Country Book_. By the Author of "Reveries of a

Bachelor." New York: Charles Scribner. 12mo.

When "Ik Marvel" ten years ago turned farmer, a good proportion of the

reading public supposed that his experiment would combine the defects of

gentleman- and poet-farming, and that he would escape the bankruptcy of

Shenstone only by possessing the purse of Astor. That a man of refined

sentiments, elegant tastes, wide cultivation, and humane and tender

genius, given, moreover, to indulgences in "Reveries" and the

"Dream-Life," should succeed in the real business of agriculture, seemed

a monstrous supposition to those cockney idealists who consider the

cultivation of the mind incompatible with the cultivation of the ground,

who cannot bring, by any theory of the association of ideas, practical

talent into neighborly good-will with lofty aspirations, and who

necessarily connect the government of brutes with an imbruted

intelligence. The book we have under review is a blunt contradiction to

objectors of the literary class. That it is practical, the coarsest

farmer must admit; that its practicality is not purchased by any mean

and unwise concessions to "popular prejudice," the most sensitive

_littérateur_ will concede; and that the whole representation

constitutes a most charming book, all readers will be eager to

pronounce. Indeed, the critic of the volume is somewhat puzzled to

harmonize the fine rhythm of the periods, and the superb propriety of

the tone, with the subject-matter. The bleakest and most ghastly aspects

of Nature,--the most prosaic facts of the farmer's life,--Irish servants

and compost-heaps,--cows which try to consume their own milk,--beehives

which send forth swarms to sting the children of the house, and give no

honey,--soils which refuse to bear the products which intelligence has

anticipated,--all are transformed into "something rich and strange" by

the poet's alchemy, without any sacrifice of truth, or the insertion of

details which a farmer would disavow as inaccurate or sentimental. The

"Ik" is a full counterpoise to the "Marvel," even to the most literal

reader of the volume, though it is certain that no book has ever before

appeared in our country in which the farmer-life of New England has

assumed so poetic a form. The "chiel" among the agriculturists "taking

notes" will be more likely to seduce than to warn; and if the record of

his eventual triumphs be received as gospel truth, we must expect a vast

emigration of the men of mind from the cities to the country. Who would

not cheerfully encounter all the vexations attending a settlement in "My

Farm in Edgewood" for the compensations so bountifully provided for the

privations?

To the literary reader the doubt will arise, whether the writer of this

work might not have more profitably employed his time, during the last

ten years, in creating thoughts than in "improving" land,--in diffusing

information than in selling milk. As a poetic, scientific, and practical

farmer, he has doubtless silenced all cynic doubts of his capacity to

make four or six per cent. on the capital he invested in land; but it is

plain, that, without capital, he might have made three or four times as

much by the genial exercise of his literary power. The talent exercised

on his farm we must, therefore, consider from a financial point of view

to have been more or less wasted. As a "gentleman-farmer," he might

easily have repaired from his study all the losses which his trained

subordinates of the garden and the field incurred from the lack of his

constant superintendence. Everything which a man of mind could want in a

country-residence might have been obtained without his personal

oversight of every minute detail, and the net result of the gains of the

year would have been greater, if, instead of riding daily into New Haven

to sell his milk, he had stayed quietly in his study to write for the

magazines. This calculation we have made from a rigid scrutiny of the

figures in which the author sums up, year after year, his gains.

We have been provoked into this comparison by the evident glee with

which Ik Marvel parades the results of his agricultural labors. So

earnest is he to show that a man of genius can make money by farming,

that he is inclined to overlook the distinction between the work of an

ordinary and that of an extraordinary mind. Waiving this consideration,

we have nothing to object to his ten years' seclusion from literature.

That seclusion has brought him into contact with the rough realities of

a farmer's life, has enabled him personally to inspect every process of

agriculture, and furnish his mind with an entirely new class of facts.

The result is a book whose merit can hardly be overpraised. It should be

in every farmer's library, as a volume full of practical advice to aid

his daily work, and full of ennobling suggestions to lift his calling

into a kind of epic dignity. As a book for the generality of readers, it

far exceeds any previous work of the author in force, naturalness, and

beauty, in vividness of description and richness of style, and in that

indefinable element of genius which envelops the most prosaic details in

an atmosphere of refinement and grace.

_Methods of Study in Natural History_. By L. AGASSIZ. Boston:

Ticknor & Fields. 12mo.

A work from the scientific storehouse of Professor Agassiz needs only to

have attention called to its existence to command universal welcome. The

readers of the "Atlantic" are already in some measure familiar with its

contents, being a reprint of a series of papers published in this

journal; but they will be read again with double satisfaction in this

continuous form. The avowed purpose is "to give some general hints to

young students as to the methods by which scientific truth has been

reached."

There are many lovers of Nature, and many students of Nature; but there

are very few whom we may term philosophers of Nature. In other words,

there are those who are charmed with the external world, its landscapes,

its beauteous forms and tints, and all its various adaptations to

fascinate the senses,--and those who delight in deciphering and

describing all the details of individual objects, and their wonderful

fitness to the role they have severally or unitedly to play; and there

is the man who, endowed with all this, seeks to go still farther, and

from myriads of observations to deduce great general truths. He is the

philosopher.

When Agassiz arrived in this country, there were many good observers of

Nature here, and many who had accumulated a large store of facts. Each

one had been working in his own way, almost alone, scarcely knowing the

ultimate aims of scientific research, much less knowing how to arrive at

them. To him, more than to any other person, zoölogists in this country

are indebted for showing them how to work, and for presenting to them a

plan to be worked out, with processes and means by which this is to be

done. And now he designs to diffuse these high aims and methods

throughout the community. As he says, "The time has come when scientific

truth must cease to be the property of the few, when it must be woven

into the common life of the world." Of all men, he is the one to gain

the ear and understanding of the public on such matters, and to command

the recognition of his conclusions. His faculty of simplifying great

principles, and of clothing them in such language and with such

illustrations as to render them intelligible and attractive to the

uninstructed, is one of Professor Agassiz's most rare characteristics.

In these chapters he has unfolded some of the methods by which high

scientific results have been and may be attained, and has well

illustrated them. In a short sketch of the progress of Natural History,

he has noticed the methods which were successively pursued in its study,

and the long time which elapsed before anything like true science was

developed; he has pointed out the necessity and nature of

classification, the important terms employed, as classes, orders,

families, genera, and species, and their signification, and dwells upon

the great idea that all the denominations represented by these terms

exist definitely in Nature, and can be legitimate and permanent only as

they conform to the plan laid down by Nature herself. Much of the work

is devoted to the enforcement of this doctrine. He shows us, more

especially by the class of Radiates, how objects at first view widely

different all conform to the same definite plan, and how some which

during a part of their history would not be suspected of having any

alliance with each other, yet, by alternate generations, come to be

identical. He shows, by the ovarian egg, the great simplicity and

apparent identity of the beginnings of all animal life, and the

successive steps by which the diversified forms of animals are

developed, and insists upon the necessity of following the history of an

animal through all its phases before its true place in the grand plan

can be determined. He discusses the permanence of species, and the

limits of their variation, which he illustrates more especially by the

growth of corals, and most emphatically expresses his dissent from the

startling development-doctrines of Darwin. But it would be fruitless to

attempt an abstract of the numerous truths he has alluded to, and the

methods by which such truths are to be sought. It is to these truths, in

contradistinction to the mere study and description of species, and the

building up of systems on external characters alone, that he hopes to

direct attention. Those comprehensive truths are few. Agassiz tells us,

that, after a whole life devoted to the study of Nature, a simple

sentence may express all he himself has done: "I have shown that there

is a correspondence between the succession of fishes in geological times

and the different stages of their growth in the egg,--this is all."

Though this is by no means the limit of his claim so modestly expressed,

yet that was a grand generalization, and, like the great doctrine of

gravitation, and the demonstration by Cuvier of the existence of races

of animals and plants on the globe anterior to those now existing, it

proves to be of almost indefinite application, and, like those

doctrines, has revolutionized science.

The peculiar scientific views here presented this is no place to

criticize. But we may say that to every student of liberal culture this

work is essential. Every teacher's table and every school-library should

be furnished with it.

_Hannah Thurston: A Story of American Life_. By BAYARD TAYLOR.

New York: G.P. Putnam.

Mr. Bayard Taylor evidently does not subscribe to the theory which

"Friends in Council" attributes to a large class: "that men cannot excel

in more things than one; and that, if they can, they had better be quiet

about it." Having already achieved a reputation as a traveller, a poet,

and a secretary to a foreign legation, he now enters the lists with the

novelists, who must look well to their laurels, if they would not have

them snatched from their brows by this new-comer.

The book is called "A Story of American Life." It is American life, just

as the statue of the Venus de' Medici or the Apollo Belvedere is the

representation of the human figure. No Athenian belle, no Delphic

athlete, stood for those beautiful shapes; but the nose was modelled

from one copy, the limbs from another, the brow from a third, and the

result is a joy forever. So the American life portrayed in this story is

a conglomeration, and partially a caricature, of the various _isms_

which have disturbed the strata of our social life. That early American

village should present within its outmost circle the collection of

peculiarities gathered here would be little less than marvellous. That

they are found in so many American villages as to justify their being

attributed to American villages in general is preposterous. Certainly,

this picture does not daguerreotype New England, however it may be in

New York,--and though New England is small and provincial and New York

is large and cosmopolitan, still we respectfully submit that any

characteristic which may belong to New York and does not belong to New

England is local and not national; and though a writer, for his own

convenience and the better to convey his moral, may, if he choose, group

all the wickednesses and weaknesses of the land in one secluded spot, he

ought not to convey to strangers so wrong an idea of our rural social

life as to make that spot the exponent of all.--So much for the title.

We now open the book, and are immediately in the midst of scenes which

have an indescribable familiarity. We have a confused sense of having

met these people before. Certainly they have a strong family-likeness to

denizens of modern novels. The sewing-circles and small-talk savor of

the cheap wit of Widow Bedott. Jutnapore must have descended in a right

line from Borrioboola-Gha. The traditional spinsters with their

"withered bosoms" march in four abreast. The hereditary clergymen,

hungry, sectarian, sanctimonious, rabid, form into line with the

precision acquired by long drill. The hero and heroine stand up as good

as married in the first chapter. The features of the hero are instantly

recognizable. There is the small stir, the rising of the curtain, and

_some one_ steps upon the stage, "tall and sunburnt, with a

moustache,"--'tis he! Alonzo!--"with easy self-possession and a genial

air,"--the very man,--"habitual manners slightly touched with reserve,

but no man could unbend more easily,"--who but he, our old

acquaintance?--"a rich baritone voice," "strung with true masculine

fibre," striking in among the sharps and flats and bringing them all

into harmony,--that is the invariable way. "Generally, the least

intellectual persons sing with the truest and most touching expression,

because voice and intellect are rarely combined, [the reason seems to us

rather a restatement of the fact,] but Maxwell Woodbury's fine organ had

not been given to him at the expense of his brain." Certainly not. He

never would have been our hero, if it had. When you add, that "his

manners were thoroughly refined, and his property large enough and not

too large for leisure," why, one might almost send a sheriff to arrest

him, trusting to this description to make sure of his identity. The

heroine is of course the "pale, quiet, earnest-looking girl," who, in

the midst of snoods, frocks, jackets, pocket-handkerchiefs, and other

commonplace handicraft, is embroidering with green silk upon warm brown

cloth the thready stems and frail diminishing fronds of a group of

fern-leaves,--who alone among assured matrons and faded spinsters is

visited by "a flitting blush, delicate and transient as the shadow of a

rose tossed upon marble,"--and who matches the "glorious lay" of the

hero, that "thrilled and shook her with its despairing solemnity," with

an Alpine song, that, pure and sweet, sets the hero once more face to

face with the Rosenlaui glacier and the jagged pyramid of the

Wetterhorn.

To this there is no special objection. Every man has a right to heap

virtues and graces upon his hero, and to heighten their effect by as

much uncouthness and insincerity as he chooses to attribute to the

subordinates; but so far as he professes to represent life, he should

keep within the bounds of natural laws. If he chooses to introduce

time-honored personages, we shall not quarrel with him, although we

certainly think it desirable that some fresh piquancy in their

characters shall be the vindication of their reappearance. We may regret

that a subtle, but palpable ridicule is cast upon foreign missions,--a

cause which, whether successful or unsuccessful in its immediate

objects, will forever stand recorded as one of the most unselfish, the

most sublime, and the most Christ-like movements that have ever been

originated by man. The hero does, indeed, patronize them to the extent

of saying that he has "seen something of your missions in India, and

believes that they are capable of accomplishing much good,"--adding,

however, lest his words excite hopes too sanguine, "Still, you must not

expect immediate returns. It is only the lowest caste that is now

reached, and the Christianizing of India must come, eventually, from the

highest,"--words which we shall be very ready to take as opinion, but

very slow to receive as oracle, since, from the time when the Founder of

Christianity was upon the earth, and the common people heard him gladly,

while the higher classes thrust him out of their synagogues, till the

present day, the history of Christianity has been the history of an

influence rising from the lower layers of society into the upper, rather

than filtering down from the upper into the lower.

Since, also, however vulgarly the Grindles may put it, it is true that

drunkenness _is_ the agony of wives, the dread of mothers,--that it does

destroy hopes, desolate hearths, break hearts,--that within the last two

years it has added to its terrible deeds wide disasters to our arms,

long sorrow to our country, and fruitless death in a thousand

households,--we think it would have been well, if the discredit cast

upon temperance measures, and the discomfiture visited upon its

advocates, had been accompanied by a less covert recognition of the evil

and by a more obvious sympathy with its victims. Since the methods taken

to insure self-control are insufficient, would it not have been possible

to indicate better? Since Woodbury does not think abstinence to be the

cure of intemperance, could he not justify his practice by a higher

principle than self-indulgence, lay it on a deeper foundation than

dilettanteism?

We regret, also, that in a book by Bayard Taylor there should have been

found room for such a paragraph as this:--

"The churches in the village undertook their periodical

'revivals,' which absorbed the interest of the community while

they lasted. It was not the usual season in Ptolemy for such

agitations of the religious atmosphere,--but the Methodist

clergyman, a very zealous and impassioned speaker, having

initiated the movement with great success, the other sects became

alarmed lest he should sweep all the repentant sinners of the

place into his own fold. As soon as they could obtain help from

Tiberius, the Baptists followed, and the Rev. Lemuel Styles was

constrained to do likewise. For a few days the latter regained the

ground he had lost, and seemed about to distance his competitors.

Luckily for him,... the material for conversion, drawn upon from

so many different quarters, was soon exhausted; but the rival

churches stoutly held out, until convinced that neither had any

further advantage to gain over the other."

No one who has given to the religious phenomena of the day the smallest

degree of intellectual and sympathetic attention can fail to pronounce

this a gross and ill-bred caricature. Ridicule is the legitimate weapon

of Truth; but ridicule that strikes rudely and indiscriminately,

wounding without benefiting, is not found in the hands of Christian

courtesy. We regret these blemishes, and such as these, the more because

we are persuaded that the effects produced were not intended by the

author. We believe, not only from his previous reputation, but from the

spirit of the book, which warms, deepens, and clarifies itself as it

goes on, that he aimed only at results pure, healthful, and desirable.

It is by no design of his, that young feet, already wavering downward,

will not be strengthened to pause, to turn, to steady themselves, but

will rather be lured on by his words. It is no purpose of his to make

the crusts of Materialism harden still more hopelessly above the stifled

soul. He designs to ridicule only that which is ridiculous. There are

evidences of a purpose to relieve the darkness of his coloring in each

instance by lines of light, but it is not made palpable enough for

running readers. He has seen the weakness that generally develops itself

in, and the hypocrisy that almost invariably clings to the skirts of a

great popular movement, and it is these alone which he aims to bring

down. In this he is right. He errs in that his vision is neither clear

nor broad. He does not always wisely discriminate as to the nature or

extent of the disease, or the effect of the remedy which he applies. The

cause of the difficulty has baffled his researches. The people upon whom

his strictures fall, and to whom strictures belong, will be inflamed,

but they will not be enlightened; and they who do see the real nature of

the movement, its bane as well as its blessing, and who are constantly

laboring to separate the chaff from the wheat, will not be helped, but

hindered, by his well-meant efforts.

But, as we intimated, the book, like fame, increases in going. Under all

the wit and humor, which are often very charming, under all the satire,

which is none the less enjoyable because occasionally half-hidden, under

the somewhat multifarious machinery, which the peculiar structure of the

book renders necessary, there rises slowly into view and presently into

prominence the outline of a purpose as noble as it is rare. In the teeth

of popular prejudice, Bayard Taylor has had the courage to take for his

heroine a woman "strong-minded," austere in her faith, past her first

youth, given to public speaking, and imbued, we might almost say to

stubbornness, with ultra ideas of "woman's rights." True, he has given

her to us in the most modified form possible to such a character,

utterly pure, unselfish, true, refined, without ambition, impelled by

the highest motives, and guided by the highest principles. But the

conjunction of these two classes of qualities in one person is the real

Malakoff. That accomplished and the work is done. In this conception

lies the true originality of the book. In this attempt lies the true

consciousness of power. He who can make his hero say,--"It was my

profound appreciation of those very elements in your character which led

you to take up these claims of woman and make them your own, that opened

the way for you to my heart: I reverence the qualities, without

accepting all the conclusions born of them,"--has a deeper insight than

most of his fellows. He shows that he looks at things, and not at the

traditions of things. He is not led away by the cry of the mob, and the

gleam of gold so pure and solid almost changes into indignation our

regret that he has ever suffered himself to be deceived by the glare of

tawdry tinsel.

Yet even here he has not struck all truth. It is the most improbable

thing in the world that any woman should have built up such a wall

around herself as is represented here. It is morally impossible that

such a woman as Hannah Thurston should have done it. It is simply

unnatural. It might, perhaps, happen, just as a woman might happen to

have been born with five fingers on each hand. But it is not with freaks

of Nature, it is with Nature, that we have to deal. Girls may please

themselves with fine-sounding phrases about equal powers and equal

rights in marriage, but they generally vanish with the first approach of

a living affection. No idea of independence or equality ever, we dare

affirm, came between a great nature and its great love. No woman of

exalted aims and large capacities, it may be safely said, will ever be

held back from love, or even from marriage, by any scruples as to her

relative standing. The stumbling-block in the way of such a woman as

Hannah Thurston would not be a dread of the "submission of love," but

rather of a submission without love, a submission of mere contiguity to

somewhat hard, false, coarse, unjust, naming itself with a name to which

it had no title. If she trusted her lover thoroughly, she would intrust

all risks to love. She would know with her head and feel with her heart,

that, with the chivalry, the intensity, the reverence, the elevation of

such a sentiment as she imagined, there could be neither bondage nor

freedom, neither mine nor thine, but a oneness that would bring all

relations into harmony with itself. The very essence of love is

humility, and at the same time its glory is that it abolishes all laws,

all rights, all powers, and is to itself alone law, right, and power. By

the completeness of self-abnegation may the footsteps of love be traced.

This partially the author recognizes, choosing it for the conclusion of

the whole matter, but erring in that he makes it come with resistance

and reluctance, the conquest of love, instead of spontaneously and

unconsciously, its necessary concomitant.

In the hero of the story and his relations to the heroine, with

occasional questionable traits, we find often a generosity, delicacy,

and devotion which give promise of good. A man who can conceive a

character so much above the common level, where the common level has

always been low, cannot fail by continued observation and candid

thinking to rise still higher. Frequently already, seeming hardly to be

conscious of it, he impinges upon a far-reaching, deep-lying, but

generally unrecognized truth. When men shall have come to study the

nature of woman, instead of haranguing about her duties, a great point

will have been gained.

The blemishes which we have pointed out, and others which we have not

pointed out, are only blemishes, and chiefly upon the surface. They mar,

but they do not vitiate.

The limits of a magazine will not admit that adequate analysis and

criticism which the ability of the book, both in point of subject and

treatment, deserves. We have only space to say, that, making every

allowance for every fault, it has the merit of being a pioneer, and an

able pioneer, in a tract which has been hitherto, so far as we know,

unbroken wilderness. Its author has not solved the problem,--he does not

even understand all its conditions; but he is travelling in the

direction of the true solution: and he offers us the rare, we had almost

said the solitary, spectacle of a man and an opponent bringing to the

discussion of the "Woman's-Rights question" an appreciable degree of

sense, justice, and moral dignity.

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FOOTNOTES:

[A] The letter is given in the valuable collection of "Winthrop Papers,"

drawn from the same rich repository which has furnished many of the

precious materials in the volume before us. The collection appears as

the Sixth Volume of the IVth Series of Collections of the Massachusetts

Historical Society.

[B] All the trigonometrical measurements connected with my experiments

were very ably conducted by Mr. Wild, now Professor at the Federal

Polytechnic School in Zurich; they are recorded in the topographical

survey and map of the glacier of the Aar, accompanying my "Système

Glaciare."

[C] Since the above was written, intelligence has been received of the

defeat of General Longstreet, the losses experienced by the enemy being

great. This disposes of the remains of the great army which Mr. Davis

had assembled to reconquer Tennessee, and to reëstablish communications

between the various parts of the Southern Confederacy on this side of

the Mississippi. The Army of the Potomac has returned to its former

ground, near Washington.