"You have let my crown fall in the dirt," she said, tossing a
wisp of hair from her forehead; "but you great, insensible beings
are always in mischief when you are in the country. Why don't
you stay at home, in your brick cages that stand on heaps of
flat stones? You are watched there all the time by creatures with
clubs in their leather belts, so you cannot tear and crush things
to pieces as you do here."
"Oh, I am so sorry, madam," I answered; "if you knew how unhappy
I felt this morning when I started on my last walk, you would
pity me. I must go home at once, and my home is in the city--shut
in by houses before and behind it. If I look out of the window,
I only see a strip of sky above me, where neither sun nor moon
passes on its journey round the world; and below me, only the
stone pavement over which goes an endless procession of men and
women, upon a hundred errands I never guess at."
The queen tapped her head with a white stick like a peeled twig,
and made such a noise that I examined it, and saw an ivory knob,
which reminded me of the budding horns of a young deer. As if in
answer to my thought, she said:
"It drops off every year. In the fairy-nature all elements are
united. We partake of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and
add our own; this makes us what we are. We do not suffer, but we
experience, without suffering, of course; our long lives glide
along like dreams. As you are in sleep, so are we awake. If
you love the country, which contains our kingdom, as the
filbert-shell contains the kernel, I will endow you with power. I
will give you something to take back with you."
What do you think she gave me? A little closet with shelves; on
each shelf were laid away all my remembrances of the summer, for
me to unfold at leisure. When she gave me the key, which looked
exactly like a steel pen, she said: "When you turn the key you
will understand my power. All things will be alive, will know as
much, and talk as fast as you do. The closet, in short, is but
a wee corner of my kingdom, where to-day and to-morrow are the
same--past and present one. A maid-of-honor wishes to go to town.
I'll send her in the closet. My slave, the geometrical spider,
must spin her a warm cobweb--and when you open the closet, be
sure and not disturb my little Fancie."
Some way Queen Imagin disappeared then. To any person less
knowing than myself, it would have seemed as if a dandelion ball
was floating in the air; but I knew better, and I watched her
sailing, sailing away till lost behind the trees. The crown was
gone, too; I discovered nothing in the neighborhood of the red
mushroom, except a tiny yellow blossom already wilted by the heat
of the sun.
Well, I am at home. I sit down this misty autumn morning in my
lonely room, and wish for some work or if not that, for something
to play with. I am too old for dolls, but very young in the way
of amusement. Ah--the closet! I'll unlock that; the key is at
hand--in my writing-desk.
Open Sesame! On the top shelf sits little Fancie, her eyes
shining like diamonds in her soft, dusky cobweb. She nods, so do
I, and we are in Greenside again--on a summer evening. How the
crickets sing; and the tree-toads harp in the trees as if they
were a picket guard entirely surrounding us. Hueston's big dog
barks in the lane at just the right distance. What security I
used to feel when I was a little child, tucked away in my bed,
and heard a dog bark a mile away; too far off ever to come up and
bite, and yet near enough to frighten prowling robbers!
"When in the breeze the distant watch-dog bayed," I was about to
say; but Polly, who is at Greenside with me, calls, "Just hear
the mosquitoes."
The blinds must be closed. What a delicious smell comes in! The
dew wetting all the shrubs and flowers distils sweet odors. What
a family of moths have rushed in; this big, brown one, with white
and red markings, is very enterprising. He has voyaged twice down
the lamp chimney, as if it were the funnel of a steamship.
Get out, moth!
"Sho," she answers in a husky voice, as if very dry, "It is my
nature to; that's all you know, turning us to moral purposes,
and making us a tiresome metaphor. We are much like you human
creatures--only we don't compare ourselves continually with
others. We just scorch ourselves as we please. My cousin,
Noctilia Glow-worm, who is out late o' nights on the grass-bank
in poor company--the Katydids, who board for the season with the
widow Poplar--a two-sided, deceitful woman--she does not care
where I go, and never shrieks out, 'A burnt moth dreads the lamp
chimney.' If she sees me wingless, she coughs, and throws out
a green light, but says nothing. Don't mind me; there's more
coming."
It can't be moths making such a noise on the second shelf. It is
Tom, who calls out to us, from his room, to come, and help him
catch a bat.
"Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat
With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wings."
"Always mouthing something," somebody mutters. But we rush into
Tom's room, and behold him in the middle of the floor, flopping
north and south, east and west, with a towel. No bat is to be
seen. I hear a pretty singing, however, and declare it to be
from a young swallow fallen down the chimney; but as there is
no fire-place in the room, my opinion goes for nothing. Tom
maintains that it is a bat; that it flew in by the window; and
that it is behind the bureau. He is right, for the bat whirrs
up to the ceiling and from that height accosts us in a squeaking
voice:
"I am weak-eyed, am I? and my wings are leathery? Catch me,
and you will find my wings are like down, my eyes as bright as
diamonds. How much you know, writing yourselves down in books as
Naturalists! My name is Vespertila; my family are from Servia,
at your service. Could you offer me a fly, or a beetle? I was
chasing Judge Blue Bottle, or I should not have been trapped. Go
to sleep, dears, and leave me to fan you. When you are asleep,
I'll bite a hole in your ear, and sup bountifully on your red
blood."
Flop went our towels, and down went Miss Vespertila behind the
bed crying. Polly crept up to her; and caught her in a towel.
What black beads of eyes had Miss Vespertila from Servia, where
her grandfather, General Vampire, still commands a brigade of
rascals! Her teeth were sharp, and white as pearls. Polly held
her up, and she cunningly combed her furry wings with her hind
feet, and said:
"Polly, dear, I itch dreadfully; do you mind plain speaking? I am
full of bat lice. Ariel caught them, and the folks say that Queen
Mab often buys fine combs--"
"Slanderer!" cried Polly, "fly to your witch home!"
She shook the towel out of the window, and the bat soared away.
"What's coming next?" we all asked. "There are the rabbits to
hear from, the pigeons, the sparrows, the mole, and the striped
snake who lives by the garden gate?"
Slap, Bang! Fancie has pulled the door to. The cunning Queen
Imagin placed her in the closet, perhaps for this purpose. But
I have the key. I shall unlock it to-morrow, for I must have the
picnic over again, under the beech tree, where the brown thrush
built her nest, and reared her young ones, who ate our crumbs,
and chirped merrily when we laughed.--_Lolly Dinks's Mother_.
* * * * *
Doth a man reproach thee for being proud or ill-natured, envious
or conceited, ignorant or detractive, consider with thyself
whether his reproaches be true. If they are not, consider that
thou art not the person whom he reproaches, but that he reviles
an imaginary being, and perhaps loves what thou really art,
although he hates what thou appearest to be. If his reproaches
are true, if thou art the envious, ill-natured man he takes
thee for, give thyself another turn, become mild, affable
and obliging, and his reproaches of thee naturally cease. His
reproaches may indeed continue, but thou art no longer the person
he reproaches.--_Epictetus_.
_LITERATURE._
"Of the making of many books there is no end," said the Wise Man
of old. Of the making of good books there is frequently an end,
say we. The good books of one year may be counted on the fingers
of one hand. Among those of the present year none ranks higher
than Taine's "Art in Greece," a translation of which, by Mr. John
Durand, is published by Messrs. Holt & Williams. The French are
a nation of critics, and Taine is the critic of the French.
This could not have been said with truth during the lifetime of
Sainte-Beuve, but since his death it is true. There is nothing,
apparently, which Taine is not competent to criticise, so subtle
is his intellect, and so wide the range of his studies, but what
he is most competent to criticise is Art. We have heard great
things of a History of English Literature by him, but as it has
not yet appeared in an English dress (although Messrs. Holt &
Williams have a translation of it in press) we shall reserve our
decision until it appears. Art, it seems to us, is the specialty
to which Taine has devoted himself, with the enthusiasm peculiar
to his countrymen, and a thoroughness peculiar to himself.
Others may have accumulated greater stores of art-knowledge--the
knowledge indispensable to the historian of Art, and the
biographer of artists--but none has so saturated himself with the
spirit of Art as Taine. We may not always agree with him, but he
is always worth listening to, and what he says is worthy of
our serious consideration. We think he is _too_ philosophical
sometimes, but then the fault may be in us. It may be that we are
so accustomed to the materialism of the English critics that
we fail, at first, to apprehend the spirituality of this most
refined and refining of Frenchmen. No English critic could have
written his "Art in Greece," because no English critic could put
himself in his place. We know what the English think of Greek
Art, or may, with a little reading: what Taine thinks of it
is--that it is what it is, simply because the Greeks were what
they were. Before he tells us what Greek Art is, he tells us what
the Greeks were. Nor does he stop here, but goes on to tell us,
or rather begins by telling us, what kind of a country it was
in which they dwelt, what skies shone over them, what mountains
looked down upon them, in the shadow of what trees they walked
within sight of the wine-dark sea. He begins at the beginning,
as the children say. Whether he succeeds in convincing us that
it was Greece alone which made the Greeks what they were, depends
somewhat upon the cast of our minds, and somewhat upon our power
to resist his eloquence. We think, ourselves, that he lays too
much stress upon the mere outward environment of the Grecian
people. The influence exercised over their lives, by the
Institutions which grew up out of these lives--the influence, in
short, of their purely physical culture--is admirably described,
as is also the difference between this culture and ours:
"Modern people are Christian, and Christianity is a
religion of second growth which opposes natural instinct.
We may liken it to a violent contraction which has
inflected the primitive attitude of the human mind. It
proclaims, in effect, that the world is sinful, and that
man is depraved--which certainly is indisputable in the
century in which it was born. According to it, man must
change his ways. Life here below is simply an exile;
let us turn our eyes upward to our celestial home. Our
natural character is vicious; let us stifle natural
desires and mortify the flesh. The experience of our
senses and the knowledge of the wise are inadequate and
delusive; let us accept the light of revelation, faith
and divine illumination. Through penitence, renunciation
and meditation let us develop within ourselves the
spiritual man; let our life be an ardent awaiting of
deliverance, a constant sacrifice of will, an undying
yearning for God, a revery of sublime love, occasionally
rewarded with ecstasy and a vision of the infinite.
For fourteen centuries the ideal of this life was the
anchorite or monk. If you would estimate the power of
such a conception and the grandeur of the transformation
it imposes on human faculties and habits, read, in turn,
the great Christian poem and the great pagan poem, one
the 'Divine Comedy' and the other the 'Odyssey' and the
'Iliad.' Dante has a vision and is transported out of our
little ephemeral sphere into eternal regions; he beholds
its tortures, its expiations and its felicities; he is
affected by superhuman anguish and horror; all that the
infuriate and subtle imagination of the lover of justice
and the executioner can conceive of he sees, suffers and
sinks under. He then ascends into light; his body loses
its gravity; he floats involuntarily, led by the smile
of a radiant woman; he listens to souls in the shape of
voices and to passing melodies; he sees choirs of angels,
a vast rose of living brightness representing the virtues
and the celestial powers; sacred utterances and the
dogmas of truth reverberate in ethereal space. At this
fervid height, where reason melts like wax, both symbol
and apparition, one effacing the other, merge into mystic
bewilderment, the entire poem, infernal or divine, being
a dream which begins with horrors and ends in ravishment.
How much more natural and healthy is the spectacle which
Homer presents! We have the Troad, the isle of Ithica and
the coasts of Greece; still at the present day we follow
in his track; we recognize the forms of mountains, the
color of the sea; the jutting fountains, the cypress and
the alders in which the sea-birds perched; he copied a
steadfast and persistent nature: with him throughout we
plant our feet on the firm ground of truth. His book is
a historical document; the manners and customs of his
contemporaries were such as he describes; his Olympus
itself is a Greek family."
The manifest inferiority of our mixed languages to their one
simple language is stated in the following paragraph, with which
we must leave Taine for the present:
"Almost the whole of our philosophic and scientific
vocabulary is foreign; we are obliged to know Greek and
Latin to make use of it properly, and, most frequently,
employ it badly. Innumerable terms find their way out of
this technical vocabulary into common conversation and
literary style, and hence it is that we now speak and
think with words cumbersome and difficult to manage.
We adopt them ready made and conjoined, we repeat
them according to routine; we make use of them without
considering their scope and without a nice appreciation
of their sense; we only approximate to that which we
would like to express. Fifteen years are necessary for
an author to learn to write, not with genius, for that
is not to be acquired, but with clearness, sequence,
propriety and precision. He finds himself obliged to
weigh and investigate ten or twelve thousand words and
diverse expressions, to note their origin, filiation and
relationships, to rebuild on an original plan, his ideas
and his whole intellect. If he has not done it, and he
wishes to reason on rights, duties, the beautiful, the
State or any other of man's important interests, he
gropes about and stumbles; he gets entangled in long,
vague phrases, in sonorous common-places, in crabbed
and abstract formulas. Look at the newspapers and the
speeches of our popular orators. It is especially the
case with workmen who are intelligent but who have had no
classical education; they are not masters of words, and,
consequently, of ideas; they use a refined language which
is not natural to them; it is a perplexity to them and
consequently confuses their minds; they have had no
time to filter it drop by drop. This is an enormous
disadvantage, from which the Greeks were exempt. There
was no break with them between the language of concrete
facts and that of abstract reasoning, between the
language spoken by the people and that of the learned;
the one was a counterpart of the other; there was no term
in any of Plato's dialogues which a youth, leaving his
gymnasia, could not comprehend; there is not a phrase in
any of Demosthenes' harangues which did not readily find
a lodging-place in the brain of an Athenian peasant or
blacksmith. Attempt to translate into Greek one of Pitt's
or Mirabeau's discourses, or an extract from Addison or
Nicole, and you will be obliged to recast and transpose
the thought; you will be led to find for the same
thoughts, expressions more akin to facts and to concrete
experience; a flood of light will heighten the prominence
of all the truths and of all the errors; that which you
were wont to call natural and clear will seem to you
affected and semi-obscure, and you will perceive by force
of contrast why, among the Greeks, the instrument of
thought being more simple, it did its office better and
with less effort."
Among the good books of the year, two belong to a special walk
of letters in which we have not hitherto excelled the English
Translation. There are periods in the history of English Poetry
when translation has played an important part. Such a period
occurred just before the Shakspearean era, and it was noted for
translations from the Latin poets. Chapman was the first English
writer to perceive the greatness of the Greek poets, and, like
the poet that he was, he attempted to translate the father of
poets, Homer. Chapman's Homer is a noble work, with all its
faults; but it is not what Homer should be in English. It was
followed by other translations mostly of the Latin poets, the
best, perhaps, being Dryden's Virgil, until, finally, the English
mind returned to Homer, or supposed it did, in the pretty,
musical numbers of Pope. Who will may read Pope's Homer. We
cannot. Nor Cowper's either, although it contains some good,
manly writing. We can read Lord Derby's Homer, or could, until
Mr. Bryant published his translation of the "Iliad," when the
necessity no longer existed. No English translation of Homer will
compare with Mr. Bryant's; and we are glad that we are soon to
have the whole of the "Odyssey," as we already have the whole of
the "Iliad." The first volume of Mr. Bryant's translation of the
"Odyssey" (J.R. Osgood & Co.) fully sustains the reputation of
the writer. It is so admirably done, that, if we did not know to
the contrary, we should think we were reading an original poem.
The stiffness which generally inheres in translations is wanting;
nowhere is there any sense of restraint, but everywhere a
delightful sense of ease--the freedom of one great poet shining
through the freedom of another great poet, as the sun shines
through the sky. It is the ideal English translation of Homer;
and we congratulate Mr. Bryant upon having finished it (for we
believe he has); and congratulate ourselves that it is the work
of an American poet.
We offer the like congratulation to Mr. Bayard Taylor for his
translation of "Faust," which occupies the same place, as regards
German Poetry, that Mr. Bryant's translation of Homer does to
Greek Poetry. The difficulty of the task which Mr. Taylor set
himself, the task of rendering the original in the measures of
the original, was never met before by any English translator of
"Faust"--never even attempted, we believe--and, to say that he
has accomplished it, is to say that Mr. Taylor is a very skilful
poet--how skilful we never knew before, highly as we have always
valued his poetical powers. He enables us to understand the
_Intention_ of Goethe in "Faust," as no one besides himself
has done; and, among the obligations that we owe him for the
enjoyment he has given us, we must not forget the obligation we
are under to him for his _Notes_. They are scholarly, and to the
point. There is not one too many, not one which we could afford
to lose, now that we have it. What _might_ have been written,
under the pretense of _Notes_--what another translator might not
have been able to resist writing--is fearful to think of--Life is
so short, and Goethe's Art so long!
The year has been fertile in American verse. How much Poetry it
has produced is a question into which we do not care to enter. It
has witnessed the publication of two volumes by Mr. Bret Harte;
of one volume by Mr. John Hay; and of one volume by Mr. William
Winter. The title of Mr. Winter's volume, "My Witness," (J.R.
Osgood & Co.) is a happy one. It is not every American writer who
can afford to place his verse on the stand as his witness; and it
is not every American writer whose verse will substantiate what
he is so desirous of proving, viz., that he is an American poet.
Mr. Winter is not without faults--what American writer is?--but
he endeavors to write simply. The virtue of simplicity--always a
rare one, and never so rare as at present--he possesses. We have
Tennyson, who is not simple; we have Browning, who is not simple;
we have Swinburne, who is not simple; and we have Mr. Joaquin
Miller, who is not simple.
Mr. Winter's book has its defects--among which we observe an
occasional lapse into Latinity--but with all its defects it is a
very _poetical_ book. Mr. Winter reminds us, more than any recent
American poet, of the English poets of the reigns of Charles the
First and Second. He has, at his best, all their graces of style,
and he has, at all times, the grace of Purity, to which they laid
no claim. With the exception of Carew (whom, we dare say, he has
never read), Mr. Winter is the daintiest and sweetest of amatory
poets. He has the fancy of Carew, without his artificiality; he
has Carew's sweetness, without his grossness of suggestion.
There is a tinge of sadness in some of Mr. Winter's poems, and
the critics, we suppose, will censure him for it. If so, they
will be in the wrong. The poet has the right to express his
moods, sad or merry, and he is no more to be judged by his sad
moods than his merry ones. He is to be judged by both, and the
sum of both--if the critic is able to add it up--is the poet. As
far as he is revealed in his book, that is, but no further. There
is such a thing as Dramatic Poetry, as some critics are aware,
and there is such a thing as Representative Poetry, as few
critics are aware. The former deals with the passions, the
latter with those shadowy and evanescent sensations which we call
feelings. Mr. Winter is not a dramatic poet, but he is, in his
own way, a representative poet. His poem "Lethe" represents one
set of feelings; "The White Flag" another; and "Love's Queen"
another. We like the last best. For, while we believe the others
to be equally genuine, they do not impress us as being the best
expression of his genius. What we feel most after finishing his
volume, what seems to us most characteristic of his poetry, is
loveliness--the tender loveliness that lingers in the mind after
we have seen the sun-set of a quiet summer evening, or after
we have heard music on a dreamy summer night. If this poetic
melancholy be treason, the critics may make the most of it. Mr.
Winter has nothing to fear. He has the authority of the greatest
poets with which to defend himself, and confute the critics.
_ART._