Othere, the old sea-captain,

Who dwelt in Helgoland,

To Alfred, the Lover of Truth,

Brought a snow-white walrus-tooth,

Which he held in his brown right-hand.

His figure was tall and stately;

Like a boy's his eye appeared;

His hair was yellow as hay,

But threads of a silvery gray

Gleamed in his tawny beard.

Hearty and hale was Othere,

His cheek had the color of oak;

With a kind of laugh in his speech,

Like the sea-tide on a beach,

As unto the King he spoke.

And Alfred, King of the Saxons,

Had a book upon his knees,

And wrote down the wondrous tale

Of him who was first to sail

Into the Arctic seas.

"So far I live to the northward,

No man lives north of me;

To the east are wild mountain-chains,

And beyond them meres and plains;

To the westward all is sea.

"So far I live to the northward,

From the harbor of Skeringes-hale,

If you only sailed by day,

With a fair wind all the way,

More than a month would you sail.

"I own six hundred reindeer,

With sheep and swine beside;

I have tribute from the Fins,--

Whalebone, and reindeer-skins,

And ropes of walrus-hide.

"I ploughed the land with horses,

But my heart was ill at ease,

For the old seafaring men

Came to me now and then

With their sagas of the seas,--

"Of Iceland, and of Greenland,

And the stormy Hebrides,

And the undiscovered deep;--

I could not eat nor sleep

For thinking of those seas.

"To the northward stretched the desert,--

How far I fain would know;

So at last I sallied forth,

And three days sailed due north,

As far as the whale-ships go.

"To the west of me was the ocean,--

To the right the desolate shore;

But I did not slacken sail

For the walrus or the whale,

Till after three days more.

"The days grew longer and longer,

Till they became as one;

And southward through the haze

I saw the sullen blaze

Of the red midnight sun.

"And then uprose before me,

Upon the water's edge,

The huge and haggard shape

Of that unknown North Cape,

Whose form is like a wedge.

"The sea was rough and stormy,

The tempest howled and wailed,

And the sea-fog, like a ghost,

Haunted that dreary coast,--

But onward still I sailed.

"Four days I steered to eastward,

Four days without a night:

Bound in a fiery ring

Went the great sun, O King,

With red and lurid light."

Here Alfred, King of the Saxons,

Ceased writing for a while;

And raised his eyes from his book,

With a strange and puzzled look,

And an incredulous smile.

But Othere, the old sea-captain,

He neither paused nor stirred;

And the King listened, and then

Once more took up his pen,

And wrote down every word.

"And now the land," said Othere,

"Bent southward suddenly,

And I followed the curving shore

And ever southward bore

Into a nameless sea.

"And there we hunted the walrus,

The narwhale, and the seal:

Ha! 'twas a noble game,

And like the lightning's flame

Flew our harpoons of steel!

"There were six of us altogether,

Norsemen of Helgoland;

In two days and no more

We killed of them threescore,

And dragged them to the strand!"

Here Alfred the Truth-Teller

Suddenly closed his book,

And lifted his blue eyes

With doubt and strange surmise

Depicted in their look.

And Othere, the old sea-captain,

Stared at him wild and weird,

Then smiled, till his shining teeth

Gleamed white from underneath

His tawny, quivering beard.

And to the King of the Saxons,

In witness of the truth,

Raising his noble head,

He stretched his brown hand, and said.

"Behold this walrus-tooth!"

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL.

[The schoolmistress came down with a rose in her hair,--a fresh June

rose. She has been walking early; she has brought back two

others,--one on each cheek.

I told her so, in some such pretty phrase as I could muster for the

occasion. Those two blush-roses I just spoke of turned into a couple

of damasks. I suppose all this went through my mind, for this was what

I went on to say:--]

I love the damask rose best of all. The flowers our mothers and

sisters used to love and cherish, those which grow beneath our eaves

and by our doorstep, are the ones we always love best. If the

Houyhnhnms should ever catch me, and, finding me particularly vicious

and unmanageable, send a man-tamer to Rareyfy me, I'll tell you what

drugs he would have to take and how he would have to use them. Imagine

yourself reading a number of the Houyhnhnms Gazette, giving an account

of such an experiment.

"MAN-TAMING EXTRAORDINARY.

"The soft-hoofed semi-quadruped recently captured was subjected to the

art of our distinguished man-tamer in presence of a numerous

assembly. The animal was led in by two stout ponies, closely confined

by straps to prevent his sudden and dangerous tricks of

shoulder-hitting and foot-striking. His countenance expressed the

utmost degree of ferocity and cunning.

"The operator took a handful of _budding lilac-leaves_, and

crushing them slightly between his hoofs, so as to bring out their

peculiar fragrance, fastened them to the end of a long pole and held

them towards the creature. Its expression changed in an instant,--it

drew in their fragrance eagerly, and attempted to seize them with its

soft split hoofs. Having thus quieted his suspicious subject, the

operator proceeded to tie a _blue hyacinth_ to the end of the

pole and held it out towards the wild animal. The effect was

magical. Its eyes filled as if with raindrops, and its lips trembled

as it pressed them to the flower. After this it was perfectly quiet,

and brought a measure of corn to the man-tamer, without showing the

least disposition to strike with the feet or hit from the shoulder."

That will do for the Houyhnhnms Gazette.--Do you ever wonder why poets

talk so much about flowers? Did you ever hear of a poet who did not

talk about them? Don't you think a poem, which, for the sake of being

original, should leave them out, would be like those verses where the

letter _a_ or _e_ or some other is omitted? No,--they will

bloom over and over again in poems as in the summer fields, to the end

of time, always old and always new. Why should we be more shy of

repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of blossoms or the night

of stars? Look at Nature. She never wearies of saying over her floral

pater-noster. In the crevices of Cyclopean walls,--in the dust where

men lie, dust also,--on the mounds that bury huge cities, the Birs

Nemroud and the Babel-heap,--still that same sweet prayer and

benediction. The Amen! of Nature is always a flower.

Are you tired of my trivial personalities,--those splashes and streaks

of sentiment, sometimes perhaps of sentimentality, which you may see

when I show you my heart's corolla as if it were a tulip? Pray, do

not give yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot whose conceit it is

to treat himself as an exceptional being. It is because you are just

like me that I talk and know that you will listen. We are all

splashed and streaked with sentiments,--not with precisely the same

tints, or in exactly the same patterns, but by the same hand and from

the same palette.

I don't believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for

the blue hyacinth which I have,--very certainly not for the crushed

lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they are. You love

the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don't doubt;

but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with young memories as

it does me. For the same reason I come back to damask roses, after

having raised a good many of the rarer varieties. I like to go to

operas and concerts, but there are queer little old homely sounds that

are better than music to me. However, I suppose it's foolish to tell

such things.

----It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time,--said the

divinity-student;--saying it, however, in one of the dead languages,

which I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and therefore do not

bear quotation as such.

Well, now,--said I,--suppose a good, clean, wholesome-looking

countryman's cart stops opposite my door.--Do I want any

huckleberries?--If I do not, there are those that do. Thereupon my

soft-voiced handmaid bears out a large tin pan, and then the wholesome

countryman, heaping the peck-measure, spreads his broad hands around

its lower arc to confine the wild and frisky berries, and so they run

nimbly along the narrowing channel until they tumble rustling down in

a black cascade and tinkle on the resounding metal beneath.--I won't

say that this rushing huckleberry hail-storm has not more music for me

than the "Anvil Chorus."

----I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.

----Where are your great trees, Sir? said the divinity-student.

Oh, all round about New England. I call all trees mine that I have put

my wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham Young has

human ones.

----One set's as green as the other,--exclaimed a boarder, who has

never been identified.

They're all Bloomers,--said the young fellow called John.

[I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our landlady's

daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by putting my

wedding-ring on a tree.]

Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear,--said I.--I have

worn a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New England elms

and other big trees.--Don't you want to hear me talk trees a little

now? That is one of my specialties.

[So they all agreed that they should like to hear me talk about

trees.]

I want you to understand, in the first place, that I have a most

intense, passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had

several romantic attachments to certain trees in particular. Now, if

you expect me to hold forth in a "scientific" way about my

tree-loves,--to talk, for instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and

describe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all that,--you are an

anserine individual, and I must refer you to a dull friend who will

discourse to you of such matters. What should you think of a lover who

should describe the idol of his heart in the language of science,

thus: Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; Genus, Homo; Species,

Europeus; Variety, Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental Formula

2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3

i--- c--- p--- m----,

2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3

and so on?

No, my friends, I shall speak of trees as we see them, love them,

adore them in the fields, where they are alive, holding their green

sun-shades over our heads, talking to us with their hundred thousand

whispering tongues, looking down on us with that sweet meekness which

belongs to huge, but limited organisms,--which one sees in the brown

eyes of oxen, but most in the patient posture, the outstretched arms,

and the heavy-drooping robes of these vast beings endowed with life,

but not with soul,--which outgrow us and outlive us, but stand

helpless,--poor things!--while Nature dresses and undresses them, like

so many full-sized, but underwitted children.

Did you ever read old Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of English

men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in

woman. I always supposed "Dr. Syntax" was written to make fun of

him. I have a whole set of his works, and am very proud of it, with

its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and orange-juice

landscapes. The _Père_ Gilpin had the kind of science I like in

the study of Nature,--a little less observation than White of

Selborne, but a little more poetry.--Just think of applying the

Linnæan system to an elm! Who cares how many stamens or pistils that

little brown flower, which comes out before the leaf, may have to

classify it by? What we want is the meaning, the character, the

expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual.

There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if well

marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language. Take the

oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a type of

strength and endurance. I wonder if you ever thought of the single

mark of supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all our other

forest-trees? All the rest of them shirk the work of resisting

gravity; the oak alone defies it. It chooses the horizontal direction

for its limbs, so that their whole weight may tell,--and then

stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that the strain may be

mighty enough to be worth resisting. You will find, that, in passing

from the extreme downward droop of the branches of the weeping-willow

to the extreme upward inclination of those of the poplar, they sweep

nearly half a circle. At 90° the oak stops short; to slant upward

another degree would mark infirmity of purpose; to bend downwards,

weakness of organization. The American elm betrays something of both;

yet sometimes, as we shall see, puts on a certain resemblance to its

sturdier neighbor.

It won't do to be exclusive in our taste about trees. There is hardly

one of them which has not peculiar beauties in some fitting place for

it. I remember a tall poplar of monumental proportions and aspect, a

vast pillar of glossy green, placed on the summit of a lofty hill, and

a beacon to all the country round. A native of that region saw fit to

build his house very near it, and, having a fancy that it might blow

down some time or other, and exterminate himself and any incidental

relatives who might be "stopping" or "tarrying" with him,--also

laboring under the delusion that human life is under all circumstances

to be preferred to vegetable existence,--had the great poplar cut

down. It is so easy to say, "It is only a poplar!" and so much harder

to replace its living cone than to build a granite obelisk!

I must tell you about some of my tree-wives. I was at one period of my

life much devoted to the young lady-population of Rhode Island, a

small, but delightful State in the neighborhood of Pawtucket. The

number of inhabitants being not very large, I had leisure, during my

visits to the Providence Plantations, to inspect the face of the

country in the intervals of more fascinating studies of physiognomy. I

heard some talk of a great elm a short distance from the locality just

mentioned. "Let us see the great elm,"--I said, and proceeded to find

it,--knowing that it was on a certain farm in a place called Johnston,

if I remember rightly. I shall never forget my ride and my

introduction to the great Johnston elm.

I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the

first time. Provincialism has no _scale_ of excellence in man or

vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it

has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for

Nature's best. I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and

that a sort of shiver came over it as over a betrothed maiden when she

first stands before the unknown to whom she has been plighted. Before

the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all quails and shrinks

into itself. All those stories of four or five men stretching their

arms around it and not touching each other's fingers, of one's pacing

the shadow at noon and making it so many hundred feet, die upon its

leafy lips in the presence of the awful ribbon which has strangled so

many false pretensions.

As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object of

my journey, the rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time at the

road-side. Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the rest, I

asked myself,--"Is this it?" But as I drew nearer, they grew

smaller,--or it proved, perhaps, that two standing in a line had

looked like one, and so deceived me. At last, all at once, when I was

not thinking of it,--I declare to you it makes my flesh creep when I

think of it now,--all at once I saw a great, green cloud swelling in

the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such Olympian majesty and

imperial supremacy among the lesser forest-growths, that my heart

stopped short, then jumped at my ribs as a hunter springs at a

five-barred gate, and I felt all through me, without need of uttering

the words,--"This is it!"

You will find this tree described, with many others, in the excellent

Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts. The author has

given my friend the Professor credit for some of his measurements, but

measured this tree himself, carefully. It is a grand elm for size of

trunk, spread of limbs, and muscular development,--one of the first,

perhaps the first, of the first class of New England elms.

The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the

ground is in the great elm lying a stone's throw or two north of the

main road (if my points of compass are right) in Springfield. But

this has much the appearance of having been formed by the union of two

trunks growing side by side.

The West-Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows belong also

to the first class of trees.

There is a noble old wreck of an elm at Hatfield, which used to spread

its claws out over a circumference of thirty-five feet or more before

they covered the foot of its bole up with earth. This is the American

elm most like an oak of any I have ever seen.

The Sheffield elm is equally remarkable for size and perfection of

form. I have seen nothing that comes near it in Berkshire County, and

few to compare with it anywhere. I am not sure that I remember any

other first-class elms in New England, but there may be many.

----What makes a first-class elm?--Why, size, in the first place, and

chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above

the ground; and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across, may

claim that title, according to my scale. All of them, with the

questionable exception of the Springfield tree above referred to,

stop, so far as my experience goes, at about twenty-two or

twenty-three feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of spread.

Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to eighteen

feet, are comparatively common. The queen of them all is that glorious

tree near one of the churches in Springfield. Beautiful and stately

she is beyond all praise. The "great tree" on Boston Common comes in

the second rank, as does the one at Cohasset, which used to have, and

probably has still, a head as round as an apple-tree, and that at

Newburyport, with scores of others which might be mentioned. These

last two have perhaps been over-celebrated. Both, however, are

pleasing vegetables. The poor old Pittsfield elm lives on its past

reputation. A wig of false leaves is indispensable to make it

presentable.

[I don't doubt there may be some monster-elm or other, vegetating

green, but inglorious, in some remote New England village, which only

wants a sacred singer to make it celebrated. Send us your

measurements,--(certified by the postmaster, to avoid possible

imposition,)--circumference five feet from soil, length of line from

bough-end to bough-end, and we will see what can be done for you.]

--I wish somebody would get us up the following work:--

SYLVA NOVANGLICA.

Photographs of New England Elms and other Trees, taken upon the Same

Scale of Magnitude. With Letter-Press Descriptions, by a Distinguished

Literary Gentleman. Boston: ---- ---- & Co. 185..

The same camera should be used,--so far as possible,--at a fixed

distance. Our friend, who is giving us so many interesting figures in

his "Trees of America," must not think this Prospectus invades his

province; a dozen portraits, with lively descriptions, would be a

pretty complement to his larger work, which, so far as published, I

find excellent. If my plan were carried out, and another series of a

dozen English trees photographed on the same scale, the comparison

would be charming.

It has always been a favorite idea of mine to bring the life of the

Old and the New World face to face, by an accurate comparison of their

various types of organization. We should begin with man, of course;

institute a large and exact comparison between the development of

_la pianta umana_, as Alfieri called it, in different sections of

each country, in the different callings, at different ages, estimating

height, weight, force by the dynamometer and the spirometer, and

finishing off with a series of typical photographs, giving the

principal national physiognomies. Mr. Hutchinson has given us some

excellent English data to begin with.

Then I would follow this up by contrasting the various parallel forms

of life in the two continents. Our naturalists have often referred to

this incidentally or expressly; but the _animus_ of Nature in the

two half-globes of the planet is so momentous a point of interest to

our race, that it should be made a subject of express and elaborate

study. Go out with me into that walk which we call _the Mall_,

and look at the English and American elms. The American elm is tall,

graceful, slender-sprayed, and drooping as if from languor. The

English elm is compact, robust, holds its branches up, and carries its

leaves for weeks longer than our own native tree.

Is this typical of the creative force on the two sides of the ocean,

or not? Nothing but a careful comparison through the whole realm of

life can answer this question.

There is a parallelism without identity in the animal and vegetable

life of the two continents, which favors the task of comparison in an

extraordinary manner. Just as we have two trees alike in many ways,

yet not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so we

have a complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the same ideal,

embody it with various modifications. Inventive power is the only

quality of which the Creative Intelligence seems to be economical;

just as with our largest human minds, that is the divinest of

faculties, and the one that most exhausts the mind which exercises it.

As the same patterns have very commonly been followed, we can see

which is worked out in the largest spirit, and determine the exact

limitations under which the Creator places the movement of life in all

its manifestations in either locality. We should find ourselves in a

very false position, if it should prove that Anglo-Saxons can't live

here, but die out, if not kept up by fresh supplies, as Dr. Knox and

other more or less wise persons have maintained. It may turn out the

other way, as I have heard one of our literary celebrities argue,--and

though I took the other side, I liked his best,--that the American is

the Englishman reinforced.

--Will you walk out and look at those elms with me after breakfast?--I

said to the schoolmistress.

[I am not going to tell lies about it, and say that she blushed,--as I

suppose she ought to have done, at such a tremendous piece of

gallantry as that was for our boarding-house. On the contrary, she

turned a little pale,--but smiled brightly and said,--Yes, with

pleasure, but she must walk towards her school.--She went for her

bonnet.--The old gentleman opposite followed her with his eyes, and

said he wished he was a young fellow. Presently she came down,

looking very pretty in her half-mourning bonnet, and carrying a

school-book in her hand.]

MY FIRST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.

This is the shortest way,--she said, as we came to a corner.--Then we

won't take it,--said I.--The schoolmistress laughed a little, and said

she was ten minutes early, so she could go round.

We walked under Mr. Paddock's row of English elms. The gray squirrels

were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them came toward us

in light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to the rail of

the burial-ground. He was on a grave with a broad blue-slate-stone at

its head, and a shrub growing on it. The stone said this was the

grave of a young man who was the son of an Honorable gentleman, and

who died a hundred years ago and more.--Oh, yes, _died_,--with a

small triangular mark in one breast, and another smaller opposite, in

his back, where another young man's rapier had slid through his body;

and so he lay down out there on the Common, and was found cold the

next morning, with the night-dews and the death-dews mingled on his

forehead.

Let us have one look at poor Benjamin's grave,--said I.--His bones lie

where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone says they

lie,--which is more than can be said of most of the tenants of this

and several other burial-grounds.

[The most accursed act of Vandalism ever committed within my knowledge

was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at least of our

city burial-grounds, and one at least just outside the city, and

planting them in rows to suit the taste for symmetry of the

perpetrators. Many years ago, when this disgraceful process was going

on under my eyes, I addressed an indignant remonstrance to a leading

journal. I suppose it was deficient in literary elegance, or too warm

in its language; for no notice was taken of it, and the hyena-horror

was allowed to complete itself in the face of daylight. I have never

got over it. The bones of my own ancestors, being entombed, lie

beneath their own tablet; but the upright stones have been shuffled

about like chessmen, and nothing short of the Day of Judgment will

tell whose dust lies beneath any of those records, meant by affection

to mark one small spot as sacred to some cherished memory. Shame!

shame! shame!--that is all I can say. It was on public thoroughfares,

under the eye of authority, that this infamy was enacted. The red

Indians would have known better; the selectmen of an African

kraal-village would have had more respect for their ancestors. I

should like to see the gravestones which have been disturbed all

removed, and the ground levelled, leaving the flat tombstones;

epitaphs were never famous for truth, but the old reproach of "Here

lies" never had such a wholesale illustration as in these outraged

burial-places, where the stone does lie above, and the bones do not

lie beneath.]

Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman's sigh over poor

Benjamin's dust. Love killed him, I think. Twenty years old, and out

there fighting another young fellow on the Common, in the cool of that

old July evening;--yes, there must have been love at the bottom of it.

The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through the

rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge. That was all her

comment upon what I told her.--How women love Love! said I;--but she

did not speak.

We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from

the main street.--Look down there,--I said.--My friend the Professor

lived in that house at the left hand, next the further corner, for

years and years. He died out of it, the other day.--Died?--said the

schoolmistress.--Certainly,--said I.--We die out of houses, just as we

die out of our bodies. A commercial smash kills a hundred men's

houses for them, as a railroad crash kills their mortal frames and

drives out the immortal tenants. Men sicken of houses until at last

they quit them, as the soul leaves its body when it is tired of its

infirmities. The body has been called "the house we live in"; the

house is quite as much the body we live in. Shall I tell you some

things the Professor said the other day?--Do!--said the

schoolmistress.

A man's body,--said the Professor,--is whatever is occupied by his

will and his sensibility. The small room down there, where I wrote

those papers you remember reading, was much more a portion of my body

than a paralytic's senseless and motionless arm or leg is of his.

The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like

the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First he

has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial

integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of

lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his

domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the

whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose

outside wrapper.

You shall observe,--the Professor said,--for, like Mr. John Hunter and

other great men, he brings in that _shall_ with great effect

sometimes,--you shall observe that a man's clothing or series of

envelopes do after a certain time mould themselves upon his individual

nature. We know this of our hats, and are always reminded of it when

we happen to put them on wrong side foremost. We soon find that the

beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with all its irregular bumps and

depressions. Just so all that clothes a man, even to the blue sky

which caps his head,--a little loosely,--shapes itself to fit each

particular being beneath it. Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets,

lovers, condemned criminals, all find it different, according to the

eyes with which they severally look.

But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer

natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of

it. There is a shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller shells

into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have

crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own

past. See what these are, and you can tell what the occupant is.

I had no idea,--said the Professor,--until I pulled up my domestic

establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of roots I had

been making during the years I was planted there. Why, there wasn't a

nook or a corner that some fibre had not worked its way into; and when

I gave the last wrench, each of them seemed to shriek like a mandrake,

as it broke its hold and came away.

There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably,

and which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable

aspect and in all dimensions. The infinite galleries of the Past await

but one brief process and all their pictures will be called out and

fixed forever. We had a curious illustration of the great fact on a

very humble scale. When a certain bookcase, long standing in one

place, for which it was built, was removed, there was the exact image

on the wall of the whole, and of many of its portions. But in the

midst of this picture was another,--the precise outline of a map

which had hung on the wall before the bookcase was built. We had all

forgotten everything about the map until we saw its photograph on the

wall. Then we remembered it, as some day or other we may remember a

sin which has been built over and covered up, when this lower universe

is pulled away from before the wall of Infinity, where the wrongdoing

stands self-recorded.

The Professor lived in that house a long time,--not twenty years, but

pretty near it. When he entered that door, two shadows glided over the

threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for

the last time,--and one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be

longer than his own. What changes he saw in that quiet place! Death

rained through every roof but his; children came into life, grew to

maturity, wedded, faded away, threw themselves away; the whole drama

of life was played in that stock-company's theatre of a dozen houses,

one of which was his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever

entered his dwelling. Peace be to those walls, forever,--the Professor

said,--for the many pleasant years he has passed within them!

The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been

with him in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in

imagination with tender interest wherever he goes.--In that little

court, where he lived in gay loneliness so long,--

--in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes loitering

down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord, swallowing up the

small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it goes, until it gets

proud and swollen and wantons in huge luxurious oxbows about the fair

Northampton meadows, and at last overflows the oldest inhabitant's

memory in profligate freshets at Hartford and all along its lower

shores,--up in that caravansary on the banks of the stream where

Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the jovial old Colonel used to

lead the Commencement processions,--where blue Ascutney looked down

from the far distance, and the hills of Beulah, as the Professor

always called them, rolled up the opposite horizon in soft climbing

masses, so suggestive of the Pilgrim's Heavenward Path that he used to

look through his old "Dollond" to see if the Shining Ones were not

within range of sight,--sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks

that carried them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village

lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to

the terminus of their harmless stroll,--the patulous fage, in the

Professor's classic dialect,--the spreading beech, in more familiar

phrase,--[stop and breathe here a moment, for the sentence is not done

yet, and we have another long journey before us,]--

--and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the

amber-flowing Housatonic,--dark stream, but clear, like the lucid orbs

that shine beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed

demi-blondes,--in the home overlooking the winding stream and the

smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the tracks

of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the winter

snow; facing the twin summits which rise in the far North, the highest

waves of the great land-storm in all this billowy region,--suggestive

to mad fancies of the breasts of a half-buried Titaness, stretched out

by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden away beneath the leaves of

the forest,--in that home where seven blessed summers were passed,

which stand in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in the

beatific vision of the holy dreamer,--

--in that modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious, yet

not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,--full of great and

little boys' playthings from top to bottom,--in all these summer or

winter nests he was always at home and always welcome.

This long articulated sigh of reminiscences,--this calenture which

shows me the maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire and the

mountain-circled green of Grafton beneath the salt waves that come

feeling their way along the wall at my feet, restless and

soft-touching as blind men's busy fingers,--is for that friend of mine

who looks into the waters of the Patapsco and sees beneath them the

same visions that paint themselves for me in the green depths of the

Charles.

----Did I talk all this off to the schoolmistress?--Why, no,--of course

not. I have been talking with you, the reader, for the last ten

minutes. You don't think I should expect any woman to listen to such a

sentence as that long one, without giving her a chance to put in a

word?

----What did I say to the schoolmistress?--Permit me one moment. I don't

doubt your delicacy and good-breeding; but in this particular case, as

I was allowed the privilege of walking alone with a very interesting

young woman, you must allow me to remark, in the classic version of a

familiar phrase, used by our Master Benjamin Franklin, it is _nullum

tui negotii_.

When the schoolmistress and I reached the school-room door, the damask

roses I spoke of were so much heightened in color by exercise that I

felt sure it would be useful to her to take a stroll like this every

morning, and made up my mind I would ask her to let me join her again.

EXTRACT FROM MY PRIVATE JOURNAL.

(_To be burned unread._)

I am afraid I have been a fool; for I have told as much of myself to

this young person as if she were of that ripe and discreet age which

invites confidence and expansive utterance. I have been low-spirited

and listless, lately,--it is coffee, I think,--(I observe that which

is bought _ready-ground_ never affects the head,)--and I notice

that I tell my secrets too easily when I am downhearted.

There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, like that on Dighton

Rock, are never to be seen except at dead-low tide.

There is a woman's footstep on the sand at the side of my deepest

ocean-buried inscription!

----Oh, no, no, no! a thousand times, no!--Yet what is this which has

been shaping itself in my soul?--Is it a thought?--is it a dream?--is

it a _passion_?--Then I know what comes next.

----The Asylum stands on a bright and breezy hill; those glazed

corridors are pleasant to walk in, in bad weather. But there are iron

bars to all the windows. When it is fair, some of us can stroll

outside that very high fence. But I never see much life in those

groups I sometimes meet;--and then the careful man watches them so

closely! How I remember that sad company I used to pass on fine

mornings, when I was a schoolboy!--B., with his arms full of yellow

weeds,--ore from the gold mines which he discovered long before we

heard of California,--Y., born to millions, crazed by too much

plum-cake, (the boys said,) dogged, explosive,--made a Polyphemus of

my weak-eyed schoolmaster, by a vicious flirt with a stick,--(the

multi-millionnaires sent him a trifle, it was said, to buy another eye

with; but boys are jealous of rich folks,--and I don't doubt the good

people made him easy for life,)--how I remember them all!

I recollect, as all do, the story of the Hall of Eblis, in "Vathek,"

and how each shape, as it lifted its hand from its breast, showed its

heart,--a burning coal. The real Hall of Eblis stands on yonder

summit. Go there on the next visiting-day, and ask that figure

crouched in the corner, huddled up like those Indian mummies and

skeletons found buried in the sitting posture, to lift its hand,--look

upon its heart, and behold, not fire, but ashes.--No, I must not think

of such an ending! Dying would be a much more gentlemanly way of

meeting the difficulty. Make a will and leave her a house or two and

some stocks, and other little financial conveniences, to take away her

necessity for keeping school.--I wonder what nice young man's feet

would be in my French slippers before six months were over! Well,

what then? If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn't marry

her for the world, if he were not quite sure that he was the best

person she could by any possibility marry.

----It is odd enough to read over what I have just been writing.--It

is the merest fancy that ever was in the world. I shall never be

married. She will; and if she is as pleasant as she has been so far, I

will give her a silver tea-set, and go and take tea with her and her

husband, sometimes. No coffee, I hope, though,--it depresses me

sadly. I feel very miserably;--they must have been grinding it at

home.--Another morning walk will be good for me, and I don't doubt the

schoolmistress will be glad of a little fresh air before school.

* * * * *

----The throbbing flushes of the poetical intermittent have been

coming over me from time to time of late. Did you ever see that

electrical experiment which consists in passing a flash through

letters of gold-leaf in a darkened room, whereupon some name or legend

springs out of the darkness in characters of fire?

There are songs all written out in my soul, which I could read, if the

flash might but pass through them,--but the fire must come down from

heaven. Ah! but what if the stormy _nimbus_ of youthful passion

has blown by, and one asks for lightning from the ragged _cirrus_

of dissolving aspirations, or the silvered _cumulus_ of sluggish

satiety? I will call on her whom the dead poets believed in, whom

living ones no longer worship,--the immortal maid, who, name her what

you will,--Goddess, Muse, Spirit of Beauty,--sits by the pillow of

every youthful poet, and bends over his pale forehead until her

tresses lie upon his cheek and rain their gold into his dreams.

MUSA.

O my lost Beauty!--hast thou folded quite

Thy wings of morning light

Beyond those iron gates

Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates,

And Age upon his mound of ashes waits

To chill our fiery dreams,

Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy streams?

Leave me not fading in these weeds of care,

Whose flowers are silvered hair!--

Have I not loved thee long,

Though my young lips have often done thee wrong

And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song?

Ah, wilt thou yet return,

Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar burn?

Come to me!--I will flood thy silent shrine

With my soul's sacred wine,

And heap thy marble floors

As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores

In leafy islands walled with madrepores

And lapped in Orient seas,

When all their feathery palms toss, plume-like, in the breeze.

Come to me!--thou shalt feed on honeyed words,

Sweeter than song of birds;--

No wailing bulbul's throat,

No melting dulcimer's melodious note,

When o'er the midnight wave its murmurs float,

Thy ravished sense might soothe

With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-smooth.

Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen,

Sought in those bowers of green

Where loop the clustered vines

And the close-clinging dulcamara twines,--

Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines,

And Summer's fruited gems,

And coral pendants shorn from Autumn's berried stems.

Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves,--

Or stretched by grass-grown graves,

Whose gray, high-shouldered stones,

Carved with old names Life's time-worn roll disowns,

Lean, lichen-spotted, o'er the crumbled bones

Still slumbering where they lay

While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf away!

Spread o'er my couch thy visionary wing!

Still let me dream and sing,--

Dream of that winding shore

Where scarlet cardinals bloom,--for me no more,--

The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor,

And clustering nenuphars

Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced stars!

Come while their balms the linden-blossoms shed!--

Come while the rose is red,--

While blue-eyed Summer smiles

O'er the green ripples round yon sunken piles

Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian isles,

And on the sultry air

The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men in prayer!

Oh, for thy burning lips to fire my brain

With thrills of wild sweet pain!--

On life's autumnal blast,

Like shrivelled leaves, youth's passion-flowers are cast,--

Once loving thee, we love thee to the last!--

Behold thy new-decked shrine,

And hear once more the voice that breathed "Forever thine!"

THE TRUSTEE'S LAMENT.

_Per aspera ad astra._

(SCENE.--Outside the gate of the Astronomical Observatory at Albany.)

There was a time when I was blest;

The stars might rise in East or West

With all their sines and wonders;

I cared for neither great nor small,

As pointedly unmoved by all

As, on the top of steeple tall,

A lightning-rod at thunders.

What did I care for Science then?

I was a man with fellow-men,

And called the Bear the Dipper;

Segment meant piece of pie,--no more;

Cosine, the parallelogram that bore

JOHN SMITH & CO. above a door;

Arc, what called Noah skipper.

No axes weighed upon my mind,

(Unless I had a few to grind.)

And as for my astronomy,

Had Hedgecock's quadrant then been known,

I might a lamp-post's height have shown

By gas-tronomic skill,--if none

Find fault with the metonymy.

O hours of innocence! O ways

How far from these unhappy days

When all is vicy-versy!

No flower more peaceful took its due

Than I, who then no difference knew

'Twixt Ursy Major and my true

Old crony, Major Hersey.

Now in long broils and feuds we roast,

Like Strasburg geese that living toast

To make a liver-_paté_,--

And all because we fondly strove

To set the city of our love

In scientific fame above

Her sister Cincinnati!

We built our tower and furnished it

With everything folks said was fit,

From coping-stone to grounsel;

And then, to give a knowing air,

Just nominally assigned its care

To that unmanageable affair,

A Scientific Council.

We built it, not that one or two

Astronomers the stars might view

And count the comets' hair-roots,

But that it might by all be said

How very freely we had bled,--

We were not laying out a bed

To force their early square-roots.

The observations _we_ wished made

Were on the spirit we'd displayed,

Worthy of Athens' high days;

But _they_'ve put in a man who thinks

Only of planets' nodes and winks,

So full of astronomic kinks

He eats star-fish on Fridays.

The instruments we did not mean

For seeing through, but to be seen

At tap of Trustee's knuckle;

But the Director locks the gate,

And makes ourselves and strangers wait

While he is ciphering on a slate

The rust of Saturn's buckle.

So on the wall's outside we stand,

Admire the keyhole's contour grand

And gateposts' sturdy granite;--

But, ah, is Science safe, we say,

With one who treats Trustees this way?

Who knows but he may snub, some day,

A well-conducted planet?

Who knows what mischief he may brew

With such a telescope brand-new

At the four-hundredth power?

He may bring some new comet down

So near that it'll singe the town

And do the Burgess-Corps crisp-brown

Ere they can storm his tower.

We wanted (having got our show)

Some man, that had a name or so,

To be our public showman;

But this one shuts and locks the gate:

Who'll answer but he'll peculate,

(And, faith, some stars are missed of late,)

Now that he's watched by no man?

Our own discoveries he may steal,

Or put night's candles out, to deal

At junkshops with the sockets:

_Savants_, in other lands or this,

If any theory you miss

Whereon your cipher graven is,

Don't fail to search his pockets!

Lock up your comets: if that fails,

Then notch their ears and clip their tails,

That you at need may swear to 'em;

And watch your nebulous flocks at night,

For, if your palings are not tight,

He may, to gratify his spite,

Let in the Little Bear to 'em.

Then he's so quarrelsome, we've fears

He'll set the very Twins by the ears,--

So mad, if you resist him,

He'd get Aquarius to play

A milkman's trick, some cloudy day,

And water all the Milky Way

To starve some sucking system.

But plaints are vain! through wrath or pride,

The Council all espouse his side

And will our missives con no more;

And who that knows what _savants_ are,

Each snappish as a Leyden jar,

Will hope to soothe the wordy war

'Twixt Ologist and Onomer?

Search a Reform Convention, where

He- and she-resiarehs prepare

To get the world in _their_ power,

You will not, when 'tis loudest, find

Such gifts to hug and snarl combined

As drive each astronomic mind

With fifty-score Great-Bear-power!

No! put the Bootees on your foot,

Elope with Virgo, strive to shoot

That arrow of O'Ryan's,

Drain Georgian Ciders to the lees,

Attempt what crackbrained thing you please,

But dream not you can e'er appease

An angry man of science!

Ah, would I were, as I was once,

To fair Astronomy a dunce,

Or launching _jeux d'esprit_ at her,

Of light zodiacal making light,

Deaf to all tales of comets bright,

And knowing but such stars as might

Roll r-rs at our theatre!

Then calm I drew my night-cap on,

Nor bondsman was for what went on

Ere morning in the heavens;

Twas no concern of mine to fix

The Pleiades at seven or six,--

But now the _omnium genitrix_

Seems all at sixes and sevens.

Alas, 'twas in an evil hour

We signed the paper for the tower,

With Mrs. D. to head it!

For, if the Council have their way,

We've merely had, as Frenchmen say,

The painful _maladie du_ pay,

While they get all the credit!

Boys, henceforth doomed to spell Trustees,

Think not it ends in double ease

To those who hold the office;

Shun Science as you would Despair,

Sit not in Cassiopeia's chair,

Nor hope from Berenice's hair

To bring away your trophies!

THE POCKET-CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTH.

Well, it has happened, and we have survived it pretty well. The

Democratic Almanacs predicted a torrent, a whirlwind, and we know not

what meteoric phenomena,--but the next day Nature gave no sign, the

dome of the State-House was in its place, the Monument was as plumb as

ever, no chimney mourned a ravished brick, and the Republican Party

took its morning tea and toast in peace and safety. On the whole, it

must be considered a wonderful escape. Since Partridge's time there

had been no such prophecies,--since Miller's, no such perverse

disobligingness in the event.

But what had happened? Why, the Democratic Young Men's Celebration, to

be sure, and Mr. Choate's Oration.

The good city of Boston in New England, for we know not how many

years, had been in the habit of celebrating the National Birthday,

first, with an oration, as became the Athens of America, and second,

with a dinner, as was meet in the descendants of Teutonic forefathers.

The forenoon's oration glorified us in the lump as a people, and every

man could reckon and appropriate his own share of credit by the simple

arithmetical process of dividing the last census by the value he set

upon himself, a divisor easily obtained by subtracting from the total

of inhabitants in his village the number of neighbors whom he

considered ciphers. At the afternoon's dinner, the pudding of praise

was served out in slices to favored individuals; dry toasts were drunk

by drier dignitaries; the Governor was compared to Solon; the Chief

Justice to Brutus; the Orator of the Day to Demosthenes; the Colonel

of the Boston Regiment to Julius Cæsar; and everybody went home happy

from a feast where the historic parallels were sure to hold out to the

last Z in Lemprière.

Gradually matters took a new course; the Union was suddenly supposed

to lie at the point of dissolution, and what we may call the

Doctor-Brandreth style of oratory began. Every orator mounted the

rostrum, like a mountebank at a fair, to proclaim the virtues of his

private panacea for the morbid Commonwealth, and, as was natural in

young students of political therapeutics, fancied that he saw symptoms

of the dread malady of Disunion in a simple eruption of Jethro Furber

at a convention of the Catawampusville Come-outers, or of Pyrophagus

Quattlebum at a training of the Palmetto Plug-Uglies,--neither of

which was skin-deep. The dinners became equally dreary. Did the eye of

a speaker light on the national dish of beans, he was reminded of the

languid pulse of the sentiment of union; did he see a broiled chicken,

it called up to his mind's eye the bird of our _un_common

country, with the gridiron on his breast, liable to be reduced at any

moment to the heraldic duality of his Austrian congener by the strife

of contending sections pulling in opposite directions; an innocent

pippin was enough to suggest the apple of discord; and with the

removal of the cloth came a dessert of diagnoses on the cancer that

was supposed to be preying on the national vitals. The only variety

was a cringing compliment, in which Bunker Hill curtsied to King's

Mountain, to any Southern brother who chanced to be present, and who

replied patronizingly,--while his compatriots at the warmer end of the

Union were probably, with amiable sincerity, applying to the Yankees

that epithet whose expression in type differs but little from that of

a doctorate in divinity, but which precedes the name it qualifies, as

that follows it, and was never, except by Beaumarchais and Fielding,

reckoned among titles of honor or courtesy.

A delusion seemed to have taken possession of our public men, that the

people wanted doctors of the body-politic to rule over them, and, if

those were not to be had, would put up with the next best

thing,--quacks. Every one who was willing to be an Eminent Statesman

issued his circulars, like the Retired Physician, on all public

occasions, offering to send his recipe in return for a vote. The

cabalistic formula always turned out to be this:--"Take your humble

servant for four years at the White House; if no cure is effected,

repeat the dose."

Meanwhile were there any symptoms of disease in the Constitution? Not

the least. The whole affair was like one of those alarms in a

country-town which begin with the rumor of ten cases of confluent

small-pox and end with the discovery that the doctor has been called

to a case of nettle-rash at Deacon Scudder's. But sober men, who

loved the Union in a quiet way, without advertising it in the

newspapers, and who were willing to sacrifice everything to the

Constitution but the rights it was intended to protect, began to fear

that the alarmists might create the disease which they kept up so much

excitement about.

This being the posture of affairs, the city of Boston, a twelvemonth

since, chose for their annual orator a clergyman distinguished for

eloquence, and for that important part of patriotism, at least, which

consists in purity of life. This gentleman, being neither a candidate

for office nor the canvasser of a candidate, ventured upon a new kind

of address. He took for his theme the duties consequent upon the

privileges of Freedom, ventured to mention self-respect as one of

them, and commented upon the invitation of a Virginia Senator, the

author of the Fugitive Slave Bill, to a Seventeenth-of-June

Celebration, while the Senators of Massachusetts were neglected. In

speaking of this, he used, we believe, the word "flunkeyism." It is

not an elegant word; it is not even an English one;--but had the

speaker sought for a Saxon correlative, he could hardly have found one

that would have seemed more satisfactory, especially to those who

deserved it; for Saxon is straightforward, and a reluctance to be

classified (fatal to science) is characteristic of the human animal.

An orator who suggests a new view of any topic is a disturber of the

digestive organs,--this was very properly a matter of offence to the

Aldermen who were to dine after the oration,--but an orator who

tampers with the language we have inherited from Shakspeare and

Milton, and which we share with Tupper, was an object for deeper

reprobation. The Young Men's Democratic Association of Boston are

purists; they are jealous for their mother-tongue,--and it is the more

disinterested in them as a large proportion of them are Irishmen; they

are exclusive,--a generous confusion of ideas as to the meaning of

democracy, even more characteristically Hibernian; they are

sentimental, too,--melancholy as gibcats,--and feared (from last

year's example) that the city might not furnish them with a

sufficiently lachrymose Antony to hold up before them the bloody

garment of America, and show what rents the envious Blairs and Wilsons

and Douglasses had made in it. Accordingly they resolved to have a

public celebration all to themselves,--a pocket-edition of the

cumbrous civic work,--and as the city provided fireworks in the

evening, in order to be beforehand with it in their pyrotechnics, they

gave Mr. Choate in the forenoon.

We did not hear Mr. Choate's oration; we only read it in the

newspapers. Cold fireworks, the morning after, are not enlivening.

You have the form without the fire, and the stick without the soar.

But we soon found that we were to expect no such disappointment from

Mr. Choate. He seems to announce at the outset that he has closed his

laboratory. The Prospero of periods had broken his wand and sunk his

book deeper than ever office-hunter sounded. The boys in the street

might wander fancy-free, and fire their Chinese crackers as they

listed; but for him this was a solemn occasion, and he invited his

hearers to a Stoic feast of Medford crackers and water, to a

philosophic banquet of metaphors and metaphysics.

We confess that we expected a great deal. Better a crust with Plato

than nightingales' tongues with Apicius; and if Mr. Choate promised

only the crust, we were sure of one melodious tongue, at least, before

the meal was over. He is a man of whom any community might be

proud. Were society an organized thing here, as in Europe, no dinner

and no drawing-room would be perfect without his talk. He would have

been heard gladly at Johnson's club. The Hortensins of our courts,

with a cloud of clients, he yet finds time to be a scholar and a

critic, and to read Plato and Homer as they were read by Plato's and

Homer's countrymen. Unsurpassed in that eloquence which, if it does

not convince, intoxicates a jury, he was counted, so long as Webster

lived, the second advocate of our bar.

All this we concede to Mr. Choate with unreserved admiration; but

when, leaving the field where he had won his spurs as the successful

defender of men criminally accused, he undertakes to demonstrate the

sources whence national life is drawn, and the causes which lead to

its decay,--to expound authoritatively the theory of political ethics

and the principles of sagacious statesmanship, wary in its steps, and

therefore durable in its results,--it becomes natural and fair to ask,

What has been the special training that has fitted him for the task?

More than this: when he comes forward as the public prosecutor of the

Republican Party, it becomes our duty to examine the force of his

arguments and the soundness of his logic. Has his own experience given

him any right to talk superciliously to a great party overwhelmingly

triumphant in the Free States? And does his oration show him to

possess such qualities of mind, such grasp of reason, such continuity

of induction, as to entitle him to underrate the intelligence of so

large a number of his fellow-citizens by accusing them of being

incapable of a generalization and incompetent to apprehend a

principle?

The Bar has given few historically-great statesmen to the

world,--fewer than the Church, which Mr. Choate undervalues in a

sentence which, we cannot help thinking, is below the dignity of the

occasion, and jarringly discordant with the generally elevated tone of

his address. Burke, an authority whom Mr. Choate will not call in

question, has said that the training of the bar tends to make the

faculties acute, but at the same time narrow. The study of

jurisprudence may, no doubt, enlarge the intellect; but the habit of

mind induced by an indiscriminate advocacy--which may be summoned to

the defence of a Sidney to-day and of a spoon-thief to-morrow--is

rather that of the sophist than of the philosophic reasoner. Not

truth, but the questionable victory of the moment, becomes naturally

and inevitably the aim and end of all the pleader's faculties. For

him the question is not what principle, but what interest of John Doe,

may be at stake. Such has been Mr. Choate's school as a reasoner. As

a politician, his experience has been limited. The member of a party

which rarely succeeded in winning, and never in long retaining, the

suffrages of the country, he for a time occupied a seat in the Senate,

but without justifying the expectations of his friends. So far, his

history shows nothing that can give him the right to assume so high

and mighty a tone in speaking of his political opponents.

But in his scholarship he has a claim to be heard, and to be heard

respectfully. Here lies his real strength, and hence is derived the

inspiration of his better eloquence. The scholar enjoys more than the

privilege, without the curse, of the Wandering Jew. He can tread the

windy plain of Troy, he can listen to Demosthenes, can follow Dante

through Paradise, can await the rising of the curtain for the first

acting of Hamlet. Mr. Choate's oration shows that he has drawn that

full breath which is, perhaps, possible only under a Grecian sky, and

it is, in its better parts, scholarly in the best sense of the

word.[1] It shows that he has read out-of-the-way books, like Bodinus

"De Republicâ," and fresh ones, like Gladstone's Homer,--that he can

do justice, with Spinoza, to Machiavelli,--and that in letters, at

least, he has no narrow prejudices. Its sentences are full of

scholarly allusion, and its language glitters continually with pattins

of bright gold from Shakspeare. We abhor that profane vulgarity of our

politics which denies to an antagonist the merits which are justly

his, because he may have been blinded to the truth of our principles

by the demerits which are justly ours,--which hates the man because it

hates his creed, and, instead of grappling with his argument, seeks in

the kitchen-drains of scandal for the material to bespatter his

reputation. Let us say, then, honestly, what we honestly think,--the

feeling, the mastery and choice of language, the intellectual

comprehensiveness of glance, which can so order the many-columned

aisle of a period, that the eye, losing none of the crowded

particulars, yet sees through all, at the vista's end, the gleaming

figure of thought to enshrine which the costly fabric was reared,--all

these qualities of the orator demand and receive our sincere

applause. In an age when indolence or the study of French models has

reduced our sentences to the economic curtness of telegraphic

despatches, to the dimension of the epigram without its point,

Mr. Choate is one of the few whose paragraphs echo with the

long-resounding pace of Dryden's coursers, and who can drive a

predicate and six without danger of an overset.

Mr. Choate begins by congratulating his hearers that there comes one

day in our year when "faults may be forgotten,-- ... when the

arrogance of reform, the excesses of reform, the strife of parties,

the rivalries of regions, shall give place to a wider, warmer, juster

sentiment,--when, turning from the corners and dark places of

offensiveness, ... we may go up together to the serene and secret

mountain-top," etc. Had he kept to the path which he thus marked out

for himself, we should have had nothing to say. But he goes out of

his way to indulge a spleen unworthy of himself and the occasion, and

brings against political opponents, sometimes directly, sometimes by

innuendo, charges which, as displaying personal irritation, are

impolitic and in bad taste. One fruit of scholarship, and its fairest,

he does not seem to have plucked,--one proof of contented conviction

in the truth of his opinions he does not give,--that indifference to

contemporary clamor and hostile criticism, that magnanimous

self-trust, which, assured of its own loyalty to present duty, can

wait patiently for future justice.

His exordium over, Mr. Choate proceeds to define and to discuss

Nationality. We heartily agree with him in all he says in its praise,

and draw attention, in passing, to a charming idyllic passage in which

he speaks of the early influences which first develope in us its

germinal principle. But when he says, that the sentiment of a national

life, once existing, must still be kept alive by an exercise of the

reason and the will, we dissent. It must be a matter of instinct, or

it is nothing. The examples of nationality which he cites are those of

ancient Greece and modern Germany. Now we affirm, that, with

accidental exceptions, nationality has always been a matter of race,

and was eminently so in the instances he quotes. If we read rightly,

the nationality which glows in the "Iliad," and which it was, perhaps,

one object of the poem to rouse or to make coherent, is one of blood,

not territory. The same is true of Germany, of Russia, (adding the

element of a common religious creed,) and of France, where the Celtic

sentiment becomes day by day more predominant. The exceptions are

England and Switzerland, whose intense nationality is due to

insulation, and Holland, which was morally an island, cut off as it

was from France by difference of language and antipathy of race, and

from kindred Germany by the antagonism of institutions. A patriotism

by the chart is a monster that the world ne'er saw. Men may fall in

love with a lady's picture, but not with the map of their country.

Few persons have the poetic imagination of Mr. Choate, that can vivify

the dead lines and combine the complex features. It seems to us that

our own problem of creating a national sentiment out of such diverse

materials of race, such sometimes discordant or even hostile

traditions, and then of giving it an intenseness of vitality that can

overcome our vast spaces and our differences of climate and interest,

is a new problem, not easily to be worked out by the old

methods. Mr. Choate's plan seems to consist in the old formula of the

Fathers. He would have us think of their sacrifices and their

heroisms, their common danger and their common deliverance.

Excellent, as far as it goes; but what are we to do with the large

foreign fraction of our population imported within the last forty

years, a great proportion of whom never so much as heard even of the

war of 1812? Shall we talk of Bennington and Yorktown to the Germans,

whose grandfathers, if they were concerned at all in those memorable

transactions, were concerned on the wrong side? Shall we talk of the

constancy of Puritan Pilgrims to the Romanist Irishman, who knows more

of Brian Boroo than of the Mayflower?

It will be many generations before we become so fused as to have a

common past, and the conciliation and forbearance which Mr. Choate

recommends to related sections of country will be more than equally

necessary to unrelated races. But while we are waiting for a past in

which we can all agree, Mr. Choate sees danger in the disrespect which

he accuses certain _anonymi_ of entertaining for the past in

general. But for what past? Does Mr. Choate mean our own American

past? Does he refer us to that for lessons of forbearance, submission,

and waiting for God's good time? Is the contemplation of their own

history and respect for their own traditions the lenitive he

prescribes for a people whose only history is a revolution, whose only

tradition is rebellion? To what past and to what tradition did the

Pilgrim Fathers appeal, except to that past, older than all history,

that tradition, sacred from all decay, which, derived from an

antiquity behind and beyond all the hoary generations, points the

human soul to the God from whom it derived life, and with it the

privilege of freedom and the duty of obedience? To what historical

past did Jefferson go for the preamble of the Declaration, unless to

the reveries of a half-dozen innovating enthusiasts, men of the

closet,--of that class which Mr. Choate disparages by implication,

though it has done more to shape the course of the world than any

number of statesmen, whose highest office is, commonly, to deal

prudently with the circumstances of the moment?

Mr. Choate does a great injustice to the Republican Party when he lays

this irreverence for the past to their charge. As he seems to think

that he alone has read books and studied the lessons of antiquity, he

will be pleased to learn that there are persons also in that party who

have not neglected all their opportunities in that kind. The object of

the Republicans is to bring back the policy and practice of the

Republic to some nearer agreement with the traditions of the

fathers. They also have a National Idea,--for some of them are capable

of distinguishing "a phrase from an idea," or Mr. Choate would find it

easier to convert them. They propose to create a National Sentiment,

in the only way that is possible under conditions like ours, by

clearing the way for the development of a nation which shall be, not

only in Fourth-of-July orations, but on every day in the year, and in

the mouths of all peoples, great and wise, just and brave, and whose

idea, always august and venerable, by turns lovely and terrible, shall

bind us all in a common nationality by our loyalty to what is true,

our reverence for what is good, our love for what is beautiful, and

our sense of security in what is mighty. That is the America which the

Fathers conceived, and it is that to which the children look

forward,--an America which shall displace Ireland and Germany,

Massachusetts and Carolina, in the hearts of those who call them

mother, with an image of maternity at once more tender and more

majestic.

There is a past for which Republicans have indeed no respect,--but it

is one of recent date; there is a history from which they refuse to

take lessons except for warning and not example,--but it is a history

which is not yet written. When the future historian shall study that

past and gather materials for writing that history, he will find cause

for wonder at the strength of that national vitality which could

withstand and survive, not the efforts of Mr. Choate's dreadful

reformers, but of an administration calling itself Democratic, which,

with the creed of the Ostend Manifesto for its foreign, and the

practice of Kansas for its domestic policy, could yet find a scholar

and a gentleman like Mr. Choate to defend it.

Mr. Choate charges the Republicans with being incapable of a

generalization. They can, at least, generalize so far as this, that,

when they find a number of sophistries in an argument, they conclude

that the cause which requires their support must be a weak one. One of

the most amusing of these in the oration before us is where (using the

very same arguments that were urged in favor of that coalition in

Massachusetts against the morality of which the then party of Mr.

Choate exclaimed so loudly) he extols the merits of Compromise in

statesmanship. In support of what he says on this subject, he quotes

from a speech of Archbishop Whately a passage in favor of

Expediency. It is really too bad, that the Primate of Ireland, of all

men living, should be made the abetter in two fallacies. In the first

place, Mr. Choate assumes that there are certain deluded persons who

affirm that all compromises in politics are wrong. Having stuffed out

his man of straw, he proceeds gravely to argue with him, as if he were

as cunning of fence as Duns Scotus. One would think, from some of the

notions he deems it necessary to combat, that we were living in the

time of the Fifth-Monarchy men, and that Captain Venner with his troop

was ready to issue from the garrets of Batterymarch Street, to find

Armageddon in Dock Square, and the Beast of the Revelation in the

Chief of Police. There is no man who believes that the ship of State,

any more than an ordinary vessel, can be navigated by the New

Testament alone; but neither will be the worse for having it

aboard. The Puritans sailed theirs by Deuteronomy, but it was a

Deuteronomy qualified by an eye to the main chance. Mr. Choate's

syllogism may be stated thus: Some compromises are necessary in order

to carry on a free government; but this is a compromise; therefore it

is necessary. Here is the first fallacy. The other syllogism runs

thus: Expediency is essential in politics; so also is compromise;

therefore some particular compromise is expedient. Fallacy number

two. The latent application in this part of Mr. Choate's oration is,

of course, to Compromises on the Slavery question. We agree with him,

that no man of sense will deny that compromise is essential in

politics, and especially in our politics. With a single exception, all

that he says on this topic is expressed with masterly force and

completeness. But when we come to the application of it, the matter

assumes another face. Men of sense may, and do, differ as to what _is_

a compromise, or, agreeing in that, they may differ again as to

whether it be expedient. For example, if a man, having taken another's

cloak, insist on taking his coat also, the denudee, though he might

congratulate himself on having been set forward so far on his way

toward the natural man of Rousseau, would hardly call the affair a

compromise on the part of the denuder. Or again, if his brother with

principles should offer to compromise about the coat by taking only

half of it, he would be in considerable doubt whether the arrangement

were expedient. Now there are many honest people, not as eloquent as

Mr. Choate, not as scholarly, and perhaps not more illogical, who

firmly believe that our compromises on the question of Slavery have

afforded examples of both the species above described. It is not

unnatural, therefore, that, while they assent to his general

theory, they should protest against his mode of applying it to

particulars. They may be incapable of a generalization, (they

certainly are, if this be Mr. Choate's notion of one,) but they are

incapable also of a deliberate fallacy. We think we find here one of

the cases in which his training as an advocate has been of evil effect

on his fairness of mind. No more potent lie can be made than of the

ashes of truth. A fallacy is dangerous because of the half-truth in

it. Swallow a strong dose of pure poison, and the stomach may reject

it; but take half as much, mixed with innocent water, and it will do

you a mischief. But Mr. Choate is nothing, if not illogical:

recognizing the manifest hand of God in the affairs of the world, he

would leave the question of Slavery with Him. Now we offer Mr. Choate

a _dilemma_: either God _always_ interferes, or _sometimes_: if

always, why need Mr. Choate meddle? why not leave it to Him to avert

the dangers of Anti-slavery, as well as to remedy the evils of

Slavery?--if only sometimes, (_nec deus intersit nisi dignus vindice

nodus,_) who is to decide when the time for human effort has come?

Each man for himself, or Mr. Choate for all?

Let us try Mr. Choate's style of reasoning against himself. He says,

"One may know Aristophanes and Geography and the Cosmical Unity and

Telluric Influences," (why _didn't_ he add, "Neptune, Plutarch,

and Nicodemus"!) "and the smaller morals of life, and the sounding

pretensions of philanthropy," (this last, at any rate, is useful

knowledge,) "and yet not know America." We must confess, that we do

not see why on earth he should. In fact, by the time he had got to

the "Telluric Influences," (whatever they are,) we should think he

might consider his education completed, and his head would even then

be as great a wonder as that of the schoolmaster in the "Deserted

Village." In the same way, a man might have seen a horse, (if only a

clothes-horse,) a dog, a cat, and a tadpole, and yet never have seen

the elephant,--a most blame-worthy neglect of opportunities. But let

us apply Mr. Choate's syllogistic process to the list of this

extraordinary nameless person's acquirements. The Republican Party do

_not_ know any of these amazing things; _ergo_, they must

know America; and the corollary (judging from Mr. Choate's own

practice, as displayed in the parts of his oration which we are sure

he will one day wish to blot) would seem to be, that, having the honor

of her acquaintance, they may apply very contemptuous epithets to

everybody that disagrees with them. The only weak point in our case

is, that Mr. Choate himself seems to allow them the one merit of

knowing something of Geography,--for he says they wished to elect a

"geographical President,"--but, perhaps, as they did not succeed in

doing so, he will forgive them the possession of that accomplishment,

so hostile to a knowledge of America.

We confess that we were surprised to find Mr. Choate reviving, on "the

serene and secret mountain-top,"--which, being interpreted, means the

rather prosaic Tremont Temple,--the forgotten slang of a bygone

political contest, as in the instance we have just quoted of the

"geographical President." We think that Colonel Fremont might be

allowed to rest in peace, now that a California court has

decided--with a logic worthy of Mr. Choate himself--that he has no

manner of right to the gold in his Mariposa mines, _because_ he

owns them. But we should like to have Mr. Choate define, when he has

leisure, where an unfortunate candidate can take up his abode, in

order to escape the imputation of being "geographical." It is a grave

charge to be brought against any man, as we see by its being coupled

with those dreadful Telluric Influences and Cosmical (ought we not to

_dele_ the _s?_) Unities; and since the most harmless man in

the world may become a candidate before he expects it, it would be

charitable to warn him beforehand what is an allowable _habitat_

in such a contingency.

We said we were surprised at seeing our old friend, the "geographical

President," again; but we soon found that he reappeared only as the

file-leader of a ragged regiment of kindred scarecrows,--nay, with

others so battered and bedraggled, that they were scarce fit to be the

camp-followers of the soldiery with whom Falstaff refused to march

through Coventry. The sarcasms which Mr. Choate vents against the

Anti-slavery sentiment of the country are so old as to be positively

respectable,--we wish we could say that their vivacity increased with

their years,--and as for his graver indictments, there never was

anything so ancient, unless it be an American lad of eighteen. There

are not a great many of either, but they are made to recur often

enough to produce the impression of numbers. They remind us of the

theatric army, composed always of the same old guard of

supernumeraries and candle-snuffers, and which, by marching round and

round the paper forest in the background, would make six men pass

muster very well for sixty, did not the fatally regular recurrence of

the hero whose cotton armor bunches at the knees, and the other whose

legs insist on the un-Grecian eccentricity of being straight in

profile and crooked in a front view, bring us back to calmer

estimates.

We used the word _indictments_ with design, both as appropriate

to Mr. Choate's profession and exactly descriptive of the thing

itself. For, as in an indictment for murder, in order to close every

loophole of evasion, the prudent attorney affirms that the accused did

the deed with an awfully destructive _to-wit_,--with a knife,

axe, bludgeon, pistol, bootjack, six-pounder, and what not, which were

then and there in the Briarean hands of him the said What's-his-name,

so Mr. Choate represents the Republican Party to have attempted the

assassination of the Constitution with a most remarkable medley of

instruments. He does not, indeed, use the words "Republican Party,"

but it is perfectly clear from the context, as in the case of the

"geographical President," for whom the charges are intended. Out of

tenderness for the artist, let him for whom the garment is intended

put it on, though it may not fit him,--and for our own parts, as

humble members of the Anti-slave-trade, Anti-filibuster, and

Anti-disreputable-things-generally Party, we don our Joseph's coat

(for Mr. Choate could not make one that was not of many colors) with

good-humored serenity.

Of course, Sectionalism is not forgotten. The pumpkin-lantern, that

had performed so many offices of alarm, though a little wrinkled now,

was too valuable a stage-property to be neglected. In the hands of so

skilful an operator, its slender body flutters voluminous with new

folds of inexpensive cotton, and its eyes glare with the baleful

terrors of unlimited tallow. Mr. Choate honestly confesses that

sectional jealousies are coeval with the country itself, but it is

only as fomented by Anti-slavery-extension that he finds them

dreadful. When South Carolina threatened disunion unless the Tariff of

the party to which Mr. Choate then belonged were modified, did he

think it necessary for the Protectionists to surrender their policy?

There is not, and there never was, any party numerically considerable

at the North, in favor of disunion. Were homilies on fraternal

concessions the things to heal this breach, the South is the fitting

place for their delivery; but mouth-glue, however useful to stick

slight matters together, is not the cement with which confederacies

are bound to a common centre. There must be the gravitation of

interest as well as of honor and duty. We wonder that the parallel

case of Scotland and England did not occur to Mr. Choate, in speaking

upon this point. Scotland was clamorous and England jealously

contemptuous, for nearly a century. Twice since the union, the land

of cakes has been in rebellion; but as long as a pound Scots was only

a twentieth part of a pound English,--as long as the treasury was

filled chiefly from south the Tweed, and the sons of poor and proud

Scottish lairds could make glittering abstractions from it,--as long

as place was to be won or hoped for,--there was no danger. So with

us,--though Jacob and Esau quarrelled already in the womb, yet, so

long as the weaker and more politic brother can get the elder

brother's portion, and simple Esau hunts his whales and pierces his

untrodden forests, content with his mess of pottage,--honestly abiding

by his bargain, though a little puzzled at its terms,--we think that

fratricide, or the sincere thought of it, is very far off.

* * * * *

We should be glad to extract some passages of peculiar force and

beauty,--such as that where Mr. Choate rebukes the undue haste of

reformers, and calls to mind the slow development and longevity of

states and ideas. But our duty is the less pleasing one of pointing to

some of the sophistries of the argument and some of the ill-advised

ebullitions of the orator. We leave his exegesis of "Render unto

Cæsar" to answer itself; but what can be worse than this,--worse in

taste, in temper, in reason?

"There is a cant of shallowness and fanaticism which misunderstands

and denies this. There is a distempered and ambitious morality which

says civil prudence is no virtue. There is a philanthropy,--so it

calls itself,--pedantry, arrogance, folly, cruelty, impiousness, I

call it, fit enough for a pulpit, totally unfit for a people,--fit

enough for a preacher, totally unfit for a statesman."

Think of it!--fit enough for St. Augustine and St. Francis, (to

mention no greater names,) fit enough for Taylor and Barrow, for

Bossuet and Fénelon, but not for Mr. Buchanan or Mr. Cushing!

In another place Mr. Choate says, "that even the laughter of fools,

and children, and madmen, little ministers, little editors, and little

politicians, can inflict the mosquito-bite, not deep, but stinging."

As this is one of the best of his sarcasms, we give it the advantage

of the circulation of the "Atlantic,"--generous and tidal circulation,

as he himself might call it. We do not think the mosquito image

new,--if we remember, the editor of the Bungtown Copperhead uses it

weekly against "our pitiful contemporary,"--though the notion of a

mosquito-bite inflicted by a laugh is original with Mr. Choate, unless

Lord Castlereagh may have used it before. But we would seriously ask

Mr. Choate who the big ministers of the country are, if the Beechers,

if Wayland, Park, Bushnell, Cheever, Furness, Parker, Hedge, Bellows,

and Huntington are the little ones?

There is an amusing passage in which Mr. Choate would seem to assume

to himself and those who agree with him the honors of martyrdom. This

shows a wonderful change in public opinion; though the martyrs in the

"Legenda Aurea" and Fox seem to have had a harder time of it than we

supposed to be the case with Mr. Choate.

We have not space to follow him farther, and only the reputation of

the man, and the singularity of the occasion, which gave a kind of

national significance to the affair, would have tempted us to intrude

upon the select privacy of the Young Men's Democratic Association.

Finally, as Mr. Choate appears to have a very mean opinion of the

understandings and the culture of those opposed to him in politics, we

beg to remind him, since he has been led out, like Balaam, to prophesy

against the tents and armies of the Republican Israel, and has ended

by proving their invincibility, that it was an animal in all respects

inferior to a prophet, and in some to a politician, who was first

aware of the presence of the heavenly messenger; and it may be that

persons incapable of a generalization--as that patient creature

undoubtedly was--may see as far into the future as the greatest

philosopher who turns his eyes always to the past.

Footnote 1: We may be allowed to wonder, however, at his speaking of

"memories that burn and revel in the pages of Herodotus,"--a phrase

which does injustice to the simple and quiet style of the delightful

Pepys of Antiquity.

LITERARY NOTICES.

DR. ASA GRAY'S _Botanical Series_, New York, Ivison & Phinney,

consisting of--

I. _How Plants Grow_, etc., _with a Popular Flora,_

etc. 16mo. pp. 233.

II. _First Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology._

8vo. pp. 236.

III. _Introduction to Structural and Systematic Botany and Vegetable

Physiology._ 8vo. pp. 555.

IV. _Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States, including

Virginia, Kentucky,_ etc. 8vo. pp. 636.

V. Same as IV., with the _Mosses and Liverworts_ added,

illustrated by Engravings, pp. 739.

VI. Same as IV., with II. bound up with it. pp. 872.

The first-named of these books is a new candidate for public favor;

the others are revised and improved editions of books which have

already been favorably received. We have sometimes thought that the

popularity of a school-book is in inverse proportion to its merits,

and are glad to learn that five editions of Dr. Gray's "Structural and

Systematic Botany" are witnesses against the truth of this assumption.

No man can deny that Dr. Gray's books are all of the highest order of

merit. The accuracy and extent of his scholarship are manifest on

every page,--a scholarship consisting not merely in an extensive

acquaintance with the works of other botanists, but in a careful

confirmation of their results, and in additions to their knowledge, by

an observation of Nature for himself. His clearness of style is an

equally valuable characteristic, making the reader sure that he

understands Dr. Gray, and that Dr. Gray understands the subject. In

the "Manual" this clearness of style extends to the judicious

selection of distinctive marks, whereby allied species may be

distinguished from each other. Even the most difficult genera of

golden-rods, asters, and grasses become intelligible in this manual;

and many a less difficult genus which puzzled our boyhood, with

Beck's, Eaton's, and Pursh's manuals, became so plain in Gray, that we

cannot now imagine where was the difficulty. The extent of the field

which Gray's Manual covers prevents him, of course, from giving

such lifelike descriptions of plants as may be found in Dr.

Bigelow's "Plants of Boston and its Vicinity," or such minute

word-daguerreotypes as those in Mr. Emerson's "Trees of

Massachusetts,"--books which no New England student of botany can

afford to be without; but, on the other hand, the description of each

species, aided by typographical devices of Italics, etc., is

sufficient for any intelligent observer to identify a specimen. The

exquisite engravings, illustrating the genera of Ferns, Hepaticæ, and

Mosses, are also a great assistance.

The volume which we have marked III. is the fifth revised edition of

the "Botanical Text-Book." It contains a complete, although concise,

sketch of Structural Botany and Vegetable Physiology, and a birds'-eye

view of the whole vegetable kingdom in its subdivision into families,

illustrated by over thirteen hundred engravings on wood. It has become

a standard of botany, wherever our language is read.

For those who do not wish to pursue the study so far, the "First

Lessons" is one of the most happily arranged and happily written

scientific text-books ever published, and is illustrated by three

hundred and sixty well-executed wood-cuts. This takes scholars of

thirteen or fourteen years of age far enough into the recesses of the

science for them to see its beauties, and to learn the passwords which

shall admit them to all its hidden and inexhaustible treasures. It

goes over substantially the same ground that is covered by the volume

we have marked III., but in simpler language and with much less

detail; and closes with clear practical directions how to collect

specimens and make an herbarium.

The first book is intended for children of ten or twelve years old, at

home or in school. We hail it as a remarkably successful effort of a

truly learned man to write a book actually adapted to young children.

While all teachers, and writers upon education, insist on the

importance of having a child's first impressions such as shall not

need to be afterwards corrected, and such as shall attract the child

towards the study to which it is introduced, our elementary books have

usually sinned in one or both these points. They are either dry and

repulsive, or else vague and incorrect;--frequently have both

faults. But the child is here told "how plants grow" in a very

pleasant manner, with neat and pretty pictures to illustrate the

words, by one whose thorough knowledge and perspicuity of style

prevent him from ever giving a wrong impression. The "Popular Flora"

which is appended, contains a description of about one hundred

families of the most common cultivated and wild plants, and of the

most familiar genera and species in each family. The English names are

in all cases put in the foreground in bold type,--while the Latin

names stand modestly back, half hidden in parentheses and Italics; and

these English names are in general very well selected,--although we

think that when two or three English names are given to one plant, or

one name to several plants, Dr. Gray ought to indicate which name he

prefers. He allows "Dogwood" to stand without rebuke for the poison

sumac, as well as for the flowering cornel; and gives "Winterberry"

and "Black Alder" without comment to _Prinos verticellata_. A

word of preference on his part might do something towards reforming

and simplifying the popular nomenclature, and this child's manual is

the place to utter that word. We think also that in a second edition

of this Popular Flora it would be well to give a _popular_

description of a few of the most beautiful flowers belonging to those

families which are too difficult for the child properly to

analyze. Thus, Arethusa, Cypripedium, Pogonia, Calopogon, Spiranthes,

Festuca, Osmunda, Onoclea, Lycopodium, Polytrichum, Bryum, Marchantia,

Usnea, Parmelia, Cladonia, Agaricus, Chondrus, and perhaps a few other

genera, furnish plants so familiar and so striking that a child will

be sure to inquire concerning them, and a general description could

easily be framed in a few words which could not mislead him concerning

them.

In writing for children, Dr. Gray seems to have put on a new nature,

in which we have a much fuller sympathy with him than we have ever had

in reading his larger books. We do not like that cold English common

sense which seems reluctant to admit any truth in the higher regions

of thought; and we confess, that, until we had read this little

child's book, "How Plants Grow," we had always suspected Dr. Gray of

leaning towards that old error, so finely exposed by Agassiz in

zoölogy, of considering genera, families, etc., as divisions made by

human skill, for human convenience,--instead of as divisions belonging

to the Creator's plan, as yet but partially understood by human

students.

We hope that the appearance of this masterly little book, so finely

adapted to the child's understanding, may have the effect of

introducing botany into the common schools. The natural taste of

children for flowers indicates clearly the propriety and utility of

giving them lessons upon botany in their earliest years. Go into any

of our New England country-schools at this season of the year, and you

will find a bouquet of wild flowers on the teacher's desk. Take it up

and separate it,--show each flower to the school, tell its name, and

its relationship to other and more familiar cultivated flowers, the

characteristic sensible properties of its family, etc.,--and you will

find the younger scholars your most attentive listeners. And if any

practical man ask, What is the use of the younger scholars learning

anything about wild flowers, which the cultivation of the country may

soon render extinct, and which are but weeds at best?--there are two

sufficient answers ready: first, that all truth is divine, and that

the workmanship of infinite skill is beautiful and worthy of the eyes

which may behold it; secondly, that no mental discipline is better

adapted for the young mind than this learning how to distinguish

plants. No more striking deficiency is observable, in most men, than

the lack of a power to observe closely and with accuracy. The general

inaccuracy of testimony, usually ascribed to inaccuracy of memory, is

in fact to be attributed to inaccuracy of observation. In like

manner, a large proportion of popular errors of judgment spring from

an imperfect perception of the data on which the true conclusions

should be founded. The best remedy for this lack of clear perceptions

would evidently be the cultivation of those habits of close

observation and nice discrimination necessary in a successful

naturalist.