SCENE I.

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. I.--MAY, 1858.--NO. VII.

AMERICAN ANTIQUITY.

The results of the past ten or fifteen years in historical investigation

are exceedingly mortifying to any one who has been proud to call himself

a student of History. We had thought, perhaps, that we knew something

of the origin of human events and the gradual development from the

past into the world of to-day. We had read Herodotus, and Gibbon,

and Gillies, and done manful duty with Rollin. There were certain

comfortable, definite facts in antiquity. Romulus and Remus were our

friends; the transmission of the alphabet by the Phoenicians was a

resting-spot; the destruction of Babylon and the date of the Flood were

fixed stations in the wilderness. In more modern periods, we had a

refuge in the date of the discovery of America; and if we were forced

back into the wilds and uncertainties of American History, Mr. Prescott

soon restored to us the buried empires, and led us easily back through a

few plain centuries.

Beyond these dates, indeed, there was a shadowy land, through whose

changing mists could be seen sometimes the grand outlines of abandoned

cities, or the faint forms of temples, or the graceful column or massive

tomb, which marked the distant path of the advancing race: but these

were scarcely more than visions for a moment, before darkness again

covered the view. Our mythology and philosophy of the past were almost

equally misty and vague. History was to us a succession of facts; empire

succeeding empire, and one form of civilization another, with scarcely

more connection than in the scenes of a theatre;--the great isolated

fact of all being the existence of the Jews. All cosmic myths and noble

conceptions of Deity and pure religious beliefs were only offshoots of

Hebrew tradition.

This, we are pained to say, is all changed now. Our beloved dates, our

easy explanation, and popular narrative are half dissolved under the

touch of modern investigation. Roman History abandons poor Romulus and

Remus; the Flood sinks into a local inundation, and is pushed back

nobody knows how many thousands of years; an Egyptian antiquity arises

of which Herodotus never knew; and Josephus is proved ignorant of his

own subject. Nothing is found separate from the current of the world's

history,--neither Hebrew law and religion, nor Phoenician commerce,

nor Hindoo mythology, nor Grecian art. On the shadowy Past, over the

deserted battle-fields, the burial-mounds, the mausolea, the temples,

the altars, and the habitations of perished nations, new rays of light

are cast. Peoples not heard of before, empires forgotten, conquests not

recorded, arts unknown in their place at this day, and civilizations of

which all has perished but the language, appear again. The world wakes

to find itself much older than it thought. History is hardly the same

study that it once was. Even more than the investigations of hieroglyphs

and bass-reliefs and sculptures, during the past few years, have the

researches in one especial direction changed the face of the ancient

world.

LANGUAGE is found to be itself the best record of a nation's origin,

development, and relation to other races. Each vocabulary and grammar

of a dead nation is a Nineveh, rich in pictures, inscriptions, and

historical records, uncovering to the patient investigator not merely

the external life and actions of the people, but their deepest internal

life, and their connection with other peoples and times. The little

defaced word, the cast-away root, the antique construction, picked up

by the student among the vestiges of a language, may be a relic fresher

from the past and older than a stone from the Pyramids, or the sculpture

of the Assyrian temple.

In American history, this work of investigation till recently had not

been thoroughly entered upon. Within the last quarter of a century,

Kingsborough and Gallatin and Prescott and Davis and Squier and

Schoolcraft and Müller have each thrown some light over the mysterious

antiquity of our own continent. But of all, a French Abbé, an

ethnologist and a careful investigator,--M. BRASSEUR DE BOURBOURG,--has,

in a history recently published, done the best service to this cause. It

is entitled "Histoire des Nations Civilisées du Mexique et de l'Amérique

Centrale." (Paris, 1857.) M. de Bourbourg spent many years in Central

America, studying the face of the country and the languages of the

Indian tribes, and investigating the ancient picture-writing and the

remains of the wonderful ruins of that region. Probably no stranger has

ever enjoyed better opportunities of reading the ancient manuscripts and

studying the dialects of the Central American races. With these helps he

has prepared a groundwork for the history of the early civilized peoples

of our American continent,--a history, it should be remembered, ending

where Prescott's begins,--reaching back, possibly, as far as the

earliest invasions of the Huns, and one of whose fixed dates is at the

time of the Antonines. He has ventured to lift, at length, the veil from

our mysterious and confused American antiquity. It is an especial merit

of M. de Bourbourg, in this stage of the investigation, that he has

attempted to do no more. He has collected and collated facts, but

has sought to give us very few theories. The stable philosophical

conclusions he leaves for later research, when time shall have been

afforded for fuller comparison.

There is an incredible fascination to many minds in these investigations

into the traditions and beliefs of antiquity. We feel in their presence

that they are the oldest things; the most ancient books, or buildings,

or sculptures are modern by their side. They represent the childish

instincts of the human mind,--its _gropings_ after Truth,--its dim

ideals and shadowings forth of what it hopes will be. They are the

earliest answers of man to the great questions, WHENCE and WHITHER?

* * * * *

The most ancient people of Central America, according to M. de

Bourbourg,--a people referred to in all the oldest traditions, but of

whom everything except the memory has passed away,--are the Quinames.

Their rule extended over Mexico and Guatemala, and there is reason to

suppose that they attained to a considerable height of civilization. The

only accounts of their origin are the oral traditions repeated to the

Spaniards by the Indians of Yucatan,--traditions relating that the

fathers of this great nation came from the East, and that God had

delivered them from the pursuit of their enemies and had opened to

them a way over the sea. Other traditions reveal to us the Quinames as

delivered up to the most unnatural vices of ancient society. Whether

the Cyclopean ruins scattered over the continent,--vast masses of

stone placed one upon another without cement, which existed before the

splendid cities whose ruins are yet seen in Central America,--whether

these are the work of this race, or of one still older, is entirely

uncertain.

The most ancient language of Central America, the ground on which all

the succeeding languages have been planted, is the Maya. Even the Indian

languages of to-day are only combinations of their own idioms with this

ancient tongue. Its daughter, the Tzendale, transmits many of the oldest

and most interesting religious beliefs of the Indian tribes.

All the traditions, whether in the Quiche, the Mexican, or the Tzendale,

unite in one somewhat remarkable belief,--in the reverent mention of an

ancient Deliverer or Benefactor; a personage so enveloped in the halo

of religious sentiment and the mist of remote antiquity, that it is

difficult to distinguish his real form. With the Tzendale his name is

Votan;[A] among the many other names in other languages, Quetzalcohuatl

is the one most distinctive. Sometimes he appears as a wise and

dignified legislator, arrived suddenly among an ignorant people from an

unknown country, to instruct them in agriculture, the arts, and even in

religion. He bears suffering in their behalf, patiently labors for them,

and, when at length he has done his work, departs alone from amid the

weeping crowd to the country of his birth. Sometimes he is the mediator

between Deity and men; then again, a personification of the Divine

wisdom and glory; and still again, the noble features seem to be

transmuted in the confused tradition into the countenance of Divinity.

Whether this mysterious person is only the American embodiment of

the Hope of all Nations, or whether he was truly a wise and noble

legislator, driven by some accident to these shores from a foreign

country, and afterwards glorified by the gratitude of his people,

is uncertain, though our author inclines naturally to the latter

supposition. The expression of the Tzendale tradition, "Votan is

the first man whom God sent to divide and distribute these lands of

America," (Vol. I. p. 42,) indicates that he found the continent

inhabited, and either originated the distribution of property or became

a conqueror of the country. The evidence of tradition would clearly

prove that at the arrival of Votan the great proportion of the

inhabitants, from the Isthmus of Panama to the territories of

California, were in a savage condition. The builders of the Cyclopean

ruins were the only exception.

[Footnote A: The resemblance of this name to the Teutonic Wuotan or Odin

is certainly striking and will afford a new argument to the enthusiastic

Rafn, and other advocates of a Scandinavian colonization of

America.--Edd.]

The various traditions agree that this elevated being, the father of

American civilization, inculcated first of all a belief in a Supreme

Creator, Lord of Heaven and Earth. It is a singular fact, that the

ancient Quiche tradition represents the Deity as a Triad, or Trinity,

with the deified heroes arranged in orders below,--a representation not

improbably connected with the Hindoo conception. The belief in a Supreme

Being seems to have been generally diffused among the Central American

and Mexican tribes, even as late as the arrival of the Spaniards. The

Mexicans adored Him under the name of Ipalnemoaloni, or "Him in whom and

by whom we are and live." This "God of all purity," as he is

addressed in a Mexican prayer, was too elevated for vulgar thought or

representation. No altars or temples were erected to him; and it was

only under one of the later kings of the Aztec monarchy that a temple

was built to the "Unknown God."--Vol. I. p. 46.

The founders of the early American civilization bear various titles:

they are called "The Master of the Mountain," "The Heart of the Lake,"

"The Master of the Azure Surface," and the like. Even in the native

traditions, the questions are often asked: "Whence came these men?"

"Under what climate were they born?" One authority answers thus

mysteriously: "They have clearly come from the other shore of the

sea,--from the place which is called 'Camuhifal,'--_The place

where is shadow."_ Why may not this singular expression refer to a

Northern country,--a place where is a long shadow, a winter-night?

A singular characteristic of the ancient Indian legends is the mingling

of two separate courses of tradition. In their poetic conceptions, and

perhaps under the hands of their priests, the old myths of the Creation

are constantly confused with the accounts of the first periods of their

civilization.

The following is the most ancient legend of the Creation, from the MSS.

of Chichicastenango, in the Quiche text: "When all that was necessary to

be created in heaven and on earth was finished, the heaven being formed,

its angles measured and lined, its limits fixed, the lines and parallels

put in their place in heaven and on earth, heaven found itself created,

and Heaven it was called by the Creator and Maker, the Father and

Mother of Life and Existence, ... the Mother of Thought and Wisdom, the

excellence of all that is in heaven and on earth, in the lakes or the

sea. It is thus that he called himself, when all was tranquil and calm,

when all was peaceable and silent, when nothing had movement in the void

of the heavens."--Vol. I. p. 48.

In the narrative of the succeeding work of creation, says M. de

Bourbourg, there is always a double sense. Creation and life are

civilization; the silence and calm of Nature before the existence of

animated beings are the calm and tranquillity of Ocean, over which a

sail is flying towards an unknown shore; and the first aspect of the

shores of America, with its mighty mountains and great rivers, is

confounded with the first appearance of the earth from the chaos of

waters.

"This is the first word," says the Quiche text. "There were neither men,

nor animals, nor birds, nor fishes, nor wood, nor stones, nor valleys,

nor herbs, nor forests. There was only the heaven. The image of the

earth did not yet show itself. There was only the sea, on all sides

surrounded by the heaven ... Nothing had motion, and not the least sigh

agitated the air ... In the midst of this calm and this tranquillity,

was only the Father and the Maker, in the obscurity of the night; there

were only the Fathers and Generators on the whitening water, and they

were clad in azure raiment... And it is on account of them that heaven

exists, and exists equally the Heart of Heaven, which is the name of

God."--Vol. I. p. 51. [B]

[Footnote B: Compare the Hindoo conception, translated from one of the

old Vedic legends, in Bunsen's _Philosophy of History_:--

"Nor Aught nor Nought existed; yon bright

sky

Was not, nor heaven's broad roof outstretched

above.

What covered all? What sheltered? What

concealed?

Was it the waters' fathomless abyss?

There was not death,--yet was there nought

immortal.

There was no confine betwixt day and night.

The only One breathed breathless by itself;--

Other than it there nothing since has been.

Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled

In gloom profound,--an ocean without light.

The germ that still lay covered in the husk

Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent

heat."]

The legend then pictures a council between these "Fathers" and the

Supreme Creator; after which, the word is spoken, and the earth bursts

forth from the darkness, with its great mountains and forests and

animals and birds, as they might to a voyager approaching the shore. An

episode occurs, describing a deluge, but still bearing in it the

traces of the double tradition,--the one referring to some primeval

catastrophe, and the other to a local inundation, which had perhaps

surprised the first legislators in the midst of their efforts. The

Mexican tradition (Codex Chimalpopoca) shows more distinctly the united

action of the Mediator (Quetzalcohuatl) and the Deity:--"From ashes had

God created man and animated him, and they say it is Quetzalcohuatl who

hath perfected him who had been made, and hath _breathed into him, on

the seventh day, the breath of life_."

Another legend, after describing the creation of men of wood, and women

of _cibak_, (the marrow of the corn-flag,) tells us that "the fathers

and the children, from want of intelligence, did not use the language

which they had received to praise the benefaction of their creation, and

never thought of raising their eyes to praise Hurakan. Then were they

destroyed in an inundation. There descended from heaven a rain of

bitumen and resin... And on account of them, the earth was obscured; and

it rained night and day. And men went and came, out of themselves, as if

struck with madness. They wished to mount upon the roofs, and the houses

fell beneath them; when they took refuge in the caves and the

grottoes, these closed over them. This was their punishment and

destruction."--Vol. I. p. 55.

In the Mexican tradition, instead of the rain we find a violent eruption

of the volcanoes, and men are changed into fishes, and again into

_chicime_,--which may designate the barbarian tribes that invaded

Central America.

In still another tradition, the Deity and his associates are more

plainly men of superior intelligence, laboring to civilize savage

races; and finally, when they cannot inspire two essential elements of

civilization,--a taste for labor, and the religious idea,--a sudden

inundation delivers them from the indocile people. Then--so far as the

mysterious language of the legend can be interpreted--they appear to

have withdrawn themselves to a more teachable race. But with these

the difficulty for the new law-givers is that they find nothing

corresponding to the productions of the country from which they had

come. Fruits are in abundance, but there is no grain which requires

culture, and which would give origin to a continued industry. The legend

relates, somewhat naively, the hunger and distress of these elevated

beings, until at length they discover the maize, and other nutritious

fruits and grains in the county of Paxil and Cayala.

Our author places these latter in the state of Chiapas, and the

countries watered by the Usumasinta. The provinces of Mexico and the

Atlantic border of Central America he supposes to be those where the

first legislators of America landed, and where was the cradle of the

first American civilization. In these regions, the great city attributed

to Votan,--Palenque,--the ruins of whose magnificent temples and palaces

even yet astonish the traveller, was one of the first products of this

civilization.

With regard to the much-vexed question of the origin of the Indian

races, M. de Bourbourg offers no theory. In his view, the evidence from

language establishes no certain connection between the Indian tribes and

any other race whatever; though, as he justly remarks, the knowledge of

the languages of the Northeast of Asia and of the interior of America is

yet very limited, and more complete investigations must be waited for

before any very satisfactory conclusions can be attained. The similarity

of the Indian languages points without doubt to a common origin, while

their variety and immense number are indications of a high antiquity;

for who can estimate the succession of years necessary to subdivide a

common tongue into so many languages, and to give birth out of a savage

or nomadic life to a civilization like that of the Aztecs?

In the passage of man from one hemisphere to another he sees no

difficulty; as, without considering Behring's Strait, the voyage, from

Mantchooria, or Japan, following the chain of the Koorile and the

Aleutian Isles, even to the Peninsula of Alaska, would be an enterprise

of no great hazard.

The traditions of the Indian tribes, as well as their monumental

inscriptions, point to an Eastern origin. From whatever direction the

particular tribe may have emigrated, they always speak of their fathers

as having come from the rising of the sun. The Quiche, as well as the

Chippeway traditions, allude to the voyages of their fathers from the

East, from a cold and icy region, through a cloudy and wintry sea, to

countries as cold and gloomy, from which they again turned towards the

South.

Without committing himself to a theory, M. de Bourbourg supposes that

one race--the Quiche--has passed through the whole North American

continent, erecting at different stages of its civilization those

gigantic and mysterious pyramids, the _tumuli_ of the Mississippi

Valley,--of whose origin the present Northern Indian tribes have

preserved no trace, and for whose erection no single American tribe

now would have the wealth or the superfluous labor. This race was

continually driven towards the South by more savage tribes, and it at

length reached its favorite seats and the height of its civilization in

Central America. In comparing the similar monuments of Southern Siberia,

and the dates of the immigration to the Aztec plateau, with those of

the first movements of the Huns and the great revolutions in Asia, an

indication is given, worthy of being followed up by the ethnologist,

of the Asiatic origin of the Central American tribes. The traditions,

monuments, customs, mythology, and astronomic systems all point to a

similar source.

The thorough study of the aboriginal races reveals the fact, that the

whole continent, from the Arctic regions to the Southern Pole, was

divided irregularly between two distinct families;--one nomadic

and savage, the other agricultural and semi-civilized; one with no

institutions or polity or organized religion, the other with regular

forms of government and hierarchical and religious systems. Though

differing so widely, and little associated with each other, they

possessed an analogous physical constitution, analogous customs, idioms,

and grammatical forms, many of which were entirely different from those

of the Old World.

At the period of the discovery of America, not a single tribe west of

the Rocky Mountains possessed the least agricultural skill. Whether the

superiority of the Central American and Mexican tribes was due to

more favorable circumstances and a more genial climate, or to the

instructions of foreign legislators, as their traditions relate, our

author does not decide. In his view, American agriculture originated in

Central America, and was not one of the sciences brought over by the

tribes who first emigrated from Asia.

Of the architectural ruins found in Central America M. de Bourbourg

says: "Among the edifices forgotten by Time in the forests of Mexico and

Central America are found architectural characteristics so different

from one another, that it is as impossible to attribute their

construction to one and the same people, as it is to suppose that they

were built at the same epoch.... The ruins that are the most ancient and

that have the most resemblance to one another are those which have been

discovered in the country of the Lacandous, the foundations of the city

of Mayapan, some buildings of Tulha, and the greater part of those

of Palenque; it is probable that they belong to the first period of

American civilization."--Vol. I. p. 85.

The truly historical records of Central America go back to a period but

little before the Christian era. Beyond that epoch, we behold through

the mists of legends, and in the defaced pictures and sculptures, a

hierarchical despotism sustained by the successors of the mysterious

Votan. The empire of the Votanides is at length ruined by its own vices

and by the attacks of a vigorous race, whose records and language have

come down even to our day,--the only race on the American continent

whose name has been preserved in the memory of the peoples after the

ruin of its power, the only one whose institutions have survived its own

existence,--the Xahoa, or Toltec.

Of all the American languages, the Nahuatl holds the highest place, for

its richness of expression and its sonorous tone,--adapting itself with

equal flexibility to the most sublime and analytic terms of metaphysics,

and to the uses of ordinary life, so that even at this day the

Englishman and the Spaniard employ its vocabulary for natural objects.

The traditions of the Nahoas describe their life in the distant Oriental

country from which they came:--"There they multiplied to a considerable

degree, and lived without civilization. They had not then acquired the

habit of separating themselves from the places which had seen them born;

they paid no tributes; and all spoke a single language. They worshipped

neither wood nor stone; they contented themselves with raising their

eyes to heaven and observing the law of the Creator. They waited with

respect for the rising of the sun, saluting with their invocations the

morning star."

This is their prayer, handed down in Indian tradition,--the oldest piece

extant of American liturgy:--"Hail, Creator and Former! Regard us!

Listen to us! Heart of Heaven! Heart of the Earth! do not leave us! Do

not abandon us, God of Heaven and Earth!... Grant us repose, a glorious

repose, peace and prosperity! the perfection of life and of our being

grant to us, O Hurakan!"

What country and what sun nourished this worship and gave origin to this

great people is as uncertain as all other facts of the early American

history. They came from the East, the tradition says; they landed, it

seems certain, at Panuco, near the present port of Tampico, from seven

barks or ships. Other traditions represent them as accompanied by sages

with venerable beards and flowing robes. They finally settled somewhere

on the coast between Campeachy and the river Tabasco, and founded the

ancient city of Xicalanco. Their chief, who in the reverent affection of

the nation became afterwards their Deity, was Quetzalcohuatl. The

myths which surround his name reveal to us a wise legislator and noble

benefactor. He is seen instructing them in the arts, in religion, and

finally in agriculture, by introducing the cultivation of maize and

other cereals.

Whether he had become the object of envy among the people, or whether he

felt that his work was done, it appears, so far as the vague traditions

can be understood, that he at length determined to return to the unknown

country whence he had come. He gathered his brethren around him and thus

addressed them:--"Know," said he, "that the Lord your God commands you

to dwell in these lands which he hath subjected to you this day. For

him, he returns whence he has come. But he goes only to return later;

for he will visit you again, when the time shall have arrived in which

the world shall have come to an end.[C] In the mean while wait, ye

others, in these countries, with the hope of seeing him again!...Thus

farewell, while we depart with our God!"

[Footnote C: This is the expression of the legend, and certainly points

to the ideas of the Eastern hemisphere. The coincidence with the legends

of Hiawatha and the Finnish Wainamoinen will be remarked.--EDD.]

We will not follow the interesting narrative of the destruction of

the ancient empire of the Votanides by the Nahoas or Toltecs; nor the

account of the dispersion of these latter over Guatemala, Yucatan, and

even among the mountains of California. This last revolution presents

the first precise date which scholars have yet been able to assign to

early American history; it probably occurred A.D. 174.

With the account of the invasion of the Aztec plateau by the Chichemees,

a barbarian tribe of the Toltec family, in the middle of the seventh

century, or of the establishment of the Toltec monarchy in Anahuac, we

will not delay our readers, as these events bring us down to the period

of authentic history, on which we have information from other sources.

"From the moment," says M. de Bourbourg, "in which we see the supremacy

of the cities of Culhuacan and Tollan rise over the cities of the Aztec

plateau dates the true history of this country; but this history is, to

speak the truth, only a grand episode in the annals of this powerful

race [the Toltec]. In the course of a wandering of seven or eight

centuries, it overturns and destroys everything in order to build on the

ruins of ancient kingdoms its own civilization, science, and arts; it

traverses all the provinces of Mexico and Central America, leaving

everywhere traces of its superstitions, its culture, and its laws,

sowing on its passage kingdoms and cities, whose names are forgotten

to-day, but whose mysterious memorials are found again in the monuments

scattered under the forest vegetation of ages and in the different

languages of all the peoples of these countries."--Vol. I. p. 209.

M. de Bourbourg fitly closes his interesting volumes--from which we have

here given a résumé of only the opening chapters--with a remarkable

prophecy, made in the court of Yucatan by the high-priest of Mani.

According to the tradition, this pontiff, inspired by a supernatural

vision, betook himself to Mayapan and thus addressed the king:--"At the

end of the Third Period, [A.D. 1518-1542,] a nation, white and bearded,

shall come from the side where the sun rises, bearing with it a sign,

[the cross,] which shall make all the Gods to flee and fall. This nation

shall rule all the earth, giving peace to those who shall receive it in

peace and who will abandon vain images to adore an only God, whom these

bearded men adore." (Vol. II. p. 594.) M. de Bourbourg does not vouch

for the pure origin of the tradition, but suggests that the wise men of

the Quiche empire already saw that it contained in itself the elements

of destruction, and had already heard rumors of the wonderful white race

which was soon to sweep away the last vestiges of the Central American

governments.

[NOTE.--We cannot but think that our correspondent receives the

traditions reported by M. de Bourbourg with too undoubting faith. Some

of them seem to us to bear plain marks of an origin subsequent to the

Spanish Conquest, and we suspect that others have been considerably

modified in passing through the lively fancy of the Abbé. Even

Ixtlilxochitl, who, as a native and of royal race, must have had access

to all sources of information, and who had the advantage of writing more

than three centuries ago, seems to have looked on the native traditions

as extremely untrustworthy. See Prescott's _History of the Conquest of

Mexico_, Vol. I. p. 12, note.--EDD.]

* * * * *

ROGER PIERCE

The Man With Two Shadows.

"There is ever a black spot in our sunshine." Carlyle.

The sky is gray with unfallen sleet; the wind howls bitterly about the

house; relentless in its desperate speed, it whirls by green crosses

from the fir-boughs in the wood,--dry russet oak-leaves,--tiny cones

from the larch, that were once rose-red with the blood of Spring, but

now rattle on the leafless branches, black and bare as they. No leaf

remains on any bough of the forest, no scarlet streamer of brier flaunts

from the steadfast rocks that underlie all verdure, and now stand out,

bleak and barren, the truths and foundations of life, when its ornate

glories are fled away. The river flows past, a languid stream of lead;

a single crow, screaming for its mate, flaps heavily against the

north-east gale, that enters here also and lifts the carpet in

long waves across the floor, whiffles light eddies of ashes in the

chimney-corner, and vainly presses on door and window, like a houseless

spirit shrieking and pining for a shelter from its bodiless and helpless

unrest in the elements.

The whole air,--although, within, my fire crackles and leaps with

steady cheer, and the red rose on my window is warm and sanguine with

bloom,--yet this whole air is full of tiny sparks of chill to my

sensitive and morbid nature; it is at once electric and cold, the very

atmosphere of spirits.--What a shadow passed that pane! Roger, was it

you?--The storm bursts, in one fierce rush of sleet and roaring wind;

the little spaniel crouched at my feet whimpers and nestles closer; the

house is silent,--silent as my thoughts,--silent as he is who walked

these rooms once, with a face likest to the sky that darkens them

now, and lonelier, lonelier than I, though at his side forever trod a

companion.

This valley of the Moosic is narrow and thinly settled. Here and

there the mad river, leaping from some wooded gorge to rest among the

hemlock-covered islands that break its smoother path between the soft

meadows, is crossed by a strong dam; and a white village, with its

church and graveyard, clusters against the hill-side, sweeping upward

from the huge mills that stand along the shore just below the bridge.

Here and there, too, out of sight of mill or village, a quiet farmer's

house, trimly painted, with barns and hay-stacks and wood-piles drawn up

in goodly array, stands in its old orchard, and offers the front of a

fortress against want and misery. Idle aspect! fortress of vain front!

there are intangible foes that no man may conquer! In such a stronghold

was born Roger Pierce, the Man with two Shadows.

He was the son of good and upright parents. Before he came into their

arms, three tiny shapes had lain there, one after another, for a few

brief weeks, smiled, moaned, and fallen asleep,--to sleep, forever

children, under the daisies and golden-rods. For this reason they cling

to little Roger with passionate apprehension; they fought with the Angel

of Death, and overcame; and, as it ever is to the blind nature of man,

the conquest was greater to them than any gift.

The boy grew up into childhood as other children grow, a daily miracle

to see. Only for him incessant care watched and waited; unwearied as the

angel that looked from him to the face of God, so to gather ever fresh

strength and guidance for the wayward child, his mother's tender eyes

overlooked him all day, followed his tottering steps from room to room,

kept far away from him all fear and pain, shone upon him in the depths

of night, woke and wept for him always. Never could he know the hardy

self-reliance of those whom life casts upon their own strength and care;

the wisdom and the love that lived for him lived in him, and he grew to

be a boy as the tropic blossom of a hot-house grows, without thought or

toil.

It was not until his age brought him in contact with others, that there

seemed to be any difference between his nature and the common race

of children. Always, however, some touch of sullenness lurked in his

temperament; and whatever thwarted his will or fancy darkened the light

of his clear eyes, and drew a dull pallor over his blooming cheek, till

his mother used to tell him at such times that he stood between her and

the sunshine.

But as he grew older, and shared in the sports of his companions, a

strange thing came to pass. Beside the shadow that follows us all in the

light, another, like that, but something deeper, began to go with Roger

Pierce,--not falling with the other, a dial-mark to show the light that

cast it, but capriciously to right or left; on whomever or whatever was

nearest him at the moment, there that Shadow lay; and as time crept on,

the Shadow pertinaciously crept with it, till it was forever hanging

about him, ready to chill with vague terror, or harden as with a frost,

either his fellows or himself.

One peculiar trait this Shadow had: the more the restless child thought

of his visitant, the deeper it grew,--shrinking in size, but becoming

more intensely dark, till it seemed like part of a heavy thunder-cloud,

only that no lightning ever played across its blank gloom.

The first time that the Shadow ever stood before him as an actual

presence was when, a mere child, he was busied one day in the warm May

sunshine making a garden by the school-house, in a line with other

little squares, tracked and moulded by childish fingers, and set with

branches of sallow silvered with downy catkins, half-opened dandelions,

twigs of red-flowered maple, mighty reservoirs of water in sunken

clam-shells, and paths adorned with borders of broken china and

glittering bits of glass. Next to Roger's garden-bed was one that

belonged to two little boys who were sworn friends, and one of these was

busy weaving a fence for his garden, of yellow willow-twigs, which the

other cut and sharpened.

Roger looked on with longing eyes.

"Will you help me, Jimmy?" said he.

"I can't," answered the quiet, timid child.

"No!" shouted Jacob,--the frank, fearless voice bringing a tint of color

into his comrade's cheek. "Jim shan't help you, Roger Pierce! Do you

ever help anybody?"

Then the Shadow fell beside Roger, as he stood with anger and shame

swelling in his throat; it fell across the blue violets he had taken

from Jacob to dress his own garden, and they drooped and withered; it

crossed the path of shining pebbles that he had forced the younger

children to gather for him, and they grew dull as common stones; it

reached over into Jacob's positive, honest face, and darkened it, and

Jimmy, looking up, with fear in his mild eyes, whispered, softly,--"Come

away! it's going to rain;--don't you see that dark cloud?"

Roger started, for the Shadow was darkening about himself; and as he

moodily returned home, it seemed to grow deeper and deeper, till his

mother drew his head upon her knee, and by the singing fire told him

tales of her own childhood, and from the loving brightness of her tender

eyes the Shadow slunk away and left the boy to sleep, unhaunted.

As day by day went by, in patient monotony, Roger became daily more

aware of this ghostly attendant. He was not always alone, for he had

friends who loved him in spite of the Shadow, and grew used to its

appearing;--but he liked to be by himself; for, out of constant

companionship and daily use, this Shadow made for itself a strange

affinity with him, and following his daily rambles over the sharp hills,

tracing to their source the noisy brooks, or setting snares for the

wild creatures whose innocent timid eyes peered at their little enemy

curiously from nook and crevice, he grew to have a moody pleasure in the

knowledge that nothing else disturbed his path or shared his amusements.

But a time came when he must mix more with the outer world; for he was

sent away from home to school, and there, amid a host of strange faces,

he singled out the only one that had a thought of his past life and

home in it, as his special companion,--the same quiet boy who had

unconsciously feared the Shadow in their earlier school-days.

So good and gentle was he, that he did not feel the cloud of Roger's

hateful Double as every one else did; and he even won the boy himself to

except him only from a certain suspicion that had lately sprung from,

his own consciousness of his burden,--a suspicion gradually growing into

a belief that all the world had such a Shadow as his own.

Now this was not a strange result of so painful a reality. Seeing, as

Roger Pierce did, in every action of others toward himself the dark

atmosphere of the Shadow that was peculiarly his own, he watched also

their mutual actions, and, throwing from his own obscurity a shade over

all human deeds, he became possessed of the monomania, a practical

belief that every mortal man, except it might be Jimmy Doane, was

followed and overlooked by this terrible Second Shadow.

In proportion as the gloom of this black Presence seemed to be lightened

over any one was his esteem for him; but by daily looking so steadily

and with such a will to see only darkness in the hearts of men, he

discovered traces of the Shadow even in Jimmy Doane,--and the darkness

shut down, like night at sea, over all the world then.

Now Roger was miserable enough, knowing well that he could escape, if

he would; for there had come with his increasing sense of his tyrant,

a knowledge that every time he thought of the Shadow it darkened more

deeply than ever, and that in forgetting it lay his only hope of escape

from its power. But withal there was a morbid pleasure, the reflex

influence of habit and indolence, that mingled curiously with his

longing desire to forget his Double, but rendered it impossible to do

so without a greater effort than he cared to make, or some help from

another hand; and soon that help seemed to come.

When Roger left his home for school, he left in the quaint oak cradle

a little baby-sister, too young to have a place in his thought as a

definite existence; but after an absence of two years he came back to

find in her a new phase of life, into which the Shadow could not yet

enter.

The child's name her own childish tongue had softened into "Sunny," a

name that was the natural expression of her sunshiny traits, the clear

gay voice, the tranquil azure eyes, the golden curls, the loving looks,

that made Sunny the darling of the house,--the stray sunbeam that

glanced through the doors, flitted by the heavy wainscots, and danced up

the dusky stairways of that old and solitary dwelling.

When Roger returned, fresh from the rough companionship of school, Sunny

seemed to him a creature of some better race than his own. The Shadow

vanished, for he forgot it in his new devotion to Sunny. Nothing did he

leave undone to please her wayward fancies. In those hot summer-days,

he carried her to a little brook that rippled across the meadow, and,

sitting with her in his arms on the large smooth stones that divided

those shallow waters, held her carefully while she splashed her tiny

dimpled feet in the cool ripples, or grasped vainly at the blue-winged

dragon-flies sailing past, on languid, airy pinions, just beyond her

reach. Or he gathered heaps of daisies for the child to toss into the

shining stream, and see the pale star-like blossoms float smoothly down

till some eddy caught them in its sparkling whirl, and, drenching the

frail, helpless leaves, cast them on the farther shore and went its

careless way. Or he told her, in the afternoons, under some wide

apple-tree, wonderful stories of giants and naughty boys, till she fell

asleep on the sweet hay, where the curious grasshoppers peered at her

with round horny eyes, and velvet-bodied spiders scurried across her

fair curls with six-legged speed, and the robin eyed her from a bough

above with wistful glances, till Roger must needs carry her tenderly out

of their neighborhood to his mother's gentle care.

All this guard and guidance Sunny repaid with her only treasure, love.

She left her pet kitten in its gayest antics to sit on Roger's knee; she

went to sleep at night nestled against his arm; every little dainty that

she gathered from garden or field was shared with him; and no pleasure

that did not include Roger could tempt Sunny to be pleased.

For a while the unconscious charm endured; absorbed in his darling,

Roger forgot the Shadow, or remembered it only at rare intervals; and in

that brief time every one seemed to grow better and lovelier. He did not

see in this the coloring of his own more kindly thoughts.

But when, at length, the novelty of Sunny's presence wore off, her

claims grew tiresome. In the faith of her child's heart, she came as

frankly to Roger for help or comfort as she had ever done; and he found

his own plans for study or pleasure constantly interrupted by her

requests or caresses, till the Shadow darkened again beside him, and,

looking over his shoulder, fell so close to Sunny, that his old belief

drew its veil across his eyes for a moment, and he started at the sight

of what he dreaded,--a Shadow haunting Sunny.

Then,--though this first dread passed away,--slowly, but creeping on

with unfailing certainty, the Shadow returned. It fell like a brooding

storm over the fireside of home; he fancied a like shadow following his

mother's steps, darkening his baby-sister's smile; and as if in

revenge for so long an absence, the Shadow forced itself upon him more

strenuously than ever, till poor Roger Pierce was like a bruised and

beaten child,--too sore to have peace or rest, too sensitive to bear any

remedy for his ailment, and too petulant to receive or expect sympathy

from any other and more gentle nature than his own.

It was long before the Shadow made itself felt by Sunny. She never saw

it as others did. If its chill passed over her warm rosy face, she stole

up softly to her brother, and, with a look of pure childish love, put

her hand in his, and said softly, "Poor Roger!" or, with a keener sense

of the Presence, forbore to touch him, but played off her kitten's

merriest tricks before him, or rolled her tiny hoop with shouts of

laughter across the old house-dog as he slept on the grass, looking

vainly for the smile Roger had always given to her baby plays before.

So by degrees she went back to her own pleasures, full of tender thought

for every living thing, and a loving consciousness of their wants and

ways. Her lisping voice chattered brook-like to birds and bees; her

lip curled grievously over the broken wing of a painted moth, or the

struggles of a drowning fly; in Nature's company she played as with an

infant ever divine; and no darkness assailed the never-weary child.

But Roger grew daily closer to his Shadow, and gave himself up to its

dominion, till his mother saw the bondage, and tried, mourning, every

art and device to win him away from the evil spirit, but tried in vain.

So they lived till Sunny was four years old, when suddenly, one bright

day in June, she left the roses in her garden with broken stems, but

ungathered, and, tottering into the house, fell across the threshold,

flushed and sleepy,--as they who lifted her saw at once, in the first

stage of a fever.

This unexpected blow once more severed Roger from his Shadow. He watched

his little sister with a heart full of anxious regret, yet so fully

wrapt in her wants and danger, that the gloomy Shadow, which looked afar

off at his self-accusations, dared not once intrude.

At length that day of crisis came, the pause of fever and delirium,

desired, yet dreaded, by every trembling, fearful heart that hung over

the child's pillow. If she slept, the physician said, her fate hung on

the waking; life or death would seal her when sleep resigned its claim.

It was early morning when this sentence was given; in an hour's time the

fever had subsided, the flush passed from Sunny's cheek, and she slept,

watched breathlessly by Roger and his mother. The curtains of the room

were half drawn to give the little creature air, and there rustled

lightly through them a low south wind, bearing the delicate perfume of

blossoms, and the lulling murmur of bees singing at their sweet toil.

Roger was weary with watching; the chiming sounds of Summer, the low

ticking of the old clock on the stairs, and the utter quiet within,

soothed him to slumber; his head bent forward and rested on the bedside;

he fell asleep, and in his sleep he dreamed.

Over Sunny's pillow (for in this dream he seemed to himself waking and

watching) he saw a hovering spirit, the incarnate shape of Light, gazing

at the sleeping child with ineffable tenderness; but its keen eyes

caught the aspect of Roger's Shadow; the pure lineaments glowed with

something more divinely awful than anger, and with levelled lance it

assailed that evil Presence and bore it to the ground; but the Shadow

slipped aside from the spear, and cowered into distance; the angelic

face saddened, and, stooping downward, folded Sunny in its arms as if to

bear her away.

Roger woke with his own vain attempt to grasp and detain the child. The

setting sun streamed in at the window, and his mother stood at his side,

brought by some inarticulate sound from Sunny's lips.

She sent the boy to call his father, and when they came in together, the

child's wide blue eyes were open, full of supernatural calm; her parched

lips parted with a faint smile; and the loose golden curls pushed off

her forehead, where the blue veins crept, like vivid stains of violet,

under the clear skin.

"Dear mother!" she said, raising her arms slowly, to be lifted on the

pillow; but the low, hoarse voice had lost its music.

Then she turned to her father with that strange bright smile, and again

to Roger, uttering faintly,--

"Stand away, Roger; Sunny wants the light."

They drew all the curtain opposite her bed away, and, as she stretched

her hands eagerly toward the window, the last rays of sunshine glowed

on her pale illuminated face, till it was even as an angel's, and Roger

caught a sudden gleam of wings across the air; but a cold pain struck

him as he gazed, for Sunny fell backward on her pillow. She had gone

with the sunshine.

It seemed now for a time as if the phantasm that haunted Roger Pierce

were banished at last. His moody reserve disappeared; he addressed

himself with quiet, constant effort to console his mother,--to aid his

father,--to fill, so far as he could, the vacant place; and his heart

longed with an incessant thirst for the bright Spirit that hovered in

his dream over Sunny;--he seemed almost to have begun a natural and

healthy life.

But year after year passed away, and the light of Sunny's influence

faded with her fading memory. Green turf grew over her short grave, and

the long slant shadow of its headstone no longer lay on a foot-worn

track. Roger's pilgrimages to that spot were over; his heart had ceased

to remember. The Shadow had reassumed its power, and reigned.

Still through its obscurity he kept one gleam of light,--an admiration

undiminished for those who seemed to have no such attendance; but daily

the number of these grew less.

At length, after the studies of his youth were over, and he had returned

to his old home for life, there came over the settled and brooding

darkness of his soul a warm ray of dawn. In some way, as naturally as

one meets a fresh wind full of vernal odor and life, yet never marks the

moment of its first caress, so naturally, so unmarkedly, he renewed a

childish acquaintance with Violet Channing, a dweller in the same

quiet valley with himself, though for long years the fine threads of

circumstance had parted them.

Not a stone, and the frail green moss that clings to it, are more

essentially different than were Roger Pierce and Violet Channing.

Without a trace of the Shadow in herself, Violet disbelieved its

existence in others. She had heard a rumor of Roger's phantom, but

thought it some strange delusion, or want of perception, in those who

told her,--being rather softened toward him with pity that he should be

so little understood.

In the first days of their acquaintance, it seemed as if the light

of the girl's face would have dispelled forever the darkness of her

companion's Shadow, it was so mild and quiet a shining,--not the mere

outer lustre of beauty, but the deep informing expression of that Spirit

which had companioned Sunny heavenward.

With Violet, soothed by the timid sweetness of her manner, aroused by

her sudden flashes of mirth and vivid enthusiasm, Roger seemed to forget

his hateful companion, or remembered it only to be consoled by her

tender eyes that beamed with pity and affection.

Month after month this intimacy went on, brightening daily in Roger's

mind the ideal picture of his new friend, but creating in her only

a deeper sympathy and a more devout compassion for his wretched and

oppressed life. But as years instead of months went by, the sole

influence no longer rested with the girl, drawing Roger Pierce upward,

as she longed and strove to do, into her own sunshine. Their mutual

relation had only lightened his darkness in part, while it had drawn

over her the faint twilight of a Shadow like his own. But as the chief

characteristic of this unearthly Thing was that it grew by notice, as

some strange Eastern plants live on air, it throve but slowly near to

Violet Channing, whose thoughts were bent on curing the heart-evil of

Roger Pierce, and were so absorbed in that patient care that they had

little chance to turn upon herself; though, when patience almost failed,

and, weary with fruitless labor and unanswered yearning, her heart sunk,

she was conscious of a vague influence that made the sunbeams fall

coldly, and the songs of Summer mournful.

Hour after hour she lavished all the treasure she knew, and much that

she knew not consciously, to beguile the darkness from Roger's brow; or

recalled again and again her own deeds and words, to review them with

strict judgment, lest they might have set provocation in his path; till

at length her loving thoughts grew restless and painful, her face paled,

her frame wasted away, and over her deep melancholy eyes the Shadow hung

like a black tempest reflected in some clear lake.

Roger was not blind to this change; he did not see who had cast the

first veil of darkness over the pure light that had shone so freely for

him; and while he silently regretted what he deemed the desecration of

the spotless image he had loved, nothing whispered that it was his own

Shadow brooding above the true heart that had toiled so faithfully and

long for his enlightening.

The most painful result of all to Violet was the new coldness of Roger's

manner to her. Shadowed as he was, he did not perceive this change in

himself; but Violet, in the silence of night, or in the solitary hours

she spent in wood and field beside her growing Shadow, felt it with

unmingled pain. Vainly did the Spirit of Light within her counsel her to

persevere, looking only at the end she would achieve; subtler and more

penetrative to her untuned ear were the words of the fiend at her side.

One day she had brooded long and drearily on the carelessness and

coldness of her dear, her disregardful friend, and in her worn and weary

soul revolved whatever sweetness of the past had now fled, and what

pangs of love repulsed and devotion scorned lay before her in the

miserable future; and as she held her throbbing head upon her hands,

wasted with fiery pulses, it seemed to her as if the Shadow, inclining

to her ear, whispered, almost audibly,--

"Think what you have given this man!--your hope and peace; the breath of

your life and the beatings of your heart. All your soul is lavished on

him, and see how he repays you!"

The weak and disheartened girl shivered; the time was past when she

could have despised the voice of this dread companion, when the Shadow

dared not have spoken thus; and with bitter tears swelling into her eyes

she and the Shadow walked forth together to a haunt on the mountain-side

where she had been used to meet Roger.

It was a bare rock, just below the summit of a peak crowned with a few

old cedars, from whose laborious growth of dull, dark foliage long

streamers of gray moss waved in the wind. There were scattered crags

about their roots, against whose lichen-covered sides the autumn sun

shone fruitlessly; and from the leafless forests in the deep valley

beneath rose a whispering sound, as if they shuddered, and were stirred

by some foreboding horror.

Violet made her way to this height as eagerly as her lessened strength

and panting heart allowed; but as she lifted her eyes from the narrow

path she had tracked upward, they rested on the last face she wished to

meet, the gloomy visage of Roger Pierce. The girl hesitated, and would

have drawn back, but Roger bade her come near.

"There is no need of your going, Violet," said he; and she crouched

quietly on the rock at his feet, silently, but with fixed eyes,

regarding the double nature before her, the Man and his Shadow.

Still upward from the valley crept that low shiver of dread; the pale

sun shed its listless light on the gray rocks and dusky cedars; the

silent unexpectant earth seemed to have paused; all things were wrapt in

vague awe and dim apprehension; some inexpressible fatality seemed to

oppress life and breath.

A sudden impulse of escape, desperate in its strength, possessed Violet;

perhaps to name that Thing that clung so closely to Roger might shake

its power,--and with a trembling, vibrating voice she spoke:--

"Roger,--you are thinking of the Shadow?"

He did not move, nor at once speak; no new expression stirred his dark

face; at length he answered, in a voice that seemed to come from some

lips far away, in an unechoing distance:--

"The Shadow?--Yes. I see it in all faces. It lies on the valley yonder;

in the air; on every mortal brow and lip it gathers deeper yet. Violet,

you, too, share the Shadow!"

Slowly, as if his words froze her, Violet rose and turned toward him;

a light shone from her eyes that melted their dark depths into the

radiance of high noon; and she spoke with a thrilled, yet unfaltering

tone:--

"Yes, I share it, it is true. I feel and see the gloom; but if the

Shadow haunts me, Roger Pierce, ask your own heart who cast it there!

When we were first friends, I knew nothing of that darkness. I tried

with all purity and compassion to draw you upward into light; and for

reward, you have wrapped your own blackness round me, and hate your own

doing. My work is over,--is in vain! It remains only that I free myself

from this Shadow, and leave you to the mercy of a Power with whom no

such Presence can cope,--in whom no darkness nor shadow may abide."

She turned to leave him with these words, but cast back a look of such

love and tender pity, that she seemed to Roger the very Spirit that had

borne Sunny away.

Bewildered and pained to the heart, he groped his way homeward, and

night lapsed into morning, and returned and went again more than once,

ere sleep returned to his eyes.

Violet kept no vigils; she wept herself asleep as a child against its

mother's bosom, and loving eyes guarded that childlike rest. But Roger's

waking was haunted with remorse and fearful expectation; and as days

crept by, and Memory, like one who fastens the galley-slave to his oar,

still pressed on his thoughts the constant patience, toil, and affection

of Violet Channing, he felt how truly she had spoken of him, and from

his soul abhorred the Shadow of his life.

Here he vanishes. Whether with successful conflict he fought with the

evil and prevailed, and showed himself a man,--or whether the Thing

renewed its dominion, and he drew to himself another nature, not for the

good power of its pure contact, but for the further increase of that

darkness, and the blinding of another soul, is never yet to be known.

Of Violet Channing he saw no more; with her his sole earthly redemption

had fled; she went her way, free henceforward from the Shadow, and

guarded in the arms of the shining Spirit.

The wind yet howls and dashes without; the rain, rushing in gusts on

roof and casement, keeps no time nor tune; the fire is dead in the

ashes; the red rose, in the lessening light, turns gray;--but far away

to the south the cloud begins to scatter; faint amber steals along the

crest of the distant hills; after all evils, hope remains,--even for a

Man with two Shadows. Let us, perhaps his kindred after the spirit, not

despair.

AMOURS DE VOYAGE.

[Concluded.]

IV.

Eastward, or Northward, or West? I wander, and ask as I wander,

Weary, yet eager and sure, where shall I come to my love?

Whitherward hasten to seek her? Ye daughters of Italy, tell me,

Graceful and tender and dark, is she consorting with you?

Thou that out-climbest the torrent, that tendest thy goats to the summit,

Call to me, child of the Alp, has she been seen on the heights?

Italy, farewell I bid thee! for, whither she leads me, I follow.

Farewell the vineyard! for I, where I but guess her, must go.

Weariness welcome, and labor, wherever it be, if at last it

Bring me in mountain or plain into the sight of my love.

I.--Claude to Eustace,--_from Florence_.

Gone from Florence; indeed; and that is truly provoking;--

Gone to Milan, it seems; then I go also to Milan.

Five days now departed; but they can travel but slowly;--

I quicker far; and I know, as it happens, the house they will go to.--

Why, what else should I do? Stay here and look at the pictures,

Statues, and churches? Alack, I am sick of the statues and pictures!--

No, to Bologna, Parma, Piacenza, Lodi, and Milan,

Off go we to-night,--and the Venus go to the Devil!

II.--Claude to Eustace,--_from Bellaggio_.

Gone to Como, they said; and I have posted to Como.

There was a letter left, but the _cameriere_ had lost it.

Could it have been for me? They came, however, to Como,

And from Como went by the boat,--perhaps to the Splügen,--

Or to the Stelvio, say, and the Tyrol; also it might be

By Porlezza across to Lugano, and so to the Simplon

Possibly, or the St. Gothard, or possibly, too, to Baveno,

Orta, Turin, and elsewhere. Indeed, I am greatly bewildered.

III.--Claude to Eustace,--_from Bellaggio_.

I have been up the Splügen, and on the Stelvio also:

Neither of these can I find they have followed; in no one inn, and

This would be odd, have they written their names. I have been to

Porlezza.

There they have not been seen, and therefore not at Lugano.

What shall I do? Go on through the Tyrol, Switzerland, Deutschland,

Seeking, an inverse Saul, a kingdom, to find only asses?

There is a tide, at least in the _love_ affairs of mortals,

Which, when taken at flood, leads on to the happiest fortune,--

Leads to the marriage-morn and the orange-flowers and the altar,

And the long lawful line of crowned joys to crowned joys succeeding.--

Ah, it has ebbed with me! Ye gods, and when it was flowing,

Pitiful fool that I was, to stand fiddle-faddling in that way!

IV.--CLAUDE TO EUSTACE,--_from Bellaggio._

I have returned and found their names in the book at Como.

Certain it is I was right, and yet I am also in error.

Added in feminine hand, I read, _By the boat to Bellaggio._--

So to Bellaggio again, with the words of her writing, to aid me.

Yet at Bellaggio I find no trace, no sort of remembrance.

So I am here, and wait, and know every hour will remove them.

V.--CLAUDE TO EUSTACE,--_from Belaggio._

I have but one chance left,--and that is, going to Florence.

But it is cruel to turn. The mountains seem to demand me,--

Peak and valley from far to beckon and motion me onward.

Somewhere amid their folds she passes whom fain I would follow;

Somewhere among those heights she haply calls me to seek her.

Ah, could I hear her call! could I catch the glimpse of her raiment!

Turn, however, I must, though it seem I turn to desert her;

For the sense of the thing is simply to hurry to Florence,

Where the certainty yet may be learnt, I suppose, from the Ropers.

VI.--MARY TREVELLYN, _from Lucerne_, TO MISS ROPER, _at Florence_.

Dear Miss Roper,--By this you are safely away, we are hoping,

Many a league from Rome; ere long we trust we shall see you.

How have you travelled? I wonder;--was Mr. Claude your companion?

As for ourselves, we went from Como straight to Lugano;

So by the Mount St. Gothard;--we meant to go by Porlezza,

Taking the steamer, and stopping, as you had advised, at Bellaggio;

Two or three days or more; but this was suddenly altered,

After we left the hotel, on the very way to the steamer.

So we have seen, I fear, not one of the lakes in perfection.

Well, he is not come; and now, I suppose, he will not come.

What will you think, meantime?--and yet I must really confess it;--

What will you say? I wrote him a note. We left in a hurry,

Went from Milan to Como three days before we expected.

But I thought, if he came all the way to Milan, he really

Ought not to be disappointed; and so I wrote three lines to

Say I had heard he was coming, desirous of joining our party;--

If so, then I said, we had started for Como, and meant to

Cross the St. Gothard, and stay, we believed, at Lucerne, for the

summer.

Was it wrong? and why, if it was, has it failed to bring him?

Did he not think it worth while to come to Milan? He knew (you

Told him) the house we should go to. Or may it, perhaps, have

miscarried?

Any way, now, I repent, and am heartily vexed that I wrote it.

There is a home on the shore of the Alpine sea, that upswelling

High up the mountain-sides spreads in the hollow between;

Wilderness, mountain, and snow from the land of the olive conceal it;

Under Pilatus's hill low by its river it lies:

Italy, utter one word, and the olive and vine will allure not,--

Wilderness, forest, and snow will not the passage impede;

Italy, unto thy cities receding, the clue to recover,

Hither, recovered the clue, shall not the traveller haste?

V.

There is a city, upbuilt on the quays of the turbulent Arno,

Under Fiesole's heights,--thither are we to return?

There is a city that fringes the curve of the inflowing waters,

Under the perilous hill fringes the beautiful bay,--

Parthenope do they call thee?--the Siren, Neapolis, seated

Under Vesevus's hill,--thither are we to proceed?--

Sicily, Greece, will invite, and the Orient;--or are we to turn to

England, which may after all be for its children the best?

I.--MARY TREVELLYN, _at Lucerne_, TO MISS ROPER, _at Florence_.

So you are really free, and living in quiet at Florence;

That is delightful news;--you travelled slowly and safely;

Mr. Claude got you out; took rooms at Florence before you;

Wrote from Milan to say so; had left directly for Milan,

Hoping to find us soon;--_if he could, he would, you are

certain._--

Dear Miss Roper, your letter has made me exceedingly happy.

You are quite sure, you say, he asked you about our intentions;

You had not heard of Lucerne as yet, but told him of Como.--

Well, perhaps he will come;--however, I will not expect it.

Though you say you are sure,--if he can, he will, _you are

certain._

O my dear, many thanks from your ever affectionate Mary.

II.--CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.

Florence.

_Action will furnish belief,_--but will that belief be the true

one?

This is the point, you know. However, it doesn't much matter

What one wants, I suppose, is to predetermine the action,

So as to make it entail, not a chance-belief, but the true one.

_Out of the question,_ you say, _if a thing isn't wrong, we

may do it._

Ah! but this wrong, you see;--but I do not know that it matters.

Eustace, the Ropers are gone, and no one can tell me about them.

Pisa.

Pisa, they say they think; and so I follow to Pisa,

Hither and thither inquiring. I weary of making inquiries;

I am ashamed, I declare, of asking people about it.--

Who are your friends? You said you had friends who would certainly

know them.

Florence.

But it is idle, moping, and thinking, and trying to fix her

Image more and more in, to write the old perfect inscription

Over and over again upon every page of remembrance.

I have settled to stay at Florence to wait for your answer.

Who are your friends? Write quickly and tell me. I wait for your

answer.

III.--MARY TREVELLYN TO MISS ROPER, _at Lucca Baths_.

You are at Lucca Baths, you tell me, to stay for the summer;

Florence was quite too hot; you can't move further at present.

Will you not come, do you think, before the summer is over?

Mr. C. got you out with very considerable trouble;

And he was useful and kind, and seemed so happy to serve you;

Didn't stay with you long, but talked very openly to you;

Made you almost his confessor, without appearing to know it,--

What about?--and you say you didn't need his confessions.

O my dear Miss Roper, I dare not trust what you tell me!

Will he come, do you think? I am really so sorry for him!

They didn't give him my letter at Milan, I feel pretty certain.

You had told him Bellaggio. We didn't go to Bellaggio;

So he would miss our track, and perhaps never come to Lugano,

Where we were written in full, _To Lucerne, across the St.

Gothard._

But he could write to you;--you would tell him where you were going.

IV.--CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.

Let me, then, bear to forget her. I will not cling to her falsely;

Nothing factitious or forced shall impair the old happy relation.

I will let myself go, forget, not try to remember;

I will walk on my way, accept the chances that meet me,

Freely encounter the world, imbibe these alien airs, and

Never ask if new feelings and thoughts are of her or of others.

Is she not changing, herself?--the old image would only delude me.

I will be bold, too, and change,--if it must be. Yet if in all things,

Yet if I do but aspire evermore to the Absolute only,

I shall be doing, I think, somehow, what she will be doing;--

I shall be thine, O my child, some way, though I know not in what way.

Let me submit to forget her; I must; I already forget her.

V.--CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.

Utterly vain is, alas, this attempt at the Absolute,--wholly!

I, who believed not in her, because I would fain believe nothing,

Have to believe as I may, with a wilful, unmeaning acceptance.

I, who refused to enfasten the roots of my floating existence

In the rich earth, cling now to the hard, naked rock that is left me.--

Ah! she was worthy, Eustace,--and that, indeed, is my comfort,--

Worthy a nobler heart than a fool such as I could have given.

VI.--CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.

Yes, it relieves me to write, though I do not send; and the chance

that

Takes may destroy my fragments. But as men pray, without asking

Whether One really exist to hear or do anything for them,--

Simply impelled by the need of the moment to turn to a Being

In a conception of whom there is freedom from all limitation,--

So in your image I turn to an _ens rationis_ of friendship.

Even to write in your name I know not to whom nor in what wise.

VII.--CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.

There was a time, methought it was but lately departed,

When, if a thing was denied me, I felt I was bound to attempt it;

Choice alone should take, and choice alone should surrender.

There was a time, indeed, when I had not retired thus early,

Languidly thus, from pursuit of a purpose I once had adopted.

But it is over, all that! I have slunk from the perilous field in

Whose wild struggle of forces the prizes of life are contested.

It is over, all that! I am a coward, and know it.

Courage in me could be only factitious, unnatural, useless.

VIII.--CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.

Rome is fallen, I hear, the gallant Medici taken,

Noble Manara slain, and Garibaldi has lost _il Moro_;--

Rome is fallen; and fallen, or falling, heroical Venice.

I, meanwhile, for the loss of a single small chit of a girl, sit

Moping and mourning here,--for her, and myself much smaller.

Whither depart the souls of the brave that die in the battle,

Die in the lost, lost fight, for the cause that perishes with them?

Are they upborne from the field on the slumberous pinions of angels

Unto a far-off home, where the weary rest from their labor,

And the deep wounds are healed, and the bitter and burning moisture

Wiped from the generous eyes? or do they linger, unhappy,

Pining, and haunting the grave of their by-gone hope and endeavor?

All declamation, alas! though I talk, I care not for Rome, nor

Italy; feebly and faintly, and but with the lips, can lament the

Wreck of the Lombard youth and the victory of the oppressor.

Whither depart the brave?--God knows; I certainly do not.

IX.--MARY TREVELLYN TO MISS ROPER.

He has not come as yet; and now I must not expect it.

You have written, you say, to friends at Florence, to see him,

If he perhaps should return;--but that is surely unlikely.

Has he not written to you?--he did not know your direction.

Oh, how strange never once to have told him where you were going!

Yet if he only wrote to Florence, that would have reached you.

If what you say he said was true, why has he not done so?

Is he gone back to Rome, do you think, to his Vatican marbles?--

O my dear Miss Roper, forgive me! do not be angry!--

You have written to Florence;--your friends would certainly find him.

Might you not write to him?--but yet it is so little likely!

I shall expect nothing more.--Ever yours, your affectionate Mary.

X.--CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.

I cannot stay at Florence, not even to wait for a letter.

Galleries only oppress me. Remembrance of hope I had cherished

(Almost more than as hope, when I passed through Florence the first

time)

Lies like a sword in my soul. I am more a coward than ever,

Chicken-hearted, past thought. The _caffes_ and waiters distress

me.

All is unkind, and, alas, I am ready for any one's kindness.

Oh, I knew it of old, and knew it, I thought, to perfection,

If there is any one thing in the world to preclude all kindness,

It is the need of it,--it is this sad self-defeating dependence.

Why is this, Eustace? Myself, were I stronger, I think I could tell

you.

But it is odd when it comes. So plumb I the deeps of depression,

Daily in deeper, and find no support, no will, no purpose.

All my old strengths are gone. And yet I shall have to do something.

Ah, the key of our life, that passes all wards, opens all locks,

Is not _I will_, but _I must_. I must,--I must,--and I do

it.

XI--CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.

At the last moment I have your letter, for which I was waiting.

I have taken my place, and see no good in inquiries.

Do nothing more, good Eustace, I pray you. It only will vex me.

Take no measures. Indeed, should we meet, I could not be certain;

All might be changed, you know. Or perhaps there was nothing to be

changed.

It is a curious history, this; and yet I foresaw it;

I could have told it before. The Fates, it is clear, are against us;

For it is certain enough that I met with the people you mention;

They were at Florence the day I returned there, and spoke to me even;

Staid a week, saw me often; departed, and whither I know not.

Great is Fate, and is best. I believe in Providence, partly.

What is ordained is right, and all that happens is ordered.

Ah, no, that isn't it. But yet I retain my conclusion:

I will go where I am led, and will not dictate to the chances.

Do nothing more, I beg. If you love me, forbear interfering.

XII.--CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.

Shall we come out of it all, some day, as one does from a tunnel?

Will it be all at once, without our doing or asking,

We shall behold clear day, the trees and meadows about us,

And the faces of friends, and the eyes we loved looking at us?

Who knows? Who can say? It will not do to suppose it.

XIII.--CLAUDE TO EUSTACE,--_from Rome_.

Rome will not suit me, Eustace; the priests and soldiers possess it;

Priests and soldiers;--and, ah! which is worst, the priest or the

soldier?

Politics farewell, however! For what could I do? with inquiring,

Talking, collating the journals, go fever my brain about things o'er

Which I can have no control. No, happen whatever may happen,

Time, I suppose, will subsist; the earth will revolve on its axis;

People will travel; the stranger will wander as now in the city;

Rome will be here, and the Pope the _custode_ of Vatican marbles.

I have no heart, however, for any marble or fresco;

I have essayed it in vain; 'tis vain as yet to essay it:

But I may haply resume some day my studies in this kind.

Not as the Scripture says, is, I think, the fact. Ere our death-day,

Faith, I think, does pass, and Love; but Knowledge abideth.

Let us seek Knowledge;--the rest must come and go as it happens.

Knowledge is hard to seek, and harder yet to adhere to.

Knowledge is painful often; and yet when we know, we are happy.

Seek it, and leave mere Faith and Love to come with the chances.

As for Hope,--to-morrow I hope to be starting for Naples.

Rome will not do, I see; for many very good reasons.

Eastward, then, I suppose, with the coming of winter, to Egypt.

XIV.--Mary Trevellyn to Miss Roper.

You have heard nothing; of course, I know you can have heard nothing.

Ah, well, more than once I have broken my purpose, and sometimes,

Only too often, have looked for the little lake-steamer to bring him.

But it is only fancy,--I do not really expect it.

Oh, and you see I know so exactly how he would take it:

Finding the chances prevail against meeting again, he would banish

Forthwith every thought of the poor little possible hope, which

I myself could not help, perhaps, thinking only too much of;

He would resign himself, and go. I see it exactly.

So I also submit, although in a different manner.

Can you not really come? We go very shortly to England.

* * * * *

So go forth to the world, to the good report and the evil!

Go, little book! thy tale, is it not evil and good?

Go, and if strangers revile, pass quietly by without answer.

Go, and if curious friends ask of thy rearing and age,

Say, _I am flitting about many years from brain unto brain of

Feeble and restless youths born to inglorious days_;

_But_, so finish the word, _I was writ in a Roman chamber,

When from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon of France_.

INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER.

The desire, the duty, the necessity of the age in which we live is

education, or that culture which developes, enlarges, and enriches each

individual intelligence, according to the measure of its capacity, by

familiarizing it with the facts and laws of nature and human life.

But, in this rage for information, we too often overlook the mental

constitution of the being we would inform,--detaching the apprehensive

from the active powers, weakening character by overloading memory, and

reaping a harvest of imbeciles after we may have flattered ourselves we

had sown a crop of geniuses. No person can be called educated, until he

has organized his knowledge into faculty, and wields it as a weapon.

We purpose, therefore, to invite the attention of our readers to some

remarks on Intellectual Character, the last and highest result of

intellectual education, and the indispensable condition of intellectual

success.

It is evident, that, when a young man leaves his school or college to

take his place in the world, it is indispensable that he be something

as well as know something; and it will require but little experience to

demonstrate to him that what he really knows is little more than what

he really is, and that his progress in intellectual manhood is not more

determined by the information he retains, than by that portion which, by

a benign provision of Providence, he is enabled to forget. Youth, to

be sure, is his,--youth, in virtue of which he is free of the

universe,--youth, with its elastic vigor, its far-darting hopes, its

generous impatience of prudent meanness, its grand denial of instituted

falsehood, its beautiful contempt of accredited baseness,--but youth

which must now concentrate its wayward energies, which must discourse

with facts and grapple with men, and through strife and struggle, and

the sad wisdom of experience, must pass from the vague delights of

generous impulses to the assured joy of manly principles. The moment he

comes in contact with the stern and stubborn realities which frown on

his entrance into practical life, he will find that power is the soul of

knowledge, and character the condition of intelligence. He will discover

that intellectual success depends primarily on qualities which are not

strictly intellectual, but personal and constitutional. The test

of success is influence,--that is, the power of shaping events by

informing, guiding, animating, controlling other minds. Whether this

influence be exerted directly in the world of practical affairs, or

indirectly in the world of ideas, its fundamental condition is still

force of individual being, and the amount of influence is the measure

of the degree of force, just as an effect measures a cause. The

characteristic of intellect is insight,--insight into things and their

relations; but then this insight is intense or languid, clear or

confused, comprehensive or narrow, exactly in proportion to the weight

and power of the individual who sees and combines. It is not so much the

intellect that makes the man, as the man the intellect; in every act of

earnest thinking, the reach of the thought depends on the pressure of

the will; and we would therefore emphasize and enforce, as the primitive

requirement of intellectual success, that discipline of the individual

which developes dim tendencies into positive sentiments, sentiments into

ideas, and ideas into abilities,--that discipline by which intellect

is penetrated through and through with the qualities of manhood, and

endowed with arms as well as eyes. This is Intellectual Character.

Now it should be thundered in the ears of every young man who has

passed through that course of instruction ironically styled education,

"What do you intend to be, and what do you intend to do? Do you purpose

to play at living, or do you purpose to live?--to be a memory, a

word-cistern, a feeble prater on illustrious themes, one of the world's

thousand chatterers, or a will, a power, a man?" No varnish and veneer

of scholarship, no command of the tricks of logic and rhetoric, can ever

make you a positive force in the world. Look around you in the community

of educated men, and see how many, who started on their career with

minds as bright and eager and hearts as hopeful as yours, have been

mysteriously arrested in their growth,--have lost all the kindling

sentiments which glorified their youthful studies, and dwindled into

complacent echoes of surrounding mediocrity,--have begun, indeed, to die

on the very threshold of manhood, and stand in society as tombs rather

than temples of immortal souls. See, too, the wide disconnection between

knowledge and life;--heaps of information piled upon little heads;

everybody speaking,--few who have earned the right to speak; maxims

enough to regenerate a universe,--a woful lack of great hearts, in

which reason, right, and truth, regal and militant, are fortified and

encamped! Now this disposition to skulk the austere requirements of

intellectual growth in an indolent surrender of the mind's power of

self-direction must be overcome at the outset, or, in spite of your

grand generalities, you will be at the mercy of every bullying lie,

and strike your colors to every mean truism, and shape your life

in accordance with every low motive, which the strength of genuine

wickedness or genuine stupidity can bring to bear upon you. There is no

escape from slavery, or the mere pretence of freedom, but in radical

individual power; and all solid intellectual culture is simply the right

development of individuality into its true intellectual form.

And first, at the risk of being considered metaphysical,--though we fear

no metaphysician would indorse the charge,--let us define what we

mean by individuality; for the word is commonly made to signify some

peculiarity or eccentricity, some unreasonable twist, of mind or

disposition. An individual, then, in the sense in which we use the term,

is a causative spiritual force, whose root and being are in eternity,

but who lives, grows, and builds up his nature in time. All the objects

of sense and thought, all facts and ideas, all things, are external to

his essential personality. But he has bound up in his personal being

sympathies and capacities which ally him with external objects, and

enable him to transmute their inner spirit and substance into his own

personal life. The process of his growth, therefore, is a development

of power from within to assimilate objects from without, the power

increasing with every vital exercise of it. The result of this

assimilation is character. Character is the spiritual body of the

person, and represents the individualization of vital experience, the

conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men. Sir Thomas

Browne, in quaint reference to the building up of our physical frame

through the food we eat, declares that we have all been on our own

trenchers; and so, on the same principle, our spiritual faculties can be

analyzed into impersonal facts and ideas, whose life and substance we

have converted into personal reason, imagination, and passion. The

fundamental characteristic of man is spiritual hunger; the universe of

thought and matter is spiritual food. He feeds on Nature; he feeds on

ideas; he feeds, through art, science, literature, and history, on

the acts and thoughts of other minds; and could we take the mightiest

intellect that ever awed and controlled the world, and unravel his

powers, and return their constituent particles to the multitudinous

objects whence they were derived, the last probe of our analysis, after

we had stripped him of all his faculties, would touch that unquenchable

fiery atom of personality which had organized round itself such a

colossal body of mind, and which, in its simple naked energy, would

still be capable of rehabilitating itself in the powers and passions of

which it had been shorn.

It results from this doctrine of the mind's growth, that success in all

the departments of life over which intellect holds dominion depends, not

merely on an outside knowledge of the facts and laws connected with each

department, but on the assimilation of that knowledge into instinctive

intelligence and active power. Take the good farmer, and you will find

that ideas in him are endowed with will, and can work. Take the good

general, and you will find that the principles of his profession are

inwrought into the substance of his nature, and act with the velocity

of instincts. Take the good judge, and in him jurisprudence seems

impersonated, and his opinions are authorities. Take the good merchant,

and you will find that commerce, in its facts and laws, seems in him

embodied, and that his sagacity appears identical with the objects on

which it is exercised. Take the great statesman, take Webster, and note

how, by thoroughly individualizing his comprehensive experience, he

seems to carry a nation in his brain; how, in all that relates to the

matter in hand, he has in him as _faculty_ what is out of him in _fact_;

how between the man and the thing there occurs that subtile freemasonry

of recognition which we call the mind's intuitive glance; and how

conflicting principles and statements, mixed and mingling in fierce

confusion and with deafening war-cries, fall into order and relation,

and move in the direction of one inexorable controlling idea, the

moment they are grasped by an intellect which is in the secret of their

combination:--

"Confusion hears his voice, and the wild uproar

stills."

Mark, too, how, in the productions of his mind, the presence and

pressure of his whole nature, in each intellectual act, keeps his

opinions on the level of his character, and stamps every weighty

paragraph with "Daniel Webster, his mark." The characteristic, of all

his great speeches is, that the statements, arguments, and images have

what we should call a positive being of their own,--stand out as plainly

to the sight as a ledge of rocks or chain of hills,--and, like the works

of Nature herself, need no other justification of their right to exist

than the fact of their existence. We may detest their object, but we

cannot deny their solidity of organization. This power of giving a

substantial body, an undeniable external shape and form, to his thoughts

and perceptions, so that the toiling mind does not so much seem to pass

from one sentence to another, unfolding its leading idea, as to

make each sentence a solid work in a Torres-Vedras line of

fortifications,--this prodigious constructive faculty, wielded with the

strength of a huge Samson-like artificer in the material of mind, and

welding together the substances it might not be able to fuse, puzzled

all opponents who understood it not, and baffled the efforts of all who

understood it well. He rarely took a position on any political question,

which did not draw down upon him a whole battalion of adversaries, with

ingenious array of argument and infinite noise of declamation; but after

the smoke and dust and clamor of the combat were over, the speech loomed

up, perfect and whole, a permanent thing in history or literature,

while the loud thunders of opposition had too often died away into low

mutterings, audible only to the adventurous antiquary who gropes in the

"still air" of stale "Congressional Debates." The rhetoric of sentences

however melodious, of aphorisms however pointed, of abstractions however

true, cannot stand in the storm of affairs against this true rhetoric,

in which thought is consubstantiated with things.

Now in men of this stamp, who have so organized knowledge into faculty

that they have attained the power of giving Thought the character of

Fact, we notice no distinction between power of intellect and power of

will, but an indissoluble union and fusion of force and insight. Facts

and laws are so blended with their personal being, that we can hardly

decide whether it is thought that wills or will that thinks. Their

actions display the intensest intelligence; their thoughts come from

them clothed in the thews and sinews of energetic volition. Their force,

being proportioned to their intelligence, never issues in that wild and

anarchical impulse, or that tough, obstinate, narrow wilfulness, which

many take to be the characteristic of individualized power. They may, in

fact, exhibit no striking individual traits which stand impertinently

out, and yet from this very cause be all the more potent and influential

individualities. Indeed, in the highest efforts of ecstatic action,

when the person is mightiest, and amazes us by the giant leaps of his

intuition, the mere peculiarities of his personality are unseen and

unfelt. This is the case with Homer, Shakspeare, and Goethe, in

poetry,--with Plato and Bacon, in philosophy,--with Newton, in

science,--with Caesar, in war. Such men doubtless had peculiarities and

caprices, but they were "burnt and purged away" by the fire of their

genius, when its action was intensest. Then their whole natures were

melted down into pure force and insight, and the impression they leave

upon the mind is the impression of marvellous force and weight and reach

of thought.

If it be objected, that these high examples are fitted to provoke

despair rather than stimulate emulation, the answer is, that they

contain, exemplify, and emphasize the principles, and flash subtile

hints of the processes, of all mental growth and production. How comes

it that these men's thoughts radiate from them as acts, endowed not only

with an illuminating, but a penetrating and animating power? The answer

to this is a statement of the genesis, not merely of genius, but of

every form of intellectual manhood; for such thoughts do not leap, _à

la_ Minerva, full-grown from the head, but are struck off in those

moments when the whole nature of the thinker is alive and aglow with an

inspiration kindled long before in remote recesses of consciousness from

one spark of immortal fire, and unweariedly burning, burning, burning,

until it lit up the whole inert mass of surrounding mind in flame.

To show, indeed, how little there is of the _extempore_, the hap-hazard,

the hit-or-miss, in the character of creative thought, and how

completely the gladdest inspiration is earned, let us glance at the

psychological history of one of those imperial ideas which measure the

power, test the quality, and convey the life, of the minds that conceive

them. The progress of such an idea is from film to form. It has its

origin in an atmosphere of feeling; for the first vital movement of the

mind is emotional, and is expressed in a dim tendency, a feeble feeling

after the object, or the class of objects, related to the peculiar

constitution and latent affinities of its individual being. This

tendency gradually condenses and deepens into a sentiment, pervading the

man with a love of those objects,--by a sweet compulsion ordering his

energies in their direction,--and by slow degrees investing them,

through a process of imagination, with the attribute of beauty, and,

through a process of reason, investing the purpose with which he pursues

them with the attribute of intelligence. The object dilates as the mind

assimilates and the nature moves, so that every step in this advance

from mere emotion to vivid insight is a building up of the faculties

which each onward movement evokes and exercises,--sentiment,

imagination, reason increasing their power and enlarging their scope

with each impetus that speeds them on to their bright and beckoning

goal. Then, when the individual has reached his full mental stature, and

come in direct contact with the object, then, only then, does he "pluck

out the heart of its mystery" in one of those lightning-like _acts_ of

thought which we call combination, invention, discovery.

There is no luck, no accident, in all this. Nature does not capriciously

scatter her secrets as golden gifts to lazy pets and luxurious darlings,

but imposes tasks when she presents opportunities, and uplifts him whom

she would inform. The apple that she drops at the feet of Newton is but

a coy invitation to follow her to the stars.

Now this living process of developing manhood and building up mind,

while the person is on the trail of a definite object of intelligence,

is in continual danger of being devitalized into a formal process of

mere acquisition, which, though it may make great memories of students,

will be sure to leave them little men. Their thoughts will be the

_attachés_, not the offspring, of their minds. They will have a bowing

acquaintance with many truths, without being admitted to the familiarity

of embracing or shaking hands with one. If they have native stamina of

animal constitution, they may become men of passions and opinions, but

they never will become men of sentiments and ideas; they may know the

truth as it is _about_ a thing, and support it with acrid and wrangling

dogmatism, but they never will know the truth as it is in the thing,

and support it with faith and insight. And the moment they come into

collision with a really live man, they will find their souls inwardly

wither, and their boasted acquisitions fall away, before one glance of

his irradiating intelligence and one stroke of his smiting will. If, on

the contrary, they are guided by good or great sentiments, which are the

souls of good or great ideas, these sentiments will be sure to organize

all the capacity there is in them into positive intellectual character;

but let them once divorce love from their occupations in life, and they

will find that labor will degenerate into drudgery, and drudgery will

weaken the power to labor, and weakness, as a last resort, will

intrench itself in pretence and deception. If they are in the learned

professions, they will become tricksters in law, quacks in medicine,

formalists in divinity, though _regular_ practitioners in all; and

clients will be cheated, and patients will be poisoned, and parishioners

will be--we dare not say what!--though all the colleges in the universe

had showered on them their diplomas. "To be weak is miserable": Milton

wrested that secret from the Devil himself!--but what shall we say of

those whose weakness has subsided from misery into complacency, and who

feel all the moral might of their being hourly rust and decay, with the

most amiable indifference and lazy content with dissolution?

Now this weakness is a mental and moral sickness, pointing the way to

mental and moral death. It has its source in a violation of that law

which makes the health of the mind depend on its activity being directed

to an object. When directed on itself, it becomes fitful and moody;

and moodiness generates morbidness, and morbidness misanthropy, and

misanthropy self-contempt, and self-contempt begins the work of

self-dissolution. Why, every sensible man will despise himself, if he

concentrates his attention on that important personage! The joy and

confidence of activity come from its being fixed and fastened on things

external to itself. "The human heart," says Luther,--and we can apply

the remark as well, to the human mind,--"is like a millstone in a mill;

when you put wheat under it, it turns, and grinds, and bruises the wheat

into flour; if you put no wheat in, it still grinds on, but then it is

itself it grinds, and slowly wears away." Now activity for an object,

which is an activity that constantly increases the power of acting,

and keeps the mind glad, fresh, vigorous, and young, has three deadly

enemies,--intellectual indolence, intellectual conceit, and intellectual

fear. We will say a few words on the operation of this triad of

malignants.

Montaigne relates, that, while once walking in the fields, he was

accosted by a beggar of Herculean frame, who solicited alms. "Are you

not ashamed to beg?" said the philosopher, with a frown,--"you who are

so palpably able to work?" "Oh, Sir," was the sturdy knave's drawling

rejoinder, "if you only knew how lazy I am!" Herein is the whole

philosophy of idleness; and we are afraid that many a student of good

natural capacity slips and slides from thought into reverie, and from

reverie into apathy, and from apathy into incurable indisposition to

think, with as much sweet unconsciousness of degradation as Montaigne's

mendicant evinced; and at last hides from himself the fact of his

imbecility of action, somewhat as Sir James Herring accounted for the

fact that he could not rise early in the morning: he could, he said,

make up his mind to it, but could not make up his body.

"He who eats with the Devil," says the proverb, "has need of a long

spoon"; and he who domesticates this pleasant vice of indolence, and

allows it to nestle near his will, has need of a long head. Ordinary

minds may well be watchful of its insidious approaches when great ones

have mourned over its enfeebling effects; and the subtle indolence

that stole over the powers of Mackintosh, and gradually impaired the

productiveness even of Goethe, may well scare intellects of less natural

grasp and imaginations of less instinctive creativeness. Every step,

indeed, of the student's progress calls for energy and effort, and every

step is beset by some soft temptation to abandon the task of developing

power for the delight of following impulse. The appetites, for example,

instead of being bitted, and bridled, and trained into passions, and

sent through the intellect to quicken, sharpen, and intensify its

activity, are allowed to take their way unmolested to their own objects

of sense, and drag the mind down to their own sensual level. Sentiment

decays, the vision fades, faith in principles departs, the moment that

appetite rules. On the closing doors of that "sensual stye," as over the

gate of Dante's hell, be it written: "Let those who enter here leave

hope behind."

But a more refined operation of this pestilent indolence is its way

of infusing into the mind the delusive belief that it can attain the

objects of activity without its exercise. Under this illusion, men

expect to grow wise, as men who gamble in stocks expect to grow rich, by

chance, and not by work. They invest in mediocrity in the confident hope

that it will go many hundred per cent. above par; and so shocking has

been the inflation of the intellectual currency of late years, that this

speculation of indolence sometimes partially succeeds. But a revulsion

comes,--and then brass has to make a break-neck descent to reach its

proper level below gold. There are others whom indolence deludes by some

trash about "fits" of inspiration, for whose Heaven-sent spasms they are

humbly to wait. There is, it seems, a lucky thought somewhere in the

abyss of possibility, which is somehow, at some time, to step out

of essence into substance, and take up its abode in their capacious

minds,--dutifully kept unoccupied in order that the expected celestial

visitor may not be crowded for room. Chance is to make them king, and

chance to crown them, without their stir! There are others still, who,

while sloth is sapping the primitive energy of their natures, expect to

scale the fortresses of knowledge by leaps and not by ladders, and who

count on success in such perilous gymnastics, not by the discipline of

the athlete, but by the dissipation of the idler. Indolence, indeed,

is never at a loss for a smooth lie or delicious sophism to justify

inaction, and, in our day, has rationalized it into a philosophy of the

mind, and idealized it into a school of poetry, and organized it into a

"hospital of incapables." It promises you the still ecstasy of a divine

repose, while it lures you surely down into the vacant dulness of

inglorious sloth. It provides a primrose path to stagnant pools, to an

Arcadia of thistles, and a Paradise of mud.

But in a mind of any primitive power, intellectual indolence is sure to

generate intellectual conceit,--a little Jack Horner, that ensconces

itself in lazy heads, and, while it dwarfs every power to the level of

its own littleness, keeps vociferating, "What a great man am I!" It is

the essential vice of this glib imp of the mind, even when it infests

large intellects, that it puts Nature in the possessive case,--labels

all its inventions and discoveries "My truth,"--and moves about the

realms of art, science, and letters in a constant fear of having its

pockets picked. Think of a man's having vouchsafed to him one of those

awful glimpses into the mysteries of creation which should be received

with a shudder of prayerful joy, and taking the gracious boon with

a smirk of all-satisfied conceit! One page in what Shakspeare calls

"Nature's infinite book of secrecy" flies a moment open to his eager

gaze, and he hears the rustling of the myriad leaves as they close and

clasp, only to make his spirit more abject, his vanity more ravenous,

his hatred of rivals more rancorous and mean. That grand unselfish

love of truth, and joy in its discovery, by whomsoever made, which

characterize the true seeker and seer of science and creative art, alone

can keep the mind alive and alert, alone can make the possession of

truth a means of elevating and purifying the man.

But if this conceit, in powerful natures, tends to belittle character,

and eat into and consume the very faculties whose successful exercise

creates it, its slyly insinuated venom works swifter and deadlier on

youth and inexperience. The ordinary forms of conceit, it is true,

cannot well flourish in any assemblage of young men, whose plain

interest it is to undeceive all self-deception and quell every

insurrection of individual vanity, and who soon understand the art of

burning the nonsense out of an offending brother by caustic ridicule

and slow-roasting sarcasm. But there is danger of mutual deception,

springing from a common belief in a false, but attractive principle of

culture. The mischief of intellectual conceit in our day consists in its

arresting mental growth at the start by stuffing the mind with the husks

of pretentious generalities, which, while they impart no vital power and

convey no real information, give seeming enlargement to thought, and

represent a seeming opulence of knowledge. The deluded student, who

picks up these ideas in masquerade at the rag-fairs and old-clothes'

shops of philosophy, thinks he has the key to all secrets and the

solvent of all problems, when he really has no experimental knowledge of

anything, and dwindles all the more for every juiceless, unnutritious

abstraction he devours. Though famished for the lack of a morsel of the

true mental food of facts and ideas, he still swaggeringly despises all

relative information in his ambition to clutch at absolute truth, and

accordingly goes directly to ultimates by the short cuts of cheap

generalities. Why, to be sure, should he, who can, Napoleon-like, march

straight on to the interior capital, submit, Marlborough-like, to the

drudgery of besieging the frontier fortresses? Why should he, who can

throw a girdle of generalization round the universe in less than forty

minutes, stoop to master details? And this easy and sprightly amplitude

of understanding, which consists not in including, but in excluding all

relative facts and principles, he calls comprehensiveness; the mental

decrepitude it occasions he dignifies with the appellation of repose;

and, on the strength of comprehensiveness and repose, is of course

qualified to take his seat beside Shakspeare, and chat cosily with

Bacon, and wink knowingly at Goethe, and startle Leibnitz with a slap

on the shoulder,--the true Red-Republican sign of liberty in manners,

equality in power, and fraternity in ideas! These men, to be sure, have

a way of saying things which he has not yet caught; but then their

wide-reaching thoughts are his as well as theirs. Imitating the

condescension of some contemporary philosophers of the Infinite, he

graciously accepts Christianity and patronizes the idea of Deity, though

he gives you to understand that he could easily pitch a generalization

outside of both. And thus, mistaking his slab-sidedness for

many-sidedness, and forgetting that there is no insight without force

to back it,--bedizened in conceit and magnificent in littleness,--he is

thrown on society, walking in a vain show of knowledge, and doomed to

be upset and trampled on by the first brawny concrete Fact he stumbles

against. A true method of culture makes drudgery beautiful by presenting

a vision of the object to which it leads;--beware of the conceit that

dispenses with it! How much better it is to delve for a little solid

knowledge, and be sure of that, than to be a proper target for such

a sarcasm as a great statesman once shot at a glib advocate, who was

saying nothing with great fluency and at great length! "Who," he asked,

"is this self-sufficient, all-sufficient, insufficient man?"

Idleness and Conceit, however, are not more opposed to that

out-springing, reverential activity which makes the person forget

himself in devotion to his objects, than Fear. A bold heart in a sound

head,--that is the condition of energetic thinking, of the thought that

thinks round things and into things and through things; but fear freezes

activity at its inmost fountains. "There is nothing," says Montaigne,

"that I fear so much as fear." Indeed, an educated man, who creeps

along with an apologetic air, cringing to this name and ducking to that

opinion, and hoping that it is not too presumptuous in him to beg the

right to exist,--why, it is a spectacle piteous to gods and hateful to

men! Yet think of the many knots of monitory truisms in which activity

is likely to be caught and entangled at the outset,--knots which a brave

purpose will not waste time to untie, but instantly cuts. First, there

is the nonsense of students killing themselves by over-study,--some few

instances of which, not traceable to over-eating, have shielded the

short-comings of a million idlers. Next, there is the fear that the

intellect may be developed at the expense of the moral nature,--one of

those truths in the abstract which are made to do the office of lies in

the application, and which are calculated not so much to make good men

as _goodies_,--persons rejoicing in an equal mediocrity of morals and

mind, and pertinent examples of the necessity of personal force to

convert moral maxims into moral might. The truth would seem to be, that

half the crimes and sufferings which history records and observation

furnishes are directly traceable to want of thought rather than to bad

intention; and in regard to the other half, which may be referred to

the remorseless selfishness of unsanctified intelligence, has that

selfishness ever had more valuable allies and tools than the mental

torpor that cannot think and the conscientious stupidity that will not?

Moral laws, indeed, are intellectual facts, to be investigated as

well as obeyed; and it is not a blind or blear-eyed conscience, but a

conscience blended with intelligence and consolidated with character,

that can both see and act.

But curtly dismissing the fallacy, that the moral and spiritual

faculties are likely to find a sound basis in a cowed and craven reason,

we come to a form of fear that practically paralyzes independent thought

more than any other, while it is incompatible with manliness and

self-respect. This fear is compounded of self-distrust and that mode

of vanity which cowers beneath the invective of men whose applause it

neither courts nor values. If you examine critically the two raging

parties of conservatism and radicalism, you will find that a goodly

number of their partisans are men who have not chosen their position,

but have been bullied into it,--men who see clearly enough that both

parties are based on principles almost equally true in themselves,

almost equally false by being detached from their mutual relations. But

then each party keeps its professors of intimidation and stainers of

character, whose business it is to deprive men of the luxury of large

thinking, and to drive all neutrals into their respective ranks. The

missiles hurled from one side are disorganizer, infidel, disunionist,

despiser of law, and other trumpery of that sort; from the other side,

the no less effective ones of murderer, dumb dog, traitor to humanity,

and other trumpery of that sort; and the young and sensitive student

finds it difficult to keep the poise of his nature amid the cross-fire

of this logic of fury and rhetoric of execration, and too often ends in

joining one party from fear, or the other from the fear of being

thought afraid. The probability is, that the least danger to his mental

independence will proceed from any apprehension he may entertain of what

are irreverently styled the "old fogies"; for if Young America goes on

at its present headlong rate, there is little doubt that the old fogy

will have to descend from his eminence of place, become an object of

pathos rather than terror, and be compelled to make the inquiring appeal

to his brisk hunters, so often made to himself in vain, "Am I not a man

and a brother?" But with whatever association, political or moral, the

thinker may connect himself, let him go in,--and not be dragged in or

scared in. He certainly can do no good to himself, his country, or his

race, by being the slave and echo of the heads of a clique. Besides,

as most organizations are constituted on the principles of a sort of

literary socialism, and each member lives and trades on a common capital

of phrases, there is danger that these phrases may decline from signs

into substitutes of thought, and both intellect and character evaporate

in words. Thus, a man may be a Union man and a National man, or an

Anti-Slavery man and a Temperance man and a Woman's-Rights' man, and

still be very little of a man. There is, indeed, no more ludicrous sight

than to see Mediocrity, perched on one of these resounding adjectives,

strut and bluster, and give itself braggadocio airs, and dictate to all

quiet men its maxims of patriotism or morality, and all the while be

but a living illustration through what grandeurs of opinion essential

meanness and poverty of soul will peer and peep and be disclosed. To be

a statesman or reformer requires a courage that dares defy dictation

from any quarter, and a mind which has come in direct contact with the

great inspiring ideas of country and humanity. All the rest is spite,

and spleen; and cant, and conceit, and words.

It is plain, of course, that every man of large and living thought will

naturally sympathize with those great social movements, informing

and reforming, which are the glory of the age; but it must always be

remembered that the grand and generous sentiments that underlie those

movements demand in their fervid disciple a corresponding grandeur and

generosity of soul. There is no reason why his philanthropy should be

malignant because other men's conservatism may be stupid; and the vulgar

insensibility to the rights of the oppressed, and the vulgar scorn of

the claims of the wretched, which men calling themselves respectable and

educated may oppose to his own warmer feelings and nobler principles,

should be met, not with that invective which may be as vulgar as the

narrowness it denounces, nor always with that indignation which is

righteous as well as wrathful, but with that awful contempt with which

Magnanimity shames meanness, simply by the irony of her lofty example

and the sarcasm of her terrible silence.

In these remarks, which we trust our readers have at least been kind

enough to consider worthy of an effort of patience, we have attempted to

connect all genuine intellectual success with manliness of character;

have endeavored to show that force of individual being is its primary

condition; that this force is augmented and enriched, or weakened and

impoverished, according as it is or is not directed to appropriate

objects; that indolence, conceit, and fear present continual checks to

this going out of the mind into glad and invigorating communion with

facts and laws; and that as a man is not a mere bundle of faculties,

but a vital person, whose unity pervades, vivifies, and creates all

the varieties of his manifestation, the same vices which enfeeble and

deprave character tend to enfeeble and deprave intellect. But perhaps we

have not sufficiently indicated a diseased state of consciousness, from

which most intellectual men have suffered, many have died, and all

should be warned,--the disease, namely, of mental disgust, the sign and

the result of mental debility. Mental disgust "sicklies o'er" all the

objects of thought, extinguishes faith in exertion, communicates a dull

wretchedness to indolence in the very process by which it makes activity

impossible, and drags into its own slough of despond, and discolors with

its own morbid reveries, the objects which it should ardently seek and

genially assimilate. It sees things neither as they are, nor as they are

glorified and transfigured by hope and health and faith; but, in the

apathy of that idling introspection which betrays a genius for misery,

it pronounces effort to be vanity, and despairingly dismisses knowledge

as delusion. "Despair," says Donne, "is the damp of hell; rejoicing is

the serenity of heaven."

Now contrast this mental disgust, which proceeds from mental debility,

with the sunny and soul-lifting exhilaration radiated from mental

vigor,--a vigor which comes from the mind's secret consciousness that it

is in contact with moral and spiritual verities, and is partaking of the

rapture of their immortal life. A spirit earnest, hopeful, energetic,

inquisitive, making its mistakes minister to wisdom, and converting the

obstacles it vanquishes into power,--a spirit inspired by a love of the

excellency and beauty of knowledge, which will not let it sleep,--such

a spirit soon learns that the soul of joy is hid in the austere form of

Duty, and that the intellect becomes brighter, keener, clearer, more

buoyant, and more efficient, as it feels the freshening vigor infused

by her monitions and menaces, and the celestial calm imparted by her

soul-satisfying smile. In all the professions and occupations over which

Intellect holds dominion, the student will find that there is no grace

of character without its corresponding grace of mind. He will find that

virtue is an aid to insight; that good and sweet affections will bear a

harvest of pure and high thoughts; that patience will make the intellect

persistent in plans which benevolence will make beneficent in results;

that the austerities of conscience will dictate precision to statements

and exactness to arguments; that the same moral sentiments and moral

power which regulate the conduct of life will illumine the path and

stimulate the purpose of those daring spirits eager to add to the

discoveries of truth and the creations of art. And he will also find

that this purifying interaction of spiritual and mental forces will give

the mind an abiding foundation of joy for its starts of rapture and

flights of ecstasy;--a joy, in whose light and warmth languor and

discontent and depression and despair will be charmed away;--a joy,

which will make the mind large, generous, hopeful, aspiring, in order to

make life beautiful and sweet;--a joy, in the words of an old

divine, "which will put on a more glorious garment above, and be joy

superinvested in glory!"

LOO LOO.

A FEW SCENES FROM A TRUE HISTORY.

SCENE I.

Alfred Noble had grown up to manhood among the rocks and hills of a New

England village. A year spent in Mobile, employed in the duties of a

clerk, had not accustomed him to the dull routine of commercial life. He

longed for the sound of brooks and the fresh air of the hills. It was,

therefore, with great pleasure that he received from his employer a

message to be conveyed to a gentleman who lived in the pleasantest

suburb of the city. It was one of those bright autumnal days when the

earth seems to rejoice consciously in the light that gives her beauty.

Leaving behind him the business quarter of the town, he passed through

pleasant streets bordered with trees, and almost immediately found

himself amid scenes clothed with all the freshness of the country.

Handsome mansions here and there dotted the landscape, with pretty

little parks, enclosing orange-trees and magnolias, surrounded with

hedges of holly, in whose foliage numerous little foraging birds were

busy in the sunshine. The young man looked at these dwellings with

an exile's longing at his heart. He imagined groups of parents and

children, brothers and sisters, under those sheltering roofs, all

strangers to him, an orphan, alone in the world. The pensiveness of

his mood gradually gave place to more cheerful thoughts. Visions of

prosperous business and a happy home rose before him, as he walked

briskly toward the hills south of the city. The intervals between the

houses increased in length, and he soon found himself in a little forest

of pines. Emerging from this, he came suddenly in sight of an elegant

white villa, with colonnaded portico and spacious verandas. He

approached it by a path through a grove, the termination of which had

grown into the semblance of a Gothic arch, by the interlacing of two

trees, one with glossy evergreen leaves, the other yellow with the tints

of autumn. Vines had clambered to the top, and hung in light festoons

from the branches. The foliage, fluttering in a gentle breeze, caused

successive ripples of sun-flecks, which chased each other over trunks

and boughs, and joined in wayward dance with the shadows on the ground.

Arrested by this unusual combination of light and shade, color and form,

the young man stood still for a moment to gaze upon it. He was thinking

to himself that nothing could add to the perfection of its beauty, when

suddenly there came dancing under the arch a figure that seemed like the

fairy of those woods, a spirit of the mosses and the vines. She was a

child, apparently five or six years old, with large brown eyes, and a

profusion of dark hair. Her gypsy hat, ornamented with scarlet ribbons

and a garland of red holly-berries, had fallen back on her shoulders,

and her cheeks were flushed with exercise. A pretty little white dog was

with her, leaping up eagerly for a cluster of holly-berries which she

playfully shook above his head. She whirled swiftly round and round the

frisking animal, her long red ribbons flying on the breeze, and then she

paused, all aglow, swaying herself back and forth, like a flower on its

stem. A flock of doves, as if attracted toward her, came swooping down

from the sky, revolving in graceful curves above her head, their white

breasts glistening in the sunshine. The aërial movements of the child

were so full of life and joy, she was so in harmony with the golden day,

the waving vines, and the circling doves, that the whole scene seemed

like an allegro movement in music, and she a charming little melody

floating through it all.

Alfred stood like one enchanted. He feared to speak or move, lest the

fairy should vanish from mortal presence. So the child and the dog,

equally unconscious of a witness, continued their graceful gambols for

several minutes. An older man might have inwardly moralized on the folly

of the animal, aping humanity in thus earnestly striving after what

would yield no nourishment when obtained. But Alfred was too young and

too happy to moralize. The present moment was all-sufficient for him,

and stood still there in its fulness, unconnected with past or future.

This might have lasted long, had not the child been attracted by the

dove-shadows, and, looking up to watch the flight of the birds, her eyes

encountered the young man. A whole heart full of sunshine was in the

smile with which he greeted her. But, with a startled look, she turned

quickly and ran away; and the dog, still full of frolic, went bounding

by her side. As Alfred tried to pursue them, a bough knocked off his

hat. Without stopping to regain it, he sprang over a holly-hedge, and

came in view of the veranda of a house, just in time to see the fairy

and her dog disappear behind a trellis covered with the evergreen

foliage of the Cherokee rose. Conscious of the impropriety of pursuing

her farther, he paused to take breath. As he passed his hand through his

hair, tossed into masses by running against the wind, he heard a voice

from the veranda exclaim,--

"Whither so fast, Loo Loo? Come here, Loo Loo!"

Glancing upward, he saw a patrician-looking gentleman, in a handsome

morning-gown, of Oriental fashion, and slippers richly embroidered. He

was reclining on a lounge, with wreaths of smoke floating before him;

but seeing the stranger, he rose, and taking the amber-tubed cigar from

his mouth, he said, half laughing,--

"You seem to be in hot haste, Sir. Pray, what have you been hunting?"

Alfred also laughed, as he replied,--

"I have been chasing a charming little girl, who would not be caught.

Perhaps she was your daughter, Sir?"

"She _is_ my daughter," rejoined the gentleman. "A pretty little witch,

is she not? Will you walk in, Sir?"

Alfred thanked him, and said that he was in search of a Mr. Duncan,

whose residence was in that neighborhood.

"I am Mr. Duncan," replied the patrician. "Jack, go and fetch the

gentleman's hat, and bring cigars."

A negro obeyed his orders, and, after smoking awhile on the veranda, the

two gentlemen walked round the grounds.

Once when they approached the house, they heard the pattering of little

feet, and Mr. Duncan called out, with tones of fondness,--

"Come here, Loo Loo! Come, darling, and see the gentleman who has been

running after you!"

But the shy little fairy ran all the faster, and Alfred saw nothing but

the long red ribbons of her gypsy hat, as they floated behind her on the

wind.

Declining a polite invitation to dine, he walked back to the city. The

impression on his mind had been so vivid, that, as he walked, there rose

ever before him a vision of that graceful arch with waving vines, the

undulating flight of the silver-breasted doves, and the airy motions of

that beautiful child. How would his interest in the scene have deepened,

could some sibyl have foretold to him how closely the Fates had

interwoven the destinies of himself and that lovely little one!

When he entered the counting-room, he found his employer in close

conversation with Mr. Grossman, a wealthy cotton-broker. This man was

but little more than thirty years of age, but the predominance of animal

propensities was stamped upon his countenance with more distinctness

than is usual with sensualists of twice his age. The oil of a thousand

hams seemed oozing through his pimpled cheeks; his small gray eyes were

set in his head like the eyes of a pig; his mouth had the expression of

a satyr; and his nose seemed perpetually sniffing the savory prophecy

of food. When the clerk had delivered his message, he slapped him

familiarly on the shoulder, and said,--

"So you've been out to Duncan's, have you? Pretty nest there at Pine

Grove, and they say he's got a rare bird in it; but he keeps her so

close, that I could never catch sight of her. Perhaps you got a peep,

eh?"

"I saw a very beautiful child of Mr. Duncan's," replied Alfred, "but I

did not see his wife."

"That's very likely," rejoined Grossman; "because he never had any

wife."

"He said the little girl was his daughter, and I naturally inferred that

he had a wife," replied Alfred.

"That don't follow of course, my gosling," said the cotton-broker.

"You're green, young man! You're green! I swear, I'd give a good deal

to get sight of Duncan's wench. She must be devilish handsome, or he

wouldn't keep her so close."

Alfred Noble had always felt an instinctive antipathy to this man, who

was often letting fall some remark that jarred harshly with his romantic

ideas of women,--something that seemed to insult the memories of a

beloved mother and sister gone to the spirit-world. But he had never

liked him less than at this moment; for the sly wink of his eye, and

the expressive leer that accompanied his coarse words, were very

disagreeable things to be associated with that charming vision of the

circling doves and the innocent child.