CHAPTER I.

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THE

CONTINENTAL MONTHLY.

DEVOTED TO

LITERATURE AND NATIONAL POLICY.

VOLUME I. 1862.

BOSTON:

J. R. GILMORE, 110 TREMONT STREET.

NEW YORK: GEORGE P. PUTNAM, 532 BROADWAY.

ROSS & TOUSEY, AND H. DEXTER AND COMPANY

PHILADELPHIA T. B. PETERSON & BROTHER

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1861, by

JAMES R. GILMORE,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of

Massachusetts.

JOHN A. GRAY

PRINTER & STEREOTYPER,

16 and 18 Jacob St.

* * * * *

INDEX TO VOLUME I

Across the Continent. Hon. Horace Greeley, 78

Active Service; or, Campaigning In Western Virginia, 330

Actress Wife, the, 64, 139

Among the Pines. Edmund Kirke, 35, 187, 322, 438, 710

Ante-Norse Discoverers of America, the. C. G. Leland, 389, 531

Beaufort District--Past, Present, and Future. Frederic Kidder, 381

Black Witch, the. J. Warren Newcombe, Jr., 155

BOOKS RECEIVED, 94, 348, 469

Bright, John. George M. Towle, 525

Brown's Lecture Tour. Wm. Wirt Sikes, 118

Cabinet Session, 339

Campbell, The late Lord Chancellor, George M. Towle, 285

Columbia's Safety, 578

Constitution and Slavery, the. Rev. C. E. Lord, 619

Cotton, is it our King? Edward Atkinson, 247

Danger, Our, and its Cause. Hon. Geo.C. Boutwell, 219

Desperation and Colonization. C. G. Leland, 657

EDITORS TABLE, 95-112, 228-240, 349-368

470-492, 605-618, 727-749

Education to be, the. Levi Reuben, M.D., 592, 662

Edwards Family, the. Rev. W. Frothingham, 11

Edwards, Jonathan, and the Old Clergy. Rev. W. Frothingham, 265

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Miss Delia M. Colton, 48

Fairies, 524

Fatal Marriage of Bill the Soundser, the. W. L. Tiffany, 395

Fugitives at the West. Miss S. C. Blackwell, 582

General Lyon. Miss Delia M. Colton, 465

Good Wife, the. A Norwegian Story, 290

Graveyard at Princeton, the. Miss McFarlane, 32

Green Corn Dance, the. John Howard Payne, 17

Guerdon, 601

Hamlet a Fat Man. Carlton Edwards, 571

Heir of Roseton, the. Champion Bissell, 210

Howe's Cave, 422

Huguenot Families in America. Hon. G.P. Disosway, 151, 298, 461

Huguenots of Staten Island. Hon. G.P. Disosway, 683

Irving, Washington, Recollections of, 689

Knights of the Golden Circle, the. Charles G. Leland, 473

LITERARY NOTICES, 91-93, 226-227, 346-348

466-468, 602-604, 724-726

Lowell, James Russell. Miss Delia M. Colton, 176

Maccaroni and Canvas. Henry P. Leland, 302, 414, 513, 647

Molly O'Molly Papers, the. 449, 502

Motley, John Lothrop. Miss Delia M. Colton, 309

One of my Predecessors. Bayard Taylor, 273

On the Plains. Hon. Horace Greeley, 167

Our War and our Want. C. G. Leland, 113

Patterson's Campaign in Virginia, 257

Philosophic Bankrupt. Henry T. Lee, 496

POETRY:

All Together, 506

Black Flag, the. C. G. Leland, 138

Changed. Mrs. Paul Ackers, 570

Child's Call at Eventide, 289

Columbia to Britannia, 404

En Avant, 656

England, To, C. G. Leland, 209

Freedom's Stars, 166

Game of Fate, the. C. G. Leland, 268

Hemming Cotton. C. G. Leland, 272

Lesson of War, the. Henry Carey Lea, 46

Lessons of the Hour, the. Edward L. Rand, Jr., 320

Monroe to Farragut. C. G. Leland, 709

New-England's Advance. Augusta C. Kimball, 701

Potential Moods, 427

Red, White, and Blue, the. 646

Rosin the Bow. B. B. Foster, 29

Self-Reliance, 149

She Sits Alone. Henry P. Leland, 225

Song of Freedom. Edward L. Rand, Jr., 76

Sonnet. H. T. Tuckerman, 16

Sphinx and OEdipus. T. H. Underwood, 63

Spur of Monmouth, the. Henry Morford, 392

Ten to One on it. C. G. Leland, 465

Watchword, the. 126

Westward, 246

What will you do with us? C. G. Leland, 175

Progress, is it a Truth? Henry P. Leland, 6

Resurgamus. Henry P. Leland, 186

Roanoke Island. Frederic Kidder, 541

Seven Devils. Rev. F. W. Shelton, 171

Seward's, Mr., Published Diplomacy, 199

Situation, the. Richard B. Kimball, 1

Sketches of Edinburgh Literati. Rev. W. Frothingham, 453

Slave-Trade in New-York. Mr. Wilder, 86

Southern Aids to the North. C.G. Leland, 242, 445

State Rights. Sinclair Tousey, 535

Story of Mexican Life, 552, 627

Tints and Tones of Paris. H.T. Tuckerman, 127

Travel-Pictures. Henry T. Lee, 676

True Basis. C. G. Leland, 136

True Interest of Nations, the. C.C. Hazewell, 428

True Story. Miss McFarlane, 507

Ursa Major, 579

War between Freedom and Slavery in Missouri, the. 369

Was he Successful? Richard B. Kimball, 702

What shall we do with it? Hon. John W. Edmonds, 493

What to do with the Darkies. C. G. Leland, 84

THE

CONTINENTAL MONTHLY.

DEVOTED TO LITERATURE AND NATIONAL POLICY.

VOL. I.--JANUARY, 1862.--NO. I.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

The Situation, 1

Is Progress a Truth? 6

The Edwards Family, 11

Sonnet, 16

The Green Corn Dance, 17

Rosin the Bow, 29

The Graveyard at Princeton, 32

Among the Pines, 35

The Lesson of War, 46

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 49

Sphinx and OEdipus, 63

The Actress-Wife, 64

Song of Freedom, 76

Across the Continent, 78

What to do with the Darkies, 84

The Slave Trade in New York, 86

Literary Notices, 91

The Rejected Stone;

The Works of Francis Bacon;

The Old Log Schoolhouse;

Songs in Many Keys.

Books Received, 94

Editor's Table, 95

THE FEBRUARY NUMBER OF THE CONTINENTAL

Will be issued about the 15th of January, and will contain contributions

from the following among other eminent writers: HON. HORACE GREELEY,

HENRY T. TUCKERMAN, REV. F. W. SHELTON, RICHARD B. KIMBALL, BAYARD

TAYLOR, J. WARREN NEWCOMB, JR., HENRY P. LELAND, THE AUTHOR OF "THE

COTTON STATES," CHARLES G. LELAND, and CHARLES F. BROWNE.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1801, by JAMES R.

GILMORE, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of

Massachusetts.

Press of Geo. C. Rand & Avery, 3 Cornhill, Boston.

* * * * *

THE SITUATION.

In the month of November, 1860, culminated the plot against our National

existence. The conspiracy originated in South Carolina, and had a

growth, more or less checked by circumstances, of over thirty years.

For John C. Calhoun had conceived the idea of an independent position

for that State some time previous to the passage of the 'nullification

ordinance' in November, 1832. This man, although he bore no resemblance

in personal qualities to the Roman conspirator, is chargeable with the

same crime which Cicero urged against Cataline--that of 'corrupting the

youth.' His mind was too logical to adopt the ordinary propositions

about slavery, such as, 'a great but necessary evil;' 'we did not plant

it, and now we have it, we can't get rid of it,' and the like; but,

placing his back to the wall where it was impossible to outflank him, he

defended it, by all the force of his subtle intellect, as a permanent

institution. His followers refined on their master's lessons, and

asserted that it was one of the pillars on which a republic must rest!

Here was the origin of the most wicked and most audacious plot ever

attempted against any government. This plot did not involve any contest

for political power in the administration of public affairs. That, the

Southern leaders already possessed, but with that they were not content.

They were determined to destroy the Republic itself,--to literally blot

it out of existence. And why? What could betray intelligent and educated

men, persons esteemed wise in their generation, into an attempt which

amazes the civilized world, and at which posterity will be appalled? We

answer, it was the old leaven which has worked always industriously in

the breast of man since the creation--AMBITION. Corrupted by

the idea that a model republic must have slavery for its basis, knowing

that the free States could not much longer tolerate the theory, certain

leading individuals decided to dismember the country. They cast their

eyes across Texas to the fertile plains of Mexico, and so southward.

They indulged in the wildest dreams of conquest and of empire. The whole

southern continent would in time be occupied and under their control. An

aristocracy was to be built up, on which possibly a monarchy would be

engrafted. In this way a new feudal system was to be developed, negro

for serf, and a race of noble creatures spring forth, the admirable of

the earth, whose men should be famed as the world's chivalry, and whose

women should be the most beautiful and most accomplished of all the

daughters of Eve. The peaceful drudge and artisan of the North, ox-like

in their character, should serve them as they might require, and the

craven man of commerce should buy and sell for their accommodation. For

the rest, the negro would suffice. This was the extraordinary scheme of

the South Carolina 'aristocrat,' and with which he undertook to infect

certain unscrupulous leaders throughout the cotton and sugar States. It

was no part of the plan of the conspirators to precipitate the border

States into rebellion. O no! On the contrary, it was specially set forth

in the programme entrusted to the exclusive few, that those States were

to remain in the 'Old Union' as a fender between the 'South' and the

free States; always ready in Congress to stand up for a good fugitive

slave law, and various other little privileges, and prepared to threaten

secession if Congress did not yield just what was demanded. In this way

the free States would be perpetually entangled by embarrassing

questions, and the new empire left to pursue unrestricted its dazzling

plans of conquest and occupation.

A comfortable arrangement truly, and one very easy of

accomplishment,--provided the free States would consent.

'Certainly they will consent. Trade, commerce, manufactures and

mechanical pursuits, occupy them exclusively, and these promise better

results under the new order of things than under the old. As to

patriotism or public spirit, the North have neither. The people do not

even resent a personal affront, much less will they go to war for an

idea.'

So reasoned the South.

'It is not possible those fellows down yonder can be in earnest. They

are only playing the game of "brag." In their hearts they are really

devoted to the Union. They have not the least idea of separating from

us.'

So reasoned the North.

Neither side thought the other in earnest. Both were mistaken.

Negro slaves were introduced into Virginia as early as 1620. In the year

1786 England employed in the slave-trade 130 ships, and that year alone

seized and carried from their homes into slavery 42,000 blacks.

Wilberforce experienced many defeats through the influence of the

slave-trade interest, but at length carried his point, and the trade was

finally abolished in England in 1807,--not a very remote period

certainly. The same year witnessed the suppression of the slave-trade in

our own country; but, unfortunately, not the abolition of

slave-_holding_. All our readers understand how, when the Constitution

of the United States was adopted, slavery was regarded entirely as a

domestic matter, left to each of the States to manage and dispose of as

each saw fit. But at that period there was no dissenting voice to the

proposition, that, abstractly considered, slave-holding was wrong; yet

the owner of a large number of negroes could honestly declare he was

himself innocent of the first transgression, and ignorant of any

practicable way to get rid of the evil,--for it was counted an evil.

When the rice, cotton and sugar fields demanded larger developments, it

was counted a _necessary_ evil. Congress was called on for more guards

and pledges, and gave them freely. It disclaimed any power to interfere

with what had now become an institution; it had no power to do so. It

went further, and by legislation sought fully to protect the

slave-holding States in the perfect enjoyment of their rights under the

Constitution.

Meanwhile many wise and good men, North and South, who regarded slavery

as a blight and a curse upon the States where it existed, endeavored by

all the means in their power to prepare the way for gradual

emancipation. It seemed at one time that they would succeed in Delaware,

Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky. In Virginia, an emancipation act failed

of passing by a single vote.

About the time that Calhoun was spreading the heresy of his state-rights

doctrine in South Carolina and taking his 'logical ground' on the

slavery question, a class, then almost universally branded as fanatics,

but whose proportions have since very largely swelled, arose at the

North, which were a match for the South Carolina senator with his own

weapons. Each laid hold of an extreme point and maintained it. We refer

to the Abolitionists of thirty years ago, under Garrison, Tappan & Co.

These people seized on a single idea, exclusive of any other, and went

nearly mad over it. Apparently blind to the evils around them, which

were close at hand, within their own doors, swelling perhaps in their

own hearts, they were suddenly 'brought to see' the 'vile enormity' of

slave-holding. Their argument was very simple. 'Slavery is an awful sin

in the sight of God. Slave-holders are awful sinners. We of the North,

having made a covenant with such sinners, are equally guilty of the sin

of slavery with them. Slavery must be immediately abolished. _Fiat

justitia ruat coelum_. Better that the Republic fall than continue in

the unholy league one day.' These men were ready to 'dissolve the

Union,' to disintegrate the nation, to blast the hopes of perhaps

millions of persons over the world, who were watching with anxious

hearts the experiment of our government, trembling lest it should fail.

In South Carolina John C. Calhoun was ready to do the same. And thus

extremes met.

Meanwhile the Southern conspirators pursued their labors. Gathering up

the reports of the meetings of the Abolition Societies, and selecting

the most inflammable extracts from the speeches of the most violent,

they circulated them far and wide, as indications of the hostile spirit

of the North, and as proofs of the impossibility of living under the

same government with people who were determined to destroy their

domestic institutions and stir up servile insurrections. The

Abolitionists saw the alarm of the South, and pressed their advantage.

Thus year after year passed, till the memorable November elections of

1860. The conspirators received the intelligence of the election of

Lincoln with grim satisfaction. The Abolitionists witnessed the progress

of secession in the various States with a joy they did not attempt to

conceal. 'Now we can pursue our grand scheme of empire,' exclaimed the

Southern traitors. 'Now shall we see the end of slavery,' cried the

Abolitionists. Strange that neither gave a thought about the destruction

of the glorious fabric which the wisest and best men, North and South,

their own fathers, had erected. Strange, not one sigh was breathed in

prospect of the death of a nation. Incredible that no misgiving checked

the exultation of either party, lest, in destroying the temple of

Liberty and scattering its fragments, it might never again be

reconstructed. The conspirator, South, saw only the consummation of his

mad projects of ambition. The Abolitionist North, regarded only the

_immediate_ emancipation of a large number of slaves, most of whom,

incapable, through long servitude, of self-control, would be thrown

miserably on the world. Neither party thought or cared a jot about their

common country. Neither regarded the stars and stripes with the least

emotion. To one, it was secondary to the emblem of a sovereign State. To

the other, there was no beauty in its folds, because it waved over a

race in bondage.

The day after the battle of Bull Run found these two extremes still in

sympathy. Both were still rejoicing. The rebel recognized the hand of

Providence in the victory, so did the Abolitionist: one, because it

would secure to the South its claims; the other, because it would rouse

the North to a fiercer prosecution of the war, which had hitherto been

waged with 'brotherly reluctance.' Here we leave these sympathizing

extremes, and proceed to survey the situation.

The first point we note is, that in the South the war did not originate

with the people, but with certain conspirators. In the North, the mighty

armament to conquer rebellion is the work of the people alone, not of a

cabinet. In the South, it was with difficulty the inhabitants were

precipitated into 'secession.' Indeed, in certain States the leaders

dared not risk a popular vote. In the North, the rulers, appalled by

the extraordinary magnitude of the crisis, were timid and hesitating,

until the inhabitants rose in a body to save their national existence.

It is no answer to this assertion, that large armies are arrayed against

us, which engage with animosity in the war. The die cast, the several

States committed to the side of treason, there was no alternative: fight

they must. As the devil is said to betray his victims into situations

where they are compelled to advance from bad to worse, so the

conspirators adroitly hastened the people into overt acts from which

they were told there was no retreat. We believe these facts to have had

great influence with our Government; and in this way we can understand

the generous but mistaken forbearance of the administration in the

earlier stages of the contest,--we say mistaken, because it was entirely

misunderstood by the other side, and placed to the account of cowardice,

imbecility or weakness; and because there can be no middle course in

carrying on a war. We have suffered enough by it already in money and

men; we must suffer no more. Besides, we lose self-respect, and gain

only the contempt of the enemy. When the bearer of General Sherman's

polite proclamation, addressed 'to the _loyal_ citizens of South

Carolina,' communicated it to the two officers near Beaufort, they

replied, with courteous _nonchalance_, 'Your mission is fruitless; there

are no loyal citizens in the State.' The general's action in the

premises reminds us of that of a worthy clergyman who gave notice that

in the morning of the following Sunday he would preach to the young, in

the afternoon to the old, in the evening to sinners. The two first

services were respectably attended; to the last, not a soul came.

There are no 'sinners' in South Carolina, and General Sherman had better

try his hand at something else besides paper persuasions. At all events,

we suggest that future proclamations be addressed to those for whom such

documents are usually framed, to wit, rebels in arms against constituted

authority.[1]

But to our case. We have a rebellion to crush,--a rebellion large in its

proportions, threatening in its aspect, but lacking in elements of real

strength, and liable to collapse at any moment. To put down this

rebellion is the sole object and purpose of the war. We are not fighting

to enrich a certain number of army contractors, nor to give employment

to half a million of soldiers, or promotion to the officers who command

them. Neither are we fighting to emancipate the slaves. It is true the

army contractors do get rich, the half million of soldiers are employed,

the officers who command them receive advancement, and the slaves _may_

be liberated. But this is not what we fight _for_. On this head the

people have made no mistake. In the outset they proclaimed that this war

was to decide the question of government or no government, country or no

country, national existence or no national existence. And we must go

straight to this mark. We have nothing to do with any issue except how

to save the nation. If this shall require the emancipation of every

negro in the Southern States, then every negro must be emancipated. And

this brings us to another proposition, to wit, that the day is past for

discussing this slave question in a corner. This bug-bear of

politicians, this ancient annoyance to the Northern Democrat and the

Southern old-line Whig, this colored Banquo, will no longer 'down.' We

can no longer affect ignorance of the spectre's presence. It is forced

on us in the house and by the way. It follows the march of our armies.

It is present at the occupation of our Southern ports and towns and

villages. Martial law is impotent to deal with it. It frightens by its

ugly shadow our Secretary of War; in vain our good President tries to

avoid it; in vain we adopt new terms, talk about contrabands, and the

like; the inevitable African will present himself, and we are compelled

to recognize him.

Notwithstanding we fight for no other end than to save the Republic, we

are absolutely driven into the consideration of the slave question,

because it involves the very existence of any republic. This question is

not whether bondage is to cease throughout the world; but whether it is

compatible with a free government, such as we claim our own to be. In

other words, is Slavery in the United States to-day on trial? We must

_all_ abandon our morbid sensitiveness and come squarely to the

consideration of the vital point, to wit, can this great Republic be

held together while the 'peculiar system' exists in a part of it? No

matter who first posed this ugly query,--Calhoun or Garrison. We have

now to answer it. We dare not, we can not, we will not give up our

country to disunion and severance. To save it has already cost us an eye

and a hand, and now this unhappy subject must be disposed of, disposed

of honestly, conscientiously, with the temper of men who feel that the

_principle_ of our government is soon to fail or triumph. If to fail,

the cause would seem to be lost forever. What then? Why only a monarchy

on our Southern border, insolent provinces on our Northern; Spain

strengthened in her position, and recovering her lost ground; Mexico an

empire; England audacious and overbearing as of yore, and France joining

to fill our waters with mighty naval armaments. _We_, having witnessed

the dismemberment of our country, and possessing no longer a

nationality, but broken into fragments, to become the jest and

laughingstock of the world, which would point to us and say, 'These

people began to build, and were not able to finish!'

How do you fancy the picture? Do you think any morbid delicacy, any fear

of giving offense to our 'loyal Southern brethren,' should prevent our

examining this slave question? We raise, be it understood, no foregone

conclusion, we do not even pronounce on the result of the examination;

but examine it we must. Not the President, with his honest desire to

preserve every guaranteed right to the South; not the Secretary of

State, who unites the qualities of a timid man with those of a radical,

and who is therefore by instinct temporizing and 'diplomatic;' not any

other member of the cabinet, dare longer attempt to slide over or around

it. We observe, we venture on no conclusion in advance. We are not

prepared to say, if the South in a body should seek now to return to

their allegiance, that they could not hedge in and save their

'institution.' But we should still desire to discuss the subject

carefully.

So long as slavery was tolerated as a domestic custom long established

and difficult to deal with, it stood in the list of permitted evils

which all condemn, yet which it seems impossible to get rid of. But it

is one thing to _tolerate_ an evil, quite another to adopt it as a good.

And we declare that never in the world's history was there an attempt so

shameless and audacious as that to found a government on slavery as a

cornerstone! Is it possible to conceive of more ungoverned depravity or

a madness more complete?[2]

There have been contests innumerable on the earth. We read of wars for

conquest, to avenge national insults, about disputed territory, against

revolted provinces, and between dynasties; civil wars, religious wars,

wars for the succession, to preserve the balance of power, and so forth.

But never before was a war inaugurated to _establish_ slavery as a

principle of the government. We can predict no other fate for the

leaders in this diabolical plot than discomfiture and defeat. We have

an unwavering faith that the Republic will come out of this contest

stronger than ever before; that it will become a light to lighten the

nations, the hope of the lovers of liberty everywhere. But we will not

anticipate.

In periods like the present, circumstances appear to be charged with

vital and intelligent properties, working out and solving problems which

have disturbed and puzzled the wisest and most astute. At such times

impertinent intermeddlers abound, who claim to interpret the oracles,

and who would hasten the birth of events by acting as midwife. It is

impossible to dispose of or silence such people. We should be careful

that we are not misled by their egregious pretensions. The fact is, the

whole history of our race should teach us a lesson of profound humility.

We do not accomplish half so much for ourselves as is accomplished for

us. True, we have something to do. The seed will not grow if it be not

planted; but all our skill and cunning can not make it spring up and

blossom, and bear fruit in perfection. Neither can man work out events

after a plan of his own. He is made, in the grand drama of this world,

to work out the designs of the Almighty. We must accept this or accept

nothing. In this light how futile are the intemperate ravings of one

class, the unreasonable complaints of another, the cunning plots of a

third. We see no escape from a threatening danger, we perceive no path

out of a labyrinthine maze of evil; when, lo! through some apparently

trifling incident, by some slight and insignificant occurrence, the

whole order of things is changed, the impending danger vanishes, and we

thread the labyrinth with ease.

We believe God will provide us a way out of our present troubles. Only

we must do our duty, which is to maintain our common country, our flag,

the Republic ENTIRE.

Thus much at present. Where this war is to carry us, what shall be its

effect on us as a people, what great changes are in progress, and what

may result from them, we will discuss at the proper time, in a future

number.

IS PROGRESS A TRUTH?

'Human nature has been the same in all ages.'

'Men are pretty much the same wherever you find them.'

If there be anything in this world from which it would be desirable to

see men delivered, it is from a certain small, cheap wisdom which

expresses itself in general verdicts on all humanity, and enables the

fribbler or dolt who can not see beyond his nose to give an offhand

summary of the infinite. There is 'an aping of the devil' in this

flippant assumption of our immutability, which strangely combines the

pitiful and painful. Oh! if the _ne plus ultra_ which antique Ignorance

complacently inscribes on the gates of its world should ever be worn

away, let it be replaced by this owlish _credo_ in the unchangeableness

of man.

The refutation of these sayings has been the history of humanity, and

yet no argument on political or social topics fails to contain them in

one form or another. Even now, in the tremendous debate maintained by

common logic and 'fist law' between our North and South, we find them

enunciated with a clearness and precision unequaled in any state paper,

unless we except that in which William the Conqueror coolly styled

himself king 'by the right of the sword.' Science, which modestly

announces itself as incomplete the nearer it approaches completion, has

been assumed to be perfect by those most ignorant of it, in order that

its mere observations as to climate and races may be found to prove

that as man is, so he was in all ages, and so must be, 'forever and

forever as we rove.' Races now vanished in the twilight of time have

been boldly declared to be the prototypes of others, now themselves

changing into new forms, and we, unconsciously, like the old Hebrew in

Heine's Italy, repeat curses over the ancient graves of long-departed

foes--ignorant that those curses were long since fulfilled by the

unconquerable and terrible laws which ever hurry us onward and upward,

from everlasting to everlasting, from the first Darkness to the infinite

word of Light.

The assumption that mankind always has been and will be the same,

involves the conclusion that the elements of slavery and scoundrelism,

of suffering and of disorder, are immutable in essence and in

proportion, and that human exertion wastes itself in vain when it

aspires to anything save a rank in the upper ten millions. As for the

mass,--'tis a great pity,--_mais, que voulez vous?_ It is the fortune of

life's war; and then who knows? Perhaps they are as happy in their

sphere as anybody. Only see how they dance! And then they

drink--gracious goodness, how they swig it off! the gay creatures!

Oh,'tis a very fine world, gentlemen, especially if you whitewash it

well, and keep up a plenty of Potemkin card cottages along the road

which winds through the wilderness. But above all--never forget that

they--drink.

It was well enough for a stormy past, but it may not be so well for the

future, that man is prone to hero-worship. Under circumstances, varying,

however, immensely, be it observed, humanity has produced Menus,

Confuciuses, Platos, Ciceros, Sidneys, Spinozas, scholars and gentlemen,

and the ordinary student, seeing them all through a Claude Lorraine

glass of modern tinting, thinks them on the whole wonderfully like

himself. Horace chaffs with Cæsar and Mæcenas, Martial quizzes the world

and the reader very much as modern club-men and poets would do. It is

very convenient to forget how much they have been imitated; still more

so to ignore that in both are stores of recondite mode and feeling as

yet unpenetrated by any scholar of these days. You think, my brave

_Artium Baccalaureus_, that you feel all that Hafiz felt,--surely he

toped and bussed like a good fellow of all times,--and yet for seven

centuries the most embracing of scholars have folioed and disputed over

the real meaning of that Song of Solomon which is now first beginning to

be understood from Hafiz. Man, I tell you that in the old morning of

history there were races whose life-blood glowed hotter than ever yours

did, with a burning faith, such as you never felt, that all which you

now believe to be most execrably infamous was intensely holy. Your

wisest scholars lose themselves in trying to unthread the mazes and

mysteries of those incomprehensible depths of diabolical worship and

intertwined beauty and honor, now known only from trebly diminished

mythologic reflection. Perhaps some of those undecipherable hieroglyphs

of the East are not so unintelligible to you now as they would be if

translated. Do you, for that matter, fully understand why a Hindu yoghi

torments himself for thirty years? I observe that the great majority of

our good, kind missionaries have no glimmering of an idea why it is

done. Brother Zeal, of the first part, says it is superstition. Father

Squeal, of the second part, says it is the devil. Very good indeed--so

far as it goes.

But look to later ages, and see whether man has been so strikingly

similar to us of the present day. There are manias and mysteries of the

Middle Ages whose history is smothered in darkness; lost to us out of

sheer incapacity to be understood from any modern standpoint of sense or

feeling whatever. What do you make out of that crusade of scores of

thousands of unarmed, delirious Christians, who started eastward to

redeem the holy sepulchre; all their faith and hope of safety being in a

goose and a pig which they bore with them? And they all died, those

earnest Goose-and-Pigites; died in untold misery and murder--unhappy

'superstition again.' That bolt is soon shot; but I have my misgivings

whether it reaches the mark.

Or what do you make of untold and unutterable horrors, or crimes, as

they were deemed, which to us seem bewildering nonsense? What of

were-wolf manias, of districts made horrible by nightmare and

vampyreism, urged to literal and incredible reality; of abominations

which no modern wickedness dare hint at, but which raged like epidemics?

Or what of the Sieur de Gilles, with his thousand or two of girl

children elaborately tortured to death--and he a type and not a sporad?

'But,' we are told, 'men would do all this over again, if they dared.

The vice is all here, safely housed away snug as ever, only waiting its

time.' I grant it--just as I grant that the same atoms and elements

which once formed mastodons and trilobites are here--and with about as

much chance of reappearing as mastodons as humanity has of reproducing

those antique horrors. The fragments of witch-madness and star-faith may

be still raked in tolerably perfect lumps out of the mire or chaff of

mankind; but I do not think, young lady, that you will ever be accused

of riding on a broom, though you unquestionably had an ancestress,

somewhere before or after Hengist, who enjoyed the reputation of

understanding that unpopular mode of volatility. _Pommade Dupuytren_ and

_Eau de toilette_ have taken the place of the witch-ointments; and if

the spice-powder of the old alchemist Mutio di Frangipani has risen from

the recipes of the Middle Ages into modern fashion, rest assured that it

will never work wonder more, save in connection with bright eyes,

rustling fans, and Valenciennes-edged pocket-handkerchiefs.

To the student to whom all battles of the past are not like the dishes

of certain Southern hotels,--all served in the same gravy, possessing

the same agrarian, muttony flavor,--and to whom Zoroaster and Spurgeon

are not merely clergymen, differing only in dress and language, it must

appear plain enough that as there are now on earth races physically

differing from one another almost as much as from other mammalia, just

so in the course of ages have been developed in the same single descent

even greater mental and moral differences. In fact, when we remember

that the same lust, avarice, ambition and warfare have mingled with our

blood at all times, it becomes wonderful when we reflect how marvelously

the mind has been molded to such myriad varieties. It has in full

consciousness of its power sacrificed all earthly happiness, toiled and

died for rulers, for ideas of which it had no idea, for vague

war-cries--it has existed only for sensuality, or beauty, or food--for

religion or for ostentation, according to different climate or age or

soil--it has groveled for ages in misery or roamed free and proud--and

between the degraded slave and the proud free-man there is, as I think,

a very terrible difference indeed. But, quitting the vast variety of

mental developments, faiths, and _feelings_, let us cast a glance on the

general change which history has witnessed in man's physical condition.

First let us premise with certain general laws, that intelligence,

physical well-being and freedom have a decided affinity, and are most

copiously unfolded in manufacturing countries. That as labor is

developed and elaborated, it becomes allied to science and art, and, in

a word, 'respectable.' That as these advance it becomes constantly more

evident that he who strives to accomplish his labor in the most perfect

manner is continually becoming a man of science and an artist, and

rising to a well deserved intellectual equality with the 'higher

classes.' That, in fine, the tendency of industry--which in this age is

only a synonym for the action of capital--is towards Republicanism.

I have already remarked to the effect that so far as the welfare of man

in the future is concerned, it is to be regretted that hero-worship

should still influence men so largely. When Mr. Smith runs over his

scanty historical knowledge, things do not seem so bad on the whole with

anybody. Mark Antony and Coriolanus and Francis the First, the plumed

barons of the feudal days, and their embroidered and belaced ladies,

with the whole merrie companie of pages, fools, troubadours and heralds,

seem on the whole to have had fine times of it. 'Bloweth seed and

groweth mead'--assuredly the sun shone then as now, people wassailed or

wailed--oh, 'twas pretty much the same in all ages. But when we come to

the most unmistakable _facts_, all this sheen of gilded armor and

egret-plumes, of gemmed goblet and altar-lace, lute, mandolin, and lay,

is cloth of gold over the ghastly, shrunken limbs of a leper. Pass over

the glory of knight and dame and see how it was then with the

multitude--with the millions. Almost at the first glance, in fact, your

knight and dame turn out unwashed, scantily linened, living amid scents

and sounds which no modern private soldier would endure. The venison

pasty of high festival becomes the daily pork and mustard of home life,

with such an array of scrofula and cutaneous disorders as are horrible

to think on. The household books of expenditure of the noblest families

in England in the fourteenth century scarcely show as much linen used

annually among a hundred people as would serve now for one mechanic.

People of the highest rank slept naked to save night-clothes. If in

Flanders or in Italy we find during their high prosperity some

exceptions to this knightly and chivalric piggishness and penury, it is

none the less true that they outbalanced it by sundry and peculiar

vices. And yet, bad as life then was, it is impossible for us to guess

at, or realize, all its foulness. We know it mostly from poets, and the

poet and historian, like the artist, have in every age lived quite out

of the actual, and with all the tact of repulsion avoided common facts.

But it is with the multitude that truth and common sense and humanity

have to deal. And here, whether in Greece or in England, in Italy or in

France, lies in the past an abyss of horror whose greatest wonder is,

that we, who are only some three centuries distant, know so little of

it. There is a favorite compensative theory that man is miraculously

self-adaptive to all circumstances, and that deprived of modern comforts

and luxuries he would only become more vigorous and independent--that in

fact he was on the whole considerably happier under a feudal baron than

he has been since. I will believe in this when I find that a man who has

exchanged a stinging gout for a mere rheumatism finds himself entirely

free from pain. No, the serfs of the Middle Ages were in no sense happy.

Stifled moans of misery, a sense of their unutterable agonies, steal up

from proverb and by-corners of history--we feel that they were more

miserable than jail prisoners at the present day--for then, as now, man

groaned at being an inferior, and he had much more than that to groan

over in those days of strifes and dirt. And yet every one of those serfs

was God's child, as well as the baron who enslaved him. To himself he

was a world with an eternity, and of as much importance as all other

men. Through what strange heresies and insurrections, based either on

innate passion or religious conviction, do we not find Republicanism

bursting out in every age, from remote Etruscan rebellions down to

Peasants' wars, Anabaptist uprisings, and Jack Cade out-flamings. It was

always there, that sense of political equality and right--it always

goaded and tormented man, in the silent darkness of ignorance as in the

broad light of learning.

So long as European society consisted in a great measure of war tempered

by agriculture, there could be but little progress towards a better

state of things. But the germ of industry sprouted and grew, though

slowly. Merchants bought social privileges for money; even law was

grudgingly sold them, and they continued to buy. Against the old

idealism, against bugbears and mythology, fairy tales and astrology,

dreams, spells, charms, muttered exorcisms, commandments to obey master,

ship and serfdom, _de jure divino_, clouds, mists, and lies infinite;

slowly rose that stupendous power of truth and of Nature which had

hitherto in humanity only visited the world in broken gleams. We may

assume different eras for this dividing point between immutability and

progress, between slavery and freedom. In religion, Christianity appears

as first offering future happiness for the people and for all. The

revival of letters and the Reformation were glorious storms, battering

down thousands of old barriers. But in a temporal and worldly point of

view the name of Bacon, perhaps, since a name is still necessary, best

distinguishes between the old and the new. From him--or his age--dates

that grappling with facts, that classifying of all knowledge so soon as

obtained, that _Wissenschaft_ or _Science_ which never goes backward; in

fine, that information which by its dissemination continually equalizes

men and renders rank futile. With science, labor and the laboring man

began at once to rise. Comfort and cleanliness and health for the many

took the place of ancient deprivation and dirt--whether of body or of

soul. Humanity began to improve--for, with all the legends of the

bravery of the Middle Ages, it is apparent enough that their heroes or

soldiers were not so strong or large as the men of the present day. And

through all, amid struggles and strivings and subtle drawbacks and

deceits, worked and won its way the great power of Republicanism or of

Progress, destroying, one by one, illusions, and building up in their

stead fair and enduring realities.

It is but a few decades since the greater portion of all intellectual or

inventive effort was devoted to setting off rank, to exalting the

exalted, and, by contrast, still further degrading the lowly. What were

the glorious works of those mediæval artists in stone and canvas, in

orfevery and silver, in marble and bronze, nielloed salvers, golden

chasing, laces as from fairy-land, canopies, garments and gems? All

beautiful patents of rank, marks to honor wealthy rank--nothing more,

save that and the imperishable proof of genius, which is ever lovely, as

a slave or free. But where goes the inventive talent now? Beaumarchais

worked for a year to make a watch which only 'the king' could buy. Had

he lived to-day he would have striven to invent some improvement which

should be found in every man's watch. It 'pays better,' in a word, to

invent for the poor many than for the rich few--and invention has found

this out. Something which must be had in every cottage,--soap for the

million, medicine for the masses, cheap churns, cheap clocks, always

something of which one can sell many and much,--such are the objects

which claim the labor of genius now. Fools grieve that Art is dead;

'lives at best only in imitation;' and that we have chanced on a

godless, humdrum, steam and leather age--one of prose and dust, facts

and factories. Sometimes come gasping efforts--sickly self-persuasions

that all is not so bad as it seems. Mr. Slasher of the Sunday paper is

quite certain that the Creek Indian Girl statue is far superior to

anything antique, while Crasher, just back from Europe, shakes his head,

and assures the younger hadjis--expectant that the old masters are old

humbugs, and that it is generally understood to be so now in France--you

can get better pictures at half price any day in the shops. It will not

do. The art of small details, the art of pieces and bits, went out with

the last architecture. It went over to the people, and from them a

higher Art will yet bloom again in a beauty, a freshness, and grandeur

never before dreamed of. It will live again in Nature. For it is towards

Nature that progress tends--towards real beauty, and not towards the

false 'ideal.'

Yet so clearly and beautifully as social progress is defined for us in

history--so indisputably distinct as are the outlines in which it rises

before us, there are no lack of men to believe that humanity was never

so agonized as at present, never so wicked. 'Our cities are more badly

governed than were ever cities before,'--'look at the Lobby'--everything

is bad. Ah, it moves slowly, no doubt, this progress--and yet it does

move. Across rumors and lies and discouraging truths it ever

moves,--moves with the worlds through seas of light, but, unlike the

worlds, goes not back again to the point of starting. And why should it

not be slow, this progress, when an Egypt could lie four thousand years

in one type of civilization, when an India could believe itself millions

of ages old? Slowly the locomotive gets under way. Long are the first

intervals of its piston, long the wheezing sounds of its first breaths.

But puff, puff, they come, and ever a little faster. Do we not 'make

history rapidly in these days,' since England and France have entered on

their modern career? What place has the nineteenth century in the long

list of ages?

Everywhere the action of capital, the ringing of the plane, now and

then, as in those times, the sound of arms, but all tending to far other

ends than the welfare of a reigning family, or to satisfy the revengeful

whim of a royal mistress, or the bigotry of a monarch. Public opinion

has its say now in all things. Even the rascality of which the

conservative complains is individual rascality for private aims,

tempered by public opinion, and no longer the sublimely organized

rascality of all power and government. Do these things prove nothing? Do

they not show that WORK--good, hard, steady, unflinching

work--is enlarging man's destiny, and freeing itself step by step from

the primeval curse?

It is only during the present century and within the memory of man that

in France and Russia the welfare of the people has become the steady

object of diplomacy, and this because any other object would now be

ruinous. But it is chiefly in America that the most wonderful advance

has been made, and it is here, and at the present moment, that the most

tremendous struggle has arisen between the adherents of the old faith

and the new. In the South, the old feudal baron under a new name, in the

North the man of labor and of science, fight again the battle of might

and right--the one strong in ignorance, the other stronger in knowledge.

Who can doubt what the end thereof shall be? Amid storms and darkness,

through death and hell-carnivals, the great truth has ever held its way

onwards, slowly, for its heritage is eternal Time, but oh! how surely.

And yet there be those who doubt the end and the issue! Doubt--oh, never

doubt! For this faith all martyrs have died, in this battle all men

have, knowingly or unknowingly, lived--they who fought against it fought

for it--for of a verity there was never yet on earth one active deed

done which tended not towards the great advance, and to bring on the

great jubilee of Freedom.

THE EDWARDS FAMILY.

Among the surviving octogenarians of New York and its vicinity, there

are few of such interesting reminiscence as one who is passing an

honored old age at his residence on Staten Island. Those who live in

Port Richmond will have anticipated his name, and will perceive at once

that we refer to the Hon. Ogden Edwards. Judge Edwards is of an ancient

and noble stock, being grandson of the author of the treatise on the

_Freedom of the Will_. The family emigrated from England with the first

colony of the Puritans, having previously to this suffered persecution

in one of its members. This man--a minister--had an only son, who became

the founder of a line illustrious for genius and piety. The latter of

these traits was illustrated in the lives of both Daniel Edwards, of

Hartford, and his son Timothy, who was for sixty years pastor of the

church at Windsor, but in the person of Jonathan Edwards we see the

outcropping of genius. He was the son of Timothy, and followed his

father's profession in an obscure New England village, whose meadows

were washed by the waters of the Connecticut.

Jonathan Edwards, during a life of close study, developed one of the

clearest and most powerful intellects which was ever united to so rare a

degree of patience and humility. In that day of small things it could

hardly have been dreamed that the Puritan preacher, who for a quarter of

a century filled the Northampton pulpit, would ever rank among the

giants of intellect. At the distance of one hundred years no name is

more powerfully felt in the theology of America than his, while in

metaphysics, and in the sphere of pure thought, his position, like that

of Shakspeare in literature, is one of enviable greatness. This man is

not to be confounded with his son of the same name, who, though of

distinguished ability, was far from equaling his father; both, however,

were academic presidents, the one of Nassau Hall, at Princeton, the

other of Union College; to which it may be added that Dwight, grandson

of the first, was for many years the honored president of Yale. Judge

Edwards is the son of Pierrepont Edwards, who was bred at Stockbridge,

among the Indians. Here his father labored as missionary, having been

driven from his parish by an ill-disposed people, many of whom were, it

may be, like the Athenian of old, who was tired of hearing Aristides

called 'the Just.'

While laboring at Stockbridge, in the midst of poverty and privation,

Jonathan Edwards wrote the treatise on the Freedom of the Will, the

greatest of all existing polemics. A portion of the old parsonage

remains in the village, and there are still shown marks and scratches on

the wall, made by him, as it is said, in the night, to recall by

daylight the abstruse meditations of his wakeful hours.

The children learned the Indian tongue, and when Pierrepont Edwards was

established at New Haven, the old sachems used to visit the

boy-companion of their early days, when the pipe of peace was smoked in

his kitchen in ancient form.

Having studied law with Judge Reeve of Litchfield, who married Edwards's

niece, the only sister of Aaron Burr, he became highly distinguished in

his profession. It is said, indeed, that Alexander Hamilton pronounced

him the most eloquent man to whom he had ever listened. Pierrepont

Edwards bore the name of his mother's family, an old English stock,

which reckons its descent from the days of the Conqueror. The

Pierreponts dwelt near Newstead Abbey, the seat of Byron, and not far

from Sherwood Forest, the home of Robin Hood and his merry men of old.

The name of Sarah Pierrepont, wife of Jonathan Edwards, is still fresh

in honored memory for wisdom and piety. She rests by her husband's side,

among the tombs of the presidents of Nassau Hall, in Princeton cemetery,

and is the only female name in that array of the mighty dead. It was

once suggested that these remains should be conveyed to Northampton, but

this was refused. Having banished this pair after the service of a

quarter of a century, it was not meet to grant to that place the honor

of their graves, and hence of the whole family but one rests at

Northampton. This is Jerusha, a lovely girl of seventeen, of whom it is

recorded by her father, in the simple terms of primitive piety, that she

said on her death-bed that 'she had not seen one minute for several

years wherein she desired to live one minute longer for the sake of any

other good in life, but doing good and living to the glory of God.' A

cenotaph has been placed by her grave to the memory of her father, but

it can not wipe away the error of the past, and this expression of

regret only recalls a biting line from Childe Harold:

'Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar.'

Pierrepont Edwards was the government attorney during the Revolution,

and prosecuted the confiscation of tory estates. When Benedict Arnold

became a traitor his property was at once seized, and his homestead at

Norwich, and all its contents, were confiscated. The pecuniary value of

this seizure was small, since Arnold's wasteful habits forbade any

increase of wealth, but there was his dwelling, and the little store,

with its uncouth sign, 'B. Arnold,' in which in his early day he had

carried on a petty trade. In Arnold's house were found large quantities

of papers, both of a private and public character. Among the former were

certain letters to his first wife, which we have read, and from which we

learned that her life was embittered by his habits of neglect and

dissipation. In one of these he alludes to a winter trip to Canada, with

a sleigh-load of whisky, on speculation. It is possible that this

journey prompted that grand expedition in which the whisky merchant

figured as a military leader. How strange the contrast between the

lonely pedlar, dealing out strong drink in the streets of Quebec, and

the victorious chieftain who, in company with Montgomery, attacked its

citadel! Some of these domestic letters contain confessions made to an

outraged wife, of a character too disgusting for recital. They show a

reach of depravity, which, considering those primitive times, in the

land of steady habits, was indeed strange. They prove that for years

Arnold had been rotten at heart, and that his treason, like that of

Floyd, arose from no sudden temptation, but was the end toward which his

whole life had been tending. It seemed impossible that such a man could

die without achieving infamy in some new and wondrous way. After reading

these revelations of domestic treachery, we need not be surprised at the

cool perfidy exhibited at West Point. Who but a monster of treason could

have penned the papers found in André's boot? Thus, 'No. 3, a slight

wood work--_very dry_--no bomb proof--a single abattis--no cannon--_the

work easily set on fire_.' 'No. 4, a wooden work about 10 feet high--no

bomb proof--2 six-pounders--a slight abattis.' 'North redoubt--stone

work 4 feet high--above the stone, wood filled in with earth--_very

dry_--bomb proof--no ditch--3 batteries within the fort--a poor

abattis--_the work easily fired with faggots dipped in pitch_.' We quote

the above, from the André papers in the State Library, to show the

culmination of a life morally base, and whose only redeeming feature,

_courage_, was rather the nerve of a desperado.

The Arnold papers were for years in Judge Edwards's possession, and the

more valuable of them have been presented by him to the New York

Historical Society. As Arnold was fully aware of the character of his

papers, it is possible that, connected with his bloody foray upon the

shores of Connecticut, there was a desire to repossess such adverse

testimony.

Pierrepont Edwards died in 1825, having lived to see his son filling the

station of Circuit Judge upon the New York bench, where he remained

until his sixtieth year.

Those who have ever visited Judge Edwards at his seat at Port Richmond,

will not soon forget the pleasant flow of conversation which brings out

the incidents of the past. Such a man's life is a series of valuable

reminiscences, weaving together the men and manners of generations both

past and present. Judge Edwards commenced the practice of the law in New

York in 1800, at the early age of nineteen. His progress was marked by

rapid promotion, and he was at once accorded a high rank in that galaxy

which clustered around the bar. At that time Hamilton was in the

fullness of his glory, and his opulent style was set off by the concise

and pungent oratory of Burr, who was likewise in his prime. De Witt

Clinton was developing that breadth of intellect which afterward made

him the pride of New York, and was about to take his seat in the State

Senate. It was an era remarkable for brilliance of wit and eloquence, as

well as for fierce political strife. The duel was a common method of

settling disputes among lawyers and politicians, and few men then

entered the political arena who were not good shots. Looking back to

this distant point, one is astonished at the simplicity of those

beginnings which have ended in colossal greatness. The vast landed

estates which now acknowledge lordly owners were then only in

inception. The Lenox estate was a range of wild land, far away even from

the suburbs of the city, and owned by a plain, plodding merchant, whose

son is the munificent and benevolent James Lenox, of whom New York may

be justly proud. A strong-minded German of unpolished aspect, and with

something of a foreign accent, kept a fur store at the corner of Pearl

and Pine Streets, and displayed upon his sign the name of John Jacob

Astor. He was then buying up from time to time pieces of land in the

vicinity of the city, and the advance of price has at length rendered

his estate the most valuable in America.

Turning to literary matters, one might have found Washington Irving

reading law in Wall Street, and little dreaming of the fame which

awaited his advancing years. Such are among the changes which the

retrospect of a long life affords. Among the events which marked Judge

Edwards's advent to New York was the fearful duel between Burr and

Hamilton. Burr and Edwards were cousins, but the former was more than

twenty years the senior, and the blow which he received could not but be

felt by the young attorney. However, their friendship remained unbroken

through life, and Edwards watched over the unfortunate old man during

his declining years. Burr in his better days owned an estate nearly

equal to those just referred to, and one which, had he retained it,

would have rendered him immensely rich; but, although not a wasteful

man, yet his schemes were of a ruinous character, and his property in

due time fell into the hands of Astor. In fact, no one could be on

friendly terms with Burr without suffering pecuniarily, since his powers

of persuasion were beyond refusal. No man had ever been known in America

with such fascinating address, and such plausible schemes for carrying

out some great enterprise, which, however great, must perish for the

lack of endorsing a note, whose payment, of course, one would not expect

him to trouble himself with. In his latter days, when all his schemes

had exploded, and when his moral character was ruined, and men shunned

him as though he were an object of dread, Burr found a friend in his

cousin, Ogden Edwards. The one had ascended in popular favor as the

other had sunk, and now sat as Circuit Judge of New York. Burr was

shattered by paralysis, and being nearly helpless, was removed to a

house at Port Richmond, where he received every attention. His pension

as colonel in the Continental army gave him a limited support, and his

friends clung to him to the last. Much interest was felt to ascertain

his views in respect to religion, or at least as to whether any change

had taken place since the approach of age. On this point, however, he

would not converse, and it is supposed that the infidelity of his early

years remained unchanged. He died perfectly conscious, and appeared

desirous of communicating something to a son of Judge Edwards, who

attended him, but was unable to speak.

Burr was buried at Princeton with military honors. His father and

grandfather lie in the row of college presidents, and his grave was made

just opposite theirs, leaving only room for a path between. That spot

contained the remains of his parents and grandparents, who died in his

childhood. Seventy-eight years had passed away since they had fallen

asleep, and during that interval not a member of the family had been

buried there. For some years Burr's grave was without a stone. At last,

a plain but elegant slab of Italian marble was placed at its head. The

inscription is simple, yet one can not but start when for the first time

he reads that name of thrilling memories. It has been said that the

monument was placed there by some mysterious lady, and this romantic

statement has gone the rounds of the press. This, however, is incorrect;

it was the work of the Edwardses, a family which not only watched over

the last years of the unfortunate man, but thus honored his grave.[3]

Among the interesting trials which have occurred under Judge Edwards's

jurisdiction, we may mention the famous conspiracy case, in which Jacob

Barker, Mathew L. Davis and Henry Eckford were jointly indicted for

conspiracy. The object of this conspiracy was to break several of the

city banks, and the trial excited intense interest throughout the Union.

The parties were convicted, but carried the case up to the Court of

Error, and at last escaped. Hugh Maxwell, who was prosecuting attorney

at the time, received a service of plate from the merchants of New York

as an acknowledgment of his faithfulness in so important a cause.

Another case, which is still remembered for its dramatic interest and

for its thrilling details, was that of the notorious Richard P.

Robinson. We doubt if any murder case has ever occurred in our country

which brought up so many new points to embarrass the bench, or in which

that bench bore a higher responsibility.

Robinson was a youth of nineteen, but recently from Connecticut, and was

a clerk in the reputable jobbing house of Joseph Hoxie. He was arrested

early in the morning at his boarding house in Dey Street, and aroused

from a sound sleep, under a charge of murder. The victim was an

unfortunate woman, who was found slain in her bed, in a disreputable

house in Thomas Street, and who had obtained an escape from youthful

misery by the hand of an unknown assassin. But under what name should

that assassin be found? It was undeniable that the prisoner had been one

of her intimates, but was the crime limited to himself alone? Had he

partners in the deed? Was he implicated at all? Was not he wholly

innocent of the murder, and only guilty of an unfortunate acquaintance?

These were the questions which surrounded the case. It is twenty-four

years since the trial absorbed and excited the American public, and at

this distance we can not but review the matter as one of singular

interest, while the question of guilt is not yet wholly solved. In this

point it resembles the affair known as the Mary Rogers mystery, which

four years afterward thrilled New York with fresh horror.

This case attracted the genius of Edgar A. Poe, who was then elaborating

those complex tales into whose labyrinths he leads the trembling reader,

until, when he almost feels himself lost, the clue suddenly brings him

to daylight and to upper air. Poe founded upon this terrible tragedy the

tale of Marié Roget, in which he effects a plausible solution of the

question of guilt. Why did he not also solve that question, equally

perplexing, as to who murdered Ellen Jewett? The deed was committed with

a hatchet, and as this was proved to have belonged to Hoxie's store, it

was a strong proof of Robinson's guilt; but this was rebutted by the

assertion that it had been used only to open a trunk, for the purpose of

recovering a portrait and sundry gifts,--an act which by no means

involved the further crime of murder. Whoever had committed the deed had

attempted to hide it by arson, and had fired the bedding by a lighted

candle, but a timely discovery had avoided this danger.

Robinson's defence was conducted by Ogden Hoffman, whose acknowledged

eloquence rendered him the most desirable of advocates, and he proved

himself worthy of the expectation reposed in him. Who that heard can

forget his appeals in behalf of _the poor boy_, which moved the audience

to tears, and shook even the equanimity of the jury? The main strength

of the defence lay in charging the deed upon the keeper of the house,

Rosina Townsend, who was in debt to the murdered girl for such a sum as

would make her death desirable. The trial continued two weeks; the

interest increased in intensity, and the public were canvassing

testimony as fast as it was published, as though life and death to

thousands hinged upon the verdict. At last, as a conclusion to all other

testimony, Hoffman produced a witness who established an alibi. At

twelve o'clock at night word was given that the jury had agreed. The

court was opened at that late hour, the prisoner confronted with the

jury, and an acquittal pronounced. The prisoner flushed, turned pale,

and then sunk to his seat, while Hoffman caught him to his arms, and the

aged father became convulsed with sobbing emotion.

Whatever may have been the mystery enshrouding this tragedy, we have

long been satisfied as to Robinson's guilt, and we believe that it is

now admitted that the alibi was but a bold stroke of well-paid perjury.

Robinson became a wanderer and died in Texas, and Rosina Townsend,

having abandoned her infamous career, led a reformed life for some

years, and died recently, at Cattskill, in the communion of the church.

Hoffman, too, is no more; and, as the old court-house and Bridewell,

which stood in the Park, have been torn down, naught remains to recall

the tragedy but the house where it occurred. Even this exhibits proof of

the changes of time, and now, expurgated of its early shame, one may

find 41 Thomas Street serving the honest purpose of a carpenter's shop.

Among the chief objects of curious interest which adorn Judge Edwards's

residence, are the family portraits. Here we may look upon the

lineaments of the great metaphysician, exhibiting the calm simplicity of

greatness. A fitting companion to this is found in Sarah, his wife. As

one gazes upon it he can not help admiring the serene beauty of her who

softened the stern Puritanism of her age by all the graces of life, and

whose beauty of person was set off by a still higher beauty of

character. In contrast with these is the fine portrait of their

unfortunate grandson, and his daughter, almost as unfortunate, from the

pencil of Vanderleyn. The countenance of the first of these is full of

life,--the brilliant eye eloquent with power, and the whole features

instinct with that strange and fascinating beauty for which Burr was

famed. That of Theodosia has a noble bust draped after the antique, and

the superb hauteur which pervades her features would have made Cleopatra

proud. Yet, under all this there is an expression of girlish loveliness

and tender affection, which proved a true heart. No wonder that both

Burr and Allston worshiped at the shrine of parental and conjugal love,

united as they were in such a one, or that, when she was lost at sea,

the one felt the curse scathing him with hopeless desolation, while the

other went heart-broken to an early grave.

SONNET.

This age may not behold it; we may lie

Sepultured and forgotten, and the mold

Of e'er-renewing earth may first enfold

New matter to its bosom, and the sky

New nations arch beneath its canopy,

Ere this misshapen thing, the world, be rolled

And sphered to perfect freedom, ere the old

Incrusted statutes that our God defy

Be crushed in its rotation, and those die

That lived defiance through them. Then man's gold

No more shall manhood buy, or men be sold

For pottage messes. We may not be nigh

To see the glory, but if true and bold

Our hands may haste what others shall behold.

THE GREEN-CORN DANCE.

FROM AN UNPUBLISHED MS. BY JOHN HOWARD PAYNE, AUTHOR OF "HOME, SWEET

HOME"

[The following letter was written by the late JOHN HOWARD

PAYNE to a relative in New York, in 1835. The Green-Corn Dance

which it describes was, it is believed, the last ever celebrated by

the Creeks east of the Arkansas. Soon after, they were removed to

the West, where they now are.]

MACON, GEORGIA, ----, 1835.

MY DEAR ----.

... I have been among the Indians for a few days lately. Shall I tell

you about them? You make no answer, and silence gives consent;--so I

will tell you about the Indians.

The State of Alabama, you may remember, has been famous as the abode of

the Creek Indians, always regarded as the most warlike of the southern

tribes. If you will look over the map of Alabama, you will find, on the

west side of it, nearly parallel with the State of Mississippi, two

rivers,--one the Coosa and the other the Talapoosa,--which, descending,

unite in the Alabama. Nearly opposite to these, about one hundred miles

across, you will find another river,--the Chatahoochie, which also

descends to form, with certain tributaries, the Apalachicola. It is

within the space bounded by these rivers, and especially at the upper

part of it, that the Creeks now retain a sort of sovereignty. The United

States have in vain attempted to force the Creeks to volunteer a

surrender of their soil for compensation. A famous chief among them made

a treaty a few years ago to that effect; but the nation arose against

him, surrounded his house, ordered his family out, and bade him appear

at the door after all but he had departed. He did so. He was shot dead,

and the house burned. The treaty only took effect in part, if at all.

Perpetual discontents have ensued. The United States have assumed a sort

of jurisdiction over the territory, leaving the Creeks unmolested in

their national habits and their property, with this exception in their

favor, beyond all other tribes but the Cherokees,--they have the right,

if they wish to sell, to sell to individuals, at their own prices, but

are not bound to treat with the republic at a settled rate,--which last

mode of doing business they rather properly looked upon as giving them

the appearance of a vanquished race, and subject to the dictation of

conquerors. So, what the diplomatists could not achieve was forthwith

attempted by speculators;--and among those the everlasting Yankee began

to appear, and the Indian independence straightway began to disappear.

Certain forms were required by government to give Americans a claim to

these Creek lands. The purchaser was to bring the Indian before a

government agent;--in the agent's presence, the Indian was to declare

what his possessions were, and for how much he would sell them;--the

money was paid in presence of the agent, who gave a certificate, which,

when countersigned by the President, authorized the purchaser to demand

protection from the national arms, if molested. All this was well

enough; but it was soon discovered that the speculators would hire

miscreants and drunken Indians to personate the real possessors of

lands, and, having paid them the money, would take it back as soon as

the purchase was completed, give the Indian a jug of whiskey, or a small

bag of silver, for the fraud, and so become lords of the soil. Great

dissatisfaction arose, and lives were lost. An anonymous letter opened

the eyes of government. The white speculators were so desperate and

dangerous that any other mode of information was unsafe. Investigators

were appointed to examine into the validity of Creek sales, and the

examiners met at the time I went to witness a great Indian religious

festival, concerning which I will inform you presently; for it was by my

curiosity to view this relic of their remotest times that the visit

among the Indians, alluded to in the beginning of my letter, was

prompted. It has been necessary for me to be thus prolix, to make you

understand the nature of the society--and a sort of danger too--by

which we were surrounded. On one side, white rogues--border

cutthroats--contending, through corrupted red men, for the possessions

of those among them, who, though honest, are unwary. On another side,

the cheated Indian-robber of his brethren, wheedled by some fresh white

cheat into a promise to sell (payable in over-charged goods) at a higher

price to the last comer, on condition of the latter individual getting

the earlier inadequate sale set aside by the agent of the United States,

through evidence from its pretended victim that the payment for it had

only been nominal, and was forthwith fradulently withdrawn. Even the

judges are accused of being, covertly, sometimes as bad as any of the

rest, and it is said that instances are not unknown wherein some of them

have, not long after withdrawing from the seat of justice, proved to be

full of wealth in lands, which could only be accounted for by a supposed

collusion with accusers who have supplied them with pretexts for

cancelling prior sales by Indians in favor of better offers, when

contrasted with the preceding ones, though offers really amounting to

nothing at all in comparison with the true worth of the purchase. Amid

these scenes of complicated villany, it is not unusual, after the

session of a commission representing the United States for trying the

validity of titles, to see a foiled thief rush at the successful

overreaching one, with fist and bowie-knife; and it is then accounted a

case of uncommon good luck if either live to look upon what both have

stolen from the red-man, and one not only from the red-man, but the

white.

I beheld a fine, gentle, innocent-looking girl,--a widow, I

believe,--come up to the investigator to assert that she had never sold

her land. She had been counterfeited by some knave. The Investigator's

court was a low bar-room. He saw me eyeing him, and some one told him I

was travelling to take notes. He did not know but government had

employed me as a secret supervisor. He seemed to shrink, and postponed a

decision. I have since heard that he is a rascal of the sort at which I

have just hinted.

The ill-starred red people here are entirely at the mercy of

interpreters, who, if not negro-slaves of their own, are half-breeds,--a

worse set, generally, than the worst of either slaves or knaves. In the

jargon of the border, they are called _linkisters_,--some say because

they form, by interpreting, a _link_ between the Indian nations and

ours; but I should rather regard the word as a mere corruption of

_linguist_.

The Indians become more easily deluded by the borderers than by others,

because the borderers know that they never esteem any one to be

substantial who does not keep a shop. So your rascal of the frontier

sets up a shop, and is pronounced a _sneezer_. If his shop be large, he

is a _sneezer-chubco_; if larger than any other, he is a

_sneezer-chubco-mico_. But, in any of his grades, a _sneezer_ is always

considered as a personage by no means to be sneezed at. The _sneezer_

will pay for land in goods, and thinks himself very honest if he charges

his goods at five hundred times their worth, and can make it appear by

his account against the Indian's claim that he has paid him thousands of

dollars, when in fact he may scarcely have paid him hundreds of cents.

Well! So much for the beautiful state of our national legislation and

morals, as civilizers and protectors of the red-men. It is time for me

to relieve you from these details, so uncomplimentary to us of the

superior order, and to tell you something about the famous religious

festival which took me amongst the Indians, and thereby caused, the

foregoing first preamble,--the ennui produced by which I proceed to

cure, like a quack doctor, _by doubling the dose_. Accordingly, here

comes a second preamble, by way of introductory explanation of what is

to come at last.

The festival in question is called the Green-Corn Festival. All the

nation assemble for its celebration at a place set apart for the

purpose, as the Temple at Jerusalem was for the religious assemblages of

all the Jewish tribes. It has been kept by the Creeks, and many other

Indian nations,--indeed, perhaps, by the entire race,--from time

immemorial. It is prepared for, as well as fulfilled with, great form

and solemnity.

When the green corn is ripe, the Creeks seem to begin their year. Until

after the religious rites of the festival with which their New Year is

ushered in, it is considered as an infamy to taste the corn. On the

approach of the season, there is a meeting of the chiefs of all the

towns forming any particular clan. First, an order is given out for the

manufacture of certain articles of pottery to be employed in the

ceremonies. A second meeting gives out a second order. New matting is to

be prepared for the seats of the assembly. There is a third meeting. A

vast number of sticks are broken into parts, and then put up in

packages, each containing as many sticks as there are days intervening

previous to the one appointed for the gathering of the clans. Runners

are sent with these. One is flung aside every day by each receiver.

Punctually, on the last day, all, with their respective families, are at

the well-known rendezvous.

That you may the more clearly understand the whole matter, I will so

anticipate my story as to put you in possession of many essential

particulars concerning the place set apart by the Creeks for gathering

their people to the festival in question. This will provide you with the

unexpected gratification of even a third preamble, as an explanatory

avenue extra to the main subject.

The chosen spot is remote from any habitations, and consists of an ample

square, with four large log houses, each one forming a side of the

square, at every angle of which there is a broad opening into the area.

The houses are of logs and clay, and a sort of wicker-work, with

sharp-topped, sloping roofs, like those of our log houses, but more

thoroughly finished. The part of the houses fronting the square is

entirely open. Their interior consists of a broad platform from end to

end, raised a little more than knee-high, and so curved and inclined as

to form a most comfortable place for either sitting or lying. It is

covered with the specially-prepared cane matting, which descends in

front of it to the ground. A space is left open along the entire back of

each house, to afford a free circulation of air. It starts from about

the hight of my thin, so that I could peep in from the outside through

the whole of each structure, and obtain a clear view of all that was

going on. Attached to every house towers a thick, notched mast. Behind,

the angle of one of the four broad entrances to the square, rises a

high, cone-roofed building, circular and dark, with an entrance down an

inclined plane, through a low door. Its interior was so obscured that I

could not make out what it contained; but some one said it was a

council-house. I occupied one corner of an outer square, next to the one

I have already described, two sides of which outer square were formed by

thick corn-fields, a third by a raised embankment apparently for

spectators, and a fourth by the back of one of the buildings before

mentioned. In the center of this outer square was a very high circular

mound. This, it seems, was formed from the earth accumulated yearly by

removing the surface of the sacred square thither. At every Green-Corn

Festival, the sacred square is strewn with soil yet untrodden; the soil

of the year preceding being taken away, but preserved as above

explained. No stranger's foot is allowed to press the new earth of the

sacred square until its consecration is complete. A gentleman told me

that he and a friend chanced once to stroll along through the edge, just

after the new soil had been laid. A friendly chief saw him and

remonstrated, and seemed greatly incensed. He explained that it was

done in ignorance. The chief was pacified, but nevertheless caused every

spot which had been polluted by their unhallowed steps to be uptorn, and

a fresh covering substituted.

The sacred square being ready, every fire in the towns under the

jurisdiction of the head chief is, at the same moment, extinguished.

Every house must also at that moment have been newly swept and washed.

Enmities are forgotten. If a person under sentence for a crime can steal

in unobserved and appear among the worshippers when their exercises

begin, his crime is no more remembered. The first ceremonial is to light

the new fire of the year. A square board is brought, with a small

circular hollow in the center. It receives the dust of a forest tree, or

of dry leaves. Five chiefs take turns to whirl the stick, until the

friction produces a flame. From this sticks are lighted and conveyed to

every house throughout the tribe. The original flame is taken to the

center of the sacred square. Wood is heaped there, and a strong fire

lighted. Over this fire the holy vessels of new-made pottery are placed.

Drinking-gourds, with long handles, are set around on a bench. Appointed

officers keep up an untiring surveillance over the whole, never moving

from the spot; and here what they call the black drink is brewed, with

many forms and with intense solemnity.

Now, then, having rendered you, by these numerous prefaces, much better

informed about the Creek Jerusalem and its paraphernalia than I was when

I got there, I will proceed with my travel story, just as if I had not

enabled you to ponder all that I saw so much more understandingly than I

myself did.

* * * * *

I cannot describe to you my feelings when I first found myself in the

Indian country. We rode miles after miles in the native forest, seeing

neither habitation nor an inhabitant to disturb the solitude and majesty

of the wilderness. At length we met a native in his native land. He was

galloping on horseback. His air was oriental;--he had a turban, a robe

of fringed and gaudily-figured calico, scarlet leggings, and beaded

belts and garters and pouch. We asked how far it was to the Square. He

held up a finger, and we understood him to mean one mile. Next we met

two Indian women on horseback, laden with water-melons. In answer to our

question of the road, they half covered a finger, to express that it was

half a mile further, and, smiling, added,'_sneezer_--_much_,' meaning

that we should find lots of our brethren, the sneezers, there, to keep

us company. We passed groups of Indian horses tied in the shade, with

cords long enough to let them graze freely. We then saw the American

flag--a gift from the government--floating over one of the hut-tops in

the square. We next passed numbers of visitors' horses and carriages,

and servants, and under the heels of one horse a drunken vagabond

Indian, or half-Indian, asleep. And, finally, we found ourselves at the

corner of the sacred square, where the aborigines were in the midst of

their devotions.

As soon as I left the carriage, seeing an elevation just outside of one

of the open corners of the sacred square, whence a clear view could be

obtained of what was going on within, I took my station there. I was

afterwards told that this mound was composed of ashes which had been

produced during many preceding years by such fires as were now blazing

in the center; and that ashes of the sort are never permitted to be

scattered, but must thus be gathered up, and carefully and religiously

preserved.

Before the solemnities begin,--and, some one said, though I am not sure

it was on good authority, ere new earth is placed,--the women dance in

the sacred square, and entirely by themselves. I missed seeing this.

They then separate from the men, and remain apart from them until after

the fasting and other religious forms are gone through, when they have

ceremonies of their own, of which I shall speak in due course.

As I gazed from my stand upon the corner mound, the sacred square

presented a most striking scene. Upon each of the notched masts, of

which I have already spoken as attached to each of the structures

within, was a stack of tall canes, hung all over with feathers, black

and white. There were rude paint-daubs about the posts and roof-beams of

the open house-fronts, and here and there they were festooned with gourd

vines. Chiefs were standing around, the sides and corners, alone, and

opposite to each other, their eyes riveted on the earth, and motionless

as statues. Every building was filled with crowds of silent

Indians,--those on the back rows seated in the Turkish fashion, but

those in front with their feet to the ground. All were turbaned, all

fantastically painted, all in dresses varying in ornament but alike in

wildness. One chief wore a tall black hat, with a broad, massive silver

band around it, and a peacock's feather; another had a silver scull-cap,

with a deep silver bullion fringe down to his eyebrows, and plates of

silver from his breast to his knee, descending his tunic. Most of them

had the eagle plume, which only those may wear who have slain a foe;

numbers sported military plumes in various positions about their

turbans; and one had a tremendous tuft of black feathers declining from

the back of his head over his back; while another's head was all shaven

smooth, excepting a tuft across the center from the back to the front,

like the crest of a helmet.

I never saw an assembly more absorbed with what they regarded as the

solemnities of the occasion.

The first sounds I heard were a strange low, deep wail,--a sound of many

voices drawn out in perfect unison, and only dying away with the breath

itself, which indeed was longer sustained than could be done by any

singer I ever yet heard. This was followed by a second wail, in the same

style, but shrill, like the sound of musical glasses, and giving a

similar shiver to the nerves. And after a third wail in another key, the

statue-like figures moved and formed two diagonal lines opposite to each

other, their backs to opposite angles of the square. One by one, they

then approached the huge bowls in which the black drink was boiling,

and, in rotation, dipped a gourd, and took, with a most reverential

expression, a long, deep draught each. The next part of the ceremony

with them was somewhat curious; but the rapt expression of the

worshippers took away the effect which such an evolution would be apt to

produce on a fastidious stomach if connected with an uninterested head.

In short, these dignitaries, without moving a muscle of the face, or a

joint of the body, after a few seconds, and with great solemnity,

ejected what had been swallowed upon the ground. It seemed as if given

forth in the spirit of a libation among the ancients. The chiefs having

afterwards tasted, each replacing the gourd, and returning to his stand

before the next came forward, they all went to their seats, and two old

men approached and handed round gourds full to the other parties present

who had remained stationary. The looks on each side were as full of

solemn awe as I have ever seen at any Christian ceremony; and certainly

the awe was more universal than usually pervades our churches.

This done, a chief made a speech, but without rising. It was listened to

with profound attention, and in one place, at a pause, called forth a

very unanimous and emphatic shout of approbation,--a long sound,

seemingly of two syllables, but uttered by all in the same breath. I

asked a professed _linkister_ what the speech was about; but he was

either indifferent or ignorant, for he only replied that it was an

appeal to them not to forsake their ancient ceremonies, but to remain

faithful in their fulfilment to the last, and that it wound up with a

sort of explanatory dissertation upon the forms which were to follow.

One chief then walked round, and, in short, abrupt sentences, seemed to

give directions; whereupon some whitened, entire gourds, with long

handles, and apparently filled with pebbles, were produced; and men took

their stations with them on mats, while those who had been seated all

arose, and formed in circles around the fire, led by a chief, and always

beginning their movement towards the left. The gourds were

shaken;--there arose a sort of low sustained chant as the procession

went on; and it was musical enough, but every few seconds, at regular

intervals, a sound was thrown in by all the dancers, in chorus, like the

sharp, quick, shrill yelp of a dog. The dance seemed to bear reference

to the fires in the center. Every time they came to a particular part of

the square, first the head chief turned and uplifted his hands over the

flame, as if invoking a benediction, and all the people followed his

example in rotation. The dance was very unlike anything I ever saw

before. The dancers never crossed their feet, but first gave two taps

each with the heel and toe of one foot, then of the other, making a step

forward as each foot was tapped on the earth; their bodies all the while

stately and erect, and each, with a feather fan,--their universal and

indispensable companion,--fanning himself, and keeping time with his fan

as he went on. The dance was quickened, at a signal, till it became

nearly a measured run, and the cries of the dancers were varied to suit

the motion, when, suddenly, all together uttered a long, shrill whoop,

and stopped short, some few remaining as guards about the sacred square,

but most of the throng forthwith rushing down a steep, narrow ravine,

canopied with foliage, to the river, into which they plunged; and the

stream was black on every side with their heads as they swam about,

playing all sorts of antics; the younger ones diving to fetch up pieces

of silver money which the visitors flung into the water, to put their

dexterity to the test.

Returning to the sacred square, they went through other dances around

the fire, varying in figure and accompaniment. All were generally led by

some aged chief, who uttered a low, broken sound, to which the others

responded in chorus. Sometimes the leader, as he went around, would

ejaculate a feeble, tremulous exclamation, like allelu_liah_,

allelu_liah_, laying the stress upon the last syllable, to which all

would respond in perfect accord, and with a deep, sonorous bass,

'allelu_liah_,' and the same alternation continued to the close, which

was invariably sudden, and after a long general whoop.

Each dance seemed to have a special form and significance;--one in

particular, where the dancers unstacked the tall canes with feathers

suspended from them, each taking one from the mast sustaining it; and

this one, I was told, meant to immortalize triumphs won at ball-plays.

The feathered canes are seized as markers of points gained by the

bearers in the ball-play, which is the main trial of strength and skill

among rival clans of the same tribe, in friendship, and even between

tribe and tribe, when in harmony. The effect of these canes and

feathers, as they glanced around, with an exulting chorus, was very

inspiriting, and the celebrants became almost wild with their delight as

it drew near its climax, ending their closing whoop with a general laugh

of triumphant recollection.

Other dances were represented as alluding to conquests over bears and

panthers, and even the buffalo, which last memorial is remarkable

enough, having among them survived all traces of the buffalo itself.

But, excepting these vague hints, I could not find any bystander capable

of giving me a further explanation of any point on which I inquired,

than that it was 'an old custom;' or, if they wished to be more

explicit, with a self-satisfied air, they would gravely remark that it

was 'the green-corn dance,'--which I knew as well as they. Could I have

been instructed even in their phrases and speeches, I might have made

valuable conjectures. But even their language, on these occasions,

seems, by their own admission, beyond the learning of the

'_linkisters_.' It is a poetical, mystical idiom, varying essentially

from that of trading and of familiar intercommunication, and utterly

incomprehensible to the literal minds of mere trafficking explainers.

Even were it otherwise, the persons hovering upon the frontier most

ingenuously own, when pressed for interpretations of Indian customs,

that they care nothing for the Indians excepting to get their lands, and

that they really consider all study concerning them as egregious folly,

save only that of finding out how much cotton their grounds will yield,

and in what way the greatest speculations can be accomplished with the

smallest capital.

The last of the ceremonies of the day consisted of a sort of trial of

fortitude upon the young.

Old chiefs were seated at the back of the council-house, and of the four

houses of the square. They had sharp instruments,--sail-needles, awls,

and flints. Children of from four to twelve, and youths, and young men,

presented their limbs, and the instrument was plunged into the thighs

and the calves of the legs, and drawn down in long, straight lines. As

the blood streamed, the wounded would scoop it up with bark or sticks,

and dash it against the back of the building; and all the building thus

became clotted with gore. The glory of the exercise seemed to be to

submit without flinching, without even consciousness. The youngest

children would sometimes show the most extraordinary self-control. All

offered themselves to the experiment voluntarily. If a shudder were

detected, the old chiefs gashed deeper. But where they saw entire

firmness, an involuntary glow of admiration would flit over their stony

faces.

We now left, and went to an infant town--and a savage infant it

seemed--over the river to break our fast,--an indulgence which to our

Indian friends is not permitted. They may neither eat nor sleep until

the ceremonies close. The town we went to is named Talassee. It has but

about a dozen houses as yet, but is delightfully situated, and I should

not wonder to see a large place there in another twelvemonth. It belongs

to the region of a clan different from the one we left, though part of

the same tribe. Here the investigating agent held his court; and the

place was crowded with drunken Indians, and more uncivilized

speculators, parading about, as some had done among the spectators at

the festival, with blacked eyes and lacerated faces,--the trophies of

_civil_ war for _savage_ plunder. At the house where we dined, I found

the landlady and her family implacable Indian haters. I was afterwards

told the cause. Her husband is continually marrying Indian

wives,--probably to entitle himself to their lands. He, being a

_sneezer_, and keeping a tavern, is a great man among them. I saw a very

comely young squaw promenading, who believed herself to be one of the

_sneezer-chubco-mico's_ last wives. The man's white and original wife

and daughters made an excuse to walk by, to have a look at the

aboriginal interloper. The latter had just received from my landlord a

present of a pair of gaudy bracelets, for which he had paid eighteen

dollars at another _sneezer's_,--bracelets worth about four. I was told

how the man came by this red mate of his. He had taken a young chiefs

wife in her husband's absence. The chief, returning while my landlord

was absent, got his young wife back. The landlord, on reappearing, is

said to have threatened the chief with General Jackson and big guns. The

chief said he was partial to his wife; but he had a sister much

prettier, and, for the sake of peace, if nothing were said about the

matter, Mr. Landlord should have her for a wife. The bargain was struck.

The handsome little squaw I have spoken of is that same young chief's

sister. This stealing of wives is beginning to excite some commotion. I

heard that there had been a council of chiefs in the neighborhood of

Talassee. It was a very animated one, and the wrong of wife-stealing was

violently discussed. It was thought by some almost as bad as

land-stealing. Others felt rather relieved by it. One of the drunken

Indians whom I saw reeling and whooping about, as I stood at the door of

the log hut where we dined, seemed of the latter party. I asked a

_linkister_ the meaning of a song the Indian was singing with such glee.

The black _linkister_ laughed, and was reluctant to explain; but when I

pressed him, the following proved to be the meaning of the burthen:--

A man may have a wife,

And that wife an untrue one;

And yet the man won't die,

But go and get a new one.

No doubt the poor fellow had been robbed in the same way, and, between

music and whiskey, was providing himself with consolation.

I was invited to 'camp out,' as they call it, near the sacred square. A

Mr. Du Bois, a man with an Indian wife and family, had arrangements for

the purpose in a neighboring field; so I went to the evening dance, and

left my party to the enjoyment of a sheltering roof at the frontier Blue

Beard's in Talassee; having made up my mind, after I had seen enough

more of the Indian festival for the night, to accept the proffered

'field-bed' which was so conveniently nigh, and sleep, for the first

time, in a real 'sky parlor.'

I sat to look at the evening dances till very late. The blazing fire

through the darkness gave a new aspect and still more striking wildness

to the fantastic scene. Some ceremonies yet unattempted seemed to be

going on over the drinks in the deep cauldrons; and the figures around

them, with those of the dancers, reminded me of the witch scenes in

Macbeth, as conceived by Shakspeare, not by the actors of them upon the

stage. Four grim figures were stirring the cauldrons incessantly, with a

sort of humming incantation, the others dancing around. In one of their

dances they used a sort of small kettle-drum, with a guitar-like handle

to it. But after a while, the evening dances seemed to vary from the

devotional to the complimentary and to the diverting; but the daylight

ones were altogether devotional. Apotheola led one of the less lofty

order, and he is one of the most popular and respected of their chiefs.

Its music seemed to consist of an exclamation from him of Yo, ho, ho!

yo, ho, ho!--to which the response appeared as if complimentary, and to

contain only the animated and measured repetition of _Apotheo_LA!

_Apotheo_LA! Another dance, which excited most boisterous mirth, was led

by a chief who is called by the borderers Peter the Gambler. He is a

great humorist, and famous for his love of play,--famous even among the

Indians, who are all gamblers. Once throwing dice with a chief, he

staked himself against a negro slave, and won the negro. I never saw a

party more diverted than were the lookers-on at this dance. It was all

monkey capers, but all with a meaning to the Indians beyond the

perception of the whites. The Indian spectators made their remarks from

their couches as the solemn mockeries proceeded, and the object of the

remarks seemed to be to provoke the dancers to laugh by making fun, and

the object of the dancers to provoke the fun-makers to laugh by

performing extravagant caricatures with imperturbable gravity.

Our semi-civilized inviter got a bench for us. Some Indians, when it was

not entirely filled, tried to pull it away. Several young ones, as a

fellow was trying to tug it from under us, seemed vastly amused at Du

Bois for saying, 'Keep your seats! keep your seats!' and mimicked him

and laughed. But we were entirely unmolested in any other way, excepting

for an instant by one white rascal on the road, as I was coming, who

galloped up towards me violently, in the dark, and shouted, 'Who the

hell may you be, if one were to let you alone?' Just then, however, I

got up to my party, and he said no more.

I have not mentioned, I believe, that no one is allowed in the sacred

square who tastes food during the devotional part of the ceremonies; but

to get drunk on this occasion is a specially great offence. It is also

considered as a desecration for an Indian to allow himself to be touched

by even the dress of a white man, until the ceremony of purification is

complete. There was a finely, though slightly, built Indian,--more

French than Tartar in his look and manner,--a _linkister_, too,--the

whites called him Charley,--and Charley had got very drunk. He was, of

course, _compelled_ to keep among the crowd outside. During the evening

dance, a chief censured those who stayed from the ceremony, and those

who dishonored it by appearing in this unworthy state. Charley was by

that time very drunk indeed, but very good humored. He came nearly naked

to listen. He heard the lecture; and, as he reeled around, pretending to

cover his face for shame, it was amusing to see his tricks to evade

tumbling against any of the bystanders, lifting his hands with an air of

dandified disdain as he staggered to one side, and repeating the mock

contemptuousness when rolling towards the same peril on the other. Next

morning I heard numbers of the natives, sitting all along the outside of

the sacred square, laughing very loud, and very good-naturedly quizzing

poor Charley, who had slept off somewhat of his exhilaration, but none

of his good humor. Charley laughed, too, and looked foolish, and laughed

again.

So, to go back and resume my story.

We went to our 'field-bed.' It consisted of a shed of loose boards on

tall stakes, and under it a raised platform of loose boards upon shorter

stakes. There were several human forms already wrapped in blankets and

asleep upon the platform. One of our party, attempting to get among

them, was told by Milly,--Du Bois's Indian wife,--who just then awoke,

'No here,--no here! dat not de rule!' It seems this was the female side

of the house. My buffalo robe was spread at the opposite end. I pulled

off my boots, and set them in the grass under the bed, and slept

delightfully. The only time I awoke, I saw the eyes of a towering black

figure fixed upon me. The chap was seeking a spot for a snooze among us;

but finding every inch of room occupied, gazed for a moment at a tree,

flung down his blanket, and tumbled on the grass, the tall tree he had

been eyeing, at his head, and a lesser one at his heels. The female side

of my house was divided from the male side by Du Bois, who slept between

the ladies and the gentlemen. Our party consisted of nine in all, Indian

ladies included. In the morning, at day-break, we were up. With a joke

to Milly about 'de rule,'--which she answered with a good-humored smile,

covering her face as she smiled,--we went back to the sacred square

among the Indians, who had been all night awake and at their devotions.

I found them preparing for the ceremonies which close the fast. Many

were standing about, and all intent on the preparations for the morning

forms. They went through the taking of the black drink, repeating all

they had done the day previous. But on this occasion I more particularly

observed two circular plates of brass and steel, which appeared the

remains of very antique shields. They were borne with great reverence by

two chiefs. The natives do not pretend to explain whence they came. They

keep them apart, as something sacred. They are only produced on great

occasions. I was told, too, that ears of green corn were brought in at a

part of the ceremony to-day, which I missed, and that they were

presented to a chief. He took them, and, after an invocation that the

corn might continue plentiful among them the year through, handed them

back.

This seemed the termination of the peace-offerings, and the religious

part of the affair was now to wind up with emblems of war. These were

expressed in what they call a Gun-Dance. When the dispositions were

making for it, some persons in carriages were desired by a white

_linkister_ to fall back and to remove their horses to a distance. Some

ladies, especially, were warned. 'Keep out of their way, ma'am,' said

the _linkister_ to a lady, 'for when they come racing about here with

their guns, they gits powerful sarcy.' I saw them dressing for the

ceremony, if it may be called dressing to throw off nearly every part of

a scanty covering. But the Indians are especially devoted to dress, in

their way. Some of them went aside to vary their costume with nearly

every dance.

Now appeared a procession of some forty or fifty women. They entered the

square, and took their seats together in one of the open houses. Two

men sat in front of them, holding gourds filled with pebbles. The gourds

were shaken so as to keep time, and the women began a long chant, with

which, at regular intervals, was given a sharp, short whoop from male

voices. The women's song was said to be intended for the wail of

mothers, wives, and daughters at the departure of the warriors for the

fight; the response conveyed the resolution of the warriors not to be

withheld, but to fight and conquer. And now were seen two

hideous-looking old warriors, with tomahawks and scalping-knives,

painted most ferociously. Each went half round the circle, exchanged

exclamations, kept up a sort of growl all the while, and at length

stopped with a war-whoop.

At this juncture, we were told to hurry to the outer square. The females

and their male leaders left their places inside, and went to the mound

in the centre of the outer square. The mound became entirely covered

with their forms, and the effect was very imposing. Here they resumed

their chant. The spectators mounted on the embankment. I got on a pile

of wood,--holy wood, I believe, and heaped there to keep up the sacred

fires. There were numbers of Indian women in the crowd. Four stuffed

figures were placed, one in each of the four corners of the square.

We now heard firing and whooping on all sides. At length in the high

corn on one side we saw crouching savages, some with guns of every sort,

some, especially the boys, with corn-stalks to represent guns. A naked

chief with a long sabre, the blade painted blood color, came before

them, flourishing his weapon and haranguing vehemently. In another

corn-field appeared another party. The two savages already mentioned as

having given the war dance in the sacred square, now hove in sight on a

third side, cowering. One of them I understood was the person who had

shot the chief I mentioned in the first part of this letter--the chief

who made an objectionable treaty, and whose house was burned. Both these

warriors crept slyly towards the outer square. One darted upon one of

the puppets, caught him from behind, and stole him off; another grasped

another puppet by the waist, flung him in the air, tumbled on him as he

fell, ripped him with his knife, tore off the scalp, and broke away in

triumph. A third puppet was tomahawked, and a fourth shot. These were

the emblems of the various forms of warfare.

After the first shot, the two parties whooped, and began to fire

indiscriminately, and every shot was answered by a whoop. One shot his

arrow into the square, but falling short of the enemy, he covered

himself with corn and crept thither to regain the arrow, and bore it

back in safety, honored with a triumphant yell as he returned. After

much of this bush skirmishing, both parties burst into the square. There

was unremitted firing and war-whooping, the music of chanting and of the

pebbled gourd going all the while. At length the fighters joined in

procession, dancing a triumphal dance around the mound, plunging thence

headlong into the sacred square and all around it, and then scampering

around the outside, and pouring back to the battle square; and the

closing whoop being given, the entire multitude from the battle square

rushed, helter-skelter, yelping, some firing as they went, and others

pelting down the spectators from their high places, with the corn-stalks

that had served for guns, and which gave blows so powerful that those

who laughed at them as weapons before, rubbed their shoulders and walked

away ashamed.

We resumed our conveyances homeward, and heard the splashing and

shouting, as we departed, of the warriors in the water.

Leave was now given to taste the corn, and all ate their fill, and, I

suppose, did not much refrain from drinking; for I heard that every

pathway and field around was in the morning strewed with sleeping

Indians.

We passed the day following in visits to the picturesque scenery of the

neighborhood. We saw the fine falls of the Talapoosa, where the broken

river tumbles over wild and fantastic precipices, varying from forty to

eighty or a hundred feet in hight; and when wandering among the slippery

rocks, we passed an old Indian with his wife and child and bow and

arrows. They had been shooting fishes in the stream, from a point

against which the fishes were brought to them by the current. The

scenery and the natives would have formed a fine picture. An artist of

the neighborhood made me a present of a view of these falls, which I

will show you when we meet.

The next part of the festival among the red folks--and which I

did not see, being that day on my 'tour in search of the

picturesque'--consisted, I was told, in the display of wives urging out

their husbands to hunt deer. When, from our travels among fine scenery,

we went down to the sacred square, towards night, we met Indians with

deer slung over their horses. The skin of the first that is shot is

presented to a priest, who flings it back to the slayer to be retained

by him as a trophy, and at the same time asks from the Great Spirit that

this may prove only the harbinger of deer in abundance whenever wanted.

There was some slight dancing that evening in the sacred square, but not

of significance enough to make it an object with me to remain for it,

and as so many were reserving themselves for the winding-up assembly of

the ladies, on Sunday morning, I thought I would do the same. Some of

our party stayed, however, for the night. They found a miscellaneous

dance at a house in the vicinity,--negroes, borderers, and reprobate

Indians, all collected in one incongruous mass. A vagabond frontier man

there asked a girl to dance. She refused, and was going to dance with

another. The first drew his pistol, and swore if she would not dance

with him she should not dance at all. Twenty pistols were clicked in an

instant; but the borderer, with a horse-laugh, asked if they thought he

didn't know there was not a soul in that section of country who dared to

draw a trigger against him? He was right, for the pistols were dropped

and the room cleared on the instant; whereupon the bully borderer

clapped his wings and crowed and disappeared.

The assemblage of the females I was rather solicitous to see, and so I

was at my post betimes. I had long to wait. I heard the gathering cry

from the men on all sides, in the corn-fields and bushes; it was like

the neighing to each other of wild horses. After a while the ladies

began to arrive. The spectators crowded in.

The Indian men went to their places, and among them a party to sing

while the women danced, two of the men rattling the gourds. The

cauldrons had disappeared from the centre of the sacred square.

And now entered a long train of females, all dressed in long gowns, like

our ladies, but all with gay colors, and bright shawls of various hues,

and beads innumerable upon their necks, and tortoise-shell combs in

their hair, and ears bored all around the rim, from top to bottom, and

from every bore a massive ear-drop, very long, and generally of silver.

A selected number of the dancers wore under their robes, and girded upon

their calves, large squares of thick leather, covered all over with

terrapin-shells closed together and perforated and filled with pebbles,

which rattled like so many sleigh-bells. These they have the knack of

keeping silent until their accompaniment is required for the music of

the dance. The dresses of all the women were so long as nearly to

conceal the feet, but I saw that some had neither shoes nor stockings

on, while others were sandalled. The shawls were principally worn like

mantles. Broad ribbons, in great profusion and of every variety of hue,

hung from the back of each head to the ground, and, as they moved,

these, and the innumerable sparkling beads of glass and coral and gold,

gave the wearers an air of graceful and gorgeous, and, at the same time,

unique wildness.

The procession entered slowly, and wound around the central fire, which

still blazed gently there, although the cauldrons had been removed; and

the train continued to stretch itself out, till it extended to three

circles and a half. The shorter side then became stationary, and stood

facing the men, who were seated in that building which contained the

chanters. This last rank of dancers seemed to include the principal

wearers of the terrapin leg-bands, which they continued to rattle,

keeping time with the chant, without shifting their position. At each

end of their line was a leader, one an old woman and the other not

young, both bearing a little notched stick, with two feathers floating

from it. At a particular turn of the general figure of the dance, these

two broke off from their fixed rank, and made a circuit outside of all

the rest, and more briskly, while the main body of the dancers, the

three circles before mentioned, which had never ceased to move, still

proceeded slowly round and round, only turning at a given signal to face

the men, as the men had turned to face the emblem of the Deity, the

central fire. Every eye among the women was planted on the ground. I

never beheld such an air of universal modesty. It seemed a part of the

old men's privilege to make comments aloud, in order to surprise the

women into a laugh. These must often have been very droll, and always

personal, I understand, and not always the most delicate. I saw a few

instances among the young girls where they were obliged to smother a

smile by putting up their handkerchiefs. But it was conquered on the

instant. The young men said nothing; but the Indian men, whether old or

young, seemed all to take as much interest in the show as we. The chief,

Apotheola, had two daughters there. Both are very elegant girls, but the

eldest delighted me exceedingly. She seemed about seventeen or eighteen.

She is tall, a fine figure; her carriage graceful and _distingué_, and

quite European. She had a white muslin gown; a black scarf, wrought all

over with flowers in brilliant colors; an embroidered white

_collarette_, I believe you call it; gold chains, coral beads, gold and

jewelled ear-rings,--single ones, not in the usual Indian

superabundance,--her hair beautifully dressed in the Parisian style; a

splendid tortoise-shell comb, gemmed; and from one large tuft of hair

upon one temple to that upon the other there passed a beautiful gold

ornament. Her sister's head-dress was nearly the same. The aforesaid

elder Princess Apotheola, I am happy to say, looked only at me. Some one

must have told her that I meant to run away with her, for I had said so

before I saw her to many of her friends. There was a very frolicksome,

quizzical expression in her eye; and now and then it seemed to say, 'No

doubt you think all these things wonderfully droll. It diverts me to see

you so puzzled by them.' But, excepting the look at me, which only

proved her excellent taste, her eye dwelt on the ground, and nothing

could have been more interestingly reserved than her whole deportment.

The dance over, all the ladies went from the square in the same order

that they entered it.

In about an hour, the same dance was repeated. When it ended, signal was

made for what they call The Dance of the Olden Time,--the breaking up of

the ceremonial, when the men and women are again allowed to intermingle.

This was done in a quick movement around and around and around again,

all the men yelping wildly and merrily, as struck their fancy, and

generally in tones intended to set the women laughing, which they did,

and heartily. The sounds most resembled the yelpings of delighted dogs.

Finally came the concluding whoop, and all the parties separated.

Between these two last dances, I sent for a chief, and desired him to

take charge of some slight gifts of tobacco and beads which I had

brought for them. The chief took them. I saw the others cut the tobacco,

and share it. Ere long my ambassador returned, saying, 'The chiefs are

mighty glad, and count it from you as very great friendship.' I had

been too bashful about my present, and kept it back too long, through

over-shyness. If I had sent it before, I might have seen the show to

more advantage. As it was, I was immediately invited to sit inside the

square, and witness the last dance from one of the places of honor.

But I was now obliged to depart, and to give up all hopes of ever again

seeing my beautiful Princess Apotheola. My only chance of a guide

through the wilderness would have been lost had I delayed. So I

reluctantly mounted my pony; and I left the Indians of Tuckabatchie and

their Green-Corn Festival, and their beautiful Princess Apotheola.

* * * * *

It was a great gratification to me to have seen this festival; with my

own eyes to have witnessed the Indians in their own nation, with my own

ears to have heard them in their own language. Nor was it any diminution

of the interest of the spectacle to reflect that this ceremony, so

precious to them, was now probably performing in the land of their

forefathers for the last, last time. I never beheld more intense

devotion; and the spirit of the forms was a right and a religious one.

It was beginning the year with fasting, with humility, with

purification, with prayer, with gratitude. It was burying animosities,

while it was strengthening courage. It was pausing to give thanks to

Heaven, before daring to partake its beneficence. It was strange to see

this, too, in the midst of my own land; to travel, in the course of a

regular journey in the New World, among the living evidences of one, it

may be, older than what we call the Old World;--the religion, and the

people, and the associations of the untraceable past, in the very heart

of the most recent portion of the most recent people upon earth. And it

was a melancholy reflection for ourselves, that, comparing the majority

of the white and red assemblage there, the barbarian should be so

infinitely the more civilized and the more interesting of the two.

ROSIN THE BOW.

A FANTASIA.

In Paris, a famous city in France,

That lies by the banks of the sluggish Seine,

Where you and I may never have been,

But which we know all about in advance;--

A place of wild and wicked romance,

A place where they gamble, and fiddle and dance,

And the slowest coach has always a chance

To get put over the road, I ween,

Where women are naughty, and men are gay,

And the suicides number a dozen a day,

And one of the gallant _jeunesse dorée_

Will spend the night at prodigious play,

And in the morning go out and slay

His bosom friend with a rapier keen,

Because he loses and cannot pay,--

Lived a nice young man named DIDIER.

This nice young man had run aground,

As such young men are apt to do;

His creditors swore and his mistress frowned,

His breeches pockets held ne'er a _sou_,

His boots were getting out at the toes,

His hat was seedy, and so were his clothes,

And, as he wandered the city around,

He could not think of a single friend

Slow to dun and prompt to lend,

Whose purse he thought he could venture to sound;

In such extremities friends are few;

At least I think so, friend, don't you?

At length, on the brink of a grim despair,

He happened to think of a quaint old fellow,

A comical customer, rusty and slow,

But who used to be an elegant beau,

In dress and manner quite _comme il faut_;

And who, because he happened to know

How to play on the violoncello,

Which he'd learned for fun long time ago,

Before his finances got so low,

Had obtained a place in an orchestra choir,

And played that beautiful instrument there;

And to him monsieur determined to go;

And so,

Up to the top of a rickety stair,

To a little attic cold and bare,

He stumbled, and found the artist there.

He told his tale; how his former pride

Was crushed and humbled into the dust;

He swore he had thought of suicide,

But the charcoal venders wouldn't trust;

He had no profession or trade or art,

Money or food, and perish he must;

And then like a blacksmith's forge he sighed,

A sigh that touched the fiddler's heart.

'Cheer up, _mon cher_, and never mind;

You're the very man I was trying to find.

You know at the grand Theatre Français

The leading violoncello I play,

And my salary is two francs a day.

There's a vacant place; if you are inclined

To take the same, you'll find 'twill pay.'

DIDIER looked up in a vast amaze:

'Why, I can't do so, you very well know,

For I never fiddled in my born days.'

'_Qu'a cela ne tienne_,' his friend replied,

'Don't be too certain,--you never have tried;

You ought to give your abilities scope;

There is an anxiety most of us feel,

We may be out of time or tune,

Leave off too late, or begin too soon,

May pitch too sharp, or perhaps too flat;

So here is a cake of excellent soap,

The old, original, pure Castile,

Just rosin your bow with that.'

He took his seat in an orchestra chair,

'Twould have made you stare

Had you been there

To see his knowing and confident air,

And to hear the considerate manager say,

'There is nobody like young _Didier_;

So nice and exact, so quite _au fait_,

With a style so thoroughly _recherché_,

Some other concern may get him away,

So I think I shall have to double his pay!'

In clover the youth continues to graze,

And still in the orchestra he plays;

He's the man who never was known to make

The smallest shadow of a mistake,

And there's only one drawback on his praise,--

He is too modest by fifty per cent

For such a master of the art,

For the story went he would never consent

To play a _solo_ part.

There's a MORAL, my juvenile friend, in this,

And you need not stumble and grope;

Just look for it sharp, and you can't go amiss;

You will find, there is nothing like soap!

Don't suffer yourself to be cast down

If capricious luck should happen to frown,

Go through with the motions, and if you're acute

None will ever suspect that your fiddle is mute;

But be sure and do as the rest of us do,

And don't flourish your stick till you get your cue.

Thus, let prosperity ebb or flow,

Still bate no jot of hope,

You may draw the longest kind of a bow

If 'tis only rosined with soap!

THE GRAVEYARD AT PRINCETON.

Reader, have you ever visited the pleasant village of Princeton, New

Jersey, renowned alike in the annals of the country and of the church?

While traveling from New York to Philadelphia by the New Jersey

Railroad, you have doubtless obtained a glimpse of it, for it is 'a city

set on a hill, which can not be hid,' and from the 'station,' a mile or

two distant, its spires and belfries, gleaming from amid its thick

embowering trees, present an interesting and picturesque appearance.

Passing onward from the station, the first notable object that meets the

eye of the traveler is the Theological Seminary, a large, plain building

of stone, the head-quarters in America of that branch of the Christian

Church of whose stern, unflinching orthodoxy John Knox was at once the

type and exponent. Near it stands its Library, an elegant Gothic

structure erected through the munificence of James Lenox, of New York,

and containing many works of great value. The street on which these

buildings stand is appropriately named Mercer Street, for beyond them,

at a short distance, lies the battle-field of Princeton, and the spot

where the gallant Hugh Mercer fell. That spot was formerly marked by a

large tree, but a few years ago the hallowed landmark was cut down and

removed by heartless barbarians. The house to which the wounded hero was

carried, where the 'two Quaker ladies waited on him' so assiduously,

still stands, and on the floor of the room in which he died are certain

marks, of doubtful origin, said to be blood-stains from his death-wound.

Over the now peaceful battle-field, reddened with nothing more terrible

than the ruddy clover-heads, a tall flag-staff, surmounted by a gilded

eagle, uprears the glorious stars and stripes, and attests the loyalty

of the people of Princeton.

About midway of the long, shady street of which Princeton chiefly

consists, stands the crowning glory of the place, the venerable College

of New Jersey. The college proper is a long, four-story edifice of

stone, its center adorned with a tower and belfry, conspicuous from

afar. At either side of it are clustered other buildings, embracing its

halls, recitation rooms, and chapel.

It stands a little distance back from the street, between it and which

lies the 'Campus,' a beautiful grassy slope of vivid green, surrounded

with an iron fence, laid out with neat gravel walks, and shaded by noble

and magnificent trees of more than a century's growth. Nothing can be

more beautiful in summer time than this shady lawn. Here, at all hours

of the day, students may be seen reading alone, or conversing in groups,

seated on the benches placed at intervals among the trees, or stretched

at full length on the fragrant grass, kicking their heels gymnastically

in the air, or sauntering with arms interlocked along the gravel walks,

singing, perhaps, some college song, such as

'Gaudeamus igitur,

Juvenes dum sumus,'

or others less classical and more uproarious.

Here, too, those known to their class-mates as the 'hard fellows,' are

wont to prowl in the darkened hours, making night hideous with terrific

voices, or stealing in darkness and silence to play some trick on the

'Profs.' or 'Tutes.'

From the gates of the Campus, every afternoon at the hour of five, or

after prayers, the whole troop of students, to the number of three

hundred, issue, for the purpose of taking their evening walk. Down the

street they march, by twos and threes, chatting, laughing, telling

college stories, or rehearsing the gossip of the day, into the extreme

lower end of the long street, a locality known as Orthodox Corner, where

they turn and march back in the same order. As they proceed, their ranks

are gradually swelled by a couple of hundreds of 'Seminary' students

(distinguishable by their more mature appearance, their heavier beards,

and their 'stove-pipe hats'), and their walk enlivened by the sight of

numerous ladies, who, by a remarkable coincidence, have also chosen the

hour between five and six as the most fashionable for promenading, the

dames of course usually going _up_ the street as the students are going

_down_, and _down_ as, the students are going _up_, in order to afford

them opportunities to exercise their graces in bowing to those whom they

know, and staring at those whom they do not. For one brief hour, the

quiet street presents the appearance of a crowded city, the pedestrians

jostling each other as they pass and repass; but soon as the hour of six

arrives, all is still again, for youths and maidens are alike engaged in

discussing that meal for which their long walk has served as a whet.

But it was of the dead, not the living, that I was about to speak.

Nearly opposite the college Campus we find Witherspoon Street, named

after that brave and good man who was president of the college in the

days of the Revolution, and one of the signers of the Declaration of

Independence. Following this street a short distance, we come to the

city of the dead. It is situated on an eminence, commanding a fine view

of the surrounding country, embracing the village of Kingston, the

distant spires of Trenton, and the blue range of hills beyond which roll

the dark waters of the Atlantic. In natural advantages it can not

compare with some of our modern cemeteries, but the historic interest

which attaches to it more than compensates for the lack of picturesque

effect.

The first spot to which the visitor is directed, is the inclosure

containing the graves of the presidents of Princeton College. They are

all of the old-fashioned style of 'table tombs,' now so seldom

constructed; a flat slab, stretched on four walls of solid masonry,

covering the whole grave. It was on such a tombstone that, in the old

Greyfriars churchyard in Edinburgh, the solemn League and Covenant, from

which resulted events so important to Scotland, was signed. No 'storied

urn or animated bust' records the virtues of these venerable men,--not

even marble in its simplest form has been used to mark their

resting-place. The slabs are of coarse, grey stone, with long

inscriptions in Latin occupying their entire surface. Many of them,

especially that of the pious and renowned JONATHAN EDWARDS, who

left his New England home only to find a grave in New Jersey, having

died a month after his removal to Princeton, have been most shamefully

mutilated by relic-hunters and curiosity-mongers; innumerable pieces

having been chipped off the edges of the slabs, until even the

inscriptions have been encroached upon. To prevent, if possible, further

mutilation, the following unique and elaborate, but eloquent notice,

enclosed in an iron frame, has been placed over the graves of these

reverend fathers. It was written by Professor, now Dr. Giger, of the

college.

Keep your sacrilegious hands off these venerable stones! Parian

marble, wrought with consummate skill, could not replace them.

Connected with these homely monuments are historical associations

that ought not to be forgotten. The scarcity of better materials,

the rudeness of monumental sculpture, the poverty of the country,

the early struggles and pecuniary embarrassments of the colony, at

the period when these monuments were erected, as well as the

self-denial and hardships and labors of the distinguished men who

gave fame and usefulness to Nassau Hall, are indicated by these

rough stones. Nothing modern, nothing polished or magnificent,

could suggest the early history of New Jersey. Spare what remains

of these broken memorials. Thoughtless young man! why do you break

and deface these old monuments? A few fragments carried in your

pocket, or placed in your cabinet, will not impart to you the

activity and energy of Burr, or the profound and logical intellect

of Edwards, or the eloquence of Davies, or the piety and triumphant

death of Finley, or the poetical wisdom, the power of governing and

inspiring youth, the love of knowledge, and the stern, unflinching

patriotism of Witherspoon. If you admire and reverence the

character of these great and good men, read their works imitate

their example; and forbear, we beseech you, to add to the shameful

mutilation of the frail memorials intended to protect their bones

from insult.

But there is a strange and startling incongruity observable in this

enclosure. At the foot of the grave where rest the remains of the

venerable Aaron Burr, first president of the College of New Jersey,

stands a tall white marble monument of modern form and appearance, so

utterly out of keeping with the rest of the tombs, that the visitor at

once turns to it, and is none the less startled to find that it marks

the last resting-place of that other Aaron Burr, the traitor, the

duellist, the libertine, whose remains, brought hither in the night,

were surreptitiously buried at the feet of his venerated father, and

this monument placed over them, years afterwards, in the same manner.

And for his father's sake, there they were suffered to remain. 'After

life's fitful fever he sleeps well,' in the midst of these old grey

stones, and surrounded by the honored dead. The monument bears no

record, except his name, the dates of his birth and death, and the

statement that he was Vice-President of the United States from 1801 to

1805. It is as if it said,--

'No further seek his merits to disclose,

Or draw his frailties from their dread abode.'

Not a quarter of a mile from where his dust thus reposes, there sleeps,

in a neglected grave in a small grove of trees behind the college, one

of his hapless victims, a young lady of Philadelphia, who died, as the

mouldering headstone, half sunken in the turf, informs us, 'at the early

age of twenty-two.'

The next point of interest is the spot where seven or eight elegant

shafts of white marble, erected by their class-mates, mark the graves of

students who have died during their collegiate course. They are all

remarkable for the beauty and chaste simplicity of their design, and the

appropriateness of their inscriptions. No historic interest attaches to

them; no well-earned fame gilds them with a halo of glory; but a feeling

touching and sad creeps over the heart as we read on the tomb the name

of each sleeper's distant home, and think of the poor young man dying in

the midst of strangers, while doubtless

'There was weeping far away,

And gentle eyes, for him,

With watching many an anxious day,

Were sorrowful and dim.'

Passing on, we reach the graves of the three Alexanders, father and two

sons, whose writings are dear to so many Christian hearts. Side by side

they repose, under three slabs of pure white marble, inscribed with

appropriate epitaphs. That of the father, Archibald Alexander, for fifty

years professor in the Theological Seminary, is a simple, unadorned

record of his personal history; that of the younger brother, Joseph

Addison, who was a man of immense learning, able to read, write, and

converse in sixteen languages, tells us that 'his great talents and vast

learning were entirely devoted to the exposition and elucidation of the

Word of God;' but to New Yorkers that of the elder brother, Dr. James W.

Alexander, is fraught with the greatest interest, from his having so

lately occupied a prominent place among the first divines and scholars

of our country. It runs thus:

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF

JAMES WADDEL ALEXANDER.

A man of God, thoroughly furnished unto all good works; a learned,

elegant, and accomplished scholar; a faithful, affectionate, and

beloved pastor; an able, eloquent, and successful preacher;

professor of mathematics in the College of New Jersey; professor of

ecclesiastical history in Princeton Theological Seminary; pastor of

the Presbyterian Church, corner of Fifth Avenue and Nineteenth

Street, New York.

Throughout his life and labors, he illustrated those gifts and

graces that exalt humanity and adorn the church of God.

Scattered about the graveyard are many monuments, attractive and

interesting from their artistic beauty alone. One of the most chaste and

elegant designs I have ever seen is the tomb erected by a gentleman of

Philadelphia, to the memory of his wife, son, and daughter, who perished

in the burning of the 'Henry Clay' on the Hudson River. It is in the

form of a casket, of white marble, beautifully carved and of graceful

form, elevated on a pedestal of polished stone, of a blueish tint. On

one end of the casket are inscribed the words

WIFE

DAUGHTER

SON

on the other end,

MOTHER

SISTER

BROTHER

while one side bears the appropriate text of Scripture:--

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and

through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee;

and the other the comforting words:--

For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also

which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.

Under a drooping cypress tree, half hidden amid its dark green foliage,

is a monument of white marble, in the form of a Greek cross, low but

massive, on which there is no epitaph or inscription whatever; but on

the little foot-stone beyond it are the simple words:--

GENEVIEVE.

Died 1851,

Aged 18.

Numerous 'broken rosebuds' mark the graves of children, and the device

is so often repeated as to become tiresome; but on one handsome monument

is carved a wreath of flowers, from which a rose has apparently dropped,

and fallen on the pedestal,--a beautiful illustration of the loss the

family circle had sustained in the death of her who rests below. Another

child-grave, the tombstone a small upright slab surmounted by a wreath

of flowers, bears the touching inscription:--

Our only Son,

JOHN AGUR E----.

Aged 2 years.

Many graves here, as elsewhere, are adorned with examples of 'graveyard

poetry;' but most of it is of that humble character which is illustrated

by the following:--

'Farewell, beloved wife: I must go

And leave you in this world of woe.

A few short years, then we shall meet

Together at our Saviour's feet.'

One more epitaph, before we leave this interesting and time-honored

place of graves. It is from a plain horizontal slab, not far from the

entrance; and is, to our thinking, one of the most beautiful and

touching monumental inscriptions ever penned.

SARAH B----,

Wife of the Rev. C---- K----.

A humble worshiper of Christ, she lived in love and died in faith.

Truthful woman, delightful companion, ardent friend, devoted wife,

self-sacrificing mother, we lay you gently here, our best beloved,

to gather strength and beauty for the coming of the Lord.

AMONG THE PINES.

Some winters ago I passed several weeks at Tallahassee, Florida, and

while there made the acquaintance of Colonel J----, a South Carolina

planter. Accident, some little time later, threw us together again at

Charleston, when I was gratified to learn that he would be my _compagnon

du voyâge_ as far north as New York.

He was accompanied by his body-servant, 'Jim,' a fine specimen of the

genus darky, about thirty years of age, born and reared in his master's

family. As far as possible we made the journey by day, stopping at some

convenient resting-place by night; on which occasions the Colonel, Jim,

and myself would occupy the same or adjoining apartments, 'we white

folks' sleeping on four posts, while the more democratic negro spread

his blanket on the floor. Thrown together thus intimately, it was but

natural that we should learn much of each other.

The 'Colonel' was a highly cultivated and intelligent gentleman, and

during this journey a friendship sprung up between us,--afterward kept

alive by a regular correspondence,--which led him, with his wife and

daughter, and the man Jim, to my house on his next visit at the North,

one year later. I then promised,--if I should ever again travel in South

Carolina,--to visit him on his plantation in the extreme north-eastern

part of the State.

In December last, a short time prior to the passage of the ordinance of

secession, I had occasion to again visit Charleston, and, previous to

setting out, dispatched a letter to the Colonel with the information

that I was then ready to be led of him 'into the wilderness.' On

arriving at the head-quarters of Secession, I found a missive awaiting

me, in which he cordially renewed his previous tender of hospitality,

gave me particular directions how to proceed, and stated that his 'man

Jim' would meet me with a carriage at Georgetown, and convey me thence,

seventy miles, to 'the plantation.'

Having performed the business which led me to Charleston, I set out for

the rendezvous five days before the date fixed for the meeting,

intending to occupy the intervening time in an exploration of the

ancient town and its surroundings. Having passed the half of one day and

the whole of one night in that delectable place,--during which night I

was set on and nearly annihilated, while lying defenceless in my bed, by

a myriad of Carolina _big-bugs_,--I found it so intolerably dull that,

to escape a siege of 'the blues,' I hired a horse and a negro driver at

a livery-stable, and started off for the plantation.

I make this preliminary statement to give the reader a satisfactory

reason for taking him over wretched roads, at so inclement a season,

with no companion but an ebony Jehu, into the very heart of

Secessiondom.

My companion was a very intelligent native African, of the name of

Scipio, who 'hired his time' of his mistress, and obtained his living by

doing odd jobs around the streets and wharves of Georgetown. Portions of

the country through which we passed were almost as wild as the forests

of Oregon, and in some places the feeling against the North and Northern

travelers ran very high. I had some strange encounters with swollen

streams and roaring secessionists, in which my negro driver was of great

service to me; and the knowledge I thus gained of him led me for the

first time to the opinion, that real elevation and nobility of character

may exist under an ebony skin.

Our first day on the road was clear, sunshiny, and of delicious

temperature--one of those days so peculiar to the Southern winter, when

the blood bounds through every vein as if thrilled by electricity, and a

man of lively temperament can scarcely restrain his legs from dancing a

breakdown. Night found us thirty miles on our way, and under the roof of

a hospitable planter. A storm came on with the going down of the sun,

and lasted during the following day; but, desiring to arrive at my

destination before the servant should set out to meet me, I decided to

push on in the rain.

Our second day's travel was attended with sundry interruptions and

adventures, and night overtook us in the midst of a forest, uncertain

where we were, and half dead from exposure to the storm; but after

several hours of hard riding, we found ourselves, drenched to the skin

and benumbed with the cold, before the door of a one-story log cabin,

tenanted by a family of

POOR WHITES.

The rain was falling in torrents, and the night was as 'dark as the

darkest corner of the dark place below.' We were in the midst of what

seemed an endless forest of turpentine pines, and had seen no human

habitation for hours. Not knowing where the road might lead us, and

feeling totally unable to proceed, we determined to ask shelter at the

shanty for the night.

In answer to our summons a wretched-looking, half-clad, dirt-bedraggled

woman thrust her head from the door-way, with the inquiry, 'Who are ye?'

'We'm only massa and me, and de hoss, and we'm half dead wid de cold,'

said Scipio; 'can't we cum in out ob de rain?'

'Wal, strangers,' replied the woman, eying us as closely as the darkness

would permit, 'you'll find mighty poor fixins har, but I reckon ye can

come in.'

Entering the house, we saw, by the light of a blazing pile of pine

knots, which roared and crackled on the hearth, that it contained only a

single apartment, about twenty feet square. In front of the fire-place,

which occupied the better half of one side of the room, the floor was of

the bare earth, littered over with pine chips, dead cinders, live coals,

broken pots, and a lazy spaniel dog. Opposite to this, at the other end

of the room, were two low beds, which looked as if they had been 'slept

in forever, and never made up.' Against the wall, between the beds and

the fire-place, stood a small pine table, and on it was a large wooden

bowl, from whose mouth protruded the handles of several unwashed pewter

spoons. On the right of the fire was a razeed rocking-chair, evidently

the peculiar property of the mistress of the mansion, and three blocks

of pine log, sawn off smoothly, and made to serve for seats. Over

against these towered a high-backed settle, something like that on which

'sot Huldy all alone,

When Zeke peeked thru the winder;'

and on it, her head resting partly on her arm, partly on the end of the

settle, one small, bare foot pressing the ground, the other, with the

part of the person which is supposed to require stockings, extended in a

horizontal direction,--reclined, not Huldy, but her Southern cousin,

who, I will wager, was decidedly the prettier and dirtier of the two.

Our entrance did not seem to disconcert her in the least, for she lay

there as unmoved as a marble statue, her large black eyes riveted on my

face as if seeing some nondescript animal for the first time. I stood

for a moment transfixed with admiration. In a somewhat extensive

observation of her sex, in both hemispheres, I had never witnessed such

a form, such eyes, such faultless features, and such wavy, black,

luxuriant hair. A glance at her dress,--a soiled, greasy, grayish

linsey-woolsey gown, apparently her only garment,--and a second look at

her face, which, on closer inspection, had precisely the hue of a tallow

candle, recalled me to myself, and allowed me to complete the survey of

the premises.

The house was built of unhewn logs, separated by wide interstices,

through which the cold air came, in decidedly fresh if not health-giving

currents, while a large rent in the roof, that let in the rain, gave the

inmates an excellent opportunity for indulging in a shower-bath, of

which they seemed greatly in need. The chimney, which had intruded a

couple of feet into the room, as if to keep out of the cold, and

threatened momentarily to tumble down, was of sticks, built up in clay,

while the windows were of thick, unplaned boards.

Two pretty girls, one of perhaps ten and the other of fourteen years,

evidently sisters of the unadorned beauty, the middle-aged woman

who had admitted us, and the dog,--the only male member of the

household,--composed the family. I had seen negro cabins, but these

people were whites, and these whites were _South Carolinians_. Who will

say that the days of chivalry are over, when such counterparts of the

feudal serfs still exist?

After I had seated myself by the fire, and the driver had gone out to

stow the horse away under the tumble-down shed at the back of the house,

the elder woman said to me,--

'Reckon yer wet. Ben in the rain?'

'Yes, madam, we've been out most of the day, and got in the river below

here.'

'Did ye? Ye mean the "run." I reckon it's right deep now.'

'Yes, the horse had to swim for it,' I replied.

'Ye orter strip and put on dry cloes to onst.'

'Thank you, madam, I will.'

Going to my portmanteau, which the darky had placed near the door, I

found it dripping with wet, and opening it, discovered that every

article in it had undergone the rite of total immersion.

'Everything is thoroughly soaked, madam. I shall have to dry myself by

your fire. Can you get me a cup of tea?'

'Right sorry, stranger, but I can't. Hain't a morsel to eat or drink in

the house.'

Remembering that our excellent hostess of the night before had insisted

on filling our wagon-box with a quantity of 'chicken fixins,' to serve

us in an emergency, and that my brandy flask was in my India-rubber

coat, I sent Scipio out for them.

Our stores disclosed boiled chicken, bacon, sandwiches, sweet potatoes,

short cake, corn bread, buttered waffles, and 'common doin's' too

numerous to mention, enough to last a family of one for a fortnight, but

all completely saturated with water. Wet or dry, however, the provisions

were a godsend to the half-starved family, and their hearts seemed to

open to me with amazing rapidity. The dog got up and wagged his tail,

and even the marble-like beauty arose from her reclining posture and

invited me to a seat with her on the bench.

The kettle was soon steaming over the fire, and the boiling water, mixed

with a little brandy, served as a capital substitute for tea. After the

chicken was re-cooked, and the other edibles 'warmed up,' the little

pine table was brought out, and I learned--what I had before

suspected--that the big wooden bowl and the half dozen pewter spoons

were the only 'crockery' the family possessed.

I declined the proffered seat at the table, the cooking utensils being

anything but inviting, and contented myself with the brandy and water;

but, forgetting for a moment his color, I motioned to the darky--who was

as wet and jaded, and much more hungry than I was--to take the place

offered to me. The negro did not seem inclined to do so, but the woman,

observing my gesture, yelled out, her eyes flashing with anger,--

'No, sar! No darkies eats with us. Hope ye don't reckon _yerself_ no

better than a good-for-nothin, no-account nigger!'

'I beg your pardon, madam; I intended no offense. Scipio has served me

very faithfully for two days, and is very tired and hungry. I forgot

myself.'

This mollified the lady, and she replied,--

'Niggers is good enuff in thar place, but warn't meant to 'sociate with

white folks.'

There may have been some ground for a distinction in that case; there

certainly was a difference between the specimens of the two races then

before me; but, not being one of the chivalry, it struck me that the

odds were on the side of the black man. The whites were shiftless,

ragged, and starving; the black well clad, cleanly, energetic, and as

much above the others in intellect as Jupiter is above a church steeple.

To be sure, color was against him, and he was, after all, a servant in

the land of chivalry and of servant-owners. Of course the woman was

right, after all.

She soon resumed the conversation, with this remark:--

'Reckon yer a stranger in these parts; whar d'ye come from?'

'From New York, madam.'

'New York! whar's that?'

'It's a city at the North.'

'Oh! yas; I've heern tell on it; that's whar the Cunnel sells his

turpentine. Quite a place, ain't it?'

'Yes, quite a place. Something larger than all South Carolina.'

'What d'ye say? Larger nor South Carolina! Kinder reckon tain't, is't?'

'Yes, madam, it is.'

'Du tell! Tain't so large as Charles'n, is't?'

'Yes, twenty times larger than Charleston.'

'Lord o'massy! How does all the folks live thar?'

'Live quite as well as they do here.'

'Ye don't have no niggers thar, does ye?'

'Yes, but none that are slaves.'

'Have Ablisherners thar, don't ye? Them people that go agin the South?'

'Yes, some of them.'

'What do they go agin the South for?'

'They go for freeing the slaves. Some of them think a black man as good

as a white one.'

'Quar, that; yer an Ablisherner, ain't ye?'

'No, I'm an old-fashioned Whig.'

'What's that? Never heerd on them afore.'

'An old-fashioned Whig, madam, is a man whose political principles are

perfect, and who is as perfect as his principles.'

That was a 'stumper' for the poor woman, who evidently did not

understand one half of the sentence.

'Right sort of folks, them,' she said, in a half inquiring tone.

'Yes, but they're all dead now.'

'Dead?'

'Yes, dead, beyond the hope of resurrection.'

'I've heern all the dead war to be resurrected. Didn't ye say ye war one

on 'em? _Ye_ ain't dead yet,' said the woman, chuckling at having

cornered me.

'But I'm more than _half_ dead just now.'

'Ah,' replied the woman, still laughing, 'yer a chicken.'

'A chicken! what's that?'

'A thing that goes on tu legs, and karkles,' was the ready reply.

'Ah, my dear madam, you can out-talk me.'

'Yes, I reckon I kin outrun ye, tu. Ye ain't over rugged.' Then, after a

pause, she added,--'What d'ye 'lect that darky Linkum for President

for?'

'I didn't elect him. _I_ voted for Douglass. But Lincoln is not a

darky.'

'He's a mullater, then; I've heern he war,' she replied.

'No, he's not a mulatto; he's a rail-splitter.'

'Rail-splitter? _Then he's a nigger, shore_.'

'No, madam; white men at the North split rails.'

'An' white wimmin tu, p'raps,' said the woman, with a contemptuous toss

of the head.

'No, they don't,' I replied,' but white women _work_ there.'

'White wimmin work thar!' chimed in the hitherto speechless beauty,

showing a set of teeth of the exact color of her skin,--_yaller_. 'What

du the' du?'

'Some of them attend in stores, some set type, some teach school, and

some work in factories.'

'Du tell! Dress nice, and make money?'

'Yes,' I replied, 'they make money, and dress like fine ladies; in fact,

_are_ fine ladies. I know one young woman, of about your age, that had

to get her own education, who earns a thousand dollars a year by

teaching, and I've heard of many factory-girls who support their

parents, and lay up a great deal of money, by working in the mills.'

'Wal!' replied the young woman, with a contemptuous curl of her

matchless upper lip; 'schule-marms ain't fine ladies; fine ladies don't

work; only niggers does that _har_. I reckon I'd ruther be 'spectable

than work for a livin'.'

I could but think how magnificently the lips of some of our glorious

Yankee girls would have curled had they heard that remark, and seen the

poor girl that made it, with her torn, worn, greasy dress; her bare,

dirty legs and feet, and her arms, neck, and face so thickly encrusted

with a layer of clayey mud that there was danger of hydrophobia if she

went near a wash-tub. Restraining my involuntary disgust, I replied,--

'We at the North think work is respectable. We do not look down on a

man or a woman for earning their daily bread. We all work.'

'Yas, and that's the why ye'r all sech cowards,' said the old woman.

'Cowards!' I said; 'who tells you that?'

'My old man; he says one on our _boys_ can lick five of your Yankee

_men_.'

'Perhaps so. Is your husband away from home?'

'Yes, him and our Cal. ar down to Charles'n.'

'Cal. is your son, is he?'

'Yes, he's my oldest, and a likely lad he ar tu--He's twenty-one, and

his name ar JOHN CALHOUN MILLS. He's gone a troopin' it with

his fader.'

'What, both gone and left you ladies here alone?'

'Yes, the Cunnel sed every man orter go, and they warn't to be ahind the

rest. The Cunnel--Cunnel J.--looks arter us while they is away.'

'But I should think the Colonel looked after you poorly--giving you

nothing to eat.'

'Oh! it's ben sech a storm to-day, the gals couldn't go for the vittles,

though tain't a great way. We'r on his plantation; this house is his'n.'

This last was agreeable news, and it occurred to me that if we were so

near the Colonel's we might push on, and get there that night, in spite

of the storm; so I said,--

'Indeed; I'm going to the Colonel's. How far is his house from here?'

'A right smart six mile; it's at the Cross-roads. Ye know the Cunnel, du

ye?'

'Oh, yes, I know him well. If his house is not more than six miles off,

I think we had better go on to-night. What do you say, Scip?'

'I reckon we'd better gwo, massa,' replied the darky, who had spread my

traveling-shawl in the chimney-corner, and was seated on it, drying his

clothes.

'Ye'd better not,' said the woman; 'ye better stay har; thar's a right

smart run twixt har and the Cunnel's, and tain't safe to cross arter

dark.'

'If that is so we'd better stay, Scip; don't you think so?' I said to

the darky.

'Jess as you like, massa. We got tru wid de oder one, and I reckon

tain't no woss nor dat.'

'The bridge ar carried away, and ye'll have to swim _shore_,' said the

woman. 'Ye'd better stay.'

'Thank you, madam, I think we will,' I replied, after a moment's

thought; 'our horse has swum one of your creeks to-night, and I dare not

try another.'

I had taken off my coat, and had been standing, during the greater part

of this conversation, in my shirt-sleeves before the fire, turning round

occasionally to facilitate the drying process, and taking every now and

then a sip from the gourd containing our brandy and water; aided in the

latter exercise by the old woman and the eldest girl, who indulged quite

as freely as I did.

'Mighty good brandy that,' at last said the woman. 'Ye like brandy,

don't ye?'

'Not very much, madam. I take it to-night because I've been exposed to

the storm, and it stimulates the circulation. But Scip, here, don't like

spirits. He'll get the rheumatism because he don't.'

'Don't like dem sort of sperits, massa; but rumatics neber trubble me.'

'But I've got it mighty bad,' said the woman, '_and I take 'em whenever

I kin get 'em_.'

I rather thought she did, but I 'reckoned' her principal beverage was

whisky.

'You have the rheumatism, madam, because your house is so open; a

draught of air is always unhealthy.'

'I allers reckoned 'twar _healthy_,' she replied. 'Ye Yankee folks have

quar notions.'

I looked at my watch, and found it was nearly ten o'clock, and, feeling

very tired, said to the hostess,--

'Where do you mean we shall sleep?'

'Ye can take that ar bed,' pointing to the one nearest the wall, 'the

darky can sleep har;' motioning to the settle on which she was seated.

'But where will you and your daughters sleep? I don't wish to turn you

out of your beds.'

'Oh! don't ye keer for us; we kin all bunk together; dun it afore. Like

to turn in now?'

'Yes, thank you, I would;' and without more ceremony I adjourned to the

further part of the room, and commenced disrobing. Doffing my boots,

waistcoat, and cravat, and placing my watch and purse under the pillow,

I gave a moment's thought to what a certain not very old lady, whom I

had left at home, might say when she heard of my lodging with a

grass-widow and three young girls, and sprung into bed. There I removed

my undermentionables, which were still too damp to sleep in, and in

about two minutes and thirty seconds sunk into oblivion.

A few streaks of grayish light were beginning to creep through the

crevices in the logs, when a movement at the foot of the bed awakened

me, and glancing downward I beheld the youngest girl emerging from under

the clothes at my feet. She had slept there, 'cross-wise,' all night. A

stir in the adjoining bed soon warned me that the other feminines were

preparing to follow her example; so, turning my face to the wall, I

feigned to be asleep. Their toilet was soon made, and they then quietly

left Scip and myself in full possession of the premises.

The darky rose as soon as they were gone, and, coming to me, said,--

'Massa, we'd better be gwine. I'se got your cloes all dry, and you can

rig up and breakfust at de Cunnel's.'

The storm had cleared away, and the sun was struggling to get through

the distant pines, when Scipio brought the horse to the door, and we

prepared to start. Turning to the old woman, I said,

'I feel greatly obliged to you, madam, for the shelter you have given

us, and would like to make you some recompense for your trouble. Please

to tell me what I shall pay you.'

'Wal, stranger, we don't gin'rally take in lodgers, but seein' as how as

thar ar tu on ye, and ye've had a good night on it, I don't keer if ye

pay me tu dollars.'

That struck me as 'rather steep' for 'common doin's,' particularly as we

had furnished the food and 'the drinks;' yet, saying nothing, I handed

her a two-dollar bank note. She took it, and held it up curiously to the

sun, then in a moment handed it back, saying, 'I don't know nothin'

'bout that ar sort of money; hain't you got no silver?'

I fumbled in my pocket a moment, and found a quarter-eagle, which I gave

her.

'I hain't got nary a fip o' change,' she said, as she took it.

'Oh! never mind the change, madam; I shall want to stop and _look_ at

you when I return,' I replied, good-humoredly.

'Ha! ha! yer a chicken,' said the woman, at the same time giving me a

gentle poke in the ribs. Fearing she might, in the exuberance of her joy

at the sight of the money, proceed to some more decided demonstration of

affection, I hastily stepped into the wagon, bade her good-by, and was

off.

We were still among the pines, which towered gigantically all around us,

but were no longer alone. Every tree was scarified for turpentine, and

the forest was alive with negro men and women gathering the 'last

dipping,' or clearing away the stumps and underbrush preparatory to the

spring work. It was Christmas week; but, as I afterwards learned, the

Colonel's negroes were accustomed to doing 'half tasks' at that season,

being paid for their labor as if they were free. They stopped their work

as we rode by, and stared at us with a sort of stupid, half-frightened

curiosity, very much like the look of a cow when a railway train is

passing. It needed but little observation to conclude that their

_status_ was but one step above the level of the brutes.

As we rode along I said to the driver, 'Scipio, what did you think of

our lodgings?'

'Mighty pore, massa. Niggas lib better'n dat.'

'Yes,' I replied, 'but these folks despise you blacks; they seem to be

both poor and proud.'

'Yas, massa, dey'm pore 'cause dey won't work, and dey'm proud 'cause

dey'r white. Dey won't work 'cause dey see de darky slaves doin' it, and

tink it am beneaf white folks to do as de darkies do. Dis habin' slaves

keeps dis hull country pore.'

'Who told you that?' I asked, astonished at hearing a remark showing so

much reflection from a negro.

'Nobody, massa, I see it myseff.'

'Are there many of these poor whites around Georgetown?'

'Not many 'round Georgetown, sar, but great many in de up-country har,

and dey'm all 'like--pore and no account; none ob 'em kin read, and dey

all eat clay.'

'Eat clay!' I said; 'what do you mean by that?'

'Didn't you see, massa, how yaller all dem wimmin war? Dat's 'cause dey

eat clay. De little children begin 'fore dey can walk, and dey eat it

till dey die; dey chaw it like 'backer. It makes all dar stumacs big,

like as you seed 'em, and spiles dar 'gestion. It am mighty onhealfy.'

'Can it be possible that human beings do such things! The brutes

wouldn't do that.'

'No, massa, but _dey_ do it; dey'm pore trash. Dat's what de big folks

call 'em, and it am true; dey'm long way lower down dan de darkies.'

By this time we had arrived at the run. We found the bridge carried

away, as the woman had told us; but its abutments were still standing,

and over these planks had been laid, which afforded a safe crossing for

foot-passengers. To reach these planks, however, it was necessary to

wade into the stream for full fifty yards, the 'run' having overflowed

its banks for that distance on either side of the bridge. The water was

evidently receding, but, as we could not well wait, like the man in the

fable, for it all to run by, we alighted, and counseled as to the best

mode of making the passage.

Scipio proposed that he should wade in to the first abutment, ascertain

the depth of the stream, and then, if it was not found too deep for the

horse to ford to that point, we would drive that far, get out, and walk

to the end of the planking, leading the horse, and then again mount the

wagon at the further end of the bridge. We were sure the horse would

have to swim in the middle of the current, and perhaps for a

considerable distance beyond; but, having witnessed his proficiency in

aquatic performances, we had no doubt of his getting safely across.

The darky's plan was decided on, and divesting himself of his trowsers,

he waded into the 'run' to take the soundings.

While he was in the water my attention was attracted to a printed paper,

posted on one of the pines near the roadside. Going up to it, I read as

follows:--

$250 REWARD.

Ran Away from the subscriber, on Monday, November 12th, his mulatto

man, SAM. Said boy is stout-built, five feet nine inches

high, 31 years old, weighs 170 lbs., and walks very erect, and with

a quick, rapid gait. The American flag is tattooed on his right arm

above the elbow. There is a knife-cut over the bridge of his nose,

a fresh bullet-wound in his left thigh, and his back bears marks of

a recent whipping. He is supposed to have made his way back to

Dinwiddie County, Va., where he was raised, or to be lurking in the

swamps in this vicinity.

The above reward will be paid for his confinement in any jail in

North or South Carolina, or Virginia, or for his delivery to the

subscriber on his plantation at ----. D. W. J----. ----, December

2, 1860.

The name signed to this hand-bill was that of the planter I was about to

visit.

Scipio having returned, reporting the stream fordable to the bridge, I

said to him, pointing to the 'notice,'--

'Read that, Scip.'

He read it, but made no remark.

'What does it mean--that fresh bullet wound, and the marks of a recent

whipping?' I asked.

'It mean, massa, dat de darky hab run away, and ben took; and dat when

dey took him dey shot him, and flogged him arter dat. Now, he hab run

away agin. De Cunnel's mighty hard on his niggas!'

'Is he! I can scarcely believe that.'

'He am, massa; but he ain't so much to blame, nuther; dey'm awful bad

set, most ob 'em,--so dey say.'

Our conversation was here interrupted by our reaching the bridge. After,

safely 'walking the plank,' and making our way to the opposite bank, I

resumed it by asking,--

'Why are the Colonel's negroes so particularly bad?'

'Cause, you see, massa, de turpentime business hab made great profits

for sum yars now, and de Cunnel hab been gettin' rich bery fass. He hab

put all his money, jes so fass as he made it, into darkies, so as to

make more; for he's got berry big plantation, and need nuffin' but

darkies to work it to make money jess like a gold mine. He goes up to

Virginny to buy niggas; and up dar _now_ dey don't sell none less dey'm

bad uns, 'cep when sum massa die or git pore. Virginny darkies dat cum

down har ain't gin'rally of much account. Dey'm either kinder

good-for-nuffin, or dey'm ugly; and de Cunnel d'rather hab de ugly dan

de no-account niggas.'

'How many negroes has he?'

''Bout two hundred, men and wimmin, I b'lieve, massa.'

'It can't be very pleasant for his family to remain in such an

out-of-the-way place, with such a gang of negroes about them, and no

white people near.'

'No, massa, not in dese times; but de missus and de young lady ain't dar

now.'

'Not there now? The Colonel said nothing to me about that. Are you

sure?'

'Oh yas, massa; I seed 'em go off on de boat to Charles'n most two weeks

ago. Dey don't mean to cum back till tings am more settled; dey'm 'fraid

to stay dar.'

'I should think it wouldn't be safe for even the Colonel there, if a

disturbance broke out among the slaves.'

''Twouldn't be safe den anywhar, sar; but de Cunnel am berry brave man.

He'm better dan twenty of _his_ niggas.'

'Why better than twenty of _his_ niggers?'

''Cause dem ugly niggas am gin'rally cowards. De darky dat is quiet,

'spectful, and does his duty, am de brave sort; _dey'll_ fight, massa,

till dey'm cut down.'

We had here reached a turn in the road, and passing it, came suddenly

upon a coach, attached to which were a pair of magnificent grays, driven

by a darky in livery.

'Hallo dar!' said Scipio to the driver, as we came nearly abreast of the

carriage. 'Am you Cunnel J----'s man?'

'Yas, I is dat,' replied the darky.

At this moment a woolley head, which I recognized at once as that of the

Colonel's man 'Jim,' was thrust out of the window of the vehicle.

'Hallo, Jim,' I said. 'How do you do? I'm glad to see you.'

'Lor bress me, massa K----, am dat you?' exclaimed the astonished negro,

hastily opening the door, and coming to me. 'Whar _did_ you cum from?

I'se mighty glad to see you;' at the same time giving my hand a hearty

shaking. I must here say, in justice to the reputation of South

Carolina, that no respectable Carolinian refuses to shake hands with a

black man, unless--the black happens to be free.

'I thought I wouldn't wait for you,' I replied. 'But how did you expect

to get on? the "runs" have swollen into rivers.'

'We got a "flat" made for dis one,--it's down dar by dis time,--de oders

we tought we'd get ober sumhow.'

BLACK FREEMASONRY.

'Jim, this is Scip,' I said, seeing that the darkies had taken no notice

of each other.

'How d'ye do, Scipio?' said Jim, extending his hand to him. A look of

singular intelligence passed over the faces of the two negroes as their

hands met; it vanished in an instant, and was so slight that none but a

close observer would have detected it, but some words that Scip had

previously let drop put me on the alert, and I felt sure it had a hidden

significance.

'Won't you get into de carriage, massa?' inquired Jim.

'No, thank you, Jim. I'll ride on with Scip. Our horse is jaded, and you

had better go ahead.'

Jim mounted the driver's seat, turned the carriage, and drove off at a

brisk pace to announce our coming at the plantation, while Scip and I

rode on at a slower gait.

'Scip, did you know Jim before?' I asked.

'Neber seed him afore, massa, but hab heern ob him.'

'How is it that you have lived in Georgetown for five years, and he only

seventy miles off, and you never have seen him?'

'I cud hab seed him, massa, good many time, ef I'd liked, but darkies

hab to be careful.'

'Careful of what?'

'Careful ob who dey knows; good many bad niggas 'bout.'

'Pshaw, Scip, you're "coming de possum;" that game won't work with me.

There isn't a better nigger than Jim in all South Carolina. I know him

well.'

'P'raps he am; reckon he _am_ a good enuff nigga.'

'Good enough nigga, Scip! Why, I tell you he's a splendid fellow; just

as true as steel. He's been North with the Colonel, often, and the

Abolitionists have tried to get him away; he knew he could go, but

wouldn't budge an inch.'

'I knew he wouldn't,' said the darky, a pleasurable gleam passing

through his eyes; 'dat sort don't run; dey face de music!'

'Why don't they run? What do you mean?'

'Nuffin', massa,--only dey'd ruther stay har.'

'Come, Scip, you've played this game long enough. Tell me, now, what

that look you gave each other when you shook hands meant.'

'What look, massa? Oh! I s'pose 'twar 'cause we'd both _heerd_ ob each

oder afore.'

''Twas more than that, Scip. Be frank; you know you can trust me.'

'Wal, den, massa,' he replied, adding, after a short pause, 'de ole

woman called you a Yankee,--you can guess.'

'If I should guess,'twould be that it meant _mischief_.'

'It don't mean mischief, sar,' said the darky, with a tone and air that

would not have disgraced a Cabinet officer; 'it mean only RIGHT

and JUSTICE.'

'It means that there is some secret understanding between you.'

'I tole you, massa,' he replied, relapsing into his usual manner, 'dat

de blacks am all Freemasons. I gabe Jim de grip, and he know'd me. He'd

ha known my name ef you hadn't tole him.'

'Why would he have known your name?'

''Cause I gabe de grip, dat tole him.'

'Why did he call you Scip_io_? I called you _Scip_.'

'Oh! de darkies all do dat. Nobody but de white folks call me _Scip_. I

can't say no more, massa; I SHUD BREAK DE OATH EF I DID!'

'You have said enough, Scipio, to satisfy me that there is a secret

league among the blacks, and that you are a leader in it. Now, I tell

you, you'll get yourself into a scrape. I've taken a liking to you,

Scip, and I should be _very sorry_ to see you run yourself into danger.'

'I tank you, massa, from de bottom ob my soul I tank you,' he said, as

the tears moistened his eyes. 'You bery kind, massa; it do me good to

talk wid you. But what am my life wuth? What am any _slave's_ life wuth?

Ef you war me you'd do like me!'

I could not deny it, and made no reply.

The writer of this article is aware that he is here making an important

statement, and one that may be called in question by those persons who

are accustomed to regard the Southern blacks as only reasoning brutes.

The great mass of them are but a little above the brutes in their habits

and instincts, but a large body are fully on a par, except in mere

book-education, with their white masters.

The conversation above recorded is, _verbatim et literatim_, TRUE. It

took place at the time indicated, and was taken down, as were other

conversations recorded in these papers, within twenty-four hours after

its occurrence. The name and the locality, only, I have, for very

evident reasons, disguised.

From this conversation, together with previous ones, held with the same

negro, and from after developments made to me at various places, and at

different times, extending over a period of six weeks, I became

acquainted with the fact--and I _know_ it to be a _fact_--that there

exists among the blacks a secret and wide-spread organization of a

Masonic character, having its grip, pass-word, and oath. It has various

grades of leaders, who are competent and _earnest_ men, and its ultimate

object is FREEDOM. It is quite as wide-spread, and much more

secret, than the order of the 'Knights of the Golden Circle,' the

kindred league among the whites.

This latter organization, which was instituted by John C. Calhoun,

William L. Porcher, and others, as far back as 1835, has for its sole

object the dissolution of the Union, and the establishment of a Southern

Empire;--Empire is the word, not Confederacy, or Republic;--and it was

solely by means of its secret but powerful machinery that the Southern

States were plunged into revolution, in defiance of the will of a

majority of their voting population.

Nearly every man of influence at the South (and many a pretended Union

man at the North) is a member of this organization, and sworn, under the

penalty of assassination, to labor, 'in season and out of season, by

fair means and by foul, at all times, and on all occasions,' for the

accomplishment of its object. The blacks are bound together by a similar

oath, and only _bide their time_.

The knowledge of the real state of political affairs, which the negroes

have acquired through this organization, is astonishingly accurate;

their leaders possess every essential of leadership,--except, it may be,

military skill,--and they are fully able to cope with the whites.

The negro whom I call Scipio, on the day when Major Anderson evacuated

Fort Moultrie, and before he or I knew of that event, which set all

South Carolina in a blaze, foretold to me the breaking out of this war

in Charleston harbor, and as confidently predicted that it would result

in the freedom of the slaves!

The knowledge of this organization I acquired by gaining the confidence

of some of the blacks, who knew me to be a Northern man, and supposed I

sympathized with them. Having acquired it in that manner, I could not

communicate it; but now, when our troops have landed in South Carolina,

and its existence is sure to be speedily developed, no harm can result

from this announcement.

The fact of its existing is not positively known (for the black is more

subtle and crafty than anything human), but is suspected, by many of the

whites; the more moderate of whom are disposed to ward off the impending

blow by some system of gradual emancipation,--declaring all black

children born after a certain date free,--or by some other action that

will pacify and keep down the slaves. These persons, however, are but a

small minority, and possess no political power, and the South is rushing

blindly on to a catastrophe, which, if not averted by the action of our

government, will make the horrors of San Domingo and the French

Revolution grow pale in history.

I say the action of our government, for with it rests the

responsibility. What the black wants is freedom. Give him that, and he

will have no incentive to insurrection. If emancipation is proclaimed at

the head of our armies,--emancipation for _all_--confiscation for the

slaves of rebels, compensation for the slaves of loyal citizens,--the

blacks will rush to the aid of our troops, the avenging angel will pass

over the homes of the many true and loyal men who are still left at the

South, and the thunderbolts of this war will fall only--where they

should fall--on the heads of its blood-stained authors. If this is not

done, after we have put down the whites we shall have to meet the

blacks, and after we have waded knee-deep in the blood of both, we shall

end the war where it began, but with the South desolated by fire and

sword, the North impoverished and loaded down with an everlasting debt,

and our once proud, happy and glorious country the by-word and scorn of

the whole civilized world.

I have all my life long been a true friend to the South. My connections,

my interests, and my sympathies are all there, and there are those now

in the ranks of this rebellion who are of my own blood; but I say, and I

would to God that every lover of his country would say it with me, 'Make

no peace with it until slavery is exterminated.' Slavery is its very

bones, marrow, and life-blood, and you can not put it down till you have

destroyed that accursed institution. If a miserable peace is patched up

before a death-stroke is given to slavery, it will gather new strength,

and drive freedom from this country forever. In the nature of things it

can not exist in the same hemisphere with liberty. Then let every man

who loves his country determine that if this war must needs last for

twenty years, it shall not end until this root of all our political

evils is weeded out forever.

A short half-hour took us to the plantation, where I found the Colonel

on the piazza awaiting me. After our greeting was over, noticing my

soiled and rather dilapidated condition, he inquired where I had passed

the night. I told him, when he burst into a hearty fit of laughter, and

for several days good-naturedly bantered me about 'putting up' at the

most aristocratic hotel in South Carolina,--the 'Mills House.'

We soon entered the mansion, and the reader will, I trust, excuse me, if

I leave him standing in its door-way till another month.

THE LESSON OF WAR.

Lex est, non poena, perire.--_Martial._

Ye warriors of the past, whose flashing swords

Light up with fitful gleams the misty night

Of half-forgotten eld, in fiery words

Ye teach a truth 'twere well we read aright.

God sends the gentle breeze to woo the flower,

And stir the pulses of the ripening corn;

He, too, lets loose the whirlwind's vengeful power

To quench the plagues of foul stagnation born.

And thus in love, sometimes disguised as wrath,

He sends his hidden blessings in the storm,

Which dashes down in its resistless path

The hoar abuses that defied reform.

When Cyrus ravaged fair Chaldea's plain,

And mocked the strength of Babylon's haughty wall,

The proud Assyrian's guilt had earned the chain,

And man rejoiced to mark the oppressor's fall.

And when, made drunk with power, the Persian lost

The stern and simple virtues of his sires,

His empire's ruin and his slaughtered host

Kindled in Greece her world-illuming fires.

Then Greece, her swift career of glory stayed,

Exhausted by her madman's triumphs lay,

Till Rome's protecting arm the loss repaid

Of Corinth's sack and Pydua's fatal day.

Imperial Rome! though crime succeeded crime

As earth fell prostrate 'neath her giant tread,

Still shall her subjects reap to endless time

The priceless harvests by her wisdom spread.

What though the stern proconsul's grinding rule

Close followed on the legion's merciless sword?

Laws, arts, and culture, in that rigid school,

Evoked a nation from each savage horde.

And when at last her crimes, reacting, wrought

Their curse upon herself, to her, supine

And helpless, the barbarian spoiler brought,

With fire and sword, new life to her decline.

Theodoric, Clovis, Charles, your endless strife,

From Weser's marsh to Naples' laughing bay,

Was but the throe that marked the nascent life

Emerging from the worn-out world's decay.

Ye were, amid that elemental war,

But straws to show its course. Ye toiled, and won,

Or lost; your people bled--yet slow and far

The mighty cause of man pressed ever on.

Long has that travail been. Kings, Kaisers, Popes,

The stern Crusader and the pirate Dane,

Each, centered in his own ambitious hopes,

But helped the cause he labored to restrain.

Hildebrand's voice sets Christendom on fire;

'Neath Frederic's plow sinks Milan's lofty wall;

Unnumbered victims glut De Montfort's ire;

From Ecclin's dungeon shrieks the night appall.

If the tide ebbs, 'tis but to flow again.

Each fierce convulsion gains some vantage ground.

Man's fettered limbs grow stronger, and the chain

Falls link by link at each tumultuous bound.

The timid burgher dons the helm and shield,

The wretched hind reluctant grasps the bow,

To fight their master's quarrels. Courtrai's field

And Sempach's hill that lesson's worth may show.

The restless soul still yearns for things unknown;

It chafes against its bondage, points the way

That leads to freedom, but the sword alone

Makes good the dreams that else would but betray.

See, Luther speaks, and Europe flies to arms:

Her stubborn fight outlasts a hundred years;

A thousand fields her richest life-blood warms,

Yet gain the vanquished more than pays their tears.

If Orange and Gustavus conquering died,

Not Coligny nor Hampden fell in vain,

For one domain escaped the furious tide,

And peace made that one desolate--chivalrous Spain!

So, when the traitorous truth was whispered round,--

Equality for man on earth as heaven,--

It was but speculation's idlest sound,

Till by the sword the time-worn bonds were riven.

Though Moscow, Leipzig, Waterloo, might seem

To roll the tide back, they but marked its flood;

Nor could the Holy Allies' darkest scheme

Restore the wrongs so well effaced in blood.

The end is not yet. God's mysterious way

Evolves its purpose in its destined time.

Vainly we seek its fated march to stay:

All things subserve it--wisdom, folly, crime.

We are his instruments. The past has fled

For us. We suffer for the future dim.

Then sternly face the darkness round us spread,

Do each his duty--leave the rest to Him!

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

The Nineteenth Century dawned upon a nation already glorious with the

sublime promise of a prophetic infancy. The strong serpents of Tyranny

and Superstition had been crushed in its powerful grasp. The songs of

two oceans--the lullaby of its earlier days--had cheered it on to a

youth whose dignity and beauty were bought with sword and rifle, with

blood and death. Wrapped at last in the _toga_ of an undisputed manhood,

it took its place among the empires of the earth, the son of a king,

mightier than all; free to enact new laws, to promulgate new systems of

economy, social and political, free to worship and to think. With what

success a government grounded on a principle so faultless has been

administered, may not now be written, but is not more doubtful than it

was when the drum beat its _reveillé_ only on our distant frontiers, and

the booming of guns from ship or shore was but the nation's welcome to

days made memorable by its great men. But before the new republic

stretched a vast field for thought, and within its almost boundless

limits, hidden beneath the husks of old theories, lay the seed ready for

the ripening. Far back toward the east rolled, like a mighty desert, the

history of the Progress of Mind. Here and there, on its arid surface,

rose, stately and awe-inspiring, great pyramids which marked those eras

of agitation when Humanity, awaking suddenly to her power, grappled with

giant strength the mighty enigmas of Being, and endeavored to wrench

from their mute souls the great secrets that Faith alone has expounded

to the satisfaction of her devotees. It availed little that one by one,

in the vaults of these temples, the axioms and deductions of their

founders were laid away lifeless and powerless. Another generation,

vigorous and persevering, laid stone after stone the foundations of

another edifice that strove to reach, with its yearning apex of desire,

the very heavens. Still high and unmoved curved the blue infinitude

above, while below its mirror in the soul of man surged wildly against

shores stern, rock-bound, immutable, unanswering.

The 'limits of the forefathers' (_fines quos posuerunt patres nostri_)

had been first transgressed by Abelard, and the speculating spirit of

Scholasticism disseminated by him overwhelmed Europe with that rage for

investigations, so futile yet so laborious, that terrified the

theologians of the mediæval church, and marked the first modern epoch in

Philosophy--the beginning of the revolt of Reason against Authority.

Next, colossal against the still unrelenting skies, towered what may be

called the _Natur-Philosophie_, 'Nature Philosophy' of Giordano Bruno.

The echoes of Luther's bugle still pierced the mountain-fastnesses of

Northern Italy and the gorges of Spain. In the church, Bruno found only

skepticism and licentiousness, ignorance and tyranny. Before him four

centuries had been swallowed up in debate on the fruitless question of

Nominalism, and others equally insignificant, but were visible to him by

the light of a logic so shallow, futile, and despotic, that it was known

only to be scorned. With an energy that astonished the feeble and

degraded clergy of his time, a fearlessness that exacted the admiration

while it aroused the indignation of his contemporaries, and a genius

that compelled the attention of those who were most zealous to combat

its evidences, Bruno, casting off the shackles of the cloister, that

'_prigione angusta e nera_,' boldly advanced a system of Philosophy,

startling, in those Inquisitorial times, from its independence, and

horrible from its antagonism to Aristotle, the Atlas of the church. This

was no less than pure Pantheism,--God in and through all, the infinite

Intelligence. _Deus est monadum monas--nempe entium entitas_. This

creed, by an incomprehensible metamorphosis, was styled, in the language

of the day, Atheism; its promulgation, even its conception, was

pronounced a crime whose penalty was death. And Bruno, who, from the

depths of infamous superstition, had risen into the pure light of

heaven, to a theory whose principles, though they might not satisfy,

could not fail to refine, elevate, and encourage the soul long groveling

in the mire of ignorance, or languishing in the dark dungeons of

Scholasticism,--Bruno died for the truth. More foolish than the savages

of whom Montesquieu speaks, who cut down trees to reach their fruit,

these judges of Bruno destroyed the tree whose seeds were already strewn

broadcast over the world. They hushed forever the voice whose echoes are

not yet stilled,--echoes that resound in the cautious _Meditations_ of

Descartes, that rise from peak to peak of the majestic method of the

great Spinoza, who was no less a martyr because reputation and not life

was the forfeit of his earnestness; and that vibrate with thrilling

sweetness in the Idealism of Schelling. 'The perfect theory of Nature,'

says Schelling, 'is that by virtue of which all Nature is resolved into

the intellectual element,' which 'intellectual element' is at once

composed of intuitions and is the source of intuitions,--the _Deus in

nobis_ of Giordano Bruno. 'It is evident,' he continues, 'that Nature is

originally identical with that which in us is recognized as the subject

and the object.'

Thus the empirical school, in its representative, Aristotle, met in the

martyr of Nola an opponent vigilant, earnest, powerful. And while the

legitimate prosecution of the former mode of philosophizing has led to

deism, skepticism, atheism, and materialism, it is to those who have

retained in methods, more mathematically clear and more perfectly

developed than that which Bruno disseminated, but still bearing, as

their key-note, the one great idea of his bold crusade,--to those we

must look for all that is most pure, most noble, in Philosophy: a system

or succession of systems whose primitive idea--substance and essence--is

the very God for a supposed denial of whom Bruno died. '_Cosi vince

Goffredo!_'

Thus rolled on the centuries. Germany, France, England, and Scotland had

each contributed her knights to the great tournament of Mind. And now

the first symptoms of agitation appeared on the hitherto unruffled

surface of Thought in the New World. Still panting after her victories,

scarcely used to her new freedom, at first the presence of a power

antagonistic to the orthodox faith was unsuspected even by those who

first entertained it. But the stone had been dashed into the tranquil

ocean when the May-flower was moored on the New England coast, and its

circling eddies drew curve after curve among the descendants, brave,

conscientious, energetic, of the old Puritans. The stern Calvinism, by

which their fathers had lived and died, was, by these early recreants,

first mistrusted, then questioned, and finally abjured. The murmurs of

dissent that had long agitated the sturdy upholders of the accepted

faith, broke out in a demand for a system whose claims should be less

absolute, and whose nature should satisfy those fugitive appeals to

Reason and the Understanding, that, weak indeed, and faint, were yet

distinctly audible to the thinkers of the day. From the cloud of

accusation and denial, of suspicion and trial, the new Perseus,

Unitarianism,--whilom a nursling of Milton, Locke, and Hartley,--was

born, and took its place among the sects, sustained by the few, dreaded

and condemned by the many.

To brand this new theory, no terms were found too strong even by the

religious periodicals of the day. Unwilling to bide their time, to test

its soundness by its strength and duration, its opponents rested not. It

was confidently predicted that the movement would influence its

followers to skepticism and atheism. The accusation of the sixteenth

century was revived, and St. Bernards cried from pulpit and press, 'The

limits of the forefathers have been transgressed!' To the great mass of

the opposition, the horror was not that Trinitarianism had been

assailed, but that men had been found so bold as to question it. The

crime with the unlearned and the majority of the professors was not

heresy, but daring. But Christians, fervent and earnest, were not

wanting who denounced the movement in its anticipated consequences. The

young and adventurous, the men of impulse and daring, would drift, it

was feared, to the very borders of open infidelity. But the contrary was

the result. A pietism the very reverse was developed, which, aided by

the beloved Channing, was disseminated through New England. Justice

Story even asserted that in Unitarianism he found refuge from the

skepticism to which in youth he had tended.

Permitted, by the liberal character of the welcome substitute for a

theology that had become too stringent for the age, to prosecute their

researches into fields hitherto forbidden to the orthodox, thinkers,

economists, statesmen and theologians gathered round the standard, and a

new impulse was given to the intellectual character of the times. A

revolution in Thought was impending.

In Literature we dared challenge the nations. The popularity of Cooper

was at its high noon. Irving, with the graphic and delicate strokes of

his sympathetic pencil, had written himself the Claude Lorraine among

_litterateurs_; and Prescott, with his sentences of granite, was

building himself an immortal name. Still, we were behind Germany, and

even France, in that wide comprehension and universal criticism that

determines more accurately than its politics the real _status_ of a

nation. These elements were now to be supplied. Carlyle had played in

England the _rôle_ so humorously yet thoroughly enacted in Germany by

Heine, and so gracefully and airily performed in France by Cousin. He

had _popularized_ the philosophers. Without the acute, electric

perceptions of the great German or the industry and amiable vanities of

that De Sevigné among philosophers, Cousin, he presented, by fierce

dashes of his crayon, black, blunt, and bluff, to the hitherto ignorant

British public, some phases of the great metaphysical bearings of the

age upon Literature and Art, as developed in Teutonic poetry and prose.

In a word, he familiarized his readers with the _Æsthetik_ of Germany.

He published in 1830 his _Sartor Resartus_, which, clothing the man in

'_der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid_,' usurped for him at once an office not

inferior to that of the _Erd-geist_ in _Faust_. The shrill notes of the

bagpipe of the critic of Craigenputtock blew across the mountains and

valleys of his island home, rousing the judge on the bench, and,

penetrating the long halls of Cambridge and Oxford, streamed yet

distinct and powerful to our shores. Astonished by the richness and

fullness of a literature so comprehensive, which seemed to inclose in

its brilliant mazes all that their meagre and unfruitful dogmas denied

of comfort to the heart and systematic development to the mind, the men

who, with girded loins and scrips in their hands, had long wandered

disconsolately on the shores of a seething ocean, now saw its waters

parted, and crossed upon dry ground. Before them stretched the vast

wilderness of German Philosophy. To their bewildered gaze, each system

was an Arabia Felix, and every axiom a graceful palm.

Meanwhile, a second influence was at work among the orthodox, an

influence that tended to the same great result, no longer an accident,

but a necessity of the age. The _Biographia Literaria_ and _The Friend_

of Coleridge, embodying a dwarfed but not distorted version of the

metaphysical system of Kant, which had created a profound sensation in

England, met with an even more enthusiastic reception in this country.

The Christian character of their author was beyond reproach, his genius

undisputed; as a poet he ranked among those to whom Great Britain owed

the laurel; and as an essayist, even the bitterest critics yielded him

the palm. When, therefore, this man, one of the most evangelical of his

time in the Established Church, brought to the aid of a time-honored and

beloved theology the principles of that very philosophy which was deemed

by others its fiercest antagonist, not a few who had been hitherto

deterred from its investigation by a dread of the accusation of heresy,

eagerly availed themselves of his labors. His _Aids to Reflection_ was

presented to the American public under the patronage of Dr. Marsh, late

president of Burlington College, Vt. An elaborate preliminary essay by

this eminently pious clergyman established the claims of the work to

favor, and it was even taken up as a text-book in Amherst and one or two

liberal Congregational universities in New England.

The effort of Coleridge, rendered obscure by his turgid and florid

style, was to explain the religious doctrines of Archbishop Leighton and

the early Puritans, which he held as orthodox, by means of the momentous

distinction between Reason and the Understanding, which he borrowed from

the _Critik der Reinen Vernunft_ of Kant. However plausible, when

disencumbered of its poetical drapery, the theory of Coleridge may be,

and however convincing, _so far as it goes_, of the truth of his

principles, we can not forget that the final tendency of the critical

philosophy of Kant is, if not a positive approach to skepticism, at

least to afford a scientific basis for it. But the formula of the author

of Christabel was the pure exponent of his creed. The terror of

metaphysics vanished as the oft-repeated words met the eye of the wary

and suspicious investigator. 'World--God = 0: God--world = Reality

Absolute. The world without God is nothing: God without the world is

already, in and of himself, absolute perfection, absolute authority.'

Thus, while Carlyle, bold, versatile, shrewd, untrammeled, worked upon

the Unitarian element in America, Coleridge, evangelical, polished, yet

adventurous, leavened the Congregationalists and other shades of

orthodox Christians with the same result. But the first literary

outgrowth and original product of the Transcendental movement in America

was Emerson's Essay on Nature, which appeared in 1838, forming a nucleus

for the writings of the Dial-ists, and proving a sort of _prolegomena_

to the new edition of Hermetic Philosophy. '_Non est philosophus nisi

fingit et pinxit_,' said the great pioneer. Here Emerson does both,

proving, by inversion, his claim to the title. Whatever may be the

negative virtues of this preliminary essay, it undoubtedly possesses the

positive one of having given a strong impulse to the study and love of

Nature. True, the man who is to grasp its details, sympathies,

significations, to hear, in all their grand harmony, its various

discordant symphonies and fugues, to see its marvelous associations,

needs to be Briarean-armed, Israfel-hearted and Argus-eyed, as perhaps

none in our imperfect day and generation can claim to be. But at least

this 'Nature' of Emerson's insinuated, dimly and dreamily, in spite of

its positive air, an occult relation between man and Nature. It invested

rock and sky and air with new and startling attributes. The deep thinker

might even draw upon its pages some _pays-de-Cocagne_ landscape, flowing

indeed with milk and honey, but in Tantalian distance. Nature's true

heart is invested with a pericardium so thick that it resists the

scalpel of the skillful critics, to whom the stethoscope alone betrays

the healthful throb of vitality beneath. With portly arguments, Emerson

bars the door to the simple but earnest-hearted. That Nature, whose

prophet he is, gleams, bright and unloving, down from a cold,

unsympathizing heaven.

'Not every one doth it beseem to question

The far-off, high Arcturus.'

And we, the lazzaroni on the piazza, can not even see the sky for the

mist of 'mottoes Italianate and Spanish terms' of an effete logic that

has risen before it.

Nevertheless, here are the first gleams of a genial appreciation of the

_Æsthetik_ of Germany, that large-hearted discernment that grasps

similitudes from the antipodes of Thought, and writes them upon its

sunny equator. And there are appeals to those finer impulses and

experiences of every feeling soul that manifest a sense, imperfect yet

animated, of that marvelous sympathy that exists between all phases of

life, whether in humanity or in external nature. His natural outbursts

of feeling are rare, but delicious as _caviare_, with a certain quaver

of piquancy. 'Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of

emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise

my Paphos and unimaginable realms of faërie; broad noon shall be my

England of the senses and the understanding, and night shall be my

Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.' Only a fantasy, and yet how he

bends Nature to suit the curve of his own temperament. And who has not

felt the involuntary exhilaration, appalling from its very depth, that

possessed him, crossing a bare common, on a bleak October afternoon,

sunless and chill, with gray winds sweeping by--'I was glad to the brink

of fear.' An intense emotion is imprisoned in these words,--the

irresistible intoxication of deep delight, the consciousness of an

unbounded faculty for enjoyment, and a lurking but delicious dread of

the lavish power of sensation cooped within the senses. Heine, in his

'Lutetia,' speaks of the 'secret raptures attendant upon the tremors of

fear.' Still, Emerson's Nature is rather a Nature à la Pompadour, in

powdered hair and jeweled stomacher and high-heeled slippers; not the

dear green mother of our dreams, who was wooed by the bending heavens,

and

'Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth from the mighty embracement;

Thousand-fold tribes of dwellers, impelled by thousand-fold instincts,

Filled, as a dream, the wide waters; the rivers sang on in their

channels;

Laughed on their shores the hoarse seas; the yearning ocean swelled

upward;

Young life lowed through the meadows, the woods, and the echoing

mountains,

Wandered bleating in valleys, and warbled in blossoming branches.'

But Nature had been broached and Society was scandalized. Like the

Chancellor in Faust, it mounted its tripod and solemnly proclaimed its

verdict upon the inadmissible theory, so inadequately proved of the

identity of Nature and Spirit. But '_was sagt_ mein Thales?'

'Natur und Geist! so spricht man nicht zu Christen:

Desshalb verbrennt man Atheisten,

Weil solche Reden höchst gefährlich sind.

Natur ist Sünde, Geist ist Teufel;

Sie hegen zwischen sich den Zweifel,

Ihr miss-gestaltet Zwitterkind.'

The Transcendental movement did not fail to attract severe opposition,

not only to its agitators, but toward the whole body of Unitarians, from

a portion of which it in a great measure sprang. If indeed, as Ellis,

its champion, asserts, Transcendentalism was not a native emanation from

New England, _i.e._, Unitarianism, yet it obviously paved the way for

its entrance, and even erected triumphal arches at intervals over its

projected route. The consequence of the renewed attack upon this already

sorely aggrieved sect was its virtual separation into moderates and

extremists: the one holding to its primitive theories, the other

inclining graciously to the more comprehensive and fascinating, because

more liberal and mystical, tenets of the new faith. The Rev. Andrew

Norton, an eminent Unitarian divine of the old school, in a discourse

before the Alumni of the Cambridge Theological School, took occasion to

attack with great vigor what he termed the 'new form of infidelity.'

This and his subsequent replies were most ably answered by George

Ripley, a zealous and genial scholar, eminent in belles-lettres and

philosophy, in his 'Letters on the latest form of Infidelity, including

the Opinions of Spinoza, Schleiermacher, and De Wette. Boston, James

Munroe & Co., 1840.'

This contest constituted the central polemic of the strife. Chilled by

the cold breath of popular intolerance, these persecuted advocates of a

metaphysical faith, which even themselves comprehended but dimly, might

have warmed their trembling hands by the fire of that _auto da fé_ whose

flames three centuries have not extinguished. Even those most opposed by

culture and habit to the innovators, could not but acknowledge that the

_Bestia Triofante_, that Giordano Bruno undertook to expel, was still

rampant and powerful in the midst of a civilized and intelligent

community. The fact was that the Transcendentalists were as much

astonished at this accusation of infidelity as even Fénélon himself

could have been. They were men of irreproachable character, the majority

religious by nature and scholarly by disposition, and they found in

their new field scope for an increased piety and a more enlarged

benevolence. Their infinitely pliable philosophy expanded amiably to

suit the requirements of any and every sect. The Rev. W. H. Furness, of

Philadelphia, though not thoroughly identified with the movement, yet,

in several volumes published at that time, manifested the influence of

Rationalism upon his own studies. But the machinery of his mind, though

exquisite in its details, was too delicate to work up successfully the

heavy material of the German importations. In a review of his 'Life of

Jesus,' by A. P. Peabody, in the _N. A. Review_, after a merited tribute

of praise and respect to the talented author, occurs the following:

'Æsthetic considerations weigh more with him than historical proofs, and

vividness of conception than demonstration. So far is he from needing

facts to verify his theories, that he is ready to reject the best

authenticated facts, if they would not flow necessarily from his _à

priori_ reasoning.' This was severe, too severe in the instance cited;

but the remark is worth preserving, as strikingly characteristic of much

of the _belles-lettres_ writings of the New School of thinkers, as they

were once, and indeed might yet be termed. But impiety was never the

result of Transcendentalism. Its advocates endeavored rather to prove

the adaptability of a generous and catholic spirit of Philosophy to

religion than to subvert it. They never advanced to a love of Strauss

and Feuerbach, and men of the second generation, of whom G.H. Lewes may

be taken as a type, have generally been regarded by them as the

Girondists regarded the Jacobins. Both urge reform, the Vergniaud and

the Robespierre, but the one respects the old landmarks, while the

other, with an unequaled nonchalance, sweeps by, unconscious of them

all, and plants his standard on a foundation as yet unshaken by foot of

man.

The consequences of the Transcendental movement were truly remarkable.

Those latitudes to which habit had accustomed us to look for our

_literati_ became one immense hot-house, in which exotics of the most

powerful fragrance bloomed luxuriantly.[4] As if by miracle, they

assumed hues and adopted habits to which, in their native soil, they

had been strangers. Every small _litterateur_ wore conspicuously his

cunningly entwined wreath. Ladies appeared at 'æsthetic tea-parties,'

crowned with the most delicate of the new importations. Young clergymen

were not complete without a flower in their button-holes, and the tables

of staid old professors groaned beneath the weight of huge pyramidal

bouquets. The cursory examination of foreign literature had given rise

to an eclecticism which reflected the distinguishing features of that of

Cousin, yet went a step further in daring. Yet this was not an

eclecticism that, gifted with the power of a king, the dignity of a

priest, and the discernment of a prophet, drew from the treasure-troves

of European libraries only their choicest gems. Diamonds, it is true,

flashed among the spoils; sapphires and emeralds gleamed; but beside

them lay bits of sandstone and scraps of anthracite, rainbow-tinted,

perhaps, but of an unconquerable opaqueness. And the alchemy that should

have transmuted these to gold, and educed from the one light and from

the other majesty, was wanting. A trace of Behmen here, a reading of

Cousin's lectures there, some Schiller and more Goethe, some pietism

encouraged by a love of Channing, the American Fénélon, some German

ballads and a flavor of Plato,--all these helped the initiated to a

curious dialect and a curious _mélange_. And this was Transcendentalism.

The great revelation that the grand Moonsee of the new movement had

declared necessary in 1838 had been made; the ninth _avatar_ had

descended, and men looked about them for the representative of Krishna,

and reverenced him in RALPH WALDO EMERSON. Under his auspices,

the _Dial_, the organ of the new sect, was published, and the next year,

1841, the first collection of his writings appeared under the simple

caption _Essays_, followed by a second series in 1847.

Spite of the fragmentary Germano-pantheism of the new Philosophy, as set

forth in these volumes, that a grand advance had been made upon the old

modes of thought was proved by the dismay in the opposing ranks. The

outcry against Unitarianism was faint compared with the howls of horror

and defiance that greeted Transcendentalism. The very name was a synonym

for arrogance. The pride of its opponents was touched. Alarming indeed,

and transcendental beyond conception, were the outpourings of thought

that anointed the _Dial_ and these _Essays_. The very chrism of

mysticism trickled along their running-titles, and dripped fragrantly

from their pages. Not only new opinions, but new words and phrases,

puzzled the uninitiated. Among these were _subjective_ and _objective_,

and the concise, comprehensive Germanisms were assailed as sure evidence

of treason or insanity. He who used them was a marked man, and liable to

find on the first oyster-shell his sentence of exile from the assemblage

of the faithful. The name of Goethe was as terrible as the sacred 'Om'

of the Brahmins; it was whispered with 'bated breath, and was generally

believed to be diabolical _per se_. In short, everything bearing the

stamp of Germany was a bit of sweet, forbidden lore. Travels in that

fog-land by dull old fogies, and simple outlines of its Philosophy by

divines high in rank, were obtained by stealth, and read in secret by

college-boys, with as much zeal as the 'Kisses' of Johannes Secundus or

the Epigrams of Martial. Even Klopstock's 'Messiah' became gilded with a

sort of delightful impropriety.

Disapprobation and distrust had merged into abuse and persecution.

Orestes A. Brownson, then drifting with the strong tide of the liberals,

published in 1840 a sort of pantheistically ending novel, entitled

_Charles Elwood, or the Infidel Converted_. The Rev. Dr. Bright, at

present editor of the Baptist _Examiner_, was at that tune a bookseller

of the firm of Bennett & Bright, and publisher of the _Baptist

Register_. When _Charles Elwood_ appeared, he ordered the usual number

of copies; but, discovering the nature of the book, made a Servetus of

the 'lot' by burning them up in the back-yard of his store. A funeral

pyre worthy the admiration and awe it must have excited.

The _Essays_ of Emerson were subsequently attacked furiously in the

_Princeton Review_ by Prof. Dod and Jas. W. Alexander. These gentlemen

gave to the world, as criticisms of Emerson and other writers, several

treatises on Pantheism, aiding the very cause they designed to destroy,

by disseminating among the religious public a statement of the primitive

Philosophy of the Vedas, and its reflection in Germany and America,

clearer than any that had yet appeared: a task for which their

scholarship and ability eminently fitted them. But in attacking German

Philosophy, both learned to respect that which was practically useful in

it. Prof. Dod left among his papers an unfinished translation of

Spinoza, and the lamented Dr. Alexander, in his admirable lectures on

literature to the students of Princeton College, recommended a perusal

of what Kant and other German metaphysicians had written on Æsthetics.

It is no reflection on the piety or sincerity of these sound divines and

ripe scholars that they found something good and useful even in the

armory of the enemy. The last step in piety, as in learning, is always

to that noble liberality which recognizes Truth and Beauty wherever

found.

And, while the religious reviews abounded in jeremiads and philippies,

the newspaper wits stood outside and shouted in derision. The game was

indeed too rare to be passed unnoticed. In a poem on Fanny Ellsler

(1841) occurred the following:--

Our wits, as usual, late upon the road,

Pick up what Europe saw long since explode.

If this you doubt, ask Harvard, she can tell

How many fragments there from Deutschland fell;

How many mysteries boggle Cambridge men

That erst in England boggled Carlyle's pen,

And will, no doubt, be mysteries again;

And also what great Coleridge left unsung.

He, too, saw Germany when very young.'

To Emerson, at this moment, numbers looked with the deepest admiration

or with fiercest hate. He was the type of his age, what Carlyle might

perhaps call its 'Priest Vates.' In his _Essays_ he stood aloft and

proclaimed, 'In me is the kernel of truth: eat and live!' But the shell

that enclosed the kernel was hard to crack, and was, moreover, like the

'Sileni' of the old French apothecaries, as described by Rabelais, so

decorated with wondrous figures, harpies, satyrs, horned geese and

bridled hares, that men were incredulous, and doubted that precious

ambergris, musk and gems were to be found within. In his first

crudities, fyttes and tilts with thought, both knight and field are

covered with a cloth of gold so dazzling that the crystalline lenses of

our common vision are in danger of dissolution, and we vainly hope for

page or dame who will whisper to us the magic word that shall dispel

this scene of enchantment. Meanwhile, his sentences, like arrows, darken

that sun, himself, and we hasten with bits of smoked glass to view the

eclipse. Happily, we have chosen the right medium: the luminousness is

destroyed, but the opaqueness remains visible. Entrenched behind a

mannerism so adroitly constructed as at once to invite and repel

invasion, Emerson hurls out axioms and establishes precedents that prove

upon examination to be either admirably varnished editions of old truths

or statements of new ones of questionable legitimacy. Turn over leaf by

leaf these early essays, and doubts arise as to the validity of the

author's claim to originality. Carlyle has led before these pompous

parades of moral truths that your child recognizes in the nursery when

he makes war upon Johnny, who has knocked down his ten-pins. The law of

compensation and the existence of evil and consequent suffering are

actual entities to him. And yet these men do not belong to the same

school. The resemblance is on the surface. Emerson dabbles delicately,

yet, let it be conceded, energetically, with theories: his hands are

not the nervy, sinewy hands of the Viking of English literature; he

lacks his keen discernment of life, his quick comprehension of the

mutual relations of men and their times; he often wants his fine

analytical power. Carlyle sees in the life of a man his actions,

associations, aspirations, disappointments, successes, what deep

principles swayed him, what noble or ignoble nature provided his

impulses, and wrought his manhood: Emerson tests him by the great

problems of the universe, as he understands them, and educes from their

application to certain circumstances the character of the man. The one

is sagacious, argus-eyed; the other oracular, sibylline. And yet

Emerson, perhaps unconsciously, through admiration of the liberal views

and unquestioned bravery of his contemporary, adopted something like his

peculiarities of style and domesticated foreign idioms, that yet, like

tamed tigers, are not to be relied on in general society. As Carlyle was

the rhinoceros of English, Emerson aspired to be its hippopotamus,--both

pachyderms, and impenetrable to the bullets of criticism.

We have called Cousin an eclecticist. His Philosophy is a positive one

compared with that of Emerson. Here are scraps of Plato and Hegel, of

Porphyry and Swedenborg, of Æschylus and De Stael. Like the _Lehrer zu

Sais_, 'he looks on the stars, and imitates their courses and positions

in the sand.' In the obscurity that proves him great, for 'To be great

is to be misunderstood,' (is this the true 'misery of greatness' of

Milton?) it is hard to grasp his individuality. His haughty assertions

meet us at every turn. We no more dare to question them than so many

'centaurs or sphinxes or pallid gorgons' in a nightmare. But he relieves

our perplexity and gives us the key to that enigma himself. 'I unsettle

all things. No facts to me are sacred, none are profane. I simply

experiment, an endless seeker, _with no past at my back_.' What is this

but another version of Brahma? 'Far or forgot to me is near.' It is a

reflection of the Veda. 'I myself never was not, nor thou, nor all the

princes of the earth, nor shall we ever hereafter cease to be.' Spinoza,

the God-intoxicated man, never ventured on a declaration so bold. 'The

eternal wisdom of God, _Dei oeterna Sapientia_,' says he, more

modestly, 'is manifested in all things, but mostly in the human mind,

and most of all in Jesus Christ.' Here then we find the individuality of

Emerson, in his pure Pantheism, and, like the sword of Martin Antolinez,

it illumines all the field. Now we understand the constant warfare, the

'inevitable polarity,' in these pages. We forgive the occasional

inconsistencies of a man who is at once, by his own confession, 'God in

Nature and a weed by the wall.' His weakness strives after infinite

power. Conscious of a divinity within, he struggles to express it

worthily; but ah! says Hermes Trismegistus,--'It is hard to conceive

God, but impossible to express him.' Freedom within chafes at the iron

necessity without, 'a necessity deep as the world,' all-controlling,

imperial, which he acknowledges in the very depths of his being. But the

necessity of Emerson is a Hegelian element, such as every Aristophanic

comedy reveals. It is not the necessity of Fichte. 'I, with all that

relates to me, am imprisoned within the bonds of Necessity. I am one

link of her inflexible chain. A time was when I was not, so those have

assured me who were before me, and, as I have no consciousness of this

time, I am constrained to believe their testimony.' This is the

necessity of mere existence, which bears no relation to the will of the

man, not that inflexible destiny to which Emerson refers, that underlies

his continued being. The first does not oppose the 'instinct of an

activity free, independent,' which Emerson afterwards acknowledges. But

'I am God in Nature,' he repeats. 'The simplest person who in his

integrity proclaims God, becomes God.' 'This thorough integrity of

purpose,' writes Fichte, 'is itself the divine idea in its most common

form, and no really _honest_ mind is without communion with God.' In

Emerson the last height is reached. Brahm as Arjoon could do no more,

no less. His eye roams over the universe and sees only manifestations of

himself: the rose of morning, the shining splendor of the sea, the

purple of the distant mountains, are his dawn and noon and eve.

'Alas! what perils do environ

The man who meddles with--a siren!'

This may be Pantheism, but if it is not in accordance with the needs of

the ages, it is not the Pantheism of Giordano Bruno, it has little in

common with Plato. The great idea, the latter tells us, in the

_Republic_, 'the idea of the God, is perceived with difficulty, but can

not be perceived without concluding that in the visible world it

produces light, and the star whence the light directly comes, and in the

invisible world it directly produces Strength and Intelligence.'

Strength and Intelligence; whose correlatives are Progress and

Happiness. Are there among Emerson's earlier 'big-sounding sentences and

words of state,' any of which these are the legitimate fruit? Does the

soul of Infinite Love that beamed from Nazareth inform these pages with

the active, perfect, immortal spirit of truth? No. In these essays,

Emerson is a royalist, an aristocrat: he aims for the centralization of

power; he does not elevate the masses; he claims for himself, for all

nature, ultra-refined and cultivated, to whom the Open Secret 'has been

discovered, a separate and highly superior personality. 'The height, the

duty of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force.

Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest

to solitude.' What an Apollo Belvidere the man would be, moulded by no

sympathies, standing aloof from his race, and independent of it,

disdainful, magnificent, a palace of ice, untenable by the summer heat

of Love. The true cosmopolite is the man of his age, even if he has

known no latitude but that of his birth, for he has won for himself the

highest individuality, and the greatest power of association with his

fellow-man, and the laws that govern man in his efforts to secure these

are the laws of the only true social science. Henry Carey says with

reason, in Italy the highest individuality was found when the Campagna

was filled with cities. It is a narrow belief that the highest

development of character demands solitude. Give to a young man, genial,

impulsive, and intelligent, only the companionship of forest, sea, and

mountain, and the chances are, he will become morbid, unpractical, and

selfish. But place him in the same position in the decline, or even in

the noon of life, when the different parts of his nature have become

subordinated to each other, by friction with diverse human organizations

about him, and he will carry a brave individuality among nature's gifts,

being himself her noblest development. 'Men,' says Emerson, 'resemble

their contemporaries even more than their progenitors. It is observed in

old couples, or in persons who have been house-inmates for a course of

years, that they grow alike: if they should live long enough we should

not be able to know them apart. Nature abhors such complaisances, which

threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens to break up such

maudlin agglutinations.' But Darby and Joan in the chimney-corner are

not types of mankind at large.

'Right ethics are central, and go from the soul outward. Gift is

contrary to the law of the universe. Serving others is serving myself. I

must absolve me to myself.' And what is myself? Let Fichte answer. 'I

affirm that in what we call the knowledge or the contemplation of

things, it is always ourselves that we know or contemplate: in every

sentiment of consciousness it is only modifications of ourselves that we

feel.' And again: 'The universe lives. From it arises a marvelous

harmony that resounds deliciously in the very depths of my heart. I live

in all that surrounds me. I recognize myself in every manifestation of

Nature, in the various forms of the beings about me, as a sunbeam that

sparkles in the million dew-drops that reflect it.... Within me Nature

is flesh, nerves, muscles; without, turf, plant, animal.'

Thus the semi-poetical Pantheism of the Bhagvat-Gita is reproduced,

beautiful, dreamy and mythical, but without the shadow of an addition.

Emerson presents to us the primeval faith in its imposing majesty and

terrible unity, but omits to mention its final winding up in the sacred

Maya or Illusion of the Hindoos. Though his early essays are brilliant

with many noble thoughts, the principles he advocates in them are

thoroughly unprogressive and unpractical. Plato is to him the

'exhaustive generalizer,' beyond whom it is folly to aspire, and by

whose stature he measures the nations. Boëthius, Rabelais, Erasmus,

Bruno, are only brisk young men translating into the vernacular wittily

his good things. St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg

also 'say after him.' Emerson either addresses men whose ignorance he

greatly exaggerates, or else the ideal men of some centuries hence. His

mission is to the Past or the Future, not to the Present. His theories,

fine and venerable, as they are as here expressed, will never save a

soul, and men are still convinced that one sharp, decisive action is

worth a thousand fine strategic points on paper. Yet he won an enviable

and wide reputation by these his early works. 'There is merit without

elevation,' says La Rochefoucauld, 'but there is no elevation without

some merit.' Such we find him in his earlier essays, while he had as yet

only grasped at the Pantheistic wing of the Egyptian globe. In England,

in 1848, four thousand people crowded Exeter Hall, to hear the champion

of free thought from America. In Poland, men who knew him only by some

fragments in a Polish review, considered him the thinker of the age. His

courage was the talisman that won him admiration, and his earnestness,

visible through the veil of arrogance and petty affectations, secured

respect.

In _Representative Men_, the old Plato-worship illumined by

Schelling--_Wissenschaften_--is the key-note, and _English Traits_ is

the record of impressions received during the _Sturm und Drang_, or

rather 'cloud-compelling' days of the _Dial_ and _Essay_ developments. A

volume of _Poems_, published in 1856, recalls the old landmarks. If they

are rich in thought, they are also luxuriant in labyrinthine sentences

that puzzle even the initiated in the Ziph language. A thought once

extricated from a maze of inversion and entangled particles,

'we are in pain

To think how to unthink that thought again.'

As a poet, Emerson is careless in versification. Like Friar John, of the

Funnels, he does not rhyme in crimson. His imagination is too bold to be

confined by the petty limits of trochee or iambus. Consequently his

pictures, when he condescends to paint, present rather a mass of

brilliant coloring than the well-finished detail that we demand in a

work of art. We look in vain in his poems for that effort of identity

between the conscious and the unconscious activities that Schelling

calls the sole privilege of genius. 'The infinite (or perfect) presented

as the finite, is Beauty.' Yet the single poem 'Threnody' would

establish Emerson's title to a place among the guild of poets. It is

classically beautiful and faultless in mechanism. Its flow is that of a

river over sands of gold, its solemn monotone broken now and then by

_staccato_ plaints, and the tender gold of its shining waters dimmed by

dark shadows, as rock beneath or tree above assails the gentle stillness

of its onward flow. Only that which comes from the heart goes again to

the heart. We find a new and delicious personality, a simple Greek

naturalness, in this exquisite dirge that scarcely owns the 'blasphemy

of grief,' that are wanted in his sententious instructions and

metaphysical wanderings.

We open Emerson's latest work, the _Conduct of Life_, in a hopeful mood.

Some mysterious sympathy, born from a natural faith in the progress of a

mind that had already proved its power by a daring and successful

onslaught upon old habits and associations, strengthened by a more

practical philosophy that dawns in _English Traits_, and culminating in

the intense passion of yearning in the _Phrenody_, justifies an

expectation that is gloriously realized. To the vigilant thinker a

decade is worth more than aeons to his sleeping brother. The Emerson of

to-day is not the Emerson of twenty or even ten years ago. Here is still

the true, epigrammatic style of his youth. He is as lavish of his

aphorisms, which, like the coins of Donatello, hang over our heads and

are free to every passer-by. Still an antiquarian, like Charles

Kingsley, he peers among Etruscan vases, Greek ruins, Norse runes and

ancient Dantean Infernos and Escurials for the models of a new

literature, a new art, a new life. But an enlarged spirit is visible on

every page.

'The south wind is strengthened

With the wild, sweet vigor of pine.'

We breathe a new air, gaze at new landscapes; a new climate is around

us. Take this book into the sultry midsummer, and its words summon the

ripe autumn with its fruits up from the west; read it by the light of

the blazing Yule log, and it will still recall the wild breezes and warm

suns of October. And it is this growing maturity of thought, this

evident tendency to a grand realization, that prove the honesty and

greatness of the man. He has worked perseveringly at his problems,

disdaining to be aided by criticism or crushed by opposition. His power

has silently gathered its energies in the mines of Thought, dark but

rich, striking shaft after shaft of vast promise. He is a gymnast

struggling now with the realities and possibilities of Life, and no

longer grappling with ignis-fatui in the marshes by the road. Now his

humor gleams genially in keen, swift comparisons: he sports with truths,

like a king tossing up his crown-jewels or Vishnu worlds in the

'Cosmogony of Menu,' and he dares do this because they are no longer his

masters, because he has made them subservient to an end--the great end

of the amelioration of his race.

It is this great element of sport that in its broadest development

elevates man to the far heights of his nature. There all is serene.

'Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.'

Even the Hindoos, those earliest _literati_ of the young earth, whose

eyes peered first into the intricate machinery of Being, and brought

therefrom strange and glowing and miraculous impressions of its

mechanical appliances,--strong levers that men use now for

criticism,--recognized this element. Afar from the scene of their

sorrow, in the lotos a-bloom on Vishnu's head, they beheld the primitive

Humor, the laughter of infinite Strength springing from bar to bar in

the great gymnasium of life. Thus we read in the Cosmogony of Menu,--

'Numerous world-developments there are, creation and extermination;

_Sportively_ he produces either, the highest Creator for ever and ever.'

And says the more orthodox Schlegel, 'Nature was in its origin naught

else than a beautiful image, a pure emanation, a wonderful creation, a

_sport_ of omnipotent love.' And Schiller, whom an impregnable

aristocracy of soul shut out from the ranks of humorists, who rode in

his coupée, three feet above the level of the common stream of humanity,

and never drifted with its tide, yet, with clear-eyed insight into the

passions he did not share, acknowledged the _Spieltrieb_ as the highest

possibility of man's nature. 'The last perfection of our faculties,' he

says, 'is, that their activity, without ceasing to be sure and earnest,

becomes _sport_.

Emerson's humor is peculiar to himself. It is not the massive, exuberant

play of Jean Paul. He does not challenge the slow-riding moon to a

cricket match, nor hurl the stars from their orbits in his mad game in

the skies. Neither has he the brusque but more solid geniality of

Lessing. Imagination fails him for the one, and a strong power of logic

for the other. But he tears the clouds of ignorance and prejudice that

are beneath his feet into ribbons and sends them streaming through

space, filmy banners of blue and white, heavily charged with the

electricity of his enfranchised thought, and illumines the world with

the lightnings of their chance collision. His humor is rather latent

than striking. It does not gleam through showy words, the paraphernalia

of a harlequinade, but peeps out from the homeliest phrases, and

convulses some simple law of our nature with laughter at its own

grotesqueness. Formerly, imprisoned as it was within unyielding limits,

it was as imposing as a miniature Gothic cathedral in a dark cave, but

now the queen-rose of the architrave blows fresh and sweet in the sunny

air. Step by step Emerson has traveled the great road worn by so many of

old, passing from the 'ideal' to the real, from reverie to a cheerful

awaking,--and the prophecy of genius is at last fulfilled.

For at last he has come out from the misty twilight of Transcendentalism

into the clear daylight of common sense. And surely it is not for us to

decry the bridge, or, if you please, the tunnel through which he has

crossed. He agitates the necessity and practicability of social reform,

but it must be through individual effort. Years ago he decided that

society was in a low state, now he calls on all men to put their

shoulders to the wheel and lift it out of the Slough of Despond, where

it has been floundering to no purpose for so long. His investigations

are aided by a keen shrewdness, that bespeaks the practical man, who

knows where to find the vulnerable heel of circumstance, and aims at it

his swiftest arrows. In his essay on Wealth this sharp practical insight

hardens every sentence. The sentimentalist, who believes, with Henri

Blaze, that romance must be the issue of this marriage of Nature with

Religion, betakes himself in consternation to his dainty, poetical

dreams of a Utopia that shall arise, ready made, from the promising

East. The capitalist, who sneers at Philosophy, and would ignorantly

couple Faust with the Mysteries of Udolpho, or Andromeda with Jack the

Giant-killer, rubs his hands gleefully over our author's nice

appreciation of capital and the mysteries of its sudden fluctuations.

'Every step of civil advancement makes a dollar worth more.' 'Political

Economy is as good a book wherein to read the life of man, and the

ascendency of laws over all private and hostile influences, as any Bible

which has come down to us.' 'The right merchant is one who has the just

average of faculties we call _common sense_; a man of a strong affinity

for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is

thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic.... He knows that all

goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent, for every effect a

perfect cause, and that good luck is another name for tenacity of

purpose.' 'The basis of political economy is non-interference.' The

merchant looks narrowly at his theory of compensation, and finds it

tallies well with the result of his own after-dinner meditations,

expressed of mornings to doubting confreres. The philanthropist rejoices

at the crushing of the shell of foppish indolence, the heralded downfall

of the petty vanities, sprung, Heaven knows with what reason, from the

loins of Norman robbers, of Huguenot refugees, of Puritans beggared and

ignorant, and centered in some wide-spreading genealogical tree, that a

whole family unite to cultivate into a banyan that may embrace the whole

little world of their satellites with inflexible ligatures. Thus 'the

doctrine of the snake' is to go out, and good men see that the sinews of

society are to be strengthened.

It is worth while to observe, in that first chapter on Fate, how

admirably Emerson provides for the exercise of a free activity in every

man. 'Every spirit makes its house, but afterward the house confines the

spirit.' This leaves no room for the coward, who declines to work out

his salvation, even with fear and trembling. It summons all men to clear

away the brush and dry leaves of a perverted fatalism,

'To make the absolute best of what God made,'

to sharpen every faculty, expand every capacity, and bow only to the

Eternal.

Æterna æternus tribuit, mortalia confert

Mortalis; divina Deus, peritura caducus.'

Here is the choice, eternal or mortal, divine or perishable. This drives

men to seek their Paradise in Culture. Well, they find in it a Beulah,

and beyond rolls the Jordan of the soul. Men have made a dwarfed

Providence to suit their dwarfed aims, an amorphous Deity, whose

attributes are imperfect, disproportioned. But yesterday I heard a

Frenchman, who has no acquaintance with our literature and never heard

of Emerson, say, 'God, with the multitude, is no more than a feeble old

man, whose whims and whose age we must respect. What is to become of his

high claims upon creatures who are to work out an infinite purpose? _Il

faut honorer la vieillesse?_ Emerson had anticipated this with his

'pistareen Providence, dressed in the clean shirt and white neckcloth of

a student of divinity;' yet it proves that minds are arriving by widely

diverging paths at the same truths.

There is nothing ideal or vague in the vigorous efforts he makes in this

volume to rise to political economy and to set forth the practical

action of capital and industry on life. He says no longer, 'To me

commerce is of trivial import,' but endorses Henry Carey's theory of

wealth, and acknowledges unreservedly, in its broadest sense, the

universal domination of Law. Statistics bourgeon into prophecies under

his pen: he does not disdain their significance, but rather aids their

influence with all the power which his spasmodic style has given in

drawing our grotesque-loving public to him. We suspect Buckle, and feel

a cheerful sense of Bacon and Comte. In his plea for socialism, for

education, we see the dawn of the ultimate triumph and dignity of labor.

'We shall one day,' he says, 'supersede Politics by Education.' Pause

well here, you who grope forward into the dark future with misgiving and

faithless hearts. This is not the chimerical delusion of a

transcendental philosophy, this death-knell to the Slavery of Ignorance

and Vice. Recognize in it the wide generosity that says with Leczinsky,

_'Je ne connais d'avarice permise que celle du temps_.' Here is wealth

for want, industry for indolence, distinction for degradation, virtue

for vice. It beams clear as the red of morning. Hear it in the whistle

of the engine, the roar of the loom, the plowing of the steam-ship

through battling waves, the tick of the telegraph, the whirr of the mill

wheel, the click of the sewing machine; and he who doubts still may

listen to the voice of cannon, the whistling of lances and the clash of

swords, and catch the notes of the same chant with a sterner chorus.

Hear even the idealist Schelling awaiting that broader freedom than any

we have yet known:--

'The third period in history will be that when that which in preceding

periods appeared as Destiny or Nature, shall develop and manifest itself

as Providence. Thus what seems to us as the work of Destiny or Nature is

already the beginning of a Providence, which reveals itself but

imperfectly. When we shall look for the birth of this period, man can

not say, but know that when it is, _God will be_.'

And Emerson takes up the strain with words of fire:--

'If Love, red Love, with tears and joy; if Want, with his scourge; if

War, with his cannonade; if Christianity, with its charity; if Trade,

with its money; if Art, with its portfolios; if Science, with her

telegraphs through the deeps of space and time, can set man's dull

nerves throbbing, and, by loud taps on the tough chrysalis, can break

its walls and let the new creature emerge erect and free,--make way and

sing paean! The age of the quadruped is to go out--the age of the brain

and the heart is to come in. The time will come when the evil forms we

have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing,

wants all the material. He is to convert all impediments into

instruments, all enemies into power. The formidable mischief will only

make the more useful slave. And if one shall read the future of the race

hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, and the

corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare

affirm that there is nothing he will not overcome and convert, until at

last culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna. He will convert the

Furies into Muses, and the hells into benefit.'

SPHINX AND OEDIPUS.

Why poets should sing of this WAR

In rapturous anthems of praise,

I know not. Its meanings so jar,

Its purpose hath so many ways,

The SPHINX never readeth the whole.

'Tis a riddle propounded to me

That I am unskillful to tell.

The Sphinx by the way-side, I see,

Is watching (I know her so well)

To mangle us, body and soul.

Is it 'Freedom, that Bondage may live,'

Which cheers on the North to the fray?

Is it 'Slavery more Freedom to give,'

That slogans the Southern foray?

She asks, and awaits your reply:

Now answer, ye _marshal_-bred bands

Whose business is murder and blood;

Ye priests with incarnadined hands;

Ye peace-men who 'fight for the good;'

Now solve her this riddle or die!

'Our Flag,' the conservative says,

'Waves over the land of the free;'

God save us!--I think many ways,

But still 'tis a riddle to me,

Whose mystery is hid from the eye;

But Oedipus, showing the souls

All fettered, imbruted and blained,

Who point where its blazonry rolls,

And wail the sad plaint of the chained,--

Asserts, 'There is, somewhere, a lie.'

THE ACTRESS WIFE.

I had been sent by my New York employers to superintend a branch of

their business in a southern city. On the evening of a brilliant

Sabbath, as I walked musingly through the cemetery, where thousands of

the city's dead had found a calm and sequestered resting place, my

attention was drawn to a monumental structure, the character and

symbolism of which defied my comprehension. On a grassy mound, in a

grove of oak trees, almost concealing it from observation, rose a

mausoleum of dark stone, which at the first glance I conjectured to

represent a Druidical temple. At the four corners were the carved

resemblances of oak trees, the trunks forming columns for the structure,

and the limbs branching out, intertwining above into a graceful

net-work. The spaces between the trunks--forming the four sides of the

edifice--were simply plain, deep-set slabs. The design could not be

mistaken. It was that of an oak grove inclosing a tomb. But whose, and

why this singular design? There was no inscription to afford an

explanation. Another view added to the mystery. Standing in the middle

of one of the sides, underneath the arch formed by the branching limbs,

was an exquisite female figure of white marble. One foot and the body

advanced, one hand grasping her robe, the other extended pointing into

the distance, her head turned to one side, the lips parted as if

speaking, the countenance expressive of the enthusiasm of love combined

with impetuous resolution, an attire of the most perfect simplicity,

similar to that worn by Roman maidens, and with a plain bandeau around

the head,--the whole presented a figure of perfect symmetry and

life-like impassioned earnestness, as beautiful as it was

unintelligible. I sought through all my recollections of ancient and

modern impersonations--of mythology, history, Scripture, and poetry--but

could find nothing to furnish a solution. The structure and the figure

surpassed even conjecture. Velleda, and Lot's wife, according to an old

picture in the catechism, were the only resemblances I could recall, but

the surroundings evidently did not suit the types.

While in my embarrassment, I became dimly conscious of seeing an elderly

man coming towards me from behind the structure, but should have

received no distinct impression of his presence had he not approached

the gate of the inclosure upon which I chanced to be leaning, and mildly

requested my permission to pass. Recalled to myself, I saw by a hasty

glance that the person before me was a man apparently some sixty years

of age, to whom time had imparted only a 'richness' of appearance,

exhibiting the gentleman at every point, and with an aspect of the most

profound grief, tempered with resignation, benevolence, and urbanity.

Having politely assisted his egress, he passed onward with a graceful

gesture of acknowledgment. He had taken but a few steps, when the

thought occurred to me that he must have come from within the perplexing

structure by some secret door, and that he could unravel its mystery. I

was impelled to follow him, and proceeded hastily to do so, when the

indelicacy of my intrusion on one evidently connected with the grief

which the monument was designed to commemorate, flashed upon me, and I

suddenly paused. He probably observed my rapid footsteps and their

pause, for he turned toward me, when in a confused manner I stammered

forth an apology, which, undesignedly on my part, involved a statement

of the contradictory motives which had influenced me. With the most

quiet and prepossessing demeanor he questioned me if I were a stranger

visiting the city, and in reply I gave him all the necessary particulars

concerning myself,--that my name was Waters, that I was employed by the

firm of Brown, Urthers & Co., managing their branch business. A

conversation ensued, which elicited the fact that the gentleman had

been acquainted with my father a score of years before. The latter,

whose head lies on his last pillow, was then a clerk in the New York

house of Sampson, Bell & Co. The gentleman before me was Mr. Bell, who

during the existence of the house had been first a clerk, and

subsequently the partner who conducted their branch business at the city

of my own present residence.

With this preliminary acquaintance, he kindly took my arm, and, leading

me back to the monument, informed me, in a manner entirely free from any

poignancy, or from that lionizing of costly memorials to departed

friends so often indulged in, that it was erected to the memory of his

wife; that she had formerly been an actress of celebrity, attaining

peculiar distinction by her representation of the character of Imogen,

in Shakespeare's Cymbeline; and that the marble figure portrayed her at

the utterance of the words--

'Oh for a horse with wings! Hear'st thou, Pisanio?

He is at Milford Haven. Read and tell me

How far 'tis thither ... Say, and speak quick,

How far it is

To this same blessed Milford;'[5]

and that the architecture of the tomb was intended to correspond with

the period at which the incidents of the drama transpired.

* * * * *

Mr. Bell's ordinary life was one neither of seclusion nor of widely

extended social courtesies; but of active benevolence and cheerful

retirement, disfigured neither by ostentatious philanthropy nor studied

recluseness. A son and daughter who had hardly passed the confines of

juvenility, with the necessary attendants, formed his household. For the

rest, he lived apparently as a gentleman of taste and wealth might be

supposed to do.

In this household I gradually acquired an intimacy. This was partially

owing to the circumstance that I had solaced the many lonely hours of my

bachelorhood in acquiring by memory and rehearsing many scraps of

poetry. Mr. Bell's favorite method of passing the evening was in

teaching his children to read and declaim poetry with dramatic

expression, and in this delightful occupation I was an acceptable

assistant. Many were the domestic dramas which we produced,--pieces of

our own invention,--in addition to our readings from the poets.

* * * * *

Frederick and Clara were to pass a year or two in schools at the North,

and thither Mr. B. removed. The first winter of their absence, I

received a letter from him relating that Clara had succumbed to the

rigor of a northern climate. Soon came the father and brother with the

corpse of their darling, which was placed within the cemetery mausoleum.

Into this I entered for the first time, but the interior differed in no

respect from others. Within its walls the mother and daughter were left

together. In less than a week it was again opened, to receive the son.

He had been drowned while attempting the rescue of a companion.

To my surprise at the time, the desolate father exhibited no grief.

There was in his demeanor an appearance of satisfaction that their

removal had preceded his own,--that he would leave none of his heart's

treasures behind him, but be enabled to claim them all in the future

existence.

* * * * *

The days lengthened and shortened through three years, in which the

routine of my life was varied by no incident. With Mr. Bell my relations

continued the same. At all times he spoke cheerfully of the past and the

future, frequently giving utterance to the feelings above attributed to

him. In one of these conversations I ventured to inquire concerning his

wife. His whole countenance was irradiated. It seemed that some bright

and glorious recollection of her had been recalled. The fancy impressed

itself on me that he had a visible consciousness of her presence. The

animation subsided into a quiet self-communing, and he soon proceeded to

relate the history of her whose marble similitude had so excited my

wonder and admiration.

* * * * *

It is nearly thirty years since I came from a New England country house

to this city, as a clerk in the branch house of Sampson Brothers. I was

then a raw youth; but my New England training had given me the serious

and money-seeking characteristics of that part of our country. For ten

years I applied myself exclusively to the details of business, having

but few associates, devoting my leisure to self-improvement, and

steadily accumulating a competency. On the death of a member of the firm

I took his place. Five years passed, and I had attained a fortune. Some

friends from the North called upon me in their travels, and during the

week of their visit, I participated in more gaieties than had been

comprised in my whole previous life. One evening it was proposed to

visit the theatre. Into a place of dramatic representation I had never

before entered, and the enchantment of all its accessories was

irresistible. But when the heroine of the evening appeared, I was

deprived of every faculty except that of the most absorbing adoration.

What was the drama enacted mattered not,--I had no perception of it, nor

of anything except the person who had fascinated me. Tall in figure,

commanding in gesture, scarcely developed into the full wealth of

womanhood, with an eye of piercing blackness, yet changing with every

gradation of passion, profuse black tresses, and a voice whose

intonations swayed the audience to every mood of feeling, SHE for the

first time appeared to me.

Well, I had passed my _premiére jeunesse_, and had arrived at that age

when a passion, once called into active life, becomes unappeasable. I

need not particularize the effects upon me of my first experience of

love. For weeks and months I had no desire, no ability to do anything

else than frequent the theatre. My want of acquaintance with all the

peculiar circumstances connected with actors and actresses almost

maddened me; for I knew of no method by which I might ever be able to

exchange a word with her who had become to me more than an idol to a

devotee, or the dream of fame to a poet. I sickened. To the physician

called in attendance, after much shrewd questioning on his part, I

revealed my secret. With a jocose laugh he left me, but in a half-hour

returned, accompanied by a somewhat vulgar-looking female, whom he

introduced as the mother of Evelyn Afton--the name of her for whom my

life was wasting and my soul pining.

The mother was the widow of an actor, and Evelyn her only daughter, who

had been bred for the stage, and her beauty and ability having secured

success, she had been enabled to attain all the accomplishments of

cultivated womanhood.

If anything could have disenchanted me, the manner of the mother would

certainly have had such an effect. She regarded my passion as simply a

business affair. She would present me to her daughter that day, and I

might contract an engagement, if I would make certain liberal allowances

and settlements. But a recurrence to these matters creates disgust. It

is sufficient to say, that I surpassed in my provisions all the demands

of the mother's avarice, and in a few months Evelyn and I were married.

There was on the part of my beautiful bride an inexplicable

expression,--a demeanor in which cold and haughty reserve blended

strangely with an utter carelessness, and occasional rapidly checked

electric ebullitions of passion to the lip and eye, but never reaching

words, followed by a passive yet proud languor. I was too happy to

observe or speculate. I received merely the impression, but was too much

occupied in arranging for my wedded life, too much absorbed in the

feeling of bliss, to analyze it. I believed in her love,--that was

sufficient for me. In after years I resolved the impression into its

prismatic elements, and thus it is I am able to delineate them.

Time passed. The extravagance of my first raptures gradually subsided

into a more settled but not less complete happiness. In all her

attentions to myself my wife was perfect. In society she was supremely

brilliant and fascinating; in private her demeanor preserved the

characteristics of which I have spoken. I accepted it as her natural

manner, and did not give it further thought. My son Frederick was born,

and for a short time, under the influence of maternal impulses, my wife

exhibited animation and emotions which I had not before

witnessed,--soon, however, relapsing into her previous demeanor. The

same contrasts--less strongly marked--occurred upon the birth of my

daughter.

* * * * *

Returning one evening from business, at the usual dinner hour, I

visited, before entering my residence, as was frequently my custom, the

stables, and inquired, in passing, of the coachman--a favorite negro--if

he had driven his mistress out that afternoon. He replied,--

'No, massa; Missers' brudder on here; been wid her dese two hours.'

The answer created much surprise, as I had not been informed that my

wife had any relatives. A moment's reflection, however, on some of the

peculiar connections of theatrical life, led me to believe that such a

person might be in existence, who, for some unpleasant reasons, had not

been recognized. Respecting my wife's secret, I passed on without

further inquiry; and, to avoid an interview with the visitor, ascended a

staircase into a conservatory connected with the upper apartments,

intending to remain there until he had departed. As I entered the

conservatory I was startled by the sound of voices, which proceeded from

the adjoining apartment,--my wife's _boudoir_,--and was transfixed at

beholding through the shrubbery, in the dim light of the room, my wife

sitting upon a sofa, exhibiting traces of powerful but suppressed

emotion, such as I had never seen in her, and partly kneeling, partly

reclining at her side, a young man, apparently in the most violent and

passionate entreaty.

'O, Evelyn! Evelyn!' he said, 'will you bid me leave you thus? Will

you have no pity? For years I toiled at my art, poor and desolate,

in a foreign land, sustained only by the hope of achieving

success--fame--fortune--to lay them before you;--your love gifting me

with all my ideal life--the hope of winning you the only incentive of my

labor. When I heard of your marriage, I dashed away my chisels, with an

oath never to resume them. In mad desperation, I destroyed the works of

years. But I have lived on in solitude and wretchedness, unvisited even

by the imaginations which once made life glorious. Now I have come to

claim you--to take you from him who robbed me. Such a marriage as yours

is not valid before just heaven. Renounce your contract. Fly with me to

Italy,--let the world say what it will. With you at my side I can create

works that will compel homage; knowing our own purity, we can laugh at

its scorn, and, contented with each other, despise both its friendship

and its enmity.'

'Stop, Frank!' she replied, 'and leave me. Do not prolong this agony.

What you wish is, it must be, impossible. It is not for myself that I

deny it. God knows I could brave any thing for you. But to yield your

request would only aid your ruin. No, no, Frank; you are mad!'

'If I am not, I soon shall be!' he murmured bitterly.

'I shall fulfill my contract to the letter,' she continued; 'or, rather,

that which was made for me. I consented to be the sacrifice, and I will

accept the fire and the knife resolutely. But you--you--should I link

myself to your fate, I should draw you to perdition. Even in the air of

Italy, my presence would be poison to you. I speak not of guilt. But my

connection--a perjured wife--would debar you from the companionship of

all that is noble and good and beautiful. I am but a woman--one woman.

Could I have been placed at your side, I might have assisted your

conceptions and stimulated your aspirations. But now--_now_--it can not

be. Go--seek some other. There are many worthy of your choice. You can

find them. If not, live for your art, Frank, and forget me.'

'My art!' he replied, with passionate bitterness; 'curses on it! Aye, I

can almost curse the Heaven which gifted me with "ideality." What is it,

but unsatisfied mockery of longing?--the execution always failing to

meet the promise of the conception. My art! What can the cold marble be

to me, when no longer animated by the soul with which my hope of your

presence infused it? My art! Would to God that a divine flash of genius

would impel me to wield the chisel but for one short month, and then

that I might expire by the side of my creation!'

'No, no, Frank,' she interposed; 'you will live long, become renowned,

and create not one, but many works for fame; and I shall read of your

successes and rejoice in them. More than that, I shall be present with

you always in spirit and sympathy. Think of that, Frank. Make me your

ideal still, if you will. This will be exquisite satisfaction to me. Let

me think that I am always inspiring you. Work for me, Frank.'

The young man buried his face in the sofa and sobbed passionately. My

wife bent over, and, unknown to him, unless he felt her breath, gently

kissed the curls of his hair. 'Come,' she said, 'now you must be gone.

Neither of us can endure this longer. Go--go. Do not give me a word or a

look. You would only rend my heart, without killing me.'

Presently he rose, and, with an effort at self-control, walked towards

the door, but stopped and faltered forth, 'Must this be? Is this then

our last farewell?'

She merely waved her hand, hiding her face.

The young man sprang to her side, fell upon his knees, grasped her hand,

and covered it with kisses, then rushed to the door and was gone.

My wife flung herself upon the sofa and burst forth into a flood of

tears. Never before had I beheld her weeping.

During this interview I stood like a statue. It seemed to me that I had

lived an age,--such a life as those may be supposed to have, who, as

related in Eastern tales, are transformed to stone for a century,

retaining their consciousness. A revolution had gone through its entire

progress in me. For the first time did I understand how selfish had been

my adoration of my wife,--how I had merely purchased her of her scheming

and avaricious mother,--how I had wronged her and one who loved

her,--how incompatible with her youth and brilliancy were my maturity

and unpoetic nature. Her conduct since our marriage was now fully

explained. My love for her was immeasurably increased, but I loathed

myself. I had but one thought, how reparation could best be made. I

swear before Heaven, that could it have been possible without staining

her name, I would have torn her from my heart, and given her to the one

who rightfully claimed her from me. This was impossible. Only by guilt

or vulgar disgrace could she become his. Then the question took

possession of me, 'How shall I win her love?--how shall I win her love?'

This repeated itself again and again, with a distinct and fearful

iteration, as if a demon were whispering it in my ear. A thousand mad

thoughts took possession of me, and suicide thrust itself on me. For a

few moments,--though it seemed an age of experience,--I was insane. The

blow had dispossessed my reason. Dimly, as in a drunken man, however,

still remained the ordinary instincts, and that perception, which, like

the muscles of respiration, keeps ever at work, let the mind be filled

as it may with thoughts and purposes that seem entirely to engross and

absorb it. I crept silently from the conservatory, and passing out into

the street, entered the house at the front. Dinner was soon served, as

usual, and my wife took her seat, with her customary manner. I, too, was

confident, exhibited no variation from mine. Her self-possession was

the result of control, mine of mere numbness. The machinery of life was

temporarily continuing its regular motion without any supervision.

This benumbed condition continued through a large portion of a sleepless

night. The unintermitted repetition of the query, 'How shall I win her

love?' tortured me into an agony like that experienced in a nightmare

dream. Slowly and gradually my reason began to work, and I methodically

commenced to elaborate a system by which to acquire what was now the

chief object of my life,--my wife's _love_. I arose in the morning

determined to obtain this, even should every other pursuit be

relinquished and every other desire sacrificed. My system was formed.

Life thereafter was to be devoted to it.

My first object was to create a change in her feelings toward my

rival;--not to destroy her love for him,--of the futility of such an

attempt I was aware,--but to modify the cold, desperate, and resentful

feeling of disappointment she entertained; to superimpose upon her

thwarted passion, which would continue to regard him as a hero of

romance, another condition of feeling, that should bring him before her

in a different aspect, and to rouse her listlessness by suggesting

something to be done which should be connected with him,--the only

incentive, I was assured, sufficiently powerful to stimulate her to

action. I had a patient whom I intended to treat in the most delicate

and scientific manner. I determined to appeal to her benevolence,--a

feeling which, though latent, always exists in a true woman. My

disconsolate hero of romance was to be brought down and made a mortal,

capable of receiving favors. Instead of being the object of love, he was

to become one of charity.

'My dear,' said I, one evening, with a suppressed yawn, as I was

perusing a magazine, 'I have been reading a stupid account of the

pictures and statues, and so on, in Florence. These things are very

fine, doubtless, to those who understand and appreciate them. My early

education in aesthetics was neglected; or rather the hard necessities of

my youth allowed me no opportunity to cultivate them. But it is a good

thing to encourage art, and I have been thinking it might be well for us

to have some paintings and statuary. If I attempt to select them I shall

be tricked and bamboozled into purchasing mere daubs and botches. Would

it not be well to engage some person of judgment--perhaps an artist--to

go to Italy and make an investment for us? I know none such, but you

have been more associated with artists, and if you can secure one, I

will give him _carte blanche_. Will you please make some inquiries?'

I had kept my eyes on the magazine, but felt that she was looking at me

with scrutinizing glances. Had she suspected my knowledge of her love,

she would probably--with some of that passion of which I had been a

secret witness--have declared the whole matter, and then, with scornful

upbraidings of my hypocrisy, perhaps have left me forever. I was careful

to avoid any such premature explosion, and with another yawn continued

carelessly turning the leaves of the magazine. Reassured, she replied

that she would undertake the business. With a hasty glance, through

apparently sleepy eyes, I saw that I had roused her,--that she was

already intent on planning occupation for Frank, and laying out for him

a course of success and honor, through the stimulus which would be

imparted by the execution of a commission of her bestowal. Another

feeling I was delighted to see exhibited. She felt that she was now

about to render him some equivalent for his disappointment. Already was

he become to her less Frank the lover than Frank the artist, whose

fortunes she was to assist. I will make you yet his lady-patroness,

thought I. I foresaw that some of my rival's productions would grace my

apartments, in a year or two. But, better his imagination than his

heart, said I to myself,--better the works of his chisel, which I and

all the throng of the public can eulogize, than the secret, doating

passion confined to the intense idolatry of one breast.

After a few premonitory nods I retired.

I did not trouble myself about the manner in which the commission was

conveyed to Frank. Thither, however, it went, as I learned in after

time.

I well understood that to attempt rivaling Frank in matters cognate with

his own department of talent, would render me only as ridiculous as an

old beau who seeks to gain favor with the girls by imitating with his

rouge, hair dyes, and laced waistcoats, the freshness and symmetry of

youth. But I must endeavor to establish some common ground on which I

and the magnificent creature at my side could meet and hold converse. I

must find it in literature. In a garret over my store I had a safe and

some papers conveyed, ostensibly for attention to private business. I

kept my room securely locked. Thither, from time to time, I secretly

carried a library of English classics, and all works of the day which

received public intention. I revived all my early recollections of

literature, and made myself acquainted with the lighter contemporaneous

works, which are the most prolific topics of conversation in society.

Under pretense of business I devoted every moment I could to my solitary

chamber. Never did college student, cramming himself for examination,

labor more intently than I. I stored my mind not only with words, but

ideas. I committed to memory innumerable fine passages. Personally, I

was well repaid for my toil. Literature is always solacing, elevating,

and ennobling. The Bedouin of the desert is less of a robber and

murderer while singing the songs of his national poets.

My acquisitions, however, were carefully hidden. They were for future

use. At present I continued to talk nothing that was beyond the scope of

the newspapers.

Thus some months passed. It was near the close of summer, and the

gorgeous autumnal season was at hand. I designed to attempt something

which would create a change in my wife's nature,--her acquired nature,

to substitute some healthful exuberance for the weary listlessness which

had become habitual to her. The physical is the foundation of all other

departments of humanity. With a physical system of glowing health,

mental or emotional or moral disease is impossible; and the converse is

true, that when these exist, the physical system must deteriorate. I

must then give a filip to my wife's physical vigor,--dissipate her

desperateness and her love in the same manner in which a good game of

billiards drives from a man the blues. I must remove all her morbidness.

Where could I go but to the great mother Nature? If physical enjoyment,

in connection with an appreciative view of the beauties and glories

everywhere spread before humanity, on the mountains, the plains, the

valleys, and the oceans, does not revive and restore, the case is

hopeless. My wife was an excellent equestrian. Her theatrical experience

had familiarized her with firearms. She had a cultivated taste for

scenery, and some degree of skill in delineating it. Far off, then, into

the prairies and the western mountains, into scenes away from the beaten

track, where everything should be as dissimilar as possible from all

previous life, I determined to lead her.

My arrangements were quickly and quietly made,--my equipments secretly

completed. On pretense of visiting business acquaintances, I requested

my wife to accompany me on a journey to St. Louis. With her usual

passiveness, she consented. In a few days we were on our way. After our

arrival, we made trips into the interior. Gradually, I diverged from

civilization. Professing to find an unexpected charm in the novelty of

this, I led the way still onward. We traveled on horseback,--often amid

solitudes. I first astonished my wife by occasionally displaying on the

game my precision with the rifle. (I had spent scores of hours at a

shooting gallery in St. Louis.) I persuaded her to try a few shots. (I

had provided a beautiful light rifle for her use.) Ambition to shoot

well soon possessed her. By degrees, our open-air life gave her blood a

bound which no secret grief could counteract. The excitement of the

chase on our fleet horses, the incidents of our hunting adventures, and

the novelty of our associations, created a glow of spirit which burst

forth in unrestrained conversation, mirth, and song. Now, then, I began

to display my literary acquisitions. During the long evenings in our

tent, or the wigwam of an Indian, or the log cabin of a backwoods

settler, we alternated in reading aloud from an excellent collection of

books I had prepared. Reading introduced topics of conversation, in

which I employed all that I had in memory, and all that had been created

in myself by the electric collision of great authors. Never did a

professional wit more ingeniously produce as sudden coruscations the

_bon mots_ tediously studied; never did a philosophical

conversationalist use to more advantage the wisdom conned over in the

closet. I talked eloquently, profoundly. I rattled forth witticisms and

poetical quotations. I amazed her. The man whom she thought incapable of

any ideas beyond his ledger, and the stock market, and the cotton

warehouse, was revealed as a person of taste and reading. Instead of

appearing to her merely an indifferent person, to whom her fate had been

chained, and whom she regarded in somewhat the same manner as Prometheus

did his rock, I had become a pleasant companion,--a being of more

vitality than she had perhaps ever met.

Still, I had not excited the emotion of love. I did not expect it at

this stage of the treatment, but I observed its absence with a pang.

For woman's love is not a slowly extorted tribute to excellence, but a

spontaneous bestowal. Unlike evil spirits, which, according to popular

superstition, need urging over the threshold before they can enter and

possess the hearthstone. Love leaps in unsolicited at any unguarded

aperture, and becomes master of the household.

Only genius could command her homage, and to this I could make no

pretension.

Love is oftener a response to appreciation, than a concession granted

upon a rational estimate of him who seeks it. She did not yet know that

I appreciated her. The time for her to learn it had not come.

The casket of a woman's heart is oftener forced than opened with a key.

Love had once entered my wife's soul, and, after accomplishing his

mischief, left demons in possession. I could not exorcise--only charm

them. For the present,--perhaps for years,--I must be content with this.

In the distant future, which had a dim horizon of hope, I expected to

make some final stroke by which to expel them. What it should be, I

could scarcely anticipate. Necessarily, I foresaw, it must be like the

highwayman's challenge, 'Money or life.' After becoming endurable to

her, in fact, inveigling her into unforeseen familiarity, I must

suddenly throw off the mask, and demand the love for which I had waited

and plotted. Either she would surrender, or there would be a tragedy.

The denouement came in a way of which I had no prescience. You will

learn it in the due course of my narrative.

But she charmed me, fearfully, when she appeared, after a morning's

chase, resplendent in the fullness of her healthful beauty, beaming with

excitement, her superb figure undulating gracefully to the restive

movements of her horse. I could have prostrated myself before her, in a

wild worship of her beauty. She had that quality which is so rare in

woman, but so admirable where it exists,--entire fearlessness; for it is

a most absurd mistake to suppose that masculine _virtues_ can not

co-exist in woman with the most lovable, feminine delicacy. Partly her

unblenching courage was the product of a strong will in a splendid

physical organization; partly, alas! it arose from a disregard of life,

which she felt was worthless.

One morning, as we turned our faces homeward, our Indian escort and

baggage having preceded us, we were riding quietly along, with no

intention of hunting, but accidentally coming on a few buffaloes

separated from their herd, the temptation to attack them was too strong

to be resisted. We both urged our horses in pursuit, and, overtaking

them, fired simultaneously at different animals. My wife's quarry--a

stout bull--continued his flight, not being fatally wounded. Suddenly,

some of our Indians who had heard the shot, and started to return, came

into view over the brow of a hill, and the buffalo, thinking himself

surrounded, turned and rushed at my wife. She avoided the onset by a

quick whirl of her horse. The buffalo gathered himself and returned to

the charge with a roar of rage. Not having reloaded my rifle, I spurred

forward, and leaped my steed full upon his massy form. We all fell

together, and when, after several seconds, I extricated myself, my wife

was standing on the buffalo's neck to prevent him from rising. I plunged

my knife into his chest, but in the mad struggle of death he partially

rose, throwing her to the ground, while one of his horns entered her

side. Never before, since I commenced my system, had I lost my studied

calmness. But the sight of her blood, dyeing her garments and the grass,

made me frantic. I tore away her vestments from the wound, pressed my

lips in an agony to the gash, and then, hastily stanching the blood,

bore her, nearly senseless as she was, in an embrace, the thrilling

energy of which can not be told, to a rivulet in the vicinity. Happily

the wound was but a lesion of the flesh, for which my surgery was

sufficient, and by the aid of stimulants she revived, subsequently

recovering without injury.

Since my fatal discovery in the conservatory, I had not before touched

her person, except for such courtesies as any gentleman may render a

lady of his acquaintance. Now, with my arms clasping her, my veins

throbbed as in a delirium. The tender light of her eyes, as she revived,

resulting partially from weakness and partially from a natural

thankfulness, moved me to the very point of prematurely throwing myself

at her feet and disclosing all. By a great throe I controlled myself. As

she resumed her natural condition, I fell back into that most ordinary

and common-place character,--a self-satisfied husband,--qualified

somewhat by sympathy and attention, of course, but without the least

infusion of sentiment.

Oh, if she had known of the volcano under this exterior! If she had

known how, at that moment, I could have exclaimed, 'Give me your love,

or here let us die!'

* * * * *

So, after various desultory wanderings, we returned home. Home! how I

dreaded it, for I knew the power of association--the effect of

localities and customary external habits on the feelings. You may take a

careworn, dyspeptic, melancholy man out for a week's excursion, and he

will show himself preëminent in all good fellowship. But as the familiar

sights gradually open on him at returning, you may see the shadows

flitting down upon his brow and entering his soul. How many good

resolutions of change and reform--of breaking old associations and

forming new ones--we make when absent from our usual haunts! How

impossible it becomes to realize them when we re-occupy the familiar

places!

* * * * *

But so it was, we reached home. All my anticipations were realized. The

old spirit, the old manner, were revived in my wife. At this time an

installment of pictures and statues from Italy came to hand. I welcomed

them as angels of mercy. When I announced the arrival to my wife, a

flush struggled to her cheek, and a radiance to her eye. 'Ha! you

think,' said I in my communings, 'that Frank is to be present with you

in his works, and that through them you may be in his presence. So you

shall, but they shall become only an annoyance and a weariness,--for

themselves and for him.'

The statues and pictures were brought to the house and unpacked. My wife

was almost tremulous with eagerness to behold them. I had taken care,

however, to have a number of acquaintances present,--some of genuine

artistic taste, some of only pretensions, and others utterly ignorant.

As the various works were displayed, my artistic friends, as in courtesy

bound, and as their merit really deserved, duly eulogized them, and the

praises were echoed by the rest. Finally we came to a box which

contained a label marked 'The statue of Hope Downcast.' 'Aha! master

Frank,' thought I, 'so I have you at last.' I could see my wife

quivering with the contest of feeling,--between her annoyance at the

presence of visitors, and the necessity of controlling herself and

uniting in their commendations.

'Hope Downcast' was raised to the perpendicular, and proved to be a

beautiful life-size statue, representing a female figure standing on a

rock, in a most dejected attitude, one foot unsandaled, her raiment

torn, her hair loose, the fillet which confined it lying parted at her

feet, the star upon the fillet deprived of some of its points, and the

ordinary emblem of Hope, the anchor, broken at her side. The

applicability of the conception to the history of Frank and my wife, I

readily understood. My guests broke out into raptures, in which I

joined, and, by continual appeals to my wife, constrained her to do the

same. I also took the opportunity of inquiring the name of the artist,

and requested my wife to express to him the entire satisfaction he had

given in the execution of his commission.

The ordeal closed, but was renewed and repeated day after day, till all

the poetry and romance connected with our artistic acquisitions was

thoroughly destroyed in my wife's mind. They became, as I could easily

observe, positively odious to her, and, doubtless, could she have obeyed

the promptings of her feelings, she would have trampled on them, and

cast them into the street.

But in this disappointment she became so forlorn, so passively

desperate, that my heart almost burst at beholding her.

Since my discovery in the conservatory I had often used it for watching

my wife,--not of course with any miserable design of playing the spy

upon, her,--but to observe her various moods, in order to adapt, my own

conduct and the progress of my system to them. One night, after we had

entertained a party of visitors, whom I had made instruments of torture

to my wife by their common-place eulogies of Frank's contributions, I

ascended my perch in the conservatory. She was sitting in her apartment,

her hands, listlessly clasped, resting on her knees, her form bowed with

the most profound dejection, coupled with that indescribable aspect of

cold, desperate defiance which I have previously noticed, exhibited in

her countenance and position. 'Oh! Frank, Frank!' she seemed to say,

'would that I had forsaken all and fled to Italy with you. There, the

creations of your taste and genius would have afforded a solace. Here

they are but torments.'

'You shall go to Italy, Evelyn, and have your fill of Frank's society,'

said I in my imaginary comment. 'But not yet; the time has not yet

come.'

Having permitted her to learn the disappointment derived from the works

of art associated with Frank's memory, I now brought into action a

scheme for teaching her the pleasure which I could afford. Before our

hunting expedition I had purchased a spacious and beautiful mansion, and

engaged upholsterers from New York to decorate it, during our absence,

in the most elegant style their taste could design. A large apartment

had been constructed by my order for the purpose of a private theatre.

I informed Evelyn of my plan, and conveyed her to our destined

residence. She was not at first much moved, but after we had entered on

possession, and she was thoroughly engaged in selecting an amateur

company from our acquaintances and arranging for our forthcoming

exhibitions, the old enthusiasm of her former profession revived, and

she appeared for the time transported back to the auspicious hours of

her young triumphs. 'The School for Scandal' was chosen for our first

performance--I of course taking the part of Sir Peter, and she that of

Lady Teazle. I did not allow my feelings once to transcend the part,

and in the conclusion looked completely the happy, good-natured,

self-satisfied, old husband. Heaven! had her protestations, where the

reconciliation occurred, been genuine, and not mere dramatic fiction!

The thought almost overpowered me. I could see the young bucks of the

city chuckling over my position, and evidently wishing they were in the

place of _that old fool_!

* * * * *

I need not relate the innumerable stratagems I devised to employ the

attention and heart of my wife in pleasures emanating from myself. I was

continually careful, however, to exhibit no sign of tender appreciation,

but allowed her to regard them as the mere ordinary gratification of my

own whims and wishes. I had now been for about a year disconnected with

my business. I had encouraged Evelyn in every species of extravagance,

and expended money lavishly in all methods. I was conscious of living

far beyond the ability of even my ample means, but there could not be an

hesitation or halting. The city looked on me with wonder; some spoke of

me as one whom fortune had crazed; others pitied me as the victim of an

extravagant wife. My New York partners expostulated with me, and, when

my theatrical exhibition reached their ears, hinted at a dissolution.

But I was deaf to rumor and reproof.

* * * * *

The person who took the part of Joseph Surface, in our representation of

'The School for Scandal,' was an unmarried gentleman of high standing,

socially and politically, of middle age, fine presence, and superior

abilities. Under polished manners and captivating conversational powers,

were concealed persistent passions and a conscience of marble. Before

even Evelyn suspected it, I was aware that he had resolved on subduing

her to his own designs, for I seemed in all things relating to her to be

gifted with preternatural intuitions.

Our next representation was to be 'The Fatal Marriage,' in which the

person alluded to--whose name was Sefton--was to take the character of

the wooer.

The necessary consultations concerning the production of the piece

brought him frequently to my house, and both the excuse and the

opportunities it gave were diligently improved.

I had a premonition one evening that his intentions toward Evelyn were

then to take some decisive expression. I left my solitary study, of

which I have before spoken, and, going home, entered the house softly,

and directed my steps towards our theatrical apartment. My confidence in

Evelyn was unbounded, but I wished to witness the apprehended collision.

Stealing behind the scenery, I saw Evelyn sitting on the stage, with

cold and erect pride,--which was yet free from affectation,--and Sefton

standing before her, having evidently just concluded speaking.

'So, sir,' she said, 'I have heard you without interruption. But the

character you rehearse is inappropriate. You forget that we are now

concerned with a piece representing the tribulations of a faithful wife,

and not a comedy of the school of Charles the Second. I see that you are

sincere; but sincerity renders a bad passion the more hateful. Now leave

me. For your own contentment crush it. If this is impossible, conceal

it. Should you ever again intimate it by even a glance, I will expel you

from my society as I would a viper.'

'Madam,' he gasped forth in suppressed rage, 'I understand you. You

shall also understand me, if you now do not. I will reduce your haughty

pride. Of this be assured. You play well the _rôle_ of the faithful

wife, but I will not do you the injustice of supposing that it is

through any regard for him on whose behalf you assume it.'

He would have said more, but Evelyn sprang up, her eyes flashing, and,

seizing a dagger which lay on a table among other 'properties,'

exclaimed,--

'Begone, sir, or you shall find me an actress who can perform a terrible

reality.'

She advanced toward him, and he turned away, passing out slowly, cowed,

but not vanquished. I could see that he was determined to become her

master, though it cost him all that he had invested in ambition, honor,

and life.

She flung down the dagger, paused till he was out of the house, and then

went to her rooms. I emerged from my hiding-place, laughing and sobbing

hysterically,--rejoicing over my glorious Evelyn, and bewailing that she

was not in truth mine.

A few weeks after this scene, I found on several occasions, when

returning home late, that Evelyn was out. I never interfered with her

freedom, nor questioned her in regard to any of her proceedings; but,

nevertheless, in all cases, as there was no concealment concerning them,

I was, by the ordinary channels of social and domestic intercourse,

acquainted with them. With regard to the absences alluded to, however, I

was at fault. They were not attributable to any of the engagements of

society. It became, of course, requisite, as part of my system, to

investigate the mystery. So, on a certain evening, after going out

apparently as usual, I watched the house, and, shortly after dusk, saw

her emerge, clad in plain habiliments, and followed her at a distance

through several secluded streets. She stopped at a very ordinary

tenement in a remote quarter of the city, and remained till a late hour,

when she returned home.

I resolved quietly to take observations, and ascertain the motive for

her visit. My intentions were precluded the next morning by the entrance

into my place of business of Mr. Sefton, who, after many complimentary

and cordial expressions, requested a private conference; which being

granted, he said,--

'My dear Mr. Bell, I wish to speak to you concerning a very delicate and

painful matter. I am conscious of involving myself in an affair, which

may, perhaps, have unpleasant consequences for me, but my friendship and

esteem for you will not permit me to remain quiet concerning a matter

which is injurious to your honor.'

He then proceeded to inform me that a certain actor, named Foster, who

once had a high reputation, but had become degraded through

dissoluteness, recently came to him, apparently in abject poverty and

dangerous illness, begging assistance and shelter; that he had placed

Foster in a tenement, which he described (the same that I had seen my

wife enter), and supplied his wants, but had reason to suppose that

Foster was imposing on his charity, having learned from others that, so

far from being ill, he was sufficiently able to enjoy his appetites and

licentious desires. 'On going,' said Mr. Sefton, 'to reprimand and expel

him, he confessed to me that he had taken this method of covering an

intrigue with a lady, and assured me he intended to repay all I had

advanced him. I became, also,' continued Mr. Sefton, 'a witness of an

interview with the lady, as she entered while I was there, and Foster,

in the haste of the occasion, was obliged to conceal me in an adjoining

room. The lady, I was astonished to perceive, was Mrs. Bell. I then

recollected that Foster was formerly intimate with her, and that they

performed on the stage together. I have deemed it my duty to relate this

astounding development to you.'

I received Mr. Sefton's announcement in all seriousness, and thanked

him. What would he have me do? He replied that my own judgment must

dictate, but that he supposed it would be best for all parties to remove

quietly to another State and apply for a divorce. I promised to consider

the matter, and after many mutual compliments he departed.

'What does this mean?' I mused. 'The supposition of an intrigue is

preposterous. Probably Foster has merely deceived Evelyn as he did

Sefton, in order to obtain her bounty. But why make her visits so

secret? That is easily explained;--she does not wish to be connected

publicly with any unhappy sequences of her former histrionic career. I

will have an interview with Foster before proceeding further.'

I visited him that night, pushing into the house immediately after the

black female servant who opened the door, lest I should be refused

admittance. I found Foster in a half-intoxicated condition, seated

comfortably at a table, with a pipe in his hand, and liquor before him.

'I am Mr. Bell,' said I, 'and had learned from my wife of your destitute

condition, which I came to relieve. But you appear in excellent

circumstances.'

Through his intoxication there was an evidence of confusion, as he

stammered out,--

'Yes, sir; much obliged to you. Take a seat--a seat. Good spell now.

Doctor prescribes a little comfort, you know, old boy!'

'A very kind doctor, I should judge, Mr. Foster, and I am glad to find

you in such a good condition. Suppose I take a glass with you?'

'Certainly. Very happy--happy. Your health, sir.'

'I hope, sir,' I said, 'that you will soon recover, after the attentions

of my wife and Mr. Sefton.'

'Sefton!' he exclaimed. 'Rascal! D--d rascal! sir.' He continued

murmuring in his throat, 'Rascal! D--d rascal!'

'I'll take another glass,' said I. 'The liquor is very good--very good,

sir. Who furnishes it?'

'Liquor! Yes--very good! Sefton--yes, Sefton sent it. Rascal! D--d

rascal!' (in a murmur, as before.)

'Now, Foster,' said I, 'I am rich. There is a purse,--and pretty well

filled. I will give it to you, and others like it, if you will tell me

why Sefton is a rascal, and how you happen to be connected with him.'

His eyes glistened with greediness, as I anticipated. He grasped the

purse and thrust it into his pocket, then immediately pulled it out,

tossed it on the table, leaned his head down on his arms and began to

sob, all in the most maudlin manner.

TO BE CONTINUED.

A SONG OF FREEDOM.

Not now, my tongue, to legends old,

Or tender lays of sunny clime;

A sterner tale must now be told,

Deep thoughts must burn in warlike rhyme;

For Freedom, with a mighty throe,

Rouses from sleep to active life,

And loud her clarion trumpets blow,

To summon _men_ to join the strife.

The seed, which long ago was sown

By free New England's rock-bound rills,

At length, in noble vigor grown,

Casts branches o'er the Southern hills.

Far o'er the prairies of the West

Rings Freedom's thrilling battle-cry,

Re-echoed where each mountain crest

Lifts Maine's dark forests to the sky.

Go forth, ye warriors for the right!

Lift high the banner of the free!

Shine far into Oppression's night,

Bright oriflamme of Liberty!

For, God be praised, the lowering cloud

So long impending overhead,

Which nations thought our funeral shroud,

Shall prove our victory-robe instead.

O maiden, who with tender smile,

O wife, who with enslaving kiss,

Some dearly loved one would beguile

From duty in a field like this;

Conjure before thy tearful sight

The glories future years shall know,

Unclasp thine arms--in Freedom's fight,

Bid him be valiant,--bid him, 'go.'

Be with him both in camp, in field,

With tender thought and earnest prayer;

Think, those who Freedom's weapons wield,

God makes his own peculiar care.

And if he fall,--as chance he may,--

Rejoice the glorious boon is thine,

To lay thy heart-flowers of a day

On Freedom's grand, eternal shrine!

O warrior, nerve thy courage well!

For fierce and stern the strife will be,--

Oppression, Wrong, the powers of hell,

War against Right and Liberty.

Fight, for the victory must be thine;

No nobler strife the world has known

Since first the Saviour, all divine,

Brought life to man from God's high throne.

And ye, who sit in seats of power,

The instruments of God's high will,

Be ye not wanting in this hour

So big with future good or ill.

Fail not, for Freedom's car rolls on

Resistless in its glorious way;

Some shall to honor be upborne,

They who oppose be crushed to clay.

Hark! from the sunny Southern plains

There comes a sound still swelling on,

The clanking of a million chains,

The cry, the groan, the lash, the moan.

That sound for years has gone on high;

The hour of judgment comes apace,

The day of right and liberty,

Of freedom for the human race.

Speed, speed the day, O righteous God,

To break the fetters, dry the tears,

To raise the slave, so long downtrod,

Through the dark age of by-gone years!

Give but to us the sword of power,

To work thy ends, in thine own way,

To see the promise of the hour

Of this the world's most glorious day.

ACROSS THE CONTINENT.

In the tense, absorbing excitement of our life-and-death-struggle for

national existence, events which in calmer times would quicken every

pulse, and arrest universal attention, pass all but unnoticed; as

historians record that during the battle between Hannibal and the Romans

by the Lake Thrasymene, the earth was shaken and upheaved by a great

natural convulsion, without attracting the observation of the fierce,

eager combatants; or, as Byron tersely phrases it,

'An earthquake rolled unheededly away,'

being regarded, if regarded at all, as one of the incidents of the

tremendous collision of Europe with Africa.

When, early in March, 1844, John C. Fremont, with thirty or forty

followers, astonished Captain Sutter by dropping down from the Sierra

Nevada upon his _ranche_ on the Sacramento, the old Switzer could not

have been more completely dumbfounded had he been told that his visitors

had just descended from the clouds, than he was by the truthful

assurance that they were an exploring party, who had left the United

States only ten months before, and had since made their way across the

continent. To pass the Sierra in winter had hitherto been deemed an

impossibility, and, indeed, the condition of Fremont's surviving beasts

of burden--thirty-three out of the sixty-seven with which he

started--proved the presumption not far out of the way. To traverse the

continent at all, even in summer, on a line stretching due west from the

Hudson, the Delaware, or the Potomac, to the Pacific Ocean, was an

unattempted feat, whereof the hardships, the dangers, were certain, and

the success exceedingly doubtful. A very few parties of daring

adventurers had, during several of the six or eight preceding summers,

pushed up the Platte from the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains, followed

the Sweetwater from the point where the North Platte emerges from the

heart of those mountains, running to the northward, and having thus

passed through the great central chain of North America (for the

Sweetwater heads on the west side of the mountain range, and the South

Pass, through which it seeks the Platte, is a broad elevated gap,

wherein the face of the country is but moderately rolling, and the trail

better than almost any where else), turned abruptly to the north-west,

crossed the Green River source of the Colorado, which leads a hundred

miles farther north, and soon struck across a mountainous water-shed to

the Lewis or Snake branch of the Columbia, which they followed down to

the great river of the west, and thus reached the coveted shore of the

Pacific,--that Oregon which they had chosen as their future home, mainly

because it was, of all possible Eldorados, the farthest and the least

accessible. Trappers, hunters, and Indian traders, few in numbers, and

generally men of desperate fortunes, who realized that

'The world was not their friend, nor the world's law,'

had, for several decades, penetrated every glen of the Rocky Mountains,

and traced every affluent of the great river in quest of their

respective prey; but the wild, desolate region watered by the Colorado,

the Humboldt, or the streams that are lost in the Great Salt Lake, or

some smaller absorbent of the scanty waters of the Great Basin, had

never proved attractive to our borderers, and for excellent reasons. It

is, as a whole, so arid, so sterile (though its valleys do not lack

fertility wherever their latent capacities can be developed by

irrigation), and its game is so scanty and worthless, that old Bridger

(pioneer of settlers at the military post in northern Utah, now known as

Fort Bridger) was probably the only American who had made his home in

the Great Basin when Fremont's exploring party first pitched their tents

by the border of Great Salt Lake, in September, 1843.

The discovery of gold in California, in the summer of 1847, closely

following the military occupation and conquest of that country by the

United States, wrought a great and sudden revolution. Of the few

Americans in that region prior to 1846, probably nine tenths had rounded

Cape Horn to reach it, while the residue had made their way across

Mexico or the Isthmus of Darien. It was 'a far coy' at best, and very

tedious as well as difficult of attainment. We have in mind an American

of decided energy, who, starting from Illinois in May or June, 1840,

with a party of adventurers, mainly mounted, reached the mouth of the

Columbia, overland, in December, and California, by water, in the course

of the winter; and who, starting again for California, via Panama, in

the summer of 1847, was nine months in reaching his destination. But the

tidings that the shining dross was being and to be picked up by the

handful on the tributaries of the Sacramento wrought like magic. Early

in 1849, steam-ships were dispatched from New York for Chagres, at the

mouth of the river of like name on the Isthmus of Darien, whence crowds

of eager gold-seekers made their way across, as they best might, to

Panama, being taken in small, worthless boats up the river, so far as

its navigation was practicable,--say sixty miles,--and thence, mounted

on donkeys or mules, for the residue of the distance, which was perhaps

half as far. Short as this portage was, it soon came to be regarded with

a terror by no means unjustified. The ascent of the rapid, shallow,

tortuous stream was at once difficult and dangerous; the boats were of

the rudest construction; the boatmen little better than savages; rains

fell incessantly for a good part of each year; the warm, moist, relaxing

climate bred fevers in the blood of a considerable percentage of those

so suddenly and so utterly exposed to its malarious influences; while

the road from Cruces, at the head of navigation, being but a rugged

bridle-path at best, was soon worn by incessant travel into the most

detestable compound of rock and mire that ever aggravated the miseries

of human life. Arrived at quaint, dull old Panama, the early adventurers

long awaited with fierce impatience the steamers which were to have

anticipated their coming, and been ready to speed them on their way; and

many were goaded into taking passage on sailing vessels, which were

months in beating up to the Golden Gate against the gentle but

persistent breezes from the west and north-west which mainly prevail on

that coast. Rarely has human endurance been put to severer tests than in

the earlier years of gold-seeking travel by the Isthmus route to

California.

The Panama Railroad--commenced in 1850, and finished in 1855, at a total

cost of $7,500,000, for a length of forty-seven and a half miles--very

considerably reduced the expense, whether in time or money, of the

Isthmus transit, diminishing its miseries and perils in still greater

proportion. It is one of the noblest achievements, whereof our

countrymen are fairly entitled to the full credit. A ship-canal or

railroad across the Isthmus had been proposed, and commended, and

surveyed for and estimated upon, by French, South American, and other

officials and engineers; but the execution of the work was left to our

countrymen, and not in vain. Contractor after contractor abandoned the

undertaking in despair; hundreds, if not thousands, of laborers--Irish,

Chinese, and others--were sacrificed to the deadly miasma of the swamps

and tropical jungle which thickly stud the route. But the work was at

last completed, and the railroad has now been some six years in constant

operation, reducing the average length of the actual transit from a week

to two hours, and its expense and peril to an inappreciable quantity. It

is a cheering fact that the capitalists who invested their faith and

their means in this beneficent enterprise have already had returned to

them in dividends the full amount of their outlay, and are now receiving

twenty per cent. per annum. Their road has shortened the average Isthmus

passage to and from California by at least a full week, and immensely

diminished the danger of loss by robbery, accident, or exposure, beside

building up a large trade which but for it would have had no existence.

Yet the Isthmus route to California is only by comparison acceptable,

even for passengers and goods, while for mails it was at best but

endurable. It is nearly twice the length of the direct route from the

Atlantic seaboard, while for the residents of the Evart Valley it is

intolerably circuitous. A letter mailed at St. Paul for Astoria or

Oregon City, or at Omaha for Sacramento, must, under the regimen of the

last ten years, be conveyed overland to New York, or by steamboat to New

Orleans, where it might have to wait ten or twelve days for an Isthmus

steam-ship, making a circuit of twice to thrice the distance by a direct

route to its destination. There has been, indeed, for some four years

past, a tri-weekly overland mail from St. Louis via New Mexico and

Arizona to San Diego, in the extreme south of California,--a route

nearly a thousand miles longer than it need or should have been, and

evincing a perverse ingenuity in the avoidance not only of Salt Lake and

Carson Valley, but even of Santa Fe. This long and mischievous

detour--one of the latest of our wholesale sacrifices to Southern

jealousy and greed--has at length been definitely abandoned, and,

instead of a tri-weekly mail via Elposo and the Gila, together with a

weekly by Salt Lake, and a fortnightly or tri-monthly by the Isthmus, we

have now one daily mail on the direct overland route from the Missouri,

at St. Joseph or Omaha, via the Platte, North Platte, Sweetwater, South

Pass, Fort Bridger, Salt Lake, Simpson's route, Carson Valley, and

thence across the Sierra Nevada to Placerville and San Francisco, in

shorter time than was usually made by way of the Isthmus, at less cost

than that of the three mails which it replaces, while the immense

advantage of a daily mail each way, over a tri-monthly or even weekly,

needs no elucidation. The territories of Colorado, Utah, Nevada, are

thus brought into intimate and constant communication with the loyal

States, and made to feel the mighty pulsations of the National heart, in

this heroic and eventful crisis of the Republic's history.

But this not all, nor the best. The old Congress, among its many wise

and beneficent measures, enacted that the government should aid whatever

company would for the lowest annual stipend establish and maintain a

line of Electric Telegraph from Missouri or Iowa to California. A

contract was accordingly made with the Western Union Telegraph Company,

under which active operations were commenced last spring, under surveys

previously made. The grand train of four hundred men, one hundred great

prairie wagons, and six or eight hundred mules or oxen,--a portion of

the cattle for the subsistence of the party,--started westward from

Omaha, Nebraska, in June last, and on the 4th of July commenced pushing

on the construction at the point which it had already reached, some two

or three hundred miles further west in the valley of the Platte. It may

give to some an idea of the destitution of timber on the great American

Desert, to know that the greatest distance over which poles had to be

drawn for the elevation of the wires of this telegraph was _only_ 240

miles! Fresh teams were from time to time dispatched on the track of the

working carts with additional supplies, and the line was pushed through

to Salt Lake City by the 18th of October. Six days afterward, that point

was reached by a like party, working eastward from Carson Valley, on

behalf of the United Telegraph Companies of California, and the young

Hercules by the Pacific vied with the infantile but vigorous territories

this side of her in flashing to Washington and New York assurances of

their invincible devotion to the indivisible American Union. So great

and difficult an enterprise was probably never before so expeditiously

and happily achieved in the experience of mankind.

The distance--some 1,500 miles--over which a working line of electric

telegraph has thus been constructed and put in operation in the course

of a single season is one of the minor obstacles surmounted. The want of

timber is far more serious. From the sink of Carson River, less than one

hundred miles this side of the Sierra, to the point at which the

construction of the line was commenced on the Platte as aforesaid, there

is no place at which a tree can fall across the fragile wires; there is

probably less timber in sight on that whole sixteen hundred miles than

is to-day standing in some single county of New York, Pennsylvania, or

Ohio. From the forks of the Platte to the valley of the Sacramento,

there is not a stick of growing timber that would make a decent

axe-helve, much less a substantial axletree. The Sierra Nevada are

heavily though not densely wooded nearly to their summits, but mainly

with stately evergreens, including a brittle and worthless live oak; but

the tough, enduring hickory, the lithe and springy white ash, the

ironwood, beech, and sugar maple, are nowhere to be seen. A low, scrubby

cedar and a small, scraggy white pine thinly cover a portion of the

hills and low mountains of Utah; the former is shorter than it should be

for telegraph poles, but stanch and durable, and is made to do. The

detestable cotton-wood, most worthless of trees, yet a great deal better

than none, thinly skirts the banks of the Platte and its affluents, in

patches that grow more and more scarce as you travel westward, until you

only see them 'afar off' on the sides of some of the mountains that

enclose the South Pass. The Colorado has a still scantier allowance of

this miserable wood; but the cedars meet you as you ascend from its

valley to the hills that surround Fort Bridger. Where cotton-wood is

used for poles,--and there are hundreds of miles where no other tree is

found,--it will have to be replaced very frequently; for it decays

rapidly, and has a fancy for twisting itself into all manner of ungainly

shapes when cut and exposed to the sun and parching winds of the plains.

Water, next to wood, is the great want of the plains and of the Great

Basin. Travel along either base of the Rocky Mountains, and you are

constantly meeting joyous, bounding streams, flowing rapidly forth from

each ravine and coursing to the arid plain; but follow them a few miles

and they begin to diminish in volume, and, unless intercepted by a

copious river, often dwindle to nothing. The Republican fork of the

Kansas or Kaw River, after a course of some thirty to fifty miles, sinks

suddenly into its bed, which thence for twenty miles exhibits nothing

but a waste of yellow sand. Of course there are seasons when this bed is

covered with water throughout; but I describe what I saw early in June,

when a teamster dug eight feet into that sand without finding a drop of

the coveted liquid for his thirst-maddened oxen. Two months later, I

observed the dry bed stretched several miles farther up and down what in

winter is the river. Passing over to Big Sandy, the most northerly

tributary of the Arkansas, I found dry sand (often incrusted with some

white alkaline deposit) the rule; water the rare exception throughout

the twenty or thirty miles of its course nearest its source. At Denver,

on the 6th of June, Cherry Creek contributed to the South Platte a

volume amply sufficient to run an ordinary grist-mill; ten days

afterwards its bed was dry as a doctrinal sermon. My first encampment on

the North Platte above Laramie was by a sparkling, dancing stream a yard

wide, which could hardly have been forced through a nine-inch ring; but

though its current was rapid and the Platte but three miles off, the

thirsty earth and air drank up every drop by the way. Big Sandy, Little

Sandy and _Dry_ Sandy are the three tributaries to be crossed between

South Pass and the Colorado, and the latter justifies its name through

the better part of each year. Golden River runs through too deep a

narrow valley and bears too strong a current from the snowy peaks in

which it heads to be thus dried up; so with Bear, Welso, and the

Timpanagos or Jordan, the principal affluents of Salt Lake, which tumble

and roar between lofty peaks the greater part of their respective

courses; but when you have crossed the Jordan, moving California-ward,

you will not find another decent mill-stream for the five hundred miles

that you traverse on your direct (Simpson's) route to the sink of the

Carson. At intervals which seem very long, you find a spring, a scanty

but welcome stream rushing down between two mountains, to be speedily

drunk up by the thirsty plain and valley at their base; but you will

oftener pass some 'sink' or depression below the general level of the

valley you are traversing, where a shrewd guess has led to brackish or

sulphurous water by digging two or three feet. A mail station-keeper

lost his oxen, at a point a hundred miles south-west of Salt Lake; they

had wandered southward on the desert, and he followed their trail for

(as he estimated) a hundred miles, without finding a drop of water, when

he gave them up, still a day's tramp ahead of him, and turned back to

save his own life and that of his suffering horse. He might, I presume,

have gone a hundred miles further without finding aught to drink but

their blood.

This dearth of wood and water can hardly be realized from any mere

description. A life-long denizen of Europe, or of the cis-Alleghany

portion of this continent, is so accustomed to the unfailing presence or

nearness of trees and springs, or streams, that he naturally supposes

them as universal as the air we breathe. In a New Englander's crude

conception, trees spring up and grow to stately maturity wherever they

are not repressed by constant vigilance and exertion, while brooks and

rivers are implied by the existence of hills and valleys, nay, of any

land whatever. But as you travel westward with the Missouri, springs,

streams, woods, become palpably scarcer and scarcer, until, unless in

the immediate valley of the Platte, Arkansas, or some more northerly

river that rushes full-fed from a long course among the snow-crowned

peaks of the Rocky Mountains, your eye ranges over a vast expanse

whereon neither forest, grove, nor even a single tree, is visible. If

the country is rolling, springs may at long intervals be found by those

who know just where to seek them; but streams are few and scanty, save

in winter, and in later summer they disappear almost entirely. Beyond

Salt Lake, the destitution of wood in Utah and Nevada is far less than

on the Plains, but that of water is even greater. Fifty miles from water

to water is the lowest interval in my experience on Simpson's route; but

I only traversed the eastern half of it, turning thence abruptly

northward to strike the valley of the Humboldt (formerly known as the

St. Mary's), which rising in the north-west corner of the new Territory

of Nevada, hardly fifty miles from the southern or Lewis branch of the

Columbia, flows southward from the Goose Creek Mountains that cradled

and nourished it, and thence hardly maintains its volume (which is that

of a decent mill stream) in its generally south-west course of three

hundred and fifty miles, till it is two thirds lost in a lake and the

residue in a reedy slough or sink, a hundred miles from the Sierra

Nevada and forty from the similar sink of the Carson, a larger and less

impulsive stream which drains a considerable section of the eastern

declivity of the Sierra Nevada only to meet this inglorious end.

Doubtless, the time has been when a large portion of western Nevada

formed one great lake or inland sea, whereof Pyramid and Mud Lakes, and

the sinks respectively of the Carson, Walker and Humboldt rivers, are

all that the thirsty earth and air have left us. The forty miles of low,

flat, naked desert--in part of heavy, wearying sand--that now separates

the sink of the Humboldt from that of the Carson, was evidently long

under water, and might, to all human perception, have better remained

so.

I can not comprehend those who talk of the Plains and the more intensely

arid wilds which mainly compose Utah and Nevada becoming a great

stock-growing region. Even California, though its climate favors the

rapid multiplication and generous growth of cattle and sheep, can never

sustain so many animals to the square mile as the colder and more rugged

hills of New York and New England, because of the intense protracted

drouth of its summers, which suffer no blade of grass to grow throughout

the six later months of every year. Animals live and thrive on the

dead-ripe herbage of the earlier months; but a large area is soon

exhausted by a herd, which must be pastured elsewhere till the winter

rains ensure a renewal of vegetation.

But the grasses of the Great Valley and of a large portion of the Plains

are exceedingly scanty where they exist at all, so that the teams and

herds annually driven across them by emigrants and traders suffer

fearfully, and are often decimated by hunger, though they carefully seek

out and adhere to the trails whereon feed is least scanty. Many a weary

day's journey, even along the valleys of the North Platte and

Sweetwater, brings to view too little grass to sustain the life of a

moderate herd; those who have traversed the South Pass in June will

generally have just escaped starvation, leaving to those that come

straggling or tottering after them a very poor feed. The carcasses of

dead animals, in every stage of decomposition, thickly stud the great

trail from the banks of the Platte westward to the passes of the Sierra

Nevada, and, I presume, to the banks of the Columbia, bearing mute but

impressive testimony to the chronic inhospitality of the Great American

Desert, which is almost everywhere thinly overgrown by worthless shrubs,

known to travelers as grease-wood and sage brush;--the former prickly

and repellant, but having a waxy or resinous property which renders it

useful to emigrants as fuel; the latter affording shelter and

subsistence to rabbits and a poor species of grouse known as the 'sage

hen,' but utterly worthless to man and to the beasts obedient to his

sway.

Yet the daily Overland Mail is an immense, a cheering fact, and the

Pacific Telegraph another. A message dispatched from any village blessed

with electric wires on poles in the Atlantic States will probably reach

its destination in any city or considerable settlement of California or

Nevada within a few hours, while every transpiring incident of the war

for the Union is directly flashed across the continent to the journals

of Sacramento and San Francisco, and will often be devoured by their

readers on the evening after its occurrence. The Republic may well be

proud of having achieved two such strides in her onward, upward course,

in the midst of a great and desolating war, and with confidence implore

a God of beneficent justice to hasten the auspicious day when we shall

be able to telegraph her children by the far Pacific that her enemies

are baffled, vanquished, humbled, and that there opens again before her

a long vista of unbroken and honorable peace.

WHAT TO DO WITH THE DARKIES.

A NEW AND ORIGINAL PLAN FOR SAVING THE UNION ON SOUTHERN PRINCIPLES.

There can be no question that the overwhelming difficulty of the present

day, is the proper disposal of the Negro.

The writer of these lines takes the liberty of believing that the war is

virtually a settled affair. There has been, there is, no diminution of

Northern determination to push on and keep pushing until the wings of

the eagle again stretch from Maine to the Rio Grande. The administration

is sustained, as from the first, by ever increasing majorities. The

daily defeats of those politicians who are known to sympathize with

secession, the wreck of the peace party, and the growing indignation of

the country, as manifested against all halfway men and measures, are

becoming what in sober seriousness can not be regarded as other than a

tremendous moral spectacle. _In medio non tutissimus ibis_.

Yet at the bottom of this foaming cup of joy remain the black dregs. I

would not invidiously compare the unfortunate black to the 'dregs of the

populace,' since labor in any form must not be lightly spoken of. But it

would be the weakest of euphuisms to affect ignorance of the social

position which he occupies, and which, not to increase the misery of his

position, is indubitably 'at the bottom of the ladder.' But that which

is at the bottom of the ladder may seriously affect its position and

standing. There is a fearful and thrilling illustration of this, to be

found in a popular cut graphically described in these words:

A negro on the top of a high ladder, white-washing, a hog lifting

it up from beneath. 'G'way dar,--you'm makin' mischief.'

President Lincoln is understood to favor emigration. This looks well.

Carry the blacks away to Liberia. Unfortunately I am informed that

_eight and a half Great Easterns_, each making one trip per month, could

only export the annual increase of our Southern slaves. This speaks in

thunder tones, even to the welkin, and provokes a scream from the eagle.

It is impossible.

But what shall we do with our blacks, since it is really impossible,

then, to export the dark, industrial, productive, proletarian,

operative, laboring element from our midst?

I suggest as a remedy that they continue in our midst, with this

amendment, that they be concentrated in that same 'midst' and the

'midst' be removed a little to one side. In other words, let us centre

them all in one State, _that State to be South Carolina_.

The justice of this arrangement must be apparent to every one. It is

evident that if the present occupation by our troops continue much

longer, there will be no white men left in South Carolina, neither is it

likely that they will ever return. Terror and pride combined must ever

keep the native whites from repopulating that region. And, as South

Carolina was especially the State which brought about this war, for the

express purpose of making the black man the basis of its society, there

would be a wonderful and fearful propriety in carrying out that theory,

or 'sociology,' even to perfection; making the negro not only the basis

of society, but _all_ society there whatever,--top, bottom, and sides.

It is true that this absolute perfection of their theory was never

contemplated even by the celebrated Hammond. But truth compels the

deduction, and reason admits it. _Verus in uno, verus in omnibus_.

I trust that the reader will not be startled, nor accuse the writer of

these lines of lacking patriotism, when he avows that since the Southern

social philosophers have boldly started a tremendous and original

theory, he should be very sorry not to see it fairly tested, tried, and

worked out. Every great doctrine or idea, be it for good or evil, must

and will work itself out, that of mudsill-ism and negro labor among the

rest. Only I claim that it should be complete in its elements,

eliminated of what the African, with a fine intuition of the truth,

ingenuously terms 'de wite trash,'--yes, in the Southern social scheme

the whites _are_ trash,--and they only find their place as a sort of

useless ornament, non-productive and inoperative, even according to

their own ideas. Therefore the 'wite trash' must be eliminated.

There is yet another and a very beautiful argument to be adduced in

favor of colonizing South Carolina with 'contrabands.' It must be

apparent to the blindest eye that the negro inclines idiosyncratically

to Southern institutions far more zealously than even Mr. Jefferson

Davis can be presumed to do. He is the most driving of drivers, the

severest of overseers, the most aristocratic of aristocrats, the most

Southern of Southerners. The planter despises poverty, but what is his

contempt of a poor white man compared to that of his slave for such

wretchedness? What indeed is the negro but an intensified Creole? His

very color reflects that of his swarthy lord. The planter is tanned, but

the negro is 'black and tanned,'--tanned always on the face, and not

unfrequently on the back!

The black, left to his own instincts in Africa, develops the Southern

sociology to a degree which casts entirely into pitiable pettiness the

puling despotism of the calaboose and slave market. Witness Dahomey,

where all lives, all fortunes, all persons, are coördinated in one

perfect 'system' of subjugation to one sable Jefferson Davis Gezo, who

is _de jure divino_ husband by a sublime fiction of law to every woman

on the sacred soil of Africa, and master of the lives of all of both

sexes. What to this stupendous and perfect theory is the impotent and

imperfect scheme so lamely announced by the sociologists of the C. S. A.?

I claim that by every law of logic the Southern philosophers have

proclaimed themselves inferior to the negro, and worthy to be swept away

to make place for him. They have claimed for him the most important

place in the body politic, and as, _ex uno disce omnes_, the whole

should be homogeneous with a part, especially the main part, it follows

that the negro, and the negro alone, should be allowed to rule in a land

where, as Southerners declare, 'God clearly intended him to live.' Now

if God clearly intended him to live there, it must follow that he did

not intend white men to reside in those regions. It may be observed in

this connection that the _Bible_ forms the great basis of all Southern

argument. If a Northern writer advances any of the ignorant and impious

doctrines, so common among his kind, against slavery, he is promptly and

properly met with the query, 'Do you believe in the Bible?' Now the

_Bible_ endorses slavery past, and 'of course' slavery present. But the

_Bible_ also insists that the curse of labor was laid on man by the

eating of the apple. On _all_ men, be it observed, without distinction

of color. But the Southerners have claimed, time and again, that 'only

the black can work in the South.' Therefore it logically results, on

Southern grounds, that the white man has no business whatever in the

South, since he _must_ work somewhere, and it can not be in the land of

rice and cotton. Who then should inhabit that sunny clime save the

'contraband'--who should there claim the respect due to the lord of the

soil if not he?

'Yo que soy contrabandista

Y campo à mé respeto.'

The more I study this subject the more does my soul expand in awe as I

watch the fearful unfoldings of the terrible moral law which governs the

actions of humanity. Ah, Heaven! it is fearful, it is awful to consider

how ignorantly we begin our beginnings without anticipating the

marvelous endings to which they rise, even as a match ignorantly lighted

may explode the dusky grain which sends a city skyward! The South has

toiled to elaborate a philosophy and an empire on the Nigger--and, lo!

at the end thereof looms up the tremendous Afreet realm of a perfect

Niggerdom, in which the white element, which first started it into life,

must logically be swept away, like the worthless _exuviæ_ of a shell

from the head of a young dragon.

As one who boldly claims respect for the 'system' of the Southern

Confederacy, but who wishes for its perfect development, I therefore

suggest that South Carolina be set aside for the great experiment. Let

the negro be there allowed to congregate and expand even to his utmost

capacity. Let all the poetry and beauty of Southern institutions be

concentrated in that happy realm, where, amid the groans of endless

labor and the swinging of countless whips, he may show the world what he

may become. Already the South has proved his capacity to work sixteen

hours a day and dance all night--perhaps under _black_ rulers he may be

brought to work twenty hours a day, and give up dancing altogether. I

claim, as one holding advanced Southern views, that this proposition be

allowed a fair trial. If not, I shall at least have the satisfaction of

having put my views before the world to bide their time. A truth never

dies. Coming ages will at least do me justice. _Magna est Veritas et

prevalebit._

THE SLAVE-TRADE IN NEW YORK.

The National Convention which in 1787 framed the Federal Constitution,

despite its firmness and patriotism, was, like all public bodies,

evidently not entirely devoid of a spirit of compromise. A majority of

its members were desirous of freeing the institutions of the young

nation from the burden of slavery, and yet they consented to engraft the

following provision upon the body of our American fundamental law:--

"The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now

existing shall think proper to admit shall not be prohibited by Congress

prior to the year 1808."

Congress was awake, however, even during the administration of

Washington, to its duty in the matter, and an act was passed declaring

the slave-trade to be piracy. Twenty years afterward the principal

European sovereigns united in the same declaration, and so the execrable

commerce was hurled beyond the pale of international law. There is now

no probability that it will ever regain its rank 'on change.' But its

illegitimation does not seem to have greatly circumscribed its activity.

In the face of apparent danger, it has continued to flourish, and there

has been hardly more risk to a _pirate_ with a living cargo from Gaboon,

than would be encountered by an ordinary merchantman from pirates in the

Gulf. Indeed, there were many who believed and feared, prior to the

breaking out of the present rebellion, that the next compromise between

the North and South would be the repeal of all laws prohibiting the

African slave-trade. So rapidly yet so insidiously was the South

obtaining an entire control in the councils of the nation.

It was notorious that a large proportion of the vessels which were

engaged in the infamous traffic were owned and fitted out by Northern

capitalists. The General Government did not exert itself in good faith

to carry out either its treaty stipulations nor the legislation of

Congress in regard to the matter. If a vessel was captured, her owners

were permitted to bond her, and thus continue her in the trade; and if

any man was convicted of this form of piracy, the executive always

interposed between him and the penalty of his crime. The laws providing

for the seizure of vessels engaged in the traffic were so constructed as

to render the duty unremunerative; and marshals now find their fees for

such services to be actually less than their necessary expenses. No one

who bears this fact in mind will be surprised at the great indifference

of these officers to the continuing of the slave-trade; in fact, he will

be ready to learn that the laws of Congress upon the subject had become

a dead letter, and that the suspicion was well grounded that certain

officers of the Federal Government had actually connived at their

violation.

The number of persons engaged in the slave-trade, and the amount of

capital embarked in it, exceed our powers of calculation. The city of

New York has been until of late the principal port of the world for this

infamous commerce; although the cities of Portland and Boston are only

second to her in that distinction. Slave dealers added largely to the

wealth of our commercial metropolis; they contributed liberally to the

treasuries of political organizations, and their bank accounts were

largely depleted to carry elections in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and

Connecticut. It was natural for the leaders of the party which they had

aided, to accord to them, as an equivalent, many facilities for carrying

on their business. There is indeed no occasion for wonder at the

countenance and impunity long given to such auxiliaries. If a few of

them chanced to be of Knickerbocker stock, and to bear the talisman

which affords admission to the higher circles of Gothamite

respectability, it is only what might have been expected. There are such

men everywhere, even in the Tombs.

It requires no miraculous gift to be able to perceive why the late

administration at Washington was sensitive as to the visitation of

American vessels of doubtful character, by the officers of British

cruisers. There was no principle at stake; but the slave-dealing

interest had demanded as an immunity, that the piece of bunting known as

the American flag should be allowed to protect from scrutiny every

suspicious ship over which it should be raised. They had the power or

influence to command; and the administration obeyed.

The present administration appears to have awakened somewhat to this

subject. The principal appointments for the Atlantic ports were given to

men of anti-slavery proclivities. The new marshal of the southern

district of New York was of different material from his predecessors,

and fortunately he was no novice. He was familiar with the habits of the

men engaged in the slave trade; he was ambitious and eager to signalize

himself for efficiency. In three months he had seized nine vessels, and

arrested twenty-eight men who had outfitted, commanded, or served on

them.

The Secretary of the Interior now resolved that the business should be

broken up in every port of the United States. He accordingly issued an

order to the several marshals of the States and districts lying upon the

seaboard, directing them to assemble at the city of New York, on the

fifteenth day of August, 1861, for the purpose of agreeing upon a system

of measures for the effectual suppression of the slave-trade in American

ports.

Burton's old Theatre, formerly dedicated to the 'sock and buskin,' and

famous during the religious revival of 1858, was now occupied by this

convention of marshals. Waiving unnecessary parliamentary usages, these

ministers of the law sat with closed doors, and discussed familiarly the

business in which they had engaged. They investigated carefully the

whole subject in its minuter details, and visited the slave brigs and

schooners which had been captured and were then lying at the Atlantic

Dock in Brooklyn. A plan of operations was concerted, by which the

marshals of the different districts should co-operate with each other in

detecting and bringing to justice persons guilty of participating in the

slave-trade. The results of this measure can not fail to be beneficial;

and, indeed, the marshals have already become so active and efficient,

that the capitalists who have maintained this branch of commerce are

actually contemplating its transferment to European ports. So much for

the convocation at Burton's Theatre. Let us now examine the principal

features of the traffic, and the practices of those by whom it is

conducted.

SLAVE DEALING IN NEW YORK.

The principal slave captains and chief officers of vessels engaged in

the slave-trade have their residences and boarding-places in the eastern

wards of the city, most of them being between James and Houston Streets.

They are known to every one who has an investment in the business.

Indeed, they are all members of a secret fraternity, having its signs,

grips, and pass-words. 'While I was in Eldridge-street jail,' said one

of them, 'Captain Loretti was captured and brought there. He did not

know any one, but I shook hands with him, and we became acquainted at

once.'

The arrival of a slave captain from one voyage is the signal for

preparation for another. Negotiations are carried on, generally in the

first-class hotels. The contracts for the City of Norfolk and several

other notorious slavers were made at the Astor House. The risk of

detection is less at such a public place than it would be at a private

office.

A man who had failed in business on Greenwich Street was recently

engaged in fitting out these vessels for their African voyage. He was

first sent to procure apparatus for the refining of palm oil. This was

but a blind, the practice being to take out the machinery, and employ

the boiler for culinary purposes, until the vessels had got out to sea,

and there was no farther necessity for duping inquisitive persons. This

man was also commissioned to purchase wooden ware, champagne, and other

necessary articles. Such were the business agents and their duty; all

was liberally paid for and promptly supplied.

As soon as a vessel is ready and officered for the voyage, measures are

taken to procure a crew. Slave-traders employ for this the services of

'runners,' who constitute a caste of pariahs of the most degraded kind.

A conscientious scruple would seem never to enter into their

calculations. They would hardly recognize a precept of the decalogue

except by the circumstance of its violation. Earning their livelihood

thus basely, debauchery and crime constitute their every-day history.

These persons keep a record of the names of men who have served on slave

ships, or been guilty of mutiny, or other villany. So accurate is their

information and so expert are they in their estimate of character, that

they seldom commit a blunder, or furnish a seaman who is not the man for

the vocation. The crew which they select are indeed 'picked men.' They

are of every nationality, and are taken from the seamen's

boarding-houses in the lower wards of the city.

A few years since, the information was received in New York that a yacht

was lying in Long Island Sound, and that circumstances warranted the

suspicion that she was intended for the slave-trade. The marshal, with a

display of enthusiastic zeal for the execution of the laws, proceeded to

the place with a strong force of assistants, and took charge of the

yacht; but subsequent investigations failed to criminate her. The

reputed owner declared that he had fitted her out for a pleasure

excursion; that was all. The vessel was discharged, and a few months

afterward landed a cargo of negroes on the coast of Georgia. So easy has

it been to deceive the Federal officers. The owner of the yacht

afterward declared that he paid ten thousand dollars to get his vessel

clear of the harbor of New York.

The obtaining of a clearance at the custom-house was not a very

difficult matter. Slavers were never detained by any extraordinary

curiosity on the part of those having cognizance of their departure.

They had but to assume a transparent disguise, raise the American flag,

and keep up the show till they arrived at the intermediate port. Here

the national ensign was changed, the papers of the vessel were altered,

and necessary arrangements were made for receiving a cargo of slaves.

Factories or agencies are maintained on the African coast, where the

vessels obtain their living freight. The captains seldom go on shore

except for purpose of observation. Each vessel generally takes with her

from New York a Spaniard to transact the business. The complement being

obtained, it only remains to get away and beyond the cruisers. The

action of the Federal government, some years since, in relation to the

visitation of vessels, has been effectual in impairing the energy of the

British squadron, which has been maintained on the coast of Africa,

pursuant to the treaty of Washington. As for the American squadron, it

never co-operated heartily in the matter of suppressing the slave-trade;

and the vessels were generally absent for the purpose of obtaining coal,

or for repairs, whenever there was opportunity of making a capture.

But the capitalists of New York do not depend entirely upon these

precautions. Their vessels are occasionally taken; and then the men on

board must be protected, or they will disclose everything. Not only are

appliances used to make an examination result in a discharge, but a

corps of attorneys is kept under pay to defend those who fall within the

clutches of the law. The impunity which has attended these men is

notorious.

CAPTAIN LATHAM.

Some time ago the brig Cora was captured at sea and brought by a prize

crew to the port of New York. Her commander, Captain Latham, was

incarcerated in Eldridge-street jail. Hendrickson, the mate, was,

however, permitted to communicate to his friends on shore, who procured

a boat, pulled quietly to the side of the brig, received him on board,

and took him ashore. His clothing and other property were conveyed to

the office of the marshal, and he was not only permitted to go and take

them away, but to visit his acquaintances in Eldridge-street jail. It

was an easy matter to arrest him, but the marshal remarked to an

associate that he did not care how the man made his money.

Captain Latham, meanwhile, remained at the jail. At the time referred

to, that place would seem to have been as jovial and sociable as a

club-room. The present marshal, not liking the arrangements, removed all

the Federal prisoners to the Tombs, where they could be kept more

securely and excluded from seeing improper visitors. The men who were

engaged in the slave-trade were in the habit of visiting their friends

in 'Eldridge Street,' and holding regular carousals. They were permitted

to visit there, it is said, at late hours in the evening, and as early

as seven o'clock in the morning. A man residing in the seventh ward, but

doing business on South Street, would come of a Saturday night and pay

the board of the officers of the captured slave vessel. A Spaniard named

Sanchez, now a prisoner at the Tombs, was a frequent guest; and

occasionally a marshal would be present. Others were also permitted. The

prisoners whom they visited were allowed to come into the office;

champagne and other liquors would be produced, and the company would

have a 'good time.'

Captain Latham is one of the most ingenious men. He has learned the

gipsy art of dyeing his face; and he can elude the closest observer.

When he falls into the power of the ministers of the law, he is shielded

by the efforts of the heaviest capitalists who have engaged in the

slave-trade; and they honor all his demands. At his examination he was

identified by the marshal's assistants, and by two persons who were

employed at the custom-house. It was arranged, however, that when he

should be arraigned for trial, each of these persons should profess

himself to be unable to recognize him. One of them is said to have

received five hundred dollars, and the others two hundred apiece, for

this want of memory.

After remaining some twelve weeks at the jail, Captain Latham determined

not to await a trial. He obtained the aid of one of the marshal's

assistants; a 'friend' of his, who has a place of business in Wall

Street, advancing three thousand dollars. One of his attorneys was also

in the secret. A writ of _habeas corpus_ was obtained from the recorder,

and dismissed for want of jurisdiction. This was all done to elude

suspicion. A ticket for a passage to Havana was procured; and on the day

that the steamer was to sail, a carriage, in which were Sanchez, the

marshal's assistant, and a friend, drove to the jail. Bidding farewell

to his fellow-prisoners, some of whom knew what was going on, Latham

left his apartments and took a seat by Sanchez. The four drove to the

clothing warehouse of Brooks Brothers in Broadway, purchased a suit of

clothing, and ordered another. It was now almost the hour for the

steamer to leave. Latham returned to the carriage, and was driven to the

pier, arriving there just in time to get on board. It is said that he

has since returned to New York; but only his friends have recognized

him. The men who aided his escape are now in prison.

It does not appear that the capitalists who are engaged in this traffic

are as profuse toward other prisoners as they were to Captain Latham.

There was among those who were removed from the jail to the City Prison,

one man who had sailed as mate with Latham. When he was captured he was

in the employment of a house in Beaver Street, which has also a branch

in Havana. He too had formed a plan of escape by bribing a warden and

getting a friend to personate one of the marshal's assistants, who

should profess to come for him by an order from a commissioner. But when

his wife applied to his employer for money to carry out this plan, she

was dismissed with a solitary dollar. This prisoner had probably fallen

from favor, and was therefore abandoned to the mercy of the law.

The names of the prominent slave-traders, their residences and places of

business, are known to the marshal. Several of them have fled from the

city; among them, a woman of wealth residing in St. Mark's Place. Their

operations have been largely curtailed, and it has become almost

impossible for a slaver to leave New York. With the concert of action

agreed upon by the convention at Burton's Theatre, it is to be hoped

that the slave-trade will be exterminated in every Northern port. Some

legislation by Congress to increase the powers of the marshals, and

efficient action on the part of the executive, are all that is now

required to sweep the infamous commerce from the ocean.

Since the above was written, Captain Gordon, of the slaver Erie, has

been convicted of piracy, before the United States Court for the

Southern District of New York. It is needless to say that this

conviction is the completest triumph which Freedom has yet gained in our

country against her adversary. It indicates more clearly even than any

event of the war, that Southern social influences are yielding, and that

ere long we shall be free from all their taint. Like the defeat of

Fernando Wood, like the breaking up of the Peace Party, like the rapidly

progressing crusade against old political corruption, it shows that

there is a reformation afoot which will work wonders, and prove to the

world that the mass of corruption in this country, so generally

attributed to the working of republican institutions, is in reality due

to a diametrically opposite cause--to the influence of a party which in

all its feelings is essentially that of despotism. May we all live to

see its last trace obliterated from the free North.

LITERARY NOTICES

THE REJECTED STONE: OR, INSURRECTION vs.

RESURRECTION. By a Native of Virginia. Boston: Walker,

Wise & Company, 245 Washington Street.

It is to be regretted that the native of Virginia who penned this volume

has not published his name, that the world might know who it was that

produced the most vigorous, unflinching, and brilliant work which has

thus far resulted from the war. In sober seriousness, we have not as

yet, in any journal or in any quarter, encountered such a handling of

facts without gloves; such a rough-riding over old prejudices,

timidities, and irresolution; such reckless straight-forwardness in

declaring what should be done to settle the great dispute, or such

laughing-devil sarcasm in ripping up dough-face weakness and

compromising hesitation. Its principle and refrain, urged with abundant

wit, ingenuity and courage, is simply EMANCIPATION--not on the narrow

ground of abolition, but on the necessity of promptly destroying an evil

which threatens to vitiate the white race. In the beginning the author

points out the inevitableness of the present war, and that our political

system has been hitherto a sacrifice to Slavery for the time, but also a

running up of arrears in favor of Liberty.

'In forming this government, Slavery clutched at the strength of

the law; Freedom relied on the inviolable justice of the ages. They

have both had, they must have, their reward. That it was and is

thus, is apparent from the very clauses under which Slavery claims

eminent domain in this country; they are all written as for an

institution passing away; the sources of it are sealed up so far as

they could be; and all the provisions for it--the crutches by which

it should limp as decently as possible to the grave--were so worded

that, when Slavery should be buried, no dead letter would stand in

the Constitution as its epitaph. It is even so. No historian a

thousand years hence could show from that instrument that a single

slave was ever held under it.' ... 'Slavery now appeals to arms

because Freedom, in her slow but steady progress, has left no

informality--no flaw--which can be seized on to reverse the

decision she has gained in any higher court.'

The style of this book is remarkable. The wealth of simile which bursts

out genially and involuntarily is only paralleled by its strange

variety, recalling CARLYLE in pleasant, piquant singularity.

Its humor is irresistible; none the less so for being keenly satirical.

We regret that our limits forbid copious extracts from these treasures,

but do the more earnestly entreat the reader to buy the volume and make

himself familiar with it. Whoever our Virginian may be, he is a rising

star, well worth observing. We find him at times a gleaming

enthusiast,--a man burning with the spirit of the war, involuntarily

uttering the most thrilling passages of Scripture,--and again provoking

laughter by dry humor and cutting jests. Let the reader in illustration

take the following paragraphs in the same sequence in which they occur

in the original work.

'"Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!" said dying Julian the apostate.

The North may, _and will_, now collect the bones of her

great-browed children who yielded because she said yield; the

fallen pillars of her crumbled church; her children whose wounds

yet smoke fresh from the state of Slavery;--and broken now upon the

stone she so long refused, shall write as their epitaph.

_Vicisti Humanitas!_

(_The Privateer_.) 'A cry comes up to the ear of America,--a long,

piercing cry of amazement and indignation,--recognizable as one

which can come only when the profoundest depths of the human

pocket are stirred. The privateers are at large! They have taken

away my coffee, and I know not where they have laid it. They have

taken my India goods with swords and staves. For my first-class

ship they have cast lots!

'Was such depravity ever known before? So long as it was a human

soul, launched by God on the eternal sea, that they despised; so

long as it was only a few million bales of humanity captured; so

long as it was but the scuttling the hearts of mothers and fathers

and husbands and wives,--we remained patient and resigned,--did we

not? But coffee and sugar--Good God! what is that blockade about?

To seize a poor innocent sloop--has Slavery no bowels? And its

helpless family of molasses barrels;--can hearts be so void of

pity? Slavery must end. The spirit of the age demands it. The blood

of a dozen captured freights crieth to Heaven in silveriest accents

against it.

'Brothers, there is a laughter that opens into the fountain of

tears.'

In a letter to the President, in which the Executive is reminded that it

is not often in this world that to one man is given the magnificent

opportunity which the madness of a great wrong has placed within his

reach,--as indeed in every chapter,--the real crisis in which this

country is now involved, and the only means of prompt and effectual

extrication, are pointed out with irresistible vehemence and shrewd

intelligence. The author declares, and truly enough, that there are

resources in this land, did we only draw on them, which would close this

war with the closing of this year. The futile and frivolous objections

which have been urged against this great scheme of warfare for the

present, and of national progress in future, are most ably refuted;

while through all runs the same vein of satire, wit, scholarship and

manly sincerity. It is, in a word, a good book, and one fully suited to

these brave and warlike times.

THE WORKS OF FRANCIS BACON, Baron of Verulam, Viscount of

St. Albans and Lord High Chancellor of England. Collected and

edited by James Spedding, M.A., Robert Leslie Ellis, M.A., and

Douglas Denyn Heath. Boston: Brown & Taggard. Volumes I. and II.

Much has been said in praise of the monks of old for preserving works of

solid wisdom; but why can not a good word be said for those publishers

of the present day who confer a service by not merely embalming, but by

reviving and sending forth by thousands into real life the best books of

the past? There are many authors who are quoted by everybody, and read

by very few, simply because good modern editions of their works, at a

moderate price, are rare.

BACON is preëminently one of these; so much, indeed, is he a

case in point, that BULWER in speaking of the celebrated axiom,

Knowledge is Power, employs him as an example to warn a young scholar

from quoting at second-hand an author whom he has never read.

The present edition includes all the works extant of Lord BACON,

embracing, as we learn from SPEDDING'S preface (which has the rare

defect of being much too brief), a biography, which in minute detail and

careful finish, and facts hitherto unpublished, will far surpass any

before written. Yet, to stay the appetite of the reader, anxious to

revive the main points of BACON'S life, he gives in this first volume

the short biography by Dr. WILLIAM RAWLEY. In addition to these

introductions, we are gratified by a general preface to BACON'S

Philosophical Works, by ROBERT LESLIE HARRIS, one to the _Parasceve_ by

JAMES SPEDDING, and a third to the _De Augmentis Scientiarum_, in which

BACON'S claims to be the creator of what is popularly and generally

understood as the Inductive Philosophy are most fairly examined; not in

the spirit of the common biographer who always canonizes his subject

through thick and thin, but in that of an impartial seeker for truth,

resolved to naught extenuate and set down naught in malice. It is

believed by many that BACON was simply so fortunate as to have his

picture stand as the frontispiece of the new Philosophy, when in truth

other contemporaries, who made great discoveries by following precisely

his method, as, for instance, GALILEO, were quite as much entitled to

the glory. But examination of BACON'S works proves that though the

great work of proof never was completed by him, that which he embraced,

foresaw, and projected, was of that vast comprehensiveness which fully

entitles him to be regarded, not merely as the most proper of _names_

whereby to indicate the author of Induction (since the world must always

have a name), but in reality the one of all others who best understood

what form the development of science must assume to become perfect. The

treatment of this question by the editors is truly interesting, and

worthy their great undertaking.

The two volumes before us, in addition to the prefaces and biography,

embrace the _Novum Organum_, 'the _Parasceve_,' and the work _De

Augmentis Scientiarum_. It is to be regretted that the English versions,

corrected by BACON himself, were omitted, but those who would

read the translations are mostly capable of reading 'Baconian Latin.' As

they are, they will be most gratefully accepted by thousands. The

forthcoming volumes will embrace the English works. We would here wish

that the editor had not, as he informs us he has done, modernized the

spelling,--but here the majority of readers will perhaps be thankful

that such is the case. As regards typography, paper, and all outward

grace, this edition leaves literally nothing to be wished for, while a

short critical article on the portraits of BACON leads us to

infer that the exquisitely engraved head of the philosopher, given in

the first volume, has been made accurate at the cost of great research

and labor.

THE OLD LOG SCHOOLHOUSE. By Alexander Clark, Editor of

_'Clark's School Visitor.'_ Philadelphia: Leary, Getz & Co.

Mr. CLARK is the most modest of writers; one in whose writings

unaffected simplicity and freedom from literary conceit is manifest on

every page. He appears in all the many sketches which constitute this

volume to have written for the direct purpose of pleasing and teaching

youthful readers or quiet and pious grown persons. He neither eyes the

world through a lorgnette or a lorgnon, nor affects a knowledge of all

things, nor even hints at it. Yet it is precisely in this that the charm

of his stories consist--they are perfectly rational, and told in the

plain language which becomes them. It is to be desired that Mr.

CLARK will give us a volume of sketches devoted entirely to

that Western and rural life which he sketches with such felicity.

SONGS IN MANY KEYS. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston:

Ticknor & Fields, 1861.

It is only a few years since HOLMES was little known to the

general reader save as a humorist. A series of writings of the most

varied character have since appeared, displaying more fully his greatly

varied ability, so that the reader will not be surprised to find in

this, his last wreath of poetic blossoms, a rich variety of every hue,

from the lightest tints of mirth to the sombre shades of tender pathos.

The variety of _feeling_ awakened by these lyrics is remarkable--and to

say that, is to bear sympathetic testimony to the excellence of each

separate piece. Even the beautiful ballad of 'Agnes,' chronicling the

loves of Sir Harry Frankland and Agnes Surraige of the Hopkinton

Frankland mansion, and which will be deemed one of the most perfect of

new ballads of the olden school, does not seem the chief flower, after

inhaling the home sweetness and heart aroma of many of the minor lyrics

in this volume. As for the humor, is it not of HOLMES? 'The

Deacon's Masterpiece,' and 'Parson Turrell's Legacy,' are of the very

best, of the triple _est_ brand; it is only to be wished there were a

hundred of them. Of that strange blending of pathos with humor, and the

'sentiment of society,' in which HOLMES equals, or, if you

will, surpasses PRAED, there are several exquisite examples.

But buy it for yourself, reader, and you will not regret the purchase,

for the harder the times, so much the more, as we opine, does the world

need cheering poesy.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

SOME OF THE MISTAKES OF EDUCATED MEN. A Biennial Address

before the Phrenokosmian Society of Pennsylvania College,

Gettysburg, Pa. By John S. Hart, M.D. Delivered Sept. 18, 1861.

Philadelphia: C. Sherman & Son, 1861.

An excellent address, which has attracted much comment and quotation

from different journals since its publication.

THE COTTON KINGDOM: A Traveler's Observations on Cotton

and Slavery in the American Slave States. Based upon three former

volumes of journeys and investigations by the same author. By

Frederick Law Olmstead. In two volumes. New York: Mason Brothers,

1861.

The best record extant of social or commercial facts and figures

illustrative of the entire South.

LADY MAUD. By Pierce Egan. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson &

Brothers.

We learn with regret that this is the only complete and unabridged

edition of Lady Maud, since from a hasty examination of its chapters we

judge that the more the work were abbreviated the better would it be for

the public.

RECORD OF AN OBSCURE MAN. '_Aux plus déshérités le plus

d'amour_.' Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

A work of very decided merit, though one advancing views and sentiments

which can not fail to provoke opposition and argument from many readers.

Of its interest, as well as of the talent of the author, there can be

but one opinion.

SPARE HOURS. By John Brown, M.D. Boston: Ticknor & Fields,

1861.

A beautiful reprint of the _Horæ Subscivæ_, beginning with 'Rab and his

Friends,' followed by many congenial sketches, the whole forming one of

the most fascinating volumes of light reading which has appeared for

years.

THE SOUTHERN REBELLION AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION. A

History of the Rise and Progress of the Rebellion. New York: James

D. Torrey, No. 13 Spruce Street.

A well written, weekly current chronicle of the events of the war,

prepared from copious sources. The arrangement of this work is

excellent.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS. By Charles Dickens. Philadelphia: T.

B. Peterson & Brothers, 1861.

Another addition to the excellent duo-decimo edition of

DICKENS'S complete works, published by PETERSON.

RELATION OF THE AMERICAN BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS

TO SLAVERY. By Charles M. Whipple. Boston: R. T. Walcutt, No. 221

Washington Street, 1861.

WOMAN'S RIGHTS UNDER THE LAW. In three Lectures delivered in

Boston, January, 1861, by Caroline H. Dall, author of Woman's Right to

Labor, &c. Boston: Walker, Wise & Co. 1861.

THE REBELLION; its Latent Causes and True Significance, in

Letters to a Friend abroad. By Henry T. Tuckerman. New York: James G.

Gregory, 1861.

LIGHT INFANTRY DRILL in the United States Army. T. B. Peterson

& Brothers. Philadelphia, 1861. Price, 25 cents.

EDITOR'S TABLE

It was usual, of old, to characterize as _Annus Mirabilis_, or A Year of

Wonder, any twelvemonth which had been more than usually prolific in

marvels. The historian who may in future days seek a dividing point or a

date for the greatest political and social struggle of this age, can

hardly fail to indicate 1861 as the _Annus Mirabilis_ of the Nineteenth

Century in America. That heart does not beat, the brain does not throb

on earth, which is capable of feeling or appreciating the tremendous

range of consequences involved in the events of this year. We hear the

most grating thunder-peals of horror; the whole artillery of death and

disaster roars and crashes from fort and field; there is blaze and ruin,

such as this continent knew not perhaps even in the primeval times of

its vanished Golden Hordes;--and again there rise prophetic organ-tones

of solemn praise; merry bells ringing the carillon of joy; sweet voices

as in dreams singing of the purple evening peace; while mysteriously and

beautifully, beyond all, breathes the Daughter of the Voice--that

strangest of prophecies known to the Hebrew of old, softly inspiring

hopes of a fairer future America than was ever before dreamed of. For,

of a truth, above all sits and works the awful destiny of man,

proclaiming as of old, amid strange races now forgotten, that the

humanity which bravely toils and labors shall live, while the haughty

and the oppressor and the sluggard, puffed up with vanity, shall all

pass away as the mist of the morning.

It is worth while, at the conclusion of such a year, to look about us;

to see what has been done or what is now doing, and to surmise as well

as we may what great changes the future may bring forth.

A year ago this country was plagued and disgraced beyond any on the face

of the earth by swarms of professional politicians; by men who regarded

all legislation as one vast Lobby and Third House, and 'ability' as the

means of turning corruption to their own personal advantage. These

miserables, whether on the Northern or Southern side, tacitly united in

driving all legislation or congressional business from its legitimate

halls into the procrastinating by-paths, in order that they might make

speeches and magnify themselves unto Buncombe, and be glorified by the

local home press because of their devotion to--the party! The party!

That was always the word. Where are these men of froth and wind

now,--these heroes of the stump and the bar-room? Passing away into

nothing, at headlong speed, before the great storm of the times. Now and

then they 'rally'--there was one ghastly wig-and-hollow-pumpkin effort

at recovery in the trembling, rattle-jointed Peace Movement of these

last summer months. Where is it now? There answers a gay laugh and merry

stave from the corners of irreverent weekly newspapers:--

'The piece of a party, called the party of peace,

Like everything else which deceases,

Has gone where the wicked from trouble shall cease,

For the party of peace is in pieces.'

Or we may see now and then wretched election meetings, as of late in New

York, where a worn-out FERNANDO WOOD and others like him gabble

as much treason as they dare. It is all played out--Mozart, Tammany,

and all the trash. Rummy, frowsy candidates, treating Five-Point

graduates, and shoulder-hitting bravos yelling at the polls, are

beginning to be disgusting and anti-national elements. Their very

existence is an insult to these great, serious and glorious times of

manly war, when young men are beginning at last to 'think great.' A few

more gasps by the politicians and down they must go into infinite depths

of congenial darkness, to be remembered only as allied to 'the

abominable state of affairs before the war.'

It is no small thing to have driven so much of the old iniquity out; but

from this and that side come murmurs that there are but few signs of the

young genius coming in. Oh, for one hour of Dundee! Oh, for a WEBSTER in

the cabinet, whose right arm should go forth and take hold of England

and Frank-land of the East, while his left swept the isles of the South

with fearful power! Oh, for the fierce old Dandolo of America, who was

_not_ blind, but whose piercing glance at this hour would dart through

many a diabolical diplomatic difficulty--for ANDREW JACKSON! Oh, for the

trumpet tones of CLAY--of MARCY--for one brave blast of that dread horn

of olden time which rang so bravely to battle!

Friends, have patience. Remember that these men, and all like them, were

slowly born of great times, and that we must await time's gestation. In

this age there spring no longer heroes dragon-tooth born into full

fighting-life inside of 2.30. But so surely as stars shine in their

rounding life, or water runs, or God lives, so surely are these days of

storm and sorrow and tremendous travail bringing slowly on their

legitimate fruit of great ideas and great men. Young man--whoever you

are--be sacred to yourself now, and, for a season, serious and pure and

noble--for _who_ knows in these times to what he may grow? But a century

ago, this land lay buried in obscurity. Here and there young

land-surveyors and country store-keepers wondered that destiny had

buried them on Virginia farms and in Yankee backwoods. But war came,--no

greater than this of ours--one involving no grander principles of human

dignity and freedom,--and the young 'obscures' darted to the heaven and

took glorious places amid the constellations of fame. 'When the tale of

bricks is doubled,' says the Hebrew proverb, 'Moses comes.'

We hear much said of the honest, sturdy, no-nonsense virtues of the old

revolutionary stock, both male and female. The thing is plain

enough--they had passed through serious times and great thoughts,

through trials, and sorrows, and healthy privation, and come out strong.

Just such will be the stock of men and women born in spirit of this war.

It is making the old material over again. It was all here as good as

ever, but wanted a little stirring up, that was all. He who has seen in

the sturdy East and glorious West the unflinching honesty and

earnestness with which men are upholding this war to the knife and knife

to the hilt, as PALAFOX phrased it,--or, as the American hath

it in humbler phrase, 'from the wheel to the hub and hub to the

linch-pin,'--has no doubt that at this minute it was never so popular,

never so determined, never so thoroughly ingrained, entwined,

inter-twisted with the whole life-core and being of our people. 'We

suffer--but on with the war! Hurrah for battle--only give us victory! Do

you ask for money, arms, ships?--take all and everything to

superfluity--but oh, give us victory and power!' Out of such will as

this there come the greatest of men--giants of a fearfully glorious

future. When we look around and see this red-hot iron determination to

see all through to the victorious end, we may well feel assured that the

day of great ideas and of great men is not far off.

It is superb for a stranger to see how the spirit of the Revolution

still lives in New England, and is voiced and acted by men bearing

Revolutionary names--it is magnificent to behold the stream, grown to a

thunder-torrent, roaring and foaming over the broad West. Hurrah! it

still lives--that old spirit of freedom, its fires are all aflame, and

it shall not again smoulder until the whole world has seen, as it did

before, that it is the light of the world, and the pillar guiding as of

old to the promised land.

If 1861 had brought nothing else to pass it would be supremely great in

this, that amid toil and trial, foes within and without, it has seen the

American people determine that _Slavery_, the worm which gnawed the core

of its tree of life, shall be plucked out. _Out it shall go_, that is

settled. We have fought the foe too long with kid gloves, but now puss

will lay aside her mittens and catch the Southern rats in earnest. It is

the negro who sustains the South; the negro who maintains its army,

feeds it, digs its trenches, squires its precious chivalry, and is

thereby forced most unnaturally to rivet his own chains. There shall be

an end to this, and our administration is yielding to this inevitable

necessity. Here again the great year has worked a wonder, since in so

short a space it has made such an advance in discovering a basis by

which all Union men may conscientiously unite in freeing the black.

There have been hitherto two steps made towards the solution. The first

was that of the old Abolition movement, which saw only the suffering of

the slave and cried aloud for his freedom, reckless of all results. It

was humane; but even humanity is not always worldly wise, and it did

unquestionably for twenty years defeat its own aim in the Border States.

But it _worked_ most unflinchingly. Then came HELPER, who saw

that the poor white man of the South was being degraded below the negro,

and that industry and capital were fearfully checked by slavery. In his

well-known work he pointed out, by calm and dispassionate facts and

figures, that the land south of 'Mason and Dixon's' was being sacrificed

most wastefully, and the majority of its white inhabitants kept in

incredible ignorance, meanness, and poverty, simply that a few

privileged families might remain 'first and foremost.' These opinions

were most clearly sustained, and the country was amazed. People began to

ask if it was quite right, after all, to suffer this slavery to grow and

grow, when it was manifestly reacting on the poor white man, and

literally sinking him _below the level of the black_. This was the

second movement on the slave question, and its effect was startling.

But there was yet a third advance required, and it came with the past

year and the war, in the form of the now so rapidly expanding

'Emancipation' movement. HELPER had shown that slavery had

degraded the poor whites, but the events leading to the present struggle

indicated to all intelligent humanity that it was rapidly demoralizing

and ruining in the most hideous manner the minds of the _masters_ of the

slaves--nay, that its foul influence was spreading like a poison mist

over the entire continent. The universal shout of joyful approbation

which the whole South had raised years ago when a Northern senator was

struck down and beaten in the most infamously cowardly manner, had

caused the very horror of amazement at such fearful meanness, among all

true hearted and manly _men_, the world over. But when there came from

the 'first families' grinnings of delight over the vilest thievery and

forgery and perjury by FLOYD and his fellows,--when the whole

South, after agreeing in carrying on an election, refused to abide by

its results,--when the whole Southern press abounded in the vilest

denunciations of labor and poverty, and in Satanic contempt of

everything 'Yankee,' meaning thereby all that had made the North and

West prosperous and glorious,--and when, finally, it was found that this

loathsome poison was working through the North itself, corrupting the

young with pseudo-aristocratic pro-slavery sympathies,--then indeed it

became apparent that _for the sake of all, and for that of men in

comparison to whose welfare that of the negro was a mere trifle_, this

fearful disease must be in some form abated. The result was the

development of Emancipation on the broadest possible grounds,--of

Emancipation for the sake of the Union and of the white man,--to be

brought about, however, by the will of the people, subject to such

rules as discussion and expediency might determine. This was the present

Emancipation movement, first urged by that name in the New York

_Knickerbocker_ magazine, though its main principles were practically

manifesting themselves in many quarters--the most prominent being the

well-known proclamations of Generals BUTLER and FREMONT.

'Emancipation' does not, as has been urged, present in comparison to

Abolition a distinction without a difference. HELPER desired

the freedom of the slave for the sake of the poor white man in the South

and for Southern development. _Emancipation_ goes further, and claims

that nowhere on the American continent is the white laborer free from

the vile comparison and vile influences of slavery, and that it should

be abolished for the sake of the Union and for the sake of _all_ white

men. It may be dim to many now, but it is true as God's providence, that

whether it be in our Union, or out of it, we can no longer exist side by

side with a state of society in which it is shamelessly proclaimed that

labor, man's holiest and noblest attribute, is a disgrace; that the

negro is the standard of the mudsill, and that the state must be based

on an essentially degraded, sunken class, whether white or black. Yet we

might for the sake of peace have long borne with all this, and yielded

to the old lie-based 'isothermal' cant, had it not resulted, as it

inevitably must, in building up the most miserable, insolent, and

arrogant pseudo aristocracy which ever made the name of aristocracy

ridiculous, not excepting that of the court of the sable Emperor

FAUSTIN of St. Domingo. It is all very well to talk of Southern

rights; but humanity and progress, or, if you will, law and order,

industry and capital, have their rights also, aye, and their manifest

destiny too, and no one can deny that; reason as we may, or concede as

much as we will, there the facts are--the principal being the utter

impossibility of a slave-aristocracy--rotted to the core with theories

now exploded through the civilized world--existing either in or out of a

neighboring republic in which freedom

'Careers with thunder-speed along.'

So we stand at the parting of the ways. But the problem is half solved

already. The year 1861 closes leaving it clear as noon-day that

emancipation in the Border States is a foregone conclusion, and that,

reduced to the cotton belt, it can never become a preponderating

national influence. As for the details of settlement, calmly considered,

they present no real difficulty to the man who realizes the enormous

industrial and recuperative energies of this country.

'What are we to do with one or two million of free blacks?' asks one. A

few years ago, when it was proposed to banish all free persons of color

from Maryland, a cry of alarm went up lest Baltimore alone should be

deprived of fifteen thousand of 'the best servants in the world.' 'How

shall we ever pay for those who may be offered for sale to us, if we

resolve to pay for their slaves all Southerners who may take the oath of

allegiance?' Eight days' expenses of the present war would pay more than

the market price for all the slaves in Maryland! But these objections

are childish. Right against them rises a tremendous, inevitable destiny,

which _must_ crush all before it. So much for 1861.

We would urge no measure in this or any other relation which shall not

have received the fullest endorsement of two thirds of the loyal

American people. As regards all foreign interference, let it never be

forgotten that public opinion after all prevails in all Western Europe,

and that this would long hesitate ere it committed a national reputation

to an endorsement of the Southern Confederacy. It is apparent from the

authentic and shameless avowals of the Southern press that Mr.

SLIDELL, the cut-short ambassador, was authorized to solicit a

French protectorate of LOUIS NAPOLEON,--to such incredible

baseness has slave 'independence' sunk,--and, as we write, much

discussion is waged whether England will take in ill part our arrest of

a man charged with such a monstrous mission! Let England imagine herself

dependent on such a protectorate for her cotton, and the thought may

possibly occur that it would have been better to have sided at once

openly and squarely with the North. But John Bull is strangely changed

in these times, and Yankee protection is inconceivably more awful to him

than the slavery with which he has been for twenty years so much

disgusted.

'The heart it pincheth sore,

But the pocket pinches more.'

And now with the New Year. Amid red-flashing war and wild strivings we

look bravely and hopefully forward into the future, and see amid these

storms blue sky rifts and golden sun gleams. Already strong and

practical advances in education, in political economy, in industry, in

all that is healthier and sounder in life, are beginning to manifest

themselves. This country can be in nothing put back by this struggle, in

no wise weakened or injured. It is our hope and will that in these

columns some share of the good work may be honestly carried out. We wish

to speak under the most vital American influences to the American

people, ambitious of being nothing more nor less than soundly national

in all things. We see a new time forming, new ideas rising, and would

give it and them a voice in such earnest and energetic tones as the

people love. We call not only for the matured thought, but also for the

young mind of the country, and beg every man and woman who entertains

vigorous and practical ideas to come out boldly and speak freely. Think

nobly, write rapidly! Remember that every letter printed in these times

will take its place in history. The forgotten comment of the moment will

rise up in after years to be honored perhaps as the right word in the

right place. The day is coming when the songs and sentences of this

great struggle will be garnered up into literary treasuries, pass into

household words, and confer honor on the children of those who penned

them. Lay hand to the work, all you who have aught to say, aid us to

become a medium for the time, and honor yourselves by your utterances.

There are a thousand reforms, innumerable ideas fit for the day, ready

to bloom forth. Write and publish; the public is listening. Now is the

time, if it ever was, to develop an American character, to show the

world what treasures of life, strength and originality this country

contains. Beyond the old conventional _belles lettres_ and æsthetic

scholarship which limited us in peace, lies a fair land, a wilderness it

may be, but one bearing beautiful, unknown flowers, and strange but

golden fruits, which are well worthy a garden. Let all who know of these

bring them in. The time has come.

We have been questioned from many of the highest sources as to the

future tendency and scope of our magazine. Let us say then, briefly,

that we hope to make a bold step forward, presenting in our columns

contributions characterized by variety, vigor, and originality, to be

written by men who are fully up with the times and endeavoring to

advance in all things. In a word, we shall do our best to give it

exuberant _life_--such as the country and age require. We shall advocate

the holy cause of the UNION with might and main, and leave no

means whatever neglected to urge the most vigorous prosecution of this

war, until the sacred principles of liberty as transmitted to us by our

forefathers have been fully recognized and re-established. Believing in

Emancipation, subject to the will of the majority and the action of the

administration, we shall still welcome to our pages the properly

expressed views of _every_ sound 'Union man' or woman on this or other

subjects, however differing from our own. We shall urge the fullest

development of education as the great basis of future social progress,

and shall have faith in making woman's intellect and labor as available

as possible in all respects. We shall hold to the belief that in

constant industrial development, the increase of capital, and the

harmony of interests between these, lies the material salvation of the

country, and that labor in every form should be continually ennobled and

socially dignified.

We shall, moreover, look with true love to all that art and beauty in

their manifold forms can supply to render life lovely and pleasant, and

welcome all that can be written in their illustration. Our columns will

never be deficient in tales, poetry and sketches, and that nothing may

be neglected, we shall always devote full room to genial gossip with the

reader, and to such original humors, quips, jests and anecdotes as

chance or the kindness of correspondents may supply. And we would here

entreat all our readers to be good friends and at home with us;

regarding the editorial department as a place of cheerful welcome for

anything which they may choose to commune on; in which all confidences

will be kept, and where all courtesies will be honorably acknowledged.

We have received most abundant and cordial promises of assistance and

support in our effort to maintain a thoroughly spirited, 'wide-awake,'

and vigorous American magazine, from the very first in the land, and

therefore go on our way rejoicing. We enter into no rivalry, for we take

a well-nigh untrodden field, and shall fail in our dearest hope unless

we present the public with a monthly of a thoroughly original and

'go-ahead' character. We are told that these are bad times; but for our

undertaking, as we understand it, there could be none better--for it

shall be made for the times, 'timely and temporal in all things.'

* * * * *

We are indebted to a correspondent for the following comment on a

subject which has thus far excited not a little wonder, and which, as

the loyal reader may be disposed to add, _should_ excite some degree of

vigorous inquiry among the people at large. Like every other practical

point involved in this struggle, it suggests the mortifying truth that

with all our sacrifices, and all our patriotism, we are as yet in the

conduct of the war far too amiable, and by far too irresolute.

WANTED, A FOUCHÉ FOR WASHINGTON.--It is high time that a

good, sharp detective police officer was set to work to discover

the source of the continued leakage of our government's plans. Of

our late naval flotilla for Beaufort, we are told that 'The

positive destination of our fleet was known even in New Orleans on

the 17th ult.,--weeks before it was known in the North! and extra

troops were dispatched from points south of Charleston to defend

the approaches of that coast.' We are informed that every care was

exercised to prevent the destination of the expedition being made

public; with how much effect the above quoted paragraph fully

demonstrates. In view of this, I repeat that a FOUCHÉ, a

keen detective, is wanted at head-quarters; believing that any man

with half the shrewdness of the celebrated 'Duke of Otranto' would

pin the traitor in less than twenty-four hours. That such a man can

easily be found, any one who has learned what American detectives

have done, can readily believe. Active, intelligent, and wide

awake, the American who by necessity takes up this life, brings to

bear upon his investigations the shrewdness of a savage, the

tenacity of an Englishman, and, in a modified degree, the _aplomb_

of a Parisian. No one can read POE'S 'Murder of the Rue

Morgue' without recognizing at a glance the latent talent that

would have made of the cloudy poet a brilliant policeman, and would

have won for him the ducal fortune without the empty title. If we

must handle the Southern mutineers in their Rebelutionary war with

a velvet glove, let there be an iron hand inside, worked by the

high-pressure power of public indignation at their treachery and

faithlessness. We should stop this leakage of our plans, cost what

it may, and the traitorous Southern correspondent meet the

execration of ARNOLD, and the fate of ANDRÉ. The

iron hand should stop the treacherous pen, should choke the wagging

tongue. The North demands it.

And yet again, since the above was penned, we learn that it has been

ascertained by a balloon reconnaissance that a projected flank movement,

planned by General McCLELLAN and confided to a very limited number, had

been completely anticipated--indicating the basest treachery in a high

quarter. Very agreeable this to all interested in the war! And what does

it mean?

It means that Washington, and not Washington alone, but the entire

North, needs purging and purifying from most injurious influences. There

are traitors among us everywhere--where two or three are gathered

together will be one who sneers at Northern successes, smiles at

Southern victory, and is a traitor at heart--ready to be a spy if

needed.

No wonder that warm friends of the Union sometimes burst out into

indignant remonstrance and fierce complaint at such toleration!

Still, we must look at the matter philosophically; rather in sorrow than

in anger, for thus only can we correct the evil. There is a large number

of well-meaning people, especially in Washington, who have lived only

for and in a society in which Southern influence greatly predominated.

Familiar with the wildest excitement of politics, yet accustomed to

regard the leaders of all parties as equally unprincipled, and only

persuaded of the single social fact, that it is highly respectable to

own slaves, they can not see, even in the horrors of war, anything more

than the old excitement, in which shrewd and wily politicians continue

to pull wires. And in many other places besides Washington do the voices

of pleasant interests, or the echoes of pleasant memories, recall old

friendships or old ties. The head may be patriotic and union-loving and

at war with the South, but the heart is peaceful and clings to ancient

memories.

Now, if there is anything, dear reader, which is allied to real

goodness, it is this very same soft-heartedness which we find it so hard

to thoroughly condemn, even in such a case as that of the good Scotch

clergyman, who pitied and prayed for 'the poor auld deevil' himself. But

here it is that the 'gallant Southron' has the advantage over us. No

lingering love for Northern friends of olden time, no kindly regard for

by-gone intimacies, flashes up from the darkened abyss of 'Dixey.' And,

to be frank and fair, reader, does it not seem to you that while the

business in hand is literal _fighting_, not without much 'battle, murder

and sudden death,' it would be at least respectful to the awful destiny

of the hour to treat its ways seriously?

But let it foam and surge on, the time is coming when the great stream

of Northern freedom will purify itself from all the foul stains of its

old stagnation. Perhaps years may be required, but this we know,--that

the dam has been broken away at last, and that now the glad torrent

whirls bravely onward in sparkling young life. For at length the time is

coming when a healthy _Northern_ sentiment shall make itself felt, where

of old it was carefully excluded, and the fresh breeze from the Northern

pines shall purify the sickly air. They will pass away, these of the old

generation--there will arise better ones to take their place, and all

shall be changed.

Meanwhile, for all our late great victories and advances, let us be

thankful! not forgetting the smaller crumbs of comfort--as, for

instance, the capture of SLIDELL, MASON and Co., which a friend

has kindly recorded for your benefit, most excellent reader, in the

following chapter:--

CHRONICLES OF SECESSIA.

CHAPTER I.

Now it came to pass in the first year of the great Rebellion

In the land of Secessia, whose men were men of Belial, hard of heart,

and inflamed with exceeding great wrath against the children of the

North, and against all people who walked in the way of truth and

justice:

Meditating evil from the first mint-julep before breakfast, even unto

the last nip of corn whisky before retiring;--

In the isles of the South, and on the firm land, where COTTON was king,

and JEFFERSON, whose surname was DAVIS, was his prophet; where BENJAMIN,

the finder of stray watches and spoons, and FLOYD, the spoiler, were

priests--Oh, my soul, enter thou not into their counsels!--

Lo! it came to pass that there arose a great cry from among the people;

A great and vehement cry, a wailing and roaring as of many of the

chivalry when they burn with strong drink at quarter races, or smite

with bowie-knives in a free fight around the court-house:

The cry of many women and children, to say nothing of editors,

politicians, dirt-eaters, and negro auctioneers:

Saying, 'Lo! these many days have we been closed up by the Yankees, even

like unto a pint of Bourbon in an exceedingly tight-corked bottle, so

that nothing may go out or in, and who shall say what may be the end

thereof?

'Since the blockade presseth sorely upon our ports, the merchandise of

many lands cometh not therein, and we are entirely out of groceries.

'Having neither balm nor myrrh, spices nor tea, coffee nor brandy.

'Quinine is not among us, neither have we cheese, shoes, sugar,

jack-knives, cigars, patent medicines, glue, tenpenny nails, French

gloves, pens or ink, dye-stuffs, nor raisins.

'Clothes are exceeding scarce, for, lo! we are becoming an extremely

ragged and seedy generation; our toes stick out through our last year's

boots, neither is there any one among us who knoweth enough to make the

first principle of a brogan.

'For all these things were made or imported by the Yankees afore-time,

even since the days of our fathers, and we are too proud to defile our

hands with such base labor.

'Shall we, too, be as dogs cobbling shoes, or as the heathen who sell

rat-traps, peddle milk-pails, and keep Thanksgiving?

'Lo! the kings of the earth see us with scorn; those who sit in high

places wag their heads, and say we are naught, yea, polluted in our

inheritance.

'And the _Times_ will declare that we sit in ashes; even the _Moniteur_

will say that we devour dust, and the _Zeitungs_ of all Germany, even

the press of the Philistines, will proclaim that we are utterly fallen.

'Now let there be a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together,

to settle this business.

'Let there be ambassadors--men of subtle tongue, cunning in

counsel--chosen to go forth; yea, let them be equipped in fine raiment,

having bran-new coats to confer honor and glory upon us, with

secretaries and assistant secretaries, sub-secretaries and

deputy-assistant sub-secretaries,--even these having their servants and

servants' servants,--lo, the least among them shall have his underling,

and so on _ad infinitum_.

'And we, albeit poor, will lavish gold out of the bag, and weigh silver

in the balance, and hire a goldsmith, who shall bedeck them exceeding

fine, so that the princes and potentates shall fall down before them,

yea, shall worship.

'Then, when our great embassy cometh, and the princes inquire of the

blockade, lo, our messengers shall laugh and say, "Go to!--it is naught,

it hath passed away, and is bosh."'

'"Are we not here, ready to declare the end from the beginning, and

from ancient times, even of CALHOUN, the things that are not

yet done, saying, 'our counsel shall stand?' Verily, it takes us, and we

are the original Jacobs, having no connection with the bogus concern

over the way."

'And they shall cotton to us, and we unto them; and we will trade our

tobacco for their wines, and _Pro Baccho Tobacco_ shall be written in

all the high places.'