Mary Read was the illegitimate daughter of an Englishwoman, who brought

her up as a boy, after revealing to her the secret of her origin,

apparently wishing to protect her against the mischances which befell

herself. She was first a footman, then a sailor on board a man-of-war;

afterwards she served with great bravery in Flanders in a regiment of

infantry. Then she entered a cavalry regiment, where she fell deeply in

love with a comrade, and her woman's nature awoke. Obeying the

uncontrollable instinct, she modestly revealed her sex to him, and was

married with great _éclat_, after he had sought in vain, repelled by her

high conduct, to make her less than wife. He died soon after, and the

Peace of Ryswick compelled her to assume her male attire again and seek

employment. She went before the mast in a vessel bound for the West

Indies, which was taken by English pirates, with whom she afterwards

enjoyed the benefit of a royal proclamation pardoning all pirates who

submitted within a limited period. Their money gave out, and they

enlisted under a privateer captain to cruise against the Spaniards; but

the men, finding a favorable opportunity, took the vessel from the

officers, and commenced their old trade. Mary was as brave as any in

boarding Spanish craft, pistol in hand, to clear the decks; no peril

made her falter, but she was disarmed again by love in the person of a

fine young pirate of superior mind and grace. She made a friend of him,

revealed her sex, and married him. Her husband had a falling-out with a

comrade, and a duel impended. Torn with love and dread, she managed to

pick a quarrel with his antagonist, appointed a meeting an hour before

the one which her husband expected, and was lucky enough to postpone the

latter indefinitely. At her trial in Jamaica, she would have escaped

through the compassion of the court, if some one had not deposed that

she often deliberately defended piracy with the argument that pirates

were fortunately amenable to capital punishment, and this was a

restraint to cowards, without which a thousand rascals who passed for

honest people, but who did nothing but pillage widows and orphans and

defraud their neighbors, would rush into a more honorable profession,

the ocean would be covered with this _canaille_, and the ruin of

commerce would involve that of piracy. She died in prison of a fever.

Ann Bonny was born in Cork. She was of a truculent disposition, and the

murdering part of piracy was much to her taste. When her husband was led

out to execution, the special favor was granted of an interview with

her; but her only benediction was,--"I'm sorry to find ye in this state;

if ye had fought like a man, ye would not be seein' yerself hung like a

dog."

But what could angels themselves have done to make Captain Teach

presentable in the best society? _Blackbeard_ was his _sobriquet_, for

he had one flowing over his chest which patriarchs might be forgiven for

coveting. The hair of his head was tastefully done up with ribbons, and

inframed his truculent face. When he went into a fight, three pairs of

pistols hung from a scarf, and two slow-matches, alight and projecting

under his hat, glowed above his cruel eyes. Certainly, the light of

battle was not in his case a metaphor.

On board his vessel, one day, Captain Teach, just combing upon

strong-water, summoned his crew. "Go to, now, let us make a hell," he

cried, "and get a little seasoned. We'll find who can stand it longest."

Thereupon they all went down into the hold, which he had carefully

battened down; then he lighted sundry pots of sulphur, and showed

superior qualifications for the future by smoking them all out.

On the day of his last combat, when advised to confide to his wife where

his money was hid, he refused, saying that only he and the Devil knew

where it was, and the survivor was to have it.

Whenever these English pirates found a clergyman, they acted as if

pillaging had been only a last resort, owing to the scarcity of that

commodity in those seas. Captain Roberts took a vessel which had on

board a body of English troops with their chaplain, destined for

garrison-duty. His crew went into ecstasies of delight, as if they had

separated themselves from mankind and incurred atrocious suspicions from

their desire to seek for religious persons in all places. They wanted

nothing but a chaplain; they had never wanted anything else; he must

join them; he would have nothing to do but to pray and make the punch.

As he steadily refused, they reluctantly parted with him; but, smitten

with his firmness, they retained of his effects nothing but three

prayer-books and a corkscrew.

These were but common villains. The genuine _Flibustier_ mingled

national hatred with his avarice, and harried the Spanish coasts with a

sense of being the avenger of old affronts, at least the divine

instrument of his country's honest instincts, whose duty it was to smite

and spoil, as if the Armada were yet upon the seas as the Inquisition

was upon the land. Frenchmen and Englishmen, Huguenot and Dutch

Calvinists, Willis, Warner, Montbar the Exterminator, Levasseur,

Lolonois, Henry Morgan, Coxon and Sharp, Bartholomew the Portuguese,

Rock the Dutchman, were representative men. They gave a villanous

expression, and an edge which avarice whetted, to the religious

patriotism of their countrymen. The sombre and deadly prejudices which

lay half torpid in their cage at home escaped from restraint in these

men, and suddenly acted out their proper nature on the highways of the

world.

We have no space to record particular deeds and cruelties. The stories

of the exploits of the _Flibustiers_ show that their outlaw-life had

developed all the powerful traits which make pioneering or the

profession of arms so illustrious. Audacity, cunning, great endurance,

tenacity of purpose, all the character of the organizing nations whence

they sprang, appeared in them so stained by murder and bestiality of

every kind, that the impression made by their career is revolting, and

gets no mitigation from their better qualities. They were generous to

each other, and scrupulously just; but it was for the sake of

strengthening their hands against mankind. They fought against the

enemies of their respective nations with all the fiendishness of popular

hate that has broken loose from popular restraints and civilizing checks

and has become a beast. Commerce was nothing to them but a convenience

for plunder; a voyaging ship was an oasis in the mid-waste on which they

swarmed for an orgy of avarice and gluttony; the cities of the Spanish

Main were hives of wealth and women to be overturned and rifled, and

their mother-country a retreat where the sanctimonious old age of a few

survivors of these successful crimes could display their money and their

piety, and perhaps a titled panel on their coach. Henry Morgan was

knighted, and made a good end in the Tower of London as a political

prisoner. Pierre le Grand, the first _Flibustier_ who took a ship,

retired to France with wealth and consideration. Captain Avery, who had

an immense fame, was the subject of a drama entitled "The Happy Pirate,"

which inoculated many a prentice-lad with cutlasses and rollicking

ferocity. Others became the agents of easy cabinets who always winked at

buccaneering, because it so often saved them the expense of war. What

gift or place would a slave-holding cabinet, or a Southern Confederacy,

have thought too dear to bestow upon Captain Walker, whose criminal acts

were feeding the concealed roots of the Great Conspiracy, if his murder

and arson had become illustrious by success?

The _Flibustiers_ were composed of many nations. The Buccaneers were

mostly French. Their head-quarters, or principal _boucans_, upon San

Domingo, were on the peninsula of Samana, at Port Margot, Savanna Brulée

near Gonaives, and the landing-place of Mirebalais. The Spaniards gained

at first several advantages over them by cutting off the couples which

were engaged in chasing the wild cattle. This compelled the Buccaneers

to associate in larger bands, and to add Spaniards to their list of

game. The word _massacre_ on the maps of the island marks places where

sanguinary surprises were effected by either party; but the Spaniards

lost more blood than their wily antagonists, and were compelled to

abandon all their settlements on the northern and northeastern coasts

and to fall back upon San Domingo and their other towns. The

_Flibustiers_ blockaded their rivers, intercepted the vessels of

slave-traders of all nations, made prizes of the cargoes, and sold them

to the French of the rising western colony, to the English at Jamaica,

or among the other islands, wherever a contraband speculation could be

made. This completed the ruin of Spanish San Domingo; for the

Government, crippled by land- and sea-fights with English, French, and

Dutch, was unable to protect its colonies. It is very strange to notice

this sudden weakness of the nation which was lately so domineering; the

causes which produced it have been stated elsewhere[13] with great

research and power.

The Spaniards had made a few settlements in the western part of the

island, the principal one of which was Yaguana, or Leogane. They were

too far from the eastern population to be successfully defended or

succored, in case of the attacks which were constantly expected after

Drake's expedition. In 1592, the town of Azua was taken and destroyed by

an English force under Christopher Newport, who was making war against

the Spaniards on his own account. He afterwards attacked Yaguana, was at

first repulsed, but took it by night and burned it to the ground. In

consequence of this, all the western settlements were abandoned; and not

a Spaniard remained in that part of the island after 1606. Cruisers of

other nations seized the ports for their private convenience.

A brief outline will suffice to conduct us to the secure establishment

of the French in Western San Domingo. Tortuga was attacked by the

Spaniards in 1638; the Buccaneers were surprised, put to the sword, and

scattered. A few joined their brethren in San Domingo. Their

discomfiture was thought to be so complete that no garrison was left

upon Tortuga. At the same time the Spaniards organized bands of fifty

men each, called _la cinquantaine_ by the French Buccaneers, to serve as

a kind of rural police to hunt down the latter and exterminate them. For

safety the French collected, and put at their head Willis, an

Englishman, who had just then appeared with two or three hundred men,

with the view of joining those of his countrymen who were Buccaneers. He

led them back to Tortuga, and threw up some rude works to command the

harbor. But the national antipathies soon appeared, on the occasion of

some encroachment of Willis, whose countrymen were the more numerous

party. The French despatched secret agents to St. Christophe, who made

it clear to M. de Poincy, the Governor of that island, that the English

could be easily dispossessed by a small force attacking them from

without, while the French rose within. The Governor thought it was a

good opportunity to weed the Huguenots, who were always making trouble

about religious matters, out of his colony; he did not hesitate,

therefore, to cooperate with the outlaws for so nice a game as driving

out the English by getting rid of his heretics. The operation was

intrusted to M. Levasseur, a brave and well-instructed Huguenot officer,

who took with him about a hundred men. Willis decamped at their first

summons, knowing the temper of his French subjects; and Levasseur

landed, and immediately began to fortify a platform-rock which rose only

a few paces from the water's edge. This he intrenched, surrounding an

open square capable of accommodating three or four hundred men. A

never-failing spring gushed from the rock for the supply of a garrison.

From the middle of this platform there rose conveniently another rock

thirty feet high, with scarped sides, upon which he built a block-house

for himself and the ammunition, communicating with the platform by a

movable ladder of iron. He made the place so formidable as a

buccaneering centre that the Spaniards resolved to attack it. They tried

it at first from the sea, but, being well battered, retired and

disembarked six hundred men by night to make a land-attack. They were

defeated, with the loss of a hundred men.

Levasseur appears to have grown arrogant with his success. He began to

abuse and persecute all the Catholics, burned their chapel, and drove

away a priest. He had stocks set up, made of iron, which he called his

Hell, and the fort where he kept it, Purgatory. Du Tertre says that he

wanted to make of Tortuga a little Geneva. He disavowed the authority of

M. de Poincy, and when the latter demanded restitution of a _Nôtre Dame_

of silver which the _Flibustiers_ had taken from a Spanish vessel, he

sent a model of it, constructed of wood, with the message that Catholics

were too spiritual to attach any value to the material, but as for

himself, he had a liking for the metal. Levasseur was assassinated by

two of his captains after a reign of a dozen years.

The next Governor sent by De Poincy to Tortuga was a Catholic, the

Chevalier Fontenay. The religion of this stronghold changed, but not its

habits. The Spaniards planned a second attack upon it in 1653, and

succeeded by dragging a couple of light cannon up the mountain so as to

command the donjon built by Levasseur. The French took refuge upon the

coast of San Domingo, where they waited for an opportunity to repossess

their little island. This soon followed upon an application made by De

Rausset, one of Levasseur's old comrades, to the French West India

Company for a sufficient force to drive out the Spaniards. De Rausset's

plan succeeded, Tortuga passed permanently into French hands, and the

Spaniards confined themselves for the future to annoying the new

colonies of Buccaneers which overflowed upon San Domingo. But their

efforts disappear after a terrible defeat inflicted upon them in 1665,

which the _Flibustiers_ followed up by the sack and destruction of

Santiago, the town second in importance to San Domingo. Henceforth the

history of the island belongs to France.

[To be continued.]

[Footnote 6: This musket was afterwards called _fusil boucanier_. _Fusil

demi-boucanier_ was the same kind, with a shorter barrel.]

[Footnote 7: _Histoire des Avanturiers Flibustiers, avec la Vie, les

Moeurs, et les Coutumes des Boucaniers_, par A.O. Oexmelin, who went out

to the West Indies as a poor _Engagé_, and became a Buccaneer. Four

Volumes. New Edition, printed in 1744: Vol. III., containing the Journal

of a Voyage made with _Flibustiers_ in the South Sea in 1685, by Le

Sieur Ravenau de Lussan; and Vol. IV., containing a History of English

pirates, with the Lives of two Female Pirates, Mary Read and Ann Bonny,

and Extracts from Pirate-Codes: translated from the English of Captain

Charles Johnson.--Charlevoix, _Histoire de St. Domingue_, Vols. III. and

IV.--_The History of the Bucaniers of America, from the First Original

down to this Time; written in several Languages, and now collected into

One Volume._ Third Edition, London, 1704: containing Portraits of all

the Celebrated _Flibustiers,_ and Plans of some of their

Land-Attacks.--_Nouveaux Voyages aux Isles Françoises de l'Amérique_,

par le Père Labat, 1724, Tom. V, pp. 228-230. See also Archenholtz.]

[Footnote 8: Not to be confounded with the Tortugas, the westernmost

islands of the Florida Keys (_Cayos_, Spanish for rocks, shoals, or

islets).]

[Footnote 9: Charlevoix will have it reversed, and derives _flibustier_

from _freebooter;_ but this English word is not old enough to have been

a vagrom in those seas at that time. Webster derives it from the Dutch

_Vrijbuiter;_ but that and the corresponding German word were themselves

derived. Schoelcher says that it is a corruption of an English word,

_fly-boater_, one who manages a fly-boat; and he adds,--"Our _flibot_, a

small and very fast craft, draws its origin from the English _fly-boat,

bateau mouche, bateau volant_." But this is only a kind of pun. Perhaps

the Dutch named it so, not from its swiftness, but from its resemblance,

with its busy oars and darting motions, to a slender-legged fly. There

appears to be no ground for saying that the boat was so called because

it first came into use upon the river Vlie in Holland. It might have

been a boat used by the inhabitants of Vlieland, a town on the island of

the same name, north of Texel. _Freebooter_ is such a good word for

_flibustier_ that it was easy to accuse it of the parentage.]

[Footnote 10: Pinnaces of five or six tons, which could be packed on

shipboard in pieces and put together when wanted, were built in the

reign of Elizabeth. The name is of Spanish origin, from the pine used

for material.]

[Footnote 11: See a contract of this kind in _Histoire Générale des

Antilles_, Du Tertre, Tom. I. p. 464.]

[Footnote 12: Bancroft's _United States_, Vol. I. p. 14.]

[Footnote 13: Buckle's _History of Civilization_, Vol. II. chap. 1.]

A COMPLAINT OF FRIENDS.

If things would not run into each other so, it would be a thousand times

easier and a million times pleasanter to get on in the world. Let the

sheepiness be set on one side and the goatiness on the other, and

immediately you know where you are. It is not necessary to ask that

there be any increase of the one or any diminution of the other, but

only that each shall preempt its own territory and stay there. Milk is

good, and water is good, but don't set the milk-pail under the pump.

Pleasure softens pain, but pain embitters pleasure; and who would not

rather have his happiness concentrated into one memorable day that shall

gleam and glow through a lifetime, than have it spread out over a dozen

comfortable, commonplace, humdrum forenoons and afternoons, each one as

like the others as two peas in a pod? Since the law of compensation

obtains, I suppose it is the best law for us; but if it had been left

with me, I should have made the clever people rich and handsome, and

left poverty and ugliness to the stupid people; because--don't you

see?--the stupid people won't know they are ugly, and won't care if they

are poor, but the clever people will be hampered and tortured. I would

have given the good wives to the good husbands, and made drunken men

marry drunken women. Then there would have been one family exquisitely

happy, instead of two struggling against misery. I would have made the

rose-stem downy, and put all the thorns on the thistles. I would have

gouged out the jewel from the toad's head, and given the peacock the

nightingale's voice, and not set everything so at half and half.

But that is the way it is. We find the world made to our hand. The wise

men marry the foolish virgins, and the splendid virgins marry dolts, and

matters in general are so mixed up that the choice lies between nice

things about spoiled and vile things that are not so bad after all, and

it is hard to tell sometimes which you like best or which you loathe

least.

I expect to lose every friend I have in the world by the publication of

this paper--except the dunces who are impaled in it. They will never

read it, and if they do, will never suspect I mean them; while the

sensible and true friends, who do me good and not evil all the days of

their lives, will think I am driving at their noble hearts, and will at

once haul off and leave me inconsolable. Still I am going to write it.

You must open the safety-valve once in a while, even if the steam does

whiz and shriek, or there will be an explosion, which is fatal, while

the whizzing and shrieking are only disagreeable.

Doubtless friendship has its advantages and its pleasures; doubtless

hostility has its isolations and its revenges: still, if called upon to

choose once for all between friends and foes, I think, on the whole, I

should cast my vote for the foes. Twenty enemies will not do you the

mischief of one friend. Enemies you always know where to find. They are

in fair and square perpetual hostility, and you keep your armor on and

your sentinels posted; but with friends you are inveigled into a false

security, and, before you know it, your honor, your modesty, your

delicacy are scudding before the gales. Moreover, with your friend you

can never make reprisals. If your enemy attacks you, you can always

strike back and hit hard. You are expected to defend yourself against

him to the top of your bent. He is your legal opponent in honorable

warfare. You can pour hot-shot into him with murderous vigor; and the

more he wriggles, the better you feel. In fact, it is rather refreshing

to measure swords once in a while with such a one. You like to exert

your power and keep yourself in practice. You do not rejoice so much in

overcoming your enemy as in overcoming. If a marble statue could show

fight, you would just as soon fight it; but as it cannot, you take

something that can, and something, besides, that has had the temerity to

attack you, and so has made a lawful target of itself. But against your

friend your hands are tied. He has injured you. He has disgusted you. He

has infuriated you. But it was most Christianly done. You cannot hurl a

thunderbolt, or pull a trigger, or lisp a syllable, against those

amiable monsters who with tenderest fingers are sticking pins all over

you. So you shut fast the doors of your lips, and inwardly sigh for a

good, stout, brawny, malignant foe, who, under any and every

circumstance, will design you harm, and on whom you can lavish your

lusty blows with a hearty will and a clear conscience.

Your enemy keeps clear of you. He neither grants nor claims favors. He

awards you your rights,--no more, no less,--and demands the same from

you. Consequently there is no friction. Your friend, on the contrary, is

continually getting himself tangled up with you "because he is your

friend." I have heard that Shelley was never better pleased than when

his associates made free with his coats, boots, and hats for their own

use, and that he appropriated their property in the same way. Shelley

was a poet, and perhaps idealized his friends. He saw them, probably, in

a state of pure intellect. I am not a poet; I look at people in the

concrete. The most obvious thing about my friends is their avoirdupois;

and I prefer that they should wear their own cloaks and suffer me to

wear mine. There is no neck in the world that I want my collar to span

except my own. It is very exasperating to me to go to my bookcase and

miss a book of which I am in immediate and pressing need, because an

intimate friend has carried it off without asking leave, on the score of

his intimacy. I have not, and do not wish to have, any alliance that

shall abrogate the eighth commandment. A great mistake is lying round

loose hereabouts,--a mistake fatal to many friendships that did run

well. The common fallacy is, that intimacy dispenses with the necessity

of politeness. The truth is just the opposite of this. The more points

of contact there are, the more danger of friction there is, and the more

carefully should people guard against it. If you see a man only once a

month, it is not of so vital importance that you do not trench on his

rights, tastes, or whims. He can bear to be crossed or annoyed

occasionally. If he does not have a very high regard for you, it is

comparatively unimportant, because your paths are generally so diverse.

But you and the man with whom you dine every day have it in your power

to make each other exceedingly uncomfortable. A very little dropping

will wear away rock, if it only keep at it. The thing that you would not

think of, if it occurred only twice a year, becomes an intolerable

burden when it happens twice a day. This is where husbands and wives run

aground. They take too much for granted. If they would but see that they

have something to gain, something to save, as well as something to

enjoy, it would be better for them; but they proceed on the assumption

that their love is an inexhaustible tank, and not a fountain depending

for its supply on the stream that trickles into it. So, for every little

annoying habit, or weakness, or fault, they draw on the tank without

being careful to keep the supply open, till they awake one morning to

find the pump dry, and, instead of love, at best, nothing but a cold

habit of complacence. On the contrary, the more intimate friends become,

whether married or unmarried, the more scrupulously should they strive

to repress in themselves everything annoying, and to cherish both in

themselves and each other everything pleasing. While each should draw on

his love to neutralize the faults of his friend, it is suicidal to draw

on his friend's love to neutralize his own faults. Love should be

cumulative, since it cannot be stationary. If it does not increase, it

decreases. Love, like confidence, is a plant of slow growth, and of most

exotic fragility. It must be constantly and tenderly cherished. Every

noxious and foreign element must be carefully removed from it. All

sunshine, and sweet airs, and morning dews, and evening showers must

breathe upon it perpetual fragrance, or it dies into a hideous and

repulsive deformity, fit only to be cast out and trodden under foot of

men, while, properly cultivated, it is a Tree of Life.

Your enemy keeps clear of you not only in business, but in society. If

circumstances thrust him into contact with you, he is curt and

centrifugal. But your friend breaks in upon your "saintly solitude" with

perfect equanimity. He never for a moment harbors a suspicion that he

can intrude, "because he is your friend." So he drops in on his way to

the office to chat half an hour over the latest news. The half-hour

isn't much in itself. If it were after dinner, you wouldn't mind it; but

after breakfast every moment "runs itself in golden sands," and the

break in your time crashes a worse break in your temper. "Are you busy?"

asks the considerate wretch, adding insult to injury. What can you do?

Say yes and wound his self-love forever? But he has a wife and family.

You respect their feelings, smile and smile, and are villain enough to

be civil with your lips, and hide the poison of asps under your tongue,

till you have a chance to relieve your o'ercharged heart by shaking your

fist in impotent wrath at his retreating form. You will receive the

reward of your hypocrisy as you richly deserve, for ten to one he will

drop in again when he comes back from his office, and arrest you

wandering in Dreamland in the beautiful twilight. Delighted to find that

you are neither reading nor writing,--the absurd dolt! as if a man

weren't at work unless he be wielding a sledge-hammer!--he will preach

out, and prose out, and twaddle out another hour of your golden

even-tide, "because he is your friend." You don't care whether he is

judge or jury,--whether he talks sense or nonsense; you don't want him

to talk at all. You don't want him there any way. You want to be alone.

If you don't, why are you sitting there in the deepening twilight? If

you wanted him, couldn't you send for him? Why don't you go out into the

drawing-room, where are music, and lights, and gay people? What right

have I to suppose, that, because you are not using your eyes, you are

not using your brain? What right have I to set myself up as judge of the

value of your time, and so rob you of perhaps the most delicious hour in

all your day, on pretence that it is of no use to you?--take a pound of

flesh clean out of your heart and trip on my smiling way as if I had not

earned the gallows?

And what in Heaven's name is the good of all this ceaseless talk? To

what purpose are you wearied, exhausted, dragged out and out to the very

extreme of tenuity? A sprightly badinage,--a running fire of nonsense

for half an hour,--a tramp over unfamiliar ground with a familiar

guide,--a discussion of something with somebody who knows all about it,

or who, not knowing, wants to learn from you,--a pleasant interchange of

commonplaces with a circle of friends around the fire, at such hours as

you give to society: all this is not only tolerable, but

agreeable,--often positively delightful; but to have an indifferent

person, on no score but that of friendship, break into your sacred

presence, and suck your blood through indefinite cycles of time, is an

abomination. If he clatters on an indifferent subject, you can do well

enough for fifteen minutes, buoyed up by the hope that he will presently

have a fit, or be sent for, or come to some kind of an end. But when you

gradually open to the conviction that _vis inertiae_ rules the hour, and

the thing which has been is that which shall be, you wax listless; your

chariot-wheels drive heavily; your end of the pole drags in the mud, and

you speedily wallow in unmitigated disgust. If he broaches a subject on

which you have a real and deep living interest, you shrink from

unbosoming yourself to him. You feel that it would be sacrilege. He

feels nothing of the sort. He treads over your heart-strings in his

cow-hide brogans, and does not see that they are not whip-cords. He

pokes his gold-headed cane in among your treasures, blind to the fact

that you are clutching both arms around them, that no gleam of flashing

gold may reveal their whereabouts to him. You draw yourself up in your

shell, projecting a monosyllabic claw occasionally as a sign of

continued vitality; but the pachyderm does not withdraw, and you

gradually lower into an indignation,--smothered, fierce, intense.

Why, _why_, WHY will people inundate their unfortunate victims with such

"weak, washy, everlasting floods"? Why will they haul everything out

into the open day? Why will they make the Holy of Holies common and

unclean? Why will they be so ineffably stupid as not to see that there

is that which speech profanes? Why will they lower their drag-nets into

the unfathomable waters, in the vain attempt to bring up your pearls and

gems, whose lustre would pale to ashes in the garish light,--whose only

sparkle is in the deep sea-soundings? _Procul, O procul este, profani!_

Oh, the matchless power of silence! There are words that concentrate in

themselves the glory of a lifetime; but there is a silence that is more

precious than they. Speech ripples over the surface of life, but silence

sinks into its depths. Airy pleasantnesses bubble up in airy, pleasant

words. Weak sorrows quaver out their shallow being and are not. When the

heart is cleft to its core, there is no speech nor language.

Do not now, Messrs. Bores, think to retrieve your characters by coming

into my house and sitting mute for two hours. Heaven forbid that your

blood should be found on my skirts! but I believe I shall kill you, if

you do. The only reason why I have not laid violent hands on you

heretofore is that your vapid talk has operated as a wire to conduct my

electricity to the receptive and kindly earth; but if you intrude upon

my magnetisms without any such life-preserver, your future in this world

is not worth a crossed six-pence. Your silence would break the reed that

your talk but bruised. The only people with whom it is a joy to sit

silent are the people with whom it is a joy to talk. Clear out!

Friendship plays the mischief in the false ideas of constancy which are

generated and cherished in its name, if not by its agency. Your enemies

are intense, but temporary. Time wears off the edge of hostility. It is

the alembic in which offences are dissolved into thin air, and a calm

indifference reigns in their stead. But your friends are expected to be

a permanent arrangement. They are not only a sore evil, but of long

continuance. Adhesiveness seems to be the head and front, the bones and

blood of their creed. It is not the direction of the quality, but the

quality itself, which they swear by. Only stick, it is no matter what

you stick to. Fall out with a man, and you can kiss and be friends as

soon as you like; the recording angel will set it down on the credit

side of his books. Fall in, and you are expected to stay in, _ad

infinitum_, _ad nauseam_. No matter what combination of laws got you

there, there you are, and there you must stay, for better, for worse,

till merciful Death you do part,--or you are--"fickle." You find a man

entertaining for an hour, a week, a concert, a journey, and _presto!_

you are saddled with him forever. What preposterous absurdity! Do but

look at it calmly. You are thrown into contact with a person, and, as in

duty bound, you proceed to fathom him: for every man is a possible

revelation. In the deeps of his soul there may lie unknown worlds for

you. Consequently you proceed at once to experiment on him. It takes a

little while to get your tackle in order. Then the line begins to run

off rapidly, and your eager soul cries out, "Ah! what depth! What

perpetual calmness must be down below! What rest is here for all my

tumult! What a grand, vast nature is this!" Surely, surely, you are on

the high seas. Surely, you will now float serenely down the eternities!

But by-and-by there is a kink. You find, that, though the line runs off

so fast, it does not go down,--it only floats out. A current has caught

it and bears it on horizontally. It does not sink plumb. You have been

deceived. Your grand Pacific Ocean is nothing but a shallow little brook

that you can ford all the year round, if it does not utterly dry up in

the summer heats, when you want it most; or, at best, it is a fussy

little tormenting river, that won't and can't sail a sloop. What are you

going to do about it? You are going to wind up your lead and line,

shoulder your birch canoe as the old sea-kings used, and thrid the deep

forests, and scale the purple hills, till you come to water again, when

you will unroll your lead and line for another essay. Is that

fickleness? What else can you do? Must you launch your bark on the

unquiet stream, against whose pebbly bottom the keel continually grates

and rasps your nerves--simply that your reputation suffer no detriment?

Fickleness? There was no fickleness about it. You were trying an

experiment which you had every right to try. As soon as you were

satisfied, you stopped. If you had stopped sooner, you would have been

unsatisfied. If you had stopped later, you would have been dissatisfied.

It is a criminal contempt of the magnificent possibilities of life not

to lay hold of "God's occasions floating by." It is an equally criminal

perversion of them to cling tenaciously to what was only the

_simulacrum_ of an occasion. A man will toil many days and nights among

the mountains to find an ingot of gold, which, found, he bears home with

infinite pains and just rejoicing; but he would be a fool who should

lade his mules with iron-pyrites to justify his labors, however severe.

Fickleness! what is it, that we make such an ado about it? And what is

constancy, that it commands such usurious interest? The one is a foible

only in its relations. The other is only thus a virtue. "Fickle as the

winds" is our death-seal upon a man; but should we like our winds

un-fickle? Would a perpetual Northeaster lay us open to perpetual

gratitude? or is a soft South gale to be orisoned and vespered

forevermore?

I am tired of this eternal prating of devotion and constancy. It is

senseless in itself and harmful in its tendencies. The dictate of reason

is to treat men and women as we do oranges. Suck all the juice out and

then let them go. Where is the good of keeping the peel and pulp-cells

till they get old, dry, and mouldy? Let them go, and they will help feed

the earth-worms and bugs and beetles who can hardly find existence a

continued banquet, and fertilize the earth which will have you give

before you receive. Thus they will ultimately spring up in new and

beautiful shapes. Clung to with constancy, they stain your knife and

napkin, impart a bad odor to your dining-room, and degenerate into

something that is neither pleasant to the eye nor good for food. I

believe in a rotation of crops, morally and socially, as well as

agriculturally. When you have taken the measure of a man, when you have

sounded him and know that you cannot wade in him more than ankle-deep,

when you have got out of him all that he has to yield for your soul's

sustenance and strength, what is the next thing to be done? Obviously,

pass him on; and turn you "to fresh woods and pastures new." Do you work

him an injury? By no means. Friends that are simply glued on, and don't

grow out of, are little worth. He has nothing more for you, nor you for

him; but he may be rich in juices wherewithal to nourish the heart of

another man, and their two lives, set together, may have an endosmose

and exosmose whose result shall be richness of soil, grandeur of growth,

beauty of foliage, and perfectness of fruit; while you and he would only

have languished into aridity and a stunted crab-tree.

For my part, I desire to sweep off my old friends with the old year and

begin the new with a clean record. It is a measure absolutely necessary.

The snake does not put on his new skin over the old one. He sloughs off

the first, before he dons the second. He would be a very clumsy serpent,

if he did not. One cannot have successive layers of friendships any more

than the snake has successive layers of skins. One must adopt some

system to guard against a congestion of the heart from plethora of

loves. I go in for the much-abused fair-weather, skin-deep, April-shower

friends,--the friends who will drop off, if let alone,--who must be kept

awake to be kept at all,--who will talk and laugh with you as long as it

suits your respective humors and you are prosperous and happy,--the

blessed butterfly-race who flutter about your June mornings, and when

the clouds lower, and the drops patter, and the rains descend, and the

winds blow, will spread their gay wings and float gracefully away to

sunny southern lands where the skies are yet blue and the breezes

violet-scented. They are not only agreeable, but deeply wise. So long as

a man keeps his streamer flying, his sails set, and his hull above

water, it is pleasant to paddle alongside; but when the sails split, the

yards crack, and the keel goes staggering down, by all means paddle off.

Why should you be submerged in his whirlpool? Will he drown any more

easily because you are drowning with him? Lung is lung. He dies from

want of air, not from want of sympathy. When, a poor fellow sits down

among the ashes, the best thing his friends can do is to stand afar off.

Job bore the loss of property, children, health, with equanimity. Satan

himself found his match there; and for all his buffetings, Job sinned

not, nor charged God foolishly. But Job's three friends must needs make

an appointment together to come and mourn with him and to comfort him,

and after this Job opened his mouth, and cursed his day,--and no wonder.

Your friends have an intimate knowledge of you that is astonishing to

contemplate. It is not that they know your affairs, which he who runs

may read, but they know you. From a bit of bone, Cuvier could predicate

a whole animal, even to the hide and hair. Such moral naturalists are

your dear five hundred friends. It seems to yourself that you are

immeasurably reticent. You know, of a certainty, that you project only

the smallest possible fragment of yourself. You yield your universality

to the bond of common brotherhood; but your individualism--what it is

that makes you you--withdraws itself naturally, involuntarily,

inevitably, into the background,--the dim distance which their eyes

cannot penetrate. But, from the fraction which you do project, they

construct another you, call it by your name, and pass it around for the

real, the actual you. You bristle with jest and laughter and wild whims,

to keep them at a distance; and they fancy this to be your every-day

equipment. They think your life holds constant carnival. It is

astonishing what ideas spring up in the heads of sensible people. There

are those who assume that a person can never have had any grief, unless

somebody has died, or he has been disappointed in love,--not knowing

that every avenue of joy lies open to the tramp of pain. They see the

flashing coronet on the queen's brow, and they infer a diamond woman,

not recking of the human heart that throbs wildly out of sight. They see

the foam-crest on the wave, and picture an Atlantic Ocean of froth, and

not the solemn sea that stands below in eternal equipoise. You turn to

them the luminous crescent of your life, and they call it the whole

round globe; and so they love you with a love that is agate, not pearl,

because what they love in you is something infinitely below the highest.

They love you level: they have never scaled your heights nor fathomed

your depths. And when they talk of you as familiarly as if they had

taken out your auricles and ventricles, and turned them inside out, and

wrung them, and shaken them,--when they prate of your transparency and

openness, the abandonment with which you draw aside the curtain and

reveal the inmost thoughts of your heart,--you, who are to yourself a

miracle and a mystery, you smile inwardly, and are content. They are on

the wrong scent, and you may pursue your plans in peace. They are

indiscriminate and satisfied. They do not know the relation of what

appears to what is. If they chance to skirt along the coasts of your

Purple Island, it will be only chance, and they will not know it. You

may close your port-holes, lower your draw-bridge, and make merry, for

they will never come within gun-shot of the "Round Tower of your heart."

There is no such thing as knowing a man intimately. Every soul is, for

the greater part of its mortal life, isolated from every other. Whether

it dwell in the Garden of Eden or the Desert of Sahara, it dwells alone.

Not only do we jostle against the street-crowd unknowing and unknown,

but we go out and come in, we lie down and rise up, with strangers.

Jupiter and Neptune sweep the heavens not more unfamiliar to us than the

worlds that circle our own hearth-stone. Day after day, and year after

year, a person moves by your side; he sits at the same table; he reads

the same books; he kneels in the same church. You know every hair of his

head, every trick of his lips, every tone of his voice; you can tell him

far off by his gait. Without seeing him, you recognize his step, his

knock, his laugh. "Know him? Yes, I have known him these twenty years."

No, you don't know him. You know his gait, and hair, and voice. You know

what preacher he hears, what ticket he voted, and what were his last

year's expenses; but you don't know him. He sits quietly in his chair,

but he is in the temple. You speak to him; his soul comes out into the

vestibule to answer you, and returns,--and the gates are shut; therein

you cannot enter. You were discussing the state of the country; but,

when you ceased, he opened a postern-gate, went down a bank, and

launched on a sea over whose waters you have no boat to sail, no star to

guide. You have loved and reverenced him. He has been your concrete of

truth and nobleness. Unwittingly you touch a secret spring, and a

Blue-Beard Chamber stands revealed. You give no sign; you meet and part

as usual; but a Dead Sea rolls between you two forevermore.

It must be so. Not even to the nearest and dearest can one unveil the

secret place where his soul abideth, so that there shall be no more any

winding ways or hidden chambers; but to your indifferent neighbor, what

blind alleys, and deep caverns, and inaccessible mountains! To him who

"touches the electric chain wherewith you're darkly bound," your soul

sends back an answering thrill. Our little window is opened, and there

is short parley. Your ships speak each other now and then in welcome,

though imperfect communication; but immediately you strike out again

into the great, shoreless sea, over which you must sail forever alone.

You may shrink from the far-reaching solitudes of your heart, but no

other foot than yours can tread them, save those

"That, eighteen hundred years ago, were nailed,

For our advantage, to the bitter cross."

Be thankful that it is so,--that only His eye sees whose hand formed. If

we could look in, we should be appalled at the vision. The worlds that

glide around us are mysteries too high for us. We cannot attain to them.

The naked soul is a sight too awful for man to look at and live. There

are individuals whose topography we would like to know a little better,

and there is danger that we crash against each other while roaming

around in the dark; but, for all that, would we not have the

Constitution broken up. Somebody says, "In heaven there will be no

secrets," which, it seems to me, would be intolerable. (If that were a

revelation from the King of Heaven, of course I would not speak

flippantly of it; but, though towards Heaven we look with reverence and

humble hope, I do not know that Tom, Dick, and Harry's notions of it

have any special claim to our respect.) Such publicity would destroy all

individuality, and undermine the foundations of society.

Clairvoyance--if there be any such thing--always seemed to me a stupid

impertinence. When people pay visits to me, I wish them to come to the

front-door, and ring the bell, and send up their names. I don't wish

them to climb in at the window, or creep through the pantry, or, worst

of all, float through the keyhole, and catch me in undress. So I believe

that in all worlds thoughts will be the subjects of volition,--more

accurately expressed when expression is desired, but just as entirely

suppressed when we will suppression.

After all, perhaps the chief trouble arises from a prevalent confusion

of ideas as to what constitutes a man your friend. Friendship may stand

for that peaceful complacence which you feel towards all well--behaved

people who wear clean collars and use tolerable grammar. This is a very

good meaning, if everybody will subscribe to it. But sundry of these

well-behaved people will mistake your civility and complacence for a

recognition of special affinity, and proceed at once to frame an

alliance offensive and defensive while the sun and the moon shall

endure. Oh, the barnacles that cling to your keel in such waters! The

inevitable result is, that they win your intense rancor. You would feel

a genial kindliness towards them, if they would be satisfied with that;

but they lay out to be your specialty. They infer your innocent little

inch to be the standard-bearer of twenty ells, and goad you to frenzy. I

mean you, you desperate little horror, who nearly dethroned my reason

six years ago! I always meant to have my revenge, and here I impale you

before the public. For three months, you fastened yourself upon me; and

I could not shake you off. What availed it me, that you were an honest

and excellent man? Did I not, twenty times a day, wish you had been a

villain, who had insulted me, and I a Kentucky giant, that I might have

the unspeakable satisfaction of knocking you down? But you added to your

crimes virtue. Villany had no part or lot in you. You were a member of a

church, in good and regular standing; you had graduated with all the

honors worth mentioning; you had not a sin, a vice, or a fault that I

knew of; and you were so thoroughly good and repulsive that you were a

great grief to me. Do you think, you dear, disinterested wretch, that I

have forgotten how you were continually putting yourself to horrible

inconveniences on my account? Do you think I am not now filled with

remorse for the aversion that rooted itself ineradicably in my soul, and

which now gloats over you, as you stand in the pillory where my own

hands have fastened you? But can Nature be crushed forever? Did I not

ruin my nerves, and seriously injure my temper, by the overpowering

pressure I laid upon them to keep them quiet when you were by? Could I

not, by the sense of coming ill through all my quivering frame, presage

your advent as exactly as the barometer heralds the approaching storm?

Those three months of agony are little atoned for by this late

vengeance: but go in peace!

Mysterious are the ways of friendship. It is not a matter of reason or

of choice, but of magnetisms. You cannot always give the premises nor

the argument, but the conclusion is a palpable and stubborn fact. Abana

and Pharpar may be broad, and deep, and blue, and grand; but only in

Jordan shall your soul wash and be clean. A thousand brooks are born of

the sunshine and the mountains: very, very few are they whose flow can

mingle with yours, and not disturb, but only deepen and broaden the

current.

Your friend! Who shall describe him, or worthily paint what he is to

you? No merchant, nor lawyer, nor farmer, nor statesman claims your

suffrage, but a kingly soul. He comes to you from God,--a prophet, a

seer, a revealer. He has a clear vision. His love is reverence. He goes

into the _penetralia_ of your life,--not presumptuously, but with

uncovered head, unsandalled feet, and pours libations at the innermost

shrine. His incense is grateful. For him the sunlight brightens, the

skies grow rosy, and all the days are Junes. Wrapped in his love, you

float in a delicious rest, rocked in the bosom of purple, scented waves.

Nameless melodies sing themselves through your heart. A golden glow

suffuses your atmosphere. A vague, fine ecstasy thrills to the sources

of life, and earth lays hold on heaven. Such friendship is worship. It

elevates the most trifling services into rites. The humblest offices are

sanctified. All things are baptized into a new name. Duty is lost in

joy. Care veils itself in caresses. Drudgery becomes delight. There is

no longer anything menial, small, or servile. All is transformed

"Into something rich and strange."

The homely household-ways lead through beds of spices and orchards of

pomegranates. The daily toil among your parsnips and carrots is plucking

May violets with the dew upon them to meet the eyes you love upon their

first awaking. In the burden and heat of the day you hear the rustling

of summer showers and the whispering of summer winds. Everything is

lifted up from the plane of labor to the plane of love, and a glory

spans your life. With your friend, speech and silence are one,--for a

communion mysterious and intangible reaches across from heart to heart.

The many dig and delve in your nature with fruitless toil to find the

spring of living water: he only raises his wand, and, obedient to the

hidden power, it bends at once to your secret. Your friendship, though

independent of language, gives to it life and light. The mystic spirit

stirs even in commonplaces, and the merest question is an endearment.

You are quiet because your heart is over-full. You talk because it is

pleasant, not because you have anything to say. You weary of terms that

are already love-laden, and you go out into the highways and hedges, and

gather up the rough, wild, wilful words, heavy with the hatreds of men,

and fill them to the brim with honey-dew. All things great and small,

grand or humble, you press into your service, force them to do soldier's

duty, and your banner over them is love.

With such a friendship, presence alone is happiness; nor is absence

wholly void,--for memories, and hopes, and pleasing fancies sparkle

through the hours, and you know the sunshine will come back.

For such friendship one is grateful. No matter that it comes unsought,

and comes not for the seeking. You do not discuss the reasonableness of

your gratitude. You only know that your whole being bows with humility

and utter thankfulness to him who thus crowns you monarch of all realms.

And the kingdom is everlasting. A thin, pale love dies weakly with the

occasion that gave it birth; but such friendship is born of the gods,

and is immortal. Clouds and darkness may sweep around it, but within the

cloud the glory lives undimmed. Death has no power over it. Time cannot

diminish, nor even dishonor annul it. Its direction may have been

unworthy, but itself is eternal. You go back into your solitudes: all is

silent as aforetime, but you cannot forget that a Voice once resounded

there. A Presence filled the valleys and gilded the mountain-tops,

--breathed upon the plains, and they sprang up in lilies

and roses,--flashed upon the waters, and they flowed to spheral

melody,--swept through the forests, and they, too, trembled into song.

And though now the warmth has faded out, though the ruddy tints and

amber clearness have paled to ashen hues, though the murmuring melodies

are dead, and forest, vale, and hill look hard and angular in the sharp

air, you know that it is not death. The fire is unquenched beneath. You

go your way not disconsolate. There needs but the Victorious Voice. At

the touch of the Prince's lips, life shall rise again and be perfected

forevermore.

THE LIFE OF BIRDS.

When one thinks of a bird, one fancies a soft, swift, aimless, joyous

thing, full of nervous energy and arrowy motions,--a song with wings. So

remote from ours their mode of existence, they seem accidental exiles

from an unknown globe, banished where none can understand their

language; and men only stare at their darting, inexplicable ways, as at

the gyrations of the circus. Watch their little traits for hours, and it

only tantalizes curiosity. Every man's secret is penetrable, if his

neighbor be sharp-sighted. Dickens, for instance, can take a poor

condemned wretch, like Fagin, whose emotions neither he nor his reader

has experienced, and can paint him in colors that seem made of the

soul's own atoms, so that each beholder feels as if he, personally, had

been the man. But this bird that hovers and alights beside me, peers up

at me, takes its food, then looks again, attitudinizing, jerking,

flirting its tail, with a thousand inquisitive and fantastic

motions,--although I have power to grasp it in my hand and crush its

life out, yet I cannot gain its secret thus, and the centre of its

consciousness is really farther from mine than the remotest planetary

orbit. "We do not steadily bear in mind," says Darwin, with a noble

scientific humility, "how profoundly ignorant we are of the condition of

existence of every animal."

What "sympathetic penetration" can fathom the life, for instance, of

yonder mysterious, almost voiceless, Humming-Bird, smallest of feathery

things, and loneliest, whirring among birds, insect-like, and among

insects, bird-like, his path untraceable, his home unseen? An image of

airy motion, yet it sometimes seems as if there were nothing joyous in

him. He seems like some exiled pigmy prince, banished, but still regal,

and doomed to wings. Did gems turn to flowers, flowers to feathers, in

that long-past dynasty of the Humming-Birds? It is strange to come upon

his tiny nest, in some gray and tangled swamp, with this brilliant atom

perched disconsolately near it, upon some mossy twig; it is like

visiting Cinderella among her ashes. And from Humming-Bird to Eagle, the

daily existence of every bird is a remote and bewitching mystery.

Pythagoras has been charged, both before and since the days of Malvolio,

with holding that "the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a

fowl,"--that delinquent men must revisit earth as women, and delinquent

women as birds. Malvolio thought nobly of the soul, and in no way

approved his opinion; but I remember that Harriet Rohan, in her

school-days, accepted this, her destiny, with glee. "When I saw the

Oriole," she wrote to me, "from his nest among the plum-trees in the

garden, sail over the air and high above the Gothic arches of the elm, a

stream of flashing light, or watched him swinging silently on pendent

twigs, I did not dream how near akin we were. Or when a Humming-Bird, a

winged drop of gorgeous sheen and gloss, a living gem, poising on his

wings, thrust his dark, slender, honey-seeking bill into the white

blossoms of a little bush beside my window, I should have thought it no

such bad thing to be a bird, even if one next became a bat, like the

colony in our eaves, that dart and drop and skim and skurry, all the

length of moonless nights, in such ecstasies of dusky joy." Was this

weird creature, the bat, in very truth a bird, in some far primeval

time? and does he fancy, in unquiet dreams at nightfall, that he is

one still? I wonder whether he can enjoy the winged brotherhood

into which he has thrust himself,--victim, perhaps, of some rash

quadruped-ambition,--an Icarus doomed forever _not_ to fall.

I think, that, if required, on pain of death, to name instantly the most

perfect thing in the universe, I should risk my fate on a bird's egg.

There is, first, its exquisite fragility of material, strong only by the

mathematical precision of that form so daintily moulded. There is its

absolute purity from external stain, since that thin barrier remains

impassable until the whole is in ruins,--a purity recognized in the

household proverb of "An apple, an egg, and a nut." Then, its range of

tints, so varied, so subdued, and so beautiful,--whether of pure white,

like the Martin's, or pure green, like the Robin's, or dotted and

mottled into the loveliest of browns, like the Red Thrush's, or

aqua-marine, with stains of moss-agate, like the Chipping-Sparrow's, or

blotched with long weird ink-marks on a pale ground, like the Oriole's,

as if it bore inscribed some magic clue to the bird's darting flight and

pensile nest. Above all, the associations and predictions of this little

wonder,--that one may bear home between his fingers all that winged

splendor, all that celestial melody, coiled in mystery within these tiny

walls! Even the chrysalis is less amazing, for its form always preserves

some trace, however fantastic, of the perfect insect, and it is but

moulting a skin; but this egg appears to the eye like a separate unit

from some other kingdom of Nature, claiming more kindred with the very

stones than with feathery existence; and it is as if a pearl opened and

an angel sang.

The nest which is to contain these fair things is a wondrous study also,

from the coarse masonry of the Robin to the soft structure of the

Humming-Bird, a baby-house among nests. Among all created things, the

birds come nearest to man in their domesticity. Their unions are usually

in pairs, and for life; and with them, unlike the practice of most

quadrupeds, the male labors for the young. He chooses the locality of

the nest, aids in its construction, and fights for it, if needful. He

sometimes assists in hatching the eggs. He feeds the brood with

exhausting labor, like yonder Robin, whose winged picturesque day is

spent in putting worms into insatiable beaks, at the rate of one morsel

in every three minutes. He has to teach them to fly, as among the

Swallows, or even to hunt, as among the Hawks. His life is anchored to

his home. Yonder Oriole fills with light and melody the thousand

branches of a neighborhood; and yet the centre for all this divergent

splendor is always that one drooping dome upon one chosen tree. This he

helped to build in May, confiscating cotton as if he were a Union

provost-martial, and singing many songs, with his mouth full of plunder;

and there he watches over his household, all through the leafy June,

perched often upon the airy cradle-edge, and swaying with it in the

summer wind. And from this deep nest, after the pretty eggs are hatched,

will he and his mate extract every fragment of the shell, leaving it,

like all other nests, save those of birds of prey, clean and pure, when

the young are flown. This they do chiefly from an instinct of delicacy;

since wood-birds are not wont to use the same nest a second time, even

if they rear several broods in a season.

The subdued tints and notes which almost always mark the female sex,

among birds,--unlike insects and human beings, of which the female is

often more showy than the male,--seem designed to secure their safety

while sitting on the nest, while the brighter colors and louder song of

the male enable his domestic circle to detect his whereabouts more

easily. It is commonly noticed, in the same way, that ground-birds have

more neutral tints than those which build out of reach. With the aid of

these advantages, it is astonishing how well these roving creatures keep

their secrets, and what sharp eyes are needed to spy out their

habitations,--while it always seems as if the empty last-year's nests

were very plenty. Some, indeed, are very elaborately concealed, as of

the Golden-Crowned Thrush, called, for this reason, the Oven-Bird,--the

Meadow-Lark, with its burrowed gallery among the grass,--and the

Kingfisher, which mines four feet into the earth. But most of the rarer

nests would hardly be discovered, only that the maternal instinct seems

sometimes so overloaded by Nature as to defeat itself, and the bird

flies and chirps in agony, when she might pass unnoticed by keeping

still. The most marked exception which I have noticed is the Red Thrush,

which, in this respect, as in others, has the most high-bred manners

among all our birds: both male and female sometimes flit in perfect

silence through the bushes, and show solicitude only in a sob which is

scarcely audible.

Passing along the shore-path by our lake, one day in June, I heard a

great sound of scuffling and yelping before me, as if dogs were hunting

rabbits or woodchucks. On approaching, I saw no sign of such

disturbances, and presently a Partridge came running at me through the

trees, with ruff and tail expanded, bill wide open, and hissing like a

Goose,--then turned suddenly, and with ruff and tail furled, but with no

pretence of lameness, scudded off through the woods in a circle,--then

at me again fiercely, approaching within two yards, and spreading all

her furbelows, to intimidate, as before,--then, taking in sail, went off

again, always at the same rate of speed, yelping like an angry squirrel,

squealing like a pig, occasionally clucking like a hen, and, in general,

so filling the woods with bustle and disturbance that there seemed no

room for anything else. Quite overawed by the display, I stood watching

her for some time, then entered the underbrush, where the little

invisible brood had been unceasingly piping, in their baby way. So

motionless were they, that, for all their noise, I stood with my feet

among them, for some minutes, without finding it possible to detect

them. When found and taken from the ground, which they so closely

resembled, they made no attempt to escape; but, when replaced, they

presently ran away fast, as if conscious that the first policy had

failed, and that their mother had retreated. Such is the summer-life of

these little things; but come again in the fall, when the wild autumnal

winds go marching through the woods, and a dozen pairs of strong wings

will thrill like thunder through the arches of the trees, as the

full-grown brood whirrs away around you.

Not only have we scarcely any species of birds which are thoroughly and

unquestionably identical with European species, but there are certain

general variations of habit. For instance, in regard to migration. This

is, of course, a Universal instinct, since even tropical birds migrate

for short distances from the equator, so essential to their existence do

these wanderings seem. But in New England, among birds as among men, the

roving habit seems unusually strong, and abodes are shifted very

rapidly. The whole number of species observed in Massachusetts is about

the same as in England,--some three hundred in all. But of this number,

in England, about a hundred habitually winter on the island, and half

that number even in the Hebrides, some birds actually breeding in

Scotland during January and February, incredible as it may seem. Their

habits can, therefore, be observed through a long period of the year;

while with us the bright army comes and encamps for a month or two and

then vanishes. You must attend their dress-parades, while they last; for

you will have but few opportunities, and their domestic life must

commonly be studied during a few weeks of the season, or not at all.

Wonderful as the instinct of migration seems, it is not, perhaps, so

altogether amazing in itself as in some of its attendant details. To a

great extent, birds follow the opening foliage northward, and flee from

its fading, south; they must keep near the food on which they live, and

secure due shelter for their eggs. Our earliest visitors shrink from

trusting the bare trees with their nests; the Song-Sparrow seeks the

ground; the Blue-Bird finds a box or a hole somewhere; the Red-Wing

haunts the marshy thickets, safer in spring than at any other season;

and even the sociable Robin prefers a pine-tree to an apple-tree, if

resolved to begin housekeeping prematurely. The movements of birds are

chiefly timed by the advance of vegetation; and the thing most

thoroughly surprising about them is not the general fact of the change

of latitude, but their accuracy in hitting the precise locality. That

the same Cat-Bird should find its way back, every spring, to almost the

same branch of yonder larch-tree,--that is the thing astonishing to me.

In England, a lame Redstart was observed in the same garden for sixteen

successive years; and the astonishing precision of course which enables

some birds of small size to fly from Australia to New Zealand in a

day--probably the longest single flight ever taken--is only a part of

the same mysterious instinct of direction.

In comparing modes of flight, the most surprising, of course, is that of

the Swallow tribe, remarkable not merely for its velocity, but for the

amazing boldness and instantaneousness of the angles it makes; so that

eminent European mechanicians have speculated in vain upon the methods

used in its locomotion, and prizes have been offered, by mechanical

exhibitions, to him who could best explain it. With impetuous dash, they

sweep through our perilous streets, these wild hunters of the air, "so

near, and yet so far"; they bathe flying, and flying they feed their

young. In my immediate vicinity, the Chimney-Swallow is not now common,

nor the Sand-Swallow; but the Cliff-Swallow, that strange emigrant from

the Far West, the Barn-Swallow, and the white-breasted species, are

abundant, together with the Purple Martin. I know no prettier sight than

a bevy of these bright little creatures, met from a dozen different

farm-houses to picnic at a way-side pool, splashing and fluttering, with

their long wings expanded like butterflies, keeping poised by a constant

hovering motion, just tilting upon their feet, which scarcely touch the

moist ground. You will seldom see them actually perch on anything less

airy than some telegraphic wire; but, when they do alight, each will

make chatter enough for a dozen, as if all the rushing hurry of the

wings had passed into the tongue.

Between the swiftness of the Swallow and the stateliness of the birds of

prey, the whole range of bird-motion seems included. The long wave of a

Hawk's wings seems almost to send a slow vibration through the

atmosphere, tolling upon the eye as yon distant bell upon the ear. I

never was more impressed with the superior dignity of these soarings

than in observing a bloodless contest in the air, last April. Standing

beside a little grove, on a rocky hill-side, I heard Crows cawing near

by, and then a sound like great flies buzzing, which I really

attributed, for a moment, to some early insect. Turning, I saw two Crows

flapping their heavy wings among the trees, and observed that they were

teasing a Hawk about as large as themselves, which was also on the wing.

Presently all three had risen above the branches, and were circling

higher and higher in a slow spiral. The Crows kept constantly swooping

at their enemy, with the same angry buzz, one of the two taking

decidedly the lead. They seldom struck at him with their beaks, but kept

lumbering against him, and flapping him with their wings, as if in a

fruitless effort to capsize him; while the Hawk kept carelessly eluding

the assaults, now inclining on one side, now on the other, with a

stately grace, never retaliating, but seeming rather to enjoy the novel

amusement, as if it were a skirmish in balloons. During all this,

indeed, he scarcely seemed once to wave his wings; yet he soared

steadily aloft, till the Crows refused to follow, though already higher

than I ever saw Crows before, dim against the fleecy sky; then the Hawk

flew northward, but soon after he sailed over us once again, with loud,

scornful _chirr_, and they only cawed, and left him undisturbed.

When we hear the tumult of music from these various artists of the air,

it seems as if the symphony never could be analyzed into its different

instruments. But with time and patience it is not so difficult; nor can

we really enjoy the performance, so long as it is only a confused chorus

to our ears. It is not merely the highest form of animal language, but,

in strictness of etymology, the only form, if it be true, as is claimed,

that no other animal employs its tongue, _lingua_, in producing sound.

In the Middle Ages, the song of birds was called their Latin, as was any

other foreign dialect. It was the old German superstition, that any one

who should eat the heart of a bird would thenceforth comprehend its

language; and one modern philologist of the same nation (Masius

declares) has so far studied the sounds produced by domestic fowls as to

announce a Goose-Lexicon. Dupont de Nemours asserted that he understood

eleven words of the Pigeon language, the same number of that of Fowls,

fourteen of the Cat tongue, twenty-two of that of Cattle, thirty of that

of Dogs, and the Raven language he understood completely. But the

ordinary observer seldom attains farther than to comprehend some of the

cries of anxiety and fear around him, often so unlike the accustomed

carol of the bird,--as the mew of the Cat-Bird, the lamb-like bleating

of the Veery and his impatient _yeoick_, the _chaip_ of the Meadow-Lark,

the _towyee_ of the Chewink, the petulant _psit_ and _tsee_ of the

Red-Winged Blackbird, and the hoarse cooing of the Bobolink. And with

some of our most familiar birds the variety of notes is so great as

really to promise difficulties in the American department of the

bird-lexicon. I have watched two Song-Sparrows, perched near each other,

in whom the spy-glass could show not the slightest difference of

marking, even in the characteristic stains upon the breast, who yet

chanted to each other, for fifteen minutes, over and over, two elaborate

songs which had nothing in common. I have observed a similar thing in

two Wood-Sparrows, with their sweet, distinct, accelerating lay; nor can

I find it stated that the difference is sexual. Who can claim to have

heard the whole song of the Robin? Taking shelter from a shower beneath

an oak-tree, the other day, I caught a few of the notes which one of

those cheery creatures, who love to sing in wet weather, tossed down to

me through the drops.

(Before noticing me,) _chirrup, cheerup_

(pausing in alarm, at my approach,) _che, che, che;_

(broken presently by a thoughtful strain,) _caw, caw,_

(then softer and more confiding,) _see, see, see;_

(then the original note, in a whisper,) _chirrup, cheerup;_

(often broken by a soft note,) _see, wee;_

(and an odder one,) _squeal;_

(and a mellow note,) _tweedle._

And all these were mingled with more complex combinations, and with

half-imitations, as of the Blue-Bird, so that it seemed almost

impossible to doubt that there was some specific meaning, to him and his

peers, in this endless vocabulary. Yet other birds, as quick-witted as

the Robins, possess but one or two chirping notes, to which they seem

unable to give more than the very rudest variation of accent.

The controversy between the singing-birds of Europe and America has had

various phases and influential disputants. Buffon easily convinced

himself that our Thrushes had no songs, because the voices of all birds

grew harsh in savage countries, such as he naturally held this continent

to be. Audubon, on the other hand, relates that even in his childhood he

was assured by his father that the American songsters were the best,

though neither Americans nor Europeans could be convinced of it.

MacGillivray, the Scottish naturalist, reports that Audubon himself, in

conversation, arranged our vocalists in the following order:--first, the

Mocking-Bird, as unrivalled; then, the Wood-Thrush, Cat-Bird, and Red

Thrush; the Rose-Breasted, Pine, and Blue Grosbeak; the Orchard and

Golden Oriole; the Tawny and Hermit Thrushes; several Finches,

--Bachmann's, the White-Crowned, the Indigo, and the Nonpareil;

and finally, the Bobolink.

Among those birds of this list which frequent Massachusetts, Audubon

might well put the Wood-Thrush at the head. As I sat the other day in

the deep woods beside a black brook which dropped from stone to stone

beneath the shadow of our Rattlesnake Rocks, the air seemed at first as

silent above me as the earth below. The buzz of summer sounds had not

begun. Sometimes a bee hummed by with a long swift thrill like a chord

of music; sometimes a breeze came resounding up the forest like an

approaching locomotive, and then died utterly away. Then, at length, a

Veery's delicious note rose in a fountain of liquid melody from beneath

me; and when it was ended, the clear, calm, interrupted chant of the

Wood-Thrush fell like solemn water-drops from some source above--I am

acquainted with no sound in Nature so sweet, so elevated, so serene.

Flutes and flageolets are Art's poor efforts to recall that softer

sound. It is simple, and seems all prelude; but the music to which it is

the overture must belong to other spheres. It might be the _Angelus_ of

some lost convent. It might be the meditation of some maiden-hermit,

saying over to herself in solitude, with recurrent tuneful pauses, the

only song she knows. Beside this soliloquy of seraphs, the carol of the

Veery seems a familiar and almost domestic thing; yet it is so charming

that Audubon must have designed to include it among the Thrushes whose

merits he proclaims.

But the range of musical perfection is a wide one; and if the standard

of excellence be that wondrous brilliancy and variety of execution

suggested by the Mocking-Bird, then the palm belongs, among our

New-England songsters, to the Red Thrush, otherwise called the Mavis or

Brown Thrasher. I have never heard the Mocking-Bird sing at liberty; and

while the caged bird may surpass the Red Thrush in volume of voice and

in quaintness of direct imitation, he gives me no such impression of

depth and magnificence. I know not how to describe the voluble and

fantastic notes which fall like pearls and diamonds from the beak of our

Mavis, while his stately attitudes and high-born bearing are in full

harmony with the song. I recall the steep, bare hill-side, and the two

great boulders which guard the lonely grove, where I first fully learned

the wonder of this lay, as if I had met Saint Cecilia there. A

thoroughly happy song, overflowing with life, it gives even its most

familiar phrases an air of gracious condescension, as when some great

violinist stoops to the "Carnival of Venice." The Red Thrush does not,

however, consent to any parrot-like mimicry, though every note of wood

or field--Oriole, Bobolink, Crow, Jay, Robin, Whippoorwill--appears to

pass in veiled procession through the song.

Retain the execution of the Red Thrush, but hopelessly impair his organ,

and you have the Cat-Bird. This accustomed visitor would seem a gifted

vocalist, but for the inevitable comparison between his thinner note and

the gushing melodies of the lordlier bird. Is it some hopeless

consciousness of this disadvantage which leads him to pursue that

peculiar habit of singing softly to himself very often, in a fancied

seclusion? When other birds are cheerily out-of-doors, on some bright

morning of May or June, one will often discover a solitary Cat-Bird

sitting concealed in the middle of a dense bush, and twittering busily,

in subdued rehearsal, the whole copious variety of his lay, practising

trills and preparing half-imitations, which, at some other time, sitting

on the topmost twig, he shall hilariously seem to improvise before all

the world. Can it be that he is really in some slight disgrace with

Nature, with that demi-mourning garb of his,--and that his feline cry of

terror, which makes his opprobrium with boys, is part of some hidden

doom decreed? No, the lovely color of the eggs which his companion

watches on that laboriously builded staging of twigs shall vindicate

this familiar companion from any suspicion of original sin. Indeed, it

is well demonstrated by our American oölogist, Dr. Brewer, that the eggs

of the Cat-Bird affiliate him with the Robin and the Wood-Thrush, all

three being widely separated in this respect from the Red Thrush. The

Red Thrush builds on the ground, and has mottled eggs; while the whole

household establishment of the Wood-Thrush is scarcely distinguishable

from that of the Robin, and the Cat-Bird differs chiefly in being more

of a carpenter and less of a mason.

The Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, which Audubon places so high on his list of

minstrels, comes annually to one region in this vicinity, but I am not

sure of having heard it. The young Pine Grosbeaks come to our woods in

winter, and have then but a subdued twitter. Every one knows the

Bobolink; and almost all recognize the Oriole, by sight at least, even

if unfamiliar with all the notes of his cheery and resounding song. The

Red-Eyed Flycatcher, heard even more constantly, is less generally

identified by name; but his note sounds all day among the elms of our

streets, and seems a sort of piano-adaptation, popularized for the

million, of the rich notes of the Thrushes. He is not mentioned by

Audubon among his favorites, and has no right to complain of the

exclusion. Yet the birds which most endear summer are not necessarily

the finest performers; and certainly there is none whose note I could

spare less easily than the little Chipping-Sparrow, called hereabouts

the Hair-Bird. To lie half-awake on a warm morning in June, and hear

that soft insect-like chirp draw in and out with long melodious

pulsations, like the rising and falling of the human breath, condenses

for my ear the whole luxury of summer. Later in the day, among the

multiplicity of noises, the chirping becomes louder and more detached,

losing that faint and dream-like thrill.

The bird-notes which have the most familiar fascination are perhaps

simply those most intimately associated with other rural things. This

applies especially to the earliest spring songsters. Listening to these

delicious prophets upon some of those still and moist days which slip in

between the rough winds of March and fill our lives for a moment with

anticipated delights, it has seemed to me that their varied notes were

sent to symbolize all the different elements of spring association. The

Blue-Bird seems to represent simply spring's faint, tremulous, liquid

sweetness, the Song-Sparrow its changing pulsations of more positive and

varied joy, and the Robin its cheery and superabundant vitality. The

later birds of the season, suggesting no such fine-drawn sensations, yet

identify themselves with their chosen haunts, so that we cannot think of

the one without the other. In the meadows, we hear the languid and

tender drawl of the Meadow-Lark,--one of the most peculiar of notes,

almost amounting to affectation in its excess of laborious sweetness.

When we reach the thickets and wooded streams, there is no affectation

in the Maryland Yellow-Throat, that little restless busybody, with his

eternal _which-is-it, which-is-it, which-is-it_, emphasizing each

syllable at will, in despair of response. Passing into the loftier

woods, we find them resounding with the loud proclamation of the

Golden-Crowned Thrush,--_scheat, scheat, scheat, scheat_,--rising and

growing louder in a vigorous way that rather suggests some great

Woodpecker than such a tiny thing. And penetrating to some yet lonelier

place, we find it consecrated to that life-long sorrow, whatever it may

be, which is made immortal in the plaintive cadence of the Pewee.

There is one favorite bird,--the Chewink, or Ground-Robin,--which, I

always fancied, must have been known to Keats when he wrote those few

words of perfect descriptiveness,--

"If an innocent bird

Before my heedless footsteps _stirred and stirred

__In little journeys_."

What restless spirit is in this creature, that, while so shy in its own

personal habits, it yet watches every visitor with a Paul-Pry curiosity,

follows him in the woods, peers out among the underbrush, scratches upon

the leaves with a pretty pretence of important business there, and

presently, when disregarded, ascends some small tree and begins to carol

its monotonous song, as if there were no such thing as man in the

universe? There is something irregular and fantastic in the coloring,

also, of the Chewink: unlike the generality of ground-birds, it is a

showy thing, with black, white, and bay intermingled, and it is one of

the most unmistakable of all our feathery creatures, in its aspect and

its ways.

Another of my favorites, perhaps from our sympathy as to localities,

since we meet freely every summer at a favorite lake, is the King-Bird

or Tyrant-Flycatcher. The habits of royalty or tyranny I have never been

able to perceive,--only a democratic habit of resistance to tyrants; but

this bird always impresses me as a perfectly well-dressed and

well-mannered person, who amid a very talkative society prefers to

listen, and shows his character by action only. So long as he sits

silently on some stake or bush in the neighborhood of his family-circle,

you notice only his glossy black cap and the white feathers in his

handsome tail; but let a Hawk or a Crow come near, and you find that he

is something more than a mere lazy listener to the Bobolink: far up in

the air, determined to be thorough in his chastisements, you will see

him, with a comrade or two, driving the bulky intruder away into the

distance, till you wonder how he ever expects to find his own way back

again. He speaks with emphasis, on these occasions, and then reverts,

more sedately than ever, to his accustomed silence.

After all the great labors of Audubon and Wilson, it is certain that the

recent visible progress of American ornithology has by no means equalled

that of several other departments of Natural History. The older books

are now out of print, and there is actually no popular treatise on the

subject to be had: a destitution singularly contrasted with the variety

of excellent botanical works which the last twenty years have produced.

Nuttall's fascinating volumes, and Brewer's edition of Wilson, are

equally inaccessible; and the most valuable contributions since their

time, so far as I know, are that portion of Dr. Brewer's work on eggs

printed in the eleventh volume of the "Smithsonian Contributions," and

four admirable articles in this very magazine.[14] But the most

important observations are locked up in the desks or exhibited in the

cabinets of private observers, who have little opportunity of comparing

facts with other students, or with reliable printed authorities. What do

we know, for instance, of the local distribution of our birds? I

remember that in my latest conversation with Thoreau, last December, he

mentioned most remarkable facts in this department, which had fallen

under his unerring eyes. The Hawk most common at Concord, the Red-Tailed

species, is not known near the sea-shore, twenty miles off,--as at

Boston or Plymouth. The White-Breasted Sparrow is rare in Concord; but

the Ashburnham woods, thirty miles away, are full of it. The Scarlet

Tanager's is the commonest note in Concord, except the Red-Eyed

Flycatcher's; yet one of the best field-ornithologists in Boston had

never heard it. The Rose-Breasted Grosbeak is seen not infrequently at

Concord, though its nest is rarely found; but in Minnesota Thoreau found

it more abundant than any other bird, far more so than the Robin. But

his most interesting statement, to my fancy, was, that, during a stay of

ten weeks on Monadnock, he found that the Snow-Bird built its nest on

the top of the mountain, and probably never came down through the

season. That was its Arctic; and it would probably yet be found, he

predicted, on Wachusett and other Massachusetts peaks. It is known that

the Snow-Bird, or "Snow-Flake," as it is called in England, was reported

by Audubon as having only once been proved to build in the United

States, namely, among the White Mountains, though Wilson found its nests

among the Alleghanies; and in New England it used to be the rural belief

that the Snow-Bird and the Chipping-Sparrow were the same.

After July, most of our birds grow silent, and, but for the insects,

August would be almost the stillest month in the year,--stiller than the

winter, when the woods are often vocal with the Crow, the Jay, and the

Chickadee. But with patient attention one may hear, even far into the

autumn, the accustomed notes. As I sat in my boat, one sunny afternoon

of last September, beneath the shady western shore of our quiet lake,

with the low sunlight striking almost level across the wooded banks, it

seemed as if the last hoarded drops of summer's sweetness were being

poured over all the world. The air was full of quiet sounds. Turtles

rustled beside the brink and slid into the water,--cows plashed in the

shallows,--fishes leaped from the placid depths,--a squirrel sobbed and

fretted on a neighboring stump,--a katydid across the lake maintained

its hard, dry croak,--the crickets chirped pertinaciously, but with

little fatigued pauses, as if glad that their work was almost done,--the

grasshoppers kept up their continual chant, which seemed thoroughly

melted and amalgamated into the summer, as if it would go on

indefinitely, though the body of the little creature were dried into

dust. All this time the birds were silent and invisible, as if they

would take no more part in the symphony of the year. Then, as if by

preconcerted signal, they joined in: Crows cawed anxiously afar; Jays

screamed in the woods; a Partridge clucked to its brood, like the gurgle

of water from a bottle; a Kingfisher wound his rattle, more briefly than

in spring, as if we now knew all about it and the merest hint ought to

suffice; a Fish-Hawk flapped into the water, with a great rude splash,

and then flew heavily away; a flock of Wild Ducks went southward

overhead, and a smaller party returned beneath them, flying low and

anxiously, as if to pick up some lost baggage; and, at last, a Loon

laughed loud from behind a distant island, and it was pleasant to people

these woods and waters with that wild shouting, linking them with

Katahdin Lake and Amperzand.

But the later the birds linger in the autumn, the more their aspect

differs from that of spring. In spring, they come, jubilant, noisy,

triumphant, from the South, the winter conquered and the long journey

done. In autumn, they come timidly from the North, and, pausing on their

anxious retreat, lurk within the fading copses and twitter snatches of

song as fading. Others fly as openly as ever, but gather in flocks, as

the Robins, most piteous of all birds at this season,--thin, faded,

ragged, their bold note sunk to a feeble quaver, and their manner a mere

caricature of that inexpressible military smartness with which they held

up their heads in May.

Yet I cannot really find anything sad even in November. When I think of

the thrilling beauty of the season past, the birds that came and went,

the insects that took up the choral song as the birds grew silent, the

procession of the flowers, the glory of autumn,--and when I think, that,

this also ended, a new gallery of wonder is opening, almost more

beautiful, in the magnificence of frost and snow, there comes an

impression of affluence and liberality in the universe, which seasons of

changeless and uneventful verdure would never give. The catkins already

formed on the alder, quite prepared to droop into April's beauty,--the

white edges of the May-flower's petals, already visible through the bud,

show in advance that winter is but a slight and temporary retardation of

the life of Nature, and that the barrier which separates November from

March is not really more solid than that which parts the sunset from the

sunrise.

[Footnote 14: "Our Birds and their Ways" (December, 1857); "The

Singing-Birds and their Songs" (August, 1858); "The Birds of the Garden

and Orchard" (October, 1858); "The Birds of the Pasture and Forest"

(December, 1853);--the first by J. Elliot Cabot, and the three last by

Wilson Flagg.]

THE NEW OPPOSITION PARTY.

In the rapid alternations of opinion produced by the varying incidents

of the present war, a few days effect the work of centuries. We may

therefore be pardoned for giving an antique coloring to an event of

recent occurrence. Accordingly we say, once upon a time, (Tuesday, July

1, 1862) a great popular convention of all who loved the Constitution

and the Union, and all who hated "niggers," was called in the city of

New York. The place of meeting was the Cooper Institute, and among the

signers to the call were prominent business and professional men of that

great metropolis. At this meeting, that eminently calm and learned

jurist, the Honorable W.A. Duer, interrupted the course of an elaborate

argument for the constitutional rights of the Southern rebels by a

melodramatic exclamation, that, if we hanged the traitors of the country

in the order of their guilt, "the next man who marched upon the scaffold

after Jefferson Davis would be Charles Sumner."

The professed object of the meeting was to form a party devoted to the

support of "the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was." Its

practical effect was to give the Confederates and foreign powers a broad

hint that the North was no longer a unit. The coincidence of the meeting

with the Federal reverses before Richmond made its professed object all

the more ridiculous. The babbling and bawling of the speakers about "the

rights of the South," and "the infamous Abolitionists who disgraced

Congress," were but faint echoes of the Confederate cannon which had

just ceased to carry death into the Union ranks. Both the speeches and

the cannon spoke hostility to the National Cause. The number of the

dead, wounded, "missing," and demoralized members of the great Army of

the Potomac exceeded, on that Tuesday evening, any army which the United

States had ever, before the present war, arrayed on any battle-field.

Jefferson Davis, on that evening, was safer at Richmond than Abraham

Lincoln was at Washington. A well-grounded apprehension, not only for

the "Union," but for the safety of loyal States, was felt on that

evening all over the North and West. It was, in fact, the darkest hour

in the whole annals of the Republic. Even the authorities at Washington

feared that the Army of the Potomac was destroyed. This was exactly the

time for the Honorable Mr. Wickliffe and the Honorable Mr. Brooks, for

the Honorable W. A. Duer and the Honorable Fernando Wood, to delight the

citizens of New York with their peculiar eloquence. This was the

appropriate occasion to stand up for the persecuted and down-trodden

South! This was the grand opportunity to assert the noble principle,

that, by the Constitution, every traitor had the right to be tried by a

jury of traitors! This was the time to dishonor all the New England

dead! This was the time to denounce the living worthies of New England!

Hang Jeff. Davis? Oh, yes! We all know that he is secure behind his

triumphant slayers of the real defenders of the Constitution and the

Union. Neither hangman nor Major-General can get near _him_. But Charles

Sumner is in our power. We can hang him easily. He has not two or four

hundred thousand men at his back. He travels alone and unattended. Do we

want a constitutional principle for combining the two men in one act of

treason? Here is a calm jurist,--here, gentlemen of the party of the

Constitution and the Laws, is the Honorable W. A. Duer. What does he

say? Simply this: "Hang Jeff. Davis and Charles Sumner." Davis we cannot

hang, but Sumner we can. Let us take one-half of his advice;

circumstances prevent us from availing ourselves of the whole. There is,

to be sure, no possibility of hanging Charles Sumner under any law known

to us, the especial champions of the laws. But what then? Don't you see

the Honorable W. A. Duer appeals, in this especial case, to "the higher

law" of the mob? Don't you see that he desires to shield Jeff. Davis by

weaving around his august person all the fine cobwebs of the Law, while

he proposes to have Sumner hanged on "irregular" principles, unknown to

the jurisprudence of Marshall and Kent?

But enough for the New York meeting. It was of no importance, except as

indicating the existence, and giving a blundering expression to the

objects, of one of the most malignant and unpatriotic factions which

this country has ever seen. The faction is led by a few cold-blooded

politicians universally known as the meanest sycophants of the South and

the most impudent bullies of the North; but they have contrived to array

on their side a considerable number of honest and well-meaning dupes by

a dexterous appeal to conservative prejudice and conservative passion,

so that hundreds serve their ends who would feel contaminated by their

companionship. Never before has Respectability so blandly consented to

become the mere instrument and tool of Rascality. The rogues trust to

inaugurate treason and anarchy under the pretence of being the special

champions of the Constitution and the Laws. Their real adherents are

culled from the most desperate and dishonest portions of our population.

They can hardly indite a leading article, or make a stump speech,

without showing their proclivities to mob-law. To be sure, if a known

traitor is informally arrested, they rave about the violation of the

rights of the citizen; but they think Lynch-law is good enough for

"Abolitionists." If a General is assailed as being over prudent and

cautious in his operations against the common enemy, they immediately

laud him as a Hannibal, a Caesar, and a Napoleon; they assume to be his

special friends and admirers; they adjure him to persevere in what they

conceive to be his policy of inaction; and, as he is a great master in

strategy, they hint that his best strategic movement would be a

movement, _à la_ Cromwell, on the Abolitionized Congress of the United

States. Disunion, anarchy, the violation of all law, the appeal to the

lowest and fiercest impulses of the most ignorant portions of the

Northern people,--these constitute the real stock-in-trade of "the

Hang-Jeff.-Davis-and-Charles-Sumner" party; but the thing is so managed,

that, formally, this party appears as the special champion of the Union,

the Constitution, and the Laws.

Those politicians who personally dislike the present holders of

political power, those politicians who think that the measures of

confiscation and emancipation passed by the Congress which has just

adjourned are both unjust and impolitic, unconsciously slide into the

aiders and abettors of the knaves they individually despise and

distrust. The "radicals" must, they say, at all events, be checked; and

they lazily follow the lead of the rascals. The rascals intend to ruin

the country. But then they propose to do it in a constitutional way. The

only thing, it seems, that a lawyer and a jurist can consider is Form.

If the country is dismembered, if all its defenders are slain, if the

Southern Confederacy is triumphant, not only at Richmond, but at

Washington and New York, if eight millions of people beat twenty

millions, and the greatest of all democracies ignominiously succumbs to

the basest of all aristocracies, the true patriots will still have the

consolation, that the defeat, the "damned defeat," occurred under the

strictest forms of Law. Better that ten Massachusetts soldiers should be

killed than that one negro should be illegally freed! Better that

Massachusetts should be governed by Jeff. Davis than that it should be

represented by such men as Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson, notoriously

hostile to the constitutional rights of the South! Subjection, in

itself, is bad; but the great American idea of local governments for

local purposes, and a general government for general purposes, still,

thank God! may survive it. To be sure, we may be beaten and enslaved,

The rascals, renegades, and liberticides may gain their object. This

object we shall ever contemn. But if they gain it fairly, under the

forms of the Constitution, it is the duty of all good citizens to

submit. Our Southern opponents, we acknowledge, committed some

"irregularities"; but nobody can assert, that, in dealing with them, we

deviated, by a hair's-breadth, from the powers intrusted to the

Government by the Fathers of the Republic. While the country is

convulsed by a rebellion unprecedented in the whole history of the

world, we are compelled by our principles to look upon it as lawyers,

and not as statesmen. We apply to it the same principles which our

venerated forefathers applied to Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts and

the Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania. To be sure, the

"circumstances" are different; but we need not remind the philanthropic

inhabitants of our section of the country, that "principles are

eternal." We judge the existing case by these eternal principles. We may

fail, and fail ignominiously; but, in our failure, nobody can say that

we violated any sacred form of the ever-glorious Constitution of the

United States. The Constitution has in it no provisions to secure its

own existence by unconstitutional means. It is therefore our duty, as

lawyers as well as legislators, to allow the gentlemen who have

repudiated it, because they were defeated in an election, to enjoy all

its benefits. That they do not seem to appreciate these benefits, but

shoot, in a shockingly "irregular" manner, all who insist on imposing on

them its blessings, furnishes no reason why we should partake in their

guilt by violating its provisions. It is true that the Government

established by the Constitution may fall by a strict adherence to our

notions of the Constitution; but even in that event we shall have the

delicious satisfaction of contemplating it in memory as a beautiful

idea, after it has ceased to exist as a palpable fact. As the best

constitution ever devised by human wisdom, we shall always find a more

exquisite delight in meditating on the mental image of its perfect

features than in enjoying the practical blessings of any other

Government which may be established after it is dead and gone; and our

feeling regarding it can be best expressed in the words in which the

lyric poet celebrates his loyalty to the soul of the departed object of

his affection:--

"Though many a gifted mind we meet,

And fairest forms we see,

To live with them is far less sweet

Than to remember thee!"

It is fortunate both for our safety and the safety of the Constitution,

that these politico-sentimental gentlemen represent only a certain

theory of the Constitution, and not the Constitution itself. Their

leading defect is an incapacity to adjust their profound legal

intellects to the altered circumstances of the country. Any child in

political knowledge is competent to give them this important item of

political information,--that by no constitution of government ever

devised by human morality and intelligence were the rights of rascals so

secured as to give them the privilege of trampling on the rights of

honest men. Any child in political knowledge is competent to inform them

of this fundamental fact, underlying all laws and constitutions,--that,

if a miscreant attempts to cut your throat, you may resist him by all

the means which your strength and his weakness place in your power. Any

child in political knowledge is further competent to furnish them with

this additional bit of wisdom,--that every constitution of government

provides, under the war-power it confers, against its own overthrow by

rebels and by enemies. If rebels rise to the dignity and exert the power

of enemies, they can be proceeded against both as rebels and as enemies.

As rebels, the Government is bound to give them all the securities which

the Constitution may guaranty to traitors. As enemies, the Government is

restricted only by the vast and vague "rights of war," of which its own

military necessities must be the final judge.

"But," say the serene thinkers and scholars whom the rogues use as

mouthpieces, "our object is simply to defend the Constitution. We do not

believe that the Government has any of the so-called 'rights of war'

against the rebels. If Jefferson Davis has committed the crime of

treason, he has the same right to be tried by a jury of the district in

which his alleged crime was committed that a murderer has to be tried by

a similar jury. We know that Mr. Davis, in case the rebellion is

crushed, will not only be triumphantly acquitted, but will be sent to

Congress as Senator from Mississippi. This is mortifying in itself, but

it still is a beautiful illustration of the merits of our admirable

system of government. It enables the South to play successfully the

transparent game of 'Heads I win, tails you lose,' and so far must be

reckoned bad. But this evil is counterbalanced by so many blessings,

that nobody but a miserable Abolitionist will think of objecting to the

arrangement. We, on the whole, agree with the traitors, whose designs we

lazily aid, in thinking that Jeff. Davis and Charles Sumner are equally

guilty, in a fair estimate of the causes of our present misfortunes.

Hang both, we say; and we say it with an inward confidence that neither

will be hanged, if the true principles of the Constitution be carried

out."

The political rogues and the class of honest men we have referred to

are, therefore, practically associated in one party to oppose the

present Government. The rogues lead; the honest men follow. If this new

party succeeds, we shall have the worst party in power that the country

has ever known. Buchanan as President, and Floyd as Secretary of War,

were bad enough. But Buchanan and Floyd had no large army to command, no

immense material of war to direct. As far as they could, they worked

mischief, and mischief only. But their means were limited. The

Administration which will succeed that of Abraham Lincoln will have

under its control one of the largest and ablest armies and navies in the

world. Every general and every admiral will be compelled to obey the

orders of the Administration. If the Administration be in the hands of

secret traitors, the immense military and naval power of the country

will be used for its own destruction. A compromise will be patched up

with the Rebel States. The leaders of the rebellion will be invited back

to their old seats of power. A united South combined with a Pro-slavery

faction in the North will rule the nation. And all this enormous evil

will be caused by the simplicity of honest men in falling into the trap

set for them by traitors and rogues.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_The Tariff-Question, considered in Regard to the Policy of England and

the Interests of the United States; with Statistical, and Comparative

Tables_. By ERASTUS B. BIGELOW. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 4to.

Under this modest title, the American public is presented with a work of

uncommon research, and of great practical utility and value. Its author

is well known as a skilful and most successful inventor, in whose

admirable power-looms nearly all the carpets of the world are now woven.

On the subject of manufactures few can speak with more authority,

whether in reference to its general bearings or its minute details. The

work before us affords ample proof of his ability to discuss one of the

most important questions in political economy.

The hundred pages of text are followed by two hundred and thirty-four

pages of tabular statistics. This large and well-arranged body of

invaluable information, though styled an appendix, was, in fact, the

precursor of the argument, and constitutes the solid base on which it

rests. These tables are "not mere copies or abstracts, but the result of

labored and careful selection, comparison, and combination." In this

treasury of facts, derived for the most part from official records, the

commercial and industrial interests of the United States and of England,

especially, are presented in all their most important aspects and

relations. The amount of information here given is immense; and knowing,

as we do, the scrupulous care of the collector, we cannot doubt its

accuracy. Independently of its connection with the author's argument,

this feature of the work cannot fail to give it value and a permanent

place in every library, office, counting-room, and workshop of the

country.

In his discussion of the tariff question, Mr. Bigelow assumes it as a

settled principle of national policy that revenue should be raised by

duties on imports. To clear the ground from ambiguity, he states exactly

what he means when he uses the terms "free-trade" and "protection," and

then proceeds to describe and explain the tariff-policy of Great

Britain. Not without good reason does he give this prominence to the

action of that great power. It is not merely that England stands at the

head of manufacturing and commercial nations, or that our

business-connections with her are intimate and extensive. The fact which

makes English policy so important an element in the discussion is found

in the persistent and too often successful efforts of that country to

shape American opinion and legislation on questions of manufacture and

trade. Nowhere else have we seen the utter fallacy of the free-trade

argument, as urged by Great Britain on other countries upon the strength

of her own successful example, so clearly shown. The nature, object,

extent, and motive of the tariff-reforms effected by Sir Robert Peel and

Mr. Gladstone are made plain, not only by the quoted explanations of

those statesmen, but by statistical facts and figures. Until she had

carried her manufactures to a height of prosperity where competition

could no longer touch them, England was, of all nations, the most

protective. Then she became of a sudden wondrously liberal. Her

protective laws were abolished, and, with a mighty show of generosity,

she opened her ports to the commerce of the world. Foreign producers

were magnanimously told that they could send their goods freely into

England at a time when English manufactures were underselling and

supplanting theirs in their own markets. The sacrifice of duties

actually made by England on foreign manufactures, and which she paraded

before the world as a reason why other nations should imitate and

reciprocate her action, amounted, as we learn from the work before us,

to this immense annual sum of two hundred and eighteen thousand dollars,

being "less than one-fourth part of the tax which Englishmen annually

pay for the privilege of keeping their dogs!"

It is true that the exports and trade of England have increased with

extraordinary rapidity since 1853, and that the free-trade economists of

that country ascribe this great prosperity in large degree to their

alleged reforms. That they have no good ground for such a representation

is shown conclusively by Mr. Bigelow. During the same period, France,

with high protection, and the United States, with moderate protection,

made equal or even greater advances. The causes of this increased

prosperity must, therefore, have been general in their nature and

influence. The progress of invention and discovery, and the increased

supply of gold, are mentioned by the author as among the most efficient.

The immense extent and vast importance of English manufactures, and

especially of the cotton-manufacture, are fully unfolded, and we cannot

wonder at the earnest and unceasing efforts of that country to preserve

and to extend this great interest. This necessity is strikingly evinced

in the section on "The Dependent Condition of England." We can only

allude to this part of the argument, as full of striking suggestions,

and as showing that in some very important respects England is the most

dependent of all countries, and that the continued maintenance of her

life and power rests on the maintenance of her manufacturing supremacy.

In the section headed "Efforts of England to extend her Manufactures,"

we have some curious and instructive history, and we specially commend

this part of the work to those who have been accustomed to lend a

willing ear to British talk on the subjects of protection and

free-trade.

Mr. Bigelow devotes a short, but graphic and comprehensive, section to

the "Condition and Resources of the United States." "The Tariffs of the

United States," their merits and defects, are briefly considered. His

"Reasons in Favor of a Protective Policy" leave, as it seems to us, very

little to be said on the other side. From a multitude of passages which

we have been tempted to quote, we select the following, as a not

unfavorable specimen of the work:--

"War is an evil to which we are always liable, and shall continue to be

liable, until the Millennium comes. With reference to this always

existent danger, no nation which is not willing to be trampled on can

safely take its position on Quaker ground. That the possible event may

not find us unprepared, we build fortresses and war-ships, and maintain

armies and artillery at vast expense. No one but the mere visionary

denies the propriety or the necessity of this. Yet it is demonstrable

that a nation about to be involved in war will find a well-developed

industrial and productive power of more real value than any or than all

of the precautionary measures above mentioned; since, without such

power, neither forts nor armies can long be sustained.

"It is obvious that the doctrine of free-trade (I mean, of course,

genuine free-trade, and not the British counterfeit) ignores the

probability, if not, indeed, the possibility of war. Could peace,

perpetual and universal, be guarantied to the world, the argument

against protection would possess a degree of strength, which, as things

now are, does not and cannot belong to it. May it not be well for us to

consider, whether, on the whole, we can do better than to take things as

they are, by conforming our national policy, not to an imaginary era of

universal peace and philanthropy, but to the hard and selfish world in

which we happen to live?

"Lest this remark should be misinterpreted, I disclaim all intent to

intimate that men acting in communities are released from those

obligations of morality and justice which bind them as individuals. As

civilization advances and mankind become more enlightened and virtuous,

the beneficial change cannot fail to show itself in the public councils

of the world, and in the kinder and broader spirit that will animate and

control the intercourse of nations. Meanwhile, let us not expect to find

in collective humanity the disinterested goodness which is so rarely

exhibited by the individual members. Let us rather assume that other

nations will act, in the main, on selfish principles; and let us shape

our own course as a nation in accordance with that presumption. Few, I

think, will call this uncharitable, when they recall to mind our own

experience during the year past. Why were so many among us surprised and

disappointed at the course pursued by the English, generally, in

reference to our domestic difficulties? Simply because they forgot,

that, with the mass of mankind, self-interest is a far stronger motive

than philanthropy. That England should sympathize, even in the slightest

degree, with a rebellious conspiracy against a kindred and friendly

nation,--a conspiracy based openly and confessedly on the extension and

perpetuity of an institution--which Englishmen everywhere professed to

regard with the deepest abhorrence,--was certainly very inconsistent;

but it was not at all strange. In fact, it was precisely the thing which

we might expect would happen under the circumstances. Those who made the

mistake have learned a lesson in human nature which should prevent them

from repeating the blunder."

From the past opinions and present condition of our Southern States, and

from the history of the war thus far, the author strongly argues the

necessity of a policy designed and fitted to build up a diversified

industry and a vigorous productive power. In regard to the degree of

protection, he advocates no more than is necessary to equalize

advantages. In consequence of her abundant capital, lower rate of

interest, and cheaper labor, England can manufacture at less cost than

we can; and this disadvantage can be counteracted only by protective

legislation. The benefits which have accrued to the manufacturers of

England from a governmental policy on whose stability they could rely,

the advantage of a long and firmly established business with all its

results of experience and skill, and the collateral aid of a widely

extended commerce, are points clearly brought out and presented to the

consideration of American economists.

But our limits forbid that we should attempt any further exposition of

this excellent work. The section on "Free Trade" cannot fail to arrest

attention, and that upon "The Harmony of Interests among the States" is

full of common sense inspired by the broadest patriotism.

Our imperfect abstract gives but a meagre notion of the fulness and

completeness of this admirable work. It will accomplish its object, if

it send the reader to the book itself. The appearance of the volume is

timely. Events and circumstances have prepared the minds of our

countrymen to understand and to appreciate the argument. The book cannot

fail to diffuse sounder views of the great topics which it discusses,

and will exert, we trust, a beneficial influence on the legislation of

the country.

_The Slave-Power; its Character, Career, and Probable Designs: being an

Attempt to explain the Real Issue involved in the American Contest_. By

J. E. CAIRNES, M. A, London: Parker, Son, & Bourn. 8vo.

This book, which is dedicated to John Stuart Mill, and is in excellent

keeping with that writer's article on "The Civil War in America,"

deserves a respectful and even cordial welcome from the people of this

country. It has grown out of a course of university-lectures on

North-American Slavery, more especially considered in its economical

aspects. But the author has been led to enlarge his view, and has

brought before the public one of the most significant works that have

yet appeared on this momentous subject. So far as the treatise is a

speculative one, it has an interest for all inquirers. So far as it is

intended to influence or modify the current estimate of the great

conflict in this country, it bears more directly on the people of

England; but, unless we have determined neither to seek nor to miss the

sympathy of intelligent Englishmen, we ought to hail so manly and

powerful an attempt to correct the errors which prevail in the

mother-country. We do not undertake at this time to subscribe to

everything we find in this book, nor are we now about to criticize its

contents. Our wish is to introduce it to our readers as a comforting

proof that there is a leaven yet working among our English kinsmen which

it would be extremely unjust in us not to recognize. We quote an English

critic, who says:--"The work is exceedingly able, as well as exceedingly

opportune. It will do much to arrest the extraordinary tide of sympathy

with the South which the clever misrepresentations of Southern advocates

have managed to set running in this country, and to imprint the picture

of a modern slave-community on the imagination of thoughtful men."

Professor Cairnes sets himself at the start against the endeavor to

refer this great crisis to superficial and secondary causes. He pierces

the question to the core, and finds there what has too often been

studiously kept out of sight, the cancer of Slavery. Acknowledging what

has been so diligently harped upon, that the motive of the war is not

the overthrow of the slave-power, he still insists that Slavery is the

cause of the war. This he attempts to establish historically and

economically; nor does he leave the subject without a searching look

into Southern society and a prospective glance at the issues of the

contest. He has freely consulted American authorities, most of which are

familiar to many of our readers; he has also turned to good account the

reports of open-eyed English travellers, and the opinions of sensible

French writers, not overlooking the remarkably clear narrative of our

political history in the "Annuaire des Deux Mondes" for 1860. He handles

his materials with great skill, and, in a word, has brought to bear on

his difficult subject an amount of good sense and sound thought quite

remarkable in a foreigner who is dealing with the complex politics of a

distant country.

Professor Cairnes, in opposition to the Southern doctrine proclaimed at

home and abroad, views the present rebellion as unconstitutional, and as

therefore amenable to the usual tests by which a revolutionary movement

is justified or condemned. He refers to the manner in which the English

people allowed their sympathies "to be carried, under the skilful

management of Southern agency acting through the press, round to the

Southern side"; and while he admires the spectacle of a people rising

"for no selfish object, but to maintain the integrity of their common

country, and to chastise a band of conspirators, who, in the wantonness

of their audacity, had dared to attack it," he attributes the "cold

criticism and derision" of the English public to a shallow, but natural,

misconception of the real issue. So far as in him lies, he does not

intend that the case shall be so misconceived any longer. Without

declaring himself an advocate or apologist of American democracy, he

warmly pleads that democracy ought not to bear the burdens of

oligarchy,--that the faults and mistakes in the policy of this country

ought not all to be laid at the door of the present National Government,

and thus redound to the benefit of its Southern foes, when so many of

those faults and mistakes were committed under the sway of the very

class in whose behalf they are now quoted. Our sensitive countrymen, who

have so keenly smarted under English indifference or hostility, may

console themselves with the thought that there is one Englishman of

undoubted ability and sincerity who calls the Southern Confederation

"the opprobrium of the age."

Near the close of the volume the author strives to penetrate the

darkness which hangs over the present conflict. He does not think "that

the North is well advised in its attempt to reconstruct the Union in its

original proportions." He would have the North supported in striving for

"a degree of success which shall compel the South to accept terms of

separation, such as the progress of civilization in America and the

advancement of human interests throughout the world imperatively

require." The terms of his proposed settlement we have not room here to

consider.

With this hasty notice, and without any attempt at criticism, we dismiss

a thoughtful and interesting book, which, however in some particulars it

may fail to meet the entire acceptance of all American readers, is well

worthy of their calm and deliberate perusal.