As to the women, there are at least as many in England who are spare

and angular of figure as here, and of those who have not passed thirty

I think rather more. The London "Spectator" said some years ago, in

discussing the Banting diet, I believe, that "scragginess was more

common in England among women than stoutness"; and it is remarkable

that the French caricatures of Englishwomen always represent them as

thin, bony, and sharp-featured. In this of course there is a little

malice; but it shows the impression left upon the French people by

their near neighbors. I cannot do better here than to offer my readers,

in the following passage, a share in one of my letters written home; it

has at least the advantage of recording on the spot impressions

received by me after careful examination under the most favorable

circumstances. I was writing about the beauty of the parks:

"It is amazing to see the great space of this little island that these

English folk have reserved for air, and health, and beauty; and it is

for all, the poorest and meanest as well as the richest and noblest;

there are no privileged classes in this. As to the effect upon their

health, I suppose it must be something, but it shows for very little.

G---- [a gentleman who is very strong upon the subject of degeneracy,

which I have always doubted] will laugh and say that it was a foregone

conclusion with me, but to set aside my inference he will be obliged to

take the position that there is nothing so misleading as facts, except

figures. I have now seen many hundreds of thousands of Englishmen and

Englishwomen of all classes. I have placed myself in positions to

examine them closely. At the great Birmingham musical festival my seat

gave me full view of the house, chorus and all. The vast hall was

filled with people of the middle and upper middle classes, and at one

end with members of the highest aristocracy, who occupied seats roped

off from the rest, and called 'the President's seats'--the President

being the Marquis of Hertford. At the end of the performance, both

evening and morning, I hastened to a place where a great part of the

audience would pass close before me. At Westminster Abbey I stood again

and again at the principal door and watched the congregation as they

came out; I have done the same in swarming railway stations; I have

walked through country villages and cathedral towns; I know the human

physiognomy of all quarters of London pretty well; I have seen the

Guards and the heavy dragoons, and I say without any hesitation that

thus far I find that the men and the women are generally smaller and

less robust than ours, and above all that the women are on the whole

sparer and less blooming than ours. The men are ruddier on the whole;

that is, there are more ruddy men here; but the number of men without

color in their cheeks seems to be nearly the same as with us. The

apparent inconsistency of what I have said is due to the fact that the

ruddy men and women here are generally so very red that they produce a

great impression of redness, an impression that lasts and remains

salient in the memory. A delicately graduated and healthy bloom is not

very common. And so the fat women are so very fat that they seem to

take up a great part of the island. But the little London 'gent,' with

whom Leech has made us so familiar, you meet everywhere in the great

city. Sunday before last, loitering in the cloisters of Westminster, I

stopped to look at a tablet in the wall. There were three of these men

before me, and the number soon increased to seven. I looked over _the

hats_--round felt hats--of the whole seven without raising my chin.

I remember that like Rosalind I am 'more than common tall,' but I never

did anything like that at home. At the Horse Guards they put their

finest men as sentinels, mounted, on each side of the gate. Well, they

are fine fellows, and would be very uncomfortable chaps to meet, except

in a friendly way; a detachment of them riding up St. James's street

the other morning, with their cuirasses like mirrors, and the coats of

their big black horses almost as bright, was a spectacle which it

seemed to me could not be surpassed for its union of military splendor

and the promise of bitter business in a fight; but Maine, or Vermont,

or Connecticut, or Kentucky can turn out whole regiments of bigger and

stronger men. Colonel M----, whom I met in Canada, said the same to me

when he thought he was talking to an Englishman. I wonder that he ever

forgave me the things he said to me during his brief self-deception;

for they were true. But he was a good fellow and bore no malice.

Nevertheless, you sometimes meet here a very fine man, or a big,

blooming beauty, and in either case the impression is stronger and more

memorable than in a like case it is apt to be with us; chiefly, I

think, because of their dress and 'set up,' which in such cases--as in

that of the Guards and Dragoons--is apt to be very pronounced."

I will add here, in passing, that this English "set up," particularly

in the case of almost all Englishmen of any pretensions, is

distinctive, and is in a great measure the cause of the impression of

superior good looks and strength on their side. It appears in a marked

degree in all military persons, rank and file as well as officers, and

in the police force, the men of which are on the whole inferior in

stature and bulk to ours--leaving the big Broadway squad, most of them

Yankees, out of the question--and yet it is far superior in appearance

to ours, owing to the "set up" of the men, and the way in which they

carry themselves. I observed that although the upper classes contained

a fair proportion, although no notable excess, of large and well-formed

men and women, the burly men and the big-bodied, heavy-limbed women

were generally of the lower and the lower middle class. This made me

wonder where all the pretty housemaids and shop girls came from; for

the prettiest faces, the most delicately blooming complexions, and the

finest figures that I saw in England were among them. In a letter

written from the Rose Inn at Canterbury, a cosy comfortable old

hostlery, I find the following passage, which is to the purpose:

"I ate my bacon and eggs this morning in the coffee room, where at

another table were three queer Englishwomen, yet nice looking--apparently

a mother and two daughters. The elder daughter was, I will not say a

lathy girl, but very slim not only in the waist, but above and below

it. The mother and the younger were plump and rosy, absurdly alike, and

with that cocked-up nose which is one of the very few distinctive

peculiarities of figure that you see here, but even this very rarely;

and their black hair was curled in tight curls all over their heads. I

was struck by this, because curling hair is comparatively rare here,

and I had expected to find it common. It was cut just like a man's, and

plainly so because it would have been impossible to dress it if it were

allowed to grow long in woman fashion. They were very jolly and

pleasant, chaffing each other in low, soft voices, and breaking out in

rich, sweet laughter. They looked just like boys masquerading in

women's clothes; for the eldest was quite young looking and may have

been an elder sister. The youngest, who was some seventeen or eighteen

years old, looked very fair and blooming across the room, but when I

came close to her, which I had an opportunity of doing, I found that

her color, both white and red, was coarse, which is very often the case

here when there is color. In the mother, or eldest sister, this

coarseness was apparent even at a distance. But see, Lady ---- and her

daughters, although pretty and elegant, had no tinge of color in their

cheeks, and they were all as thin as rails, and the girls' hair, as

well as their mother's, was as straight as fiddle strings. I came here

expecting to see golden curls in plentiful crops, or at least not

uncommonly. But it seems to me that I haven't seen a dozen curly-haired

children since I have been in the country; and I have seen them--the

children--by tens of thousands, and examined them closely, making

memorandums of my observation. Nor have the ladies of this family (I am

now at ----), Lady ---- and Mrs. ----, any more bloom than this paper,

and they are both as thin as Lady ---- and her daughters; Mrs. ----

painfully so. The men, belonging of course to another family, are

stout, well-built fellows enough, but the two other guests are as lean

as greyhounds. I went to a little dinner party the other evening, and

the carriage sent to the station for me (for they think nothing here of

asking you fifteen or twenty miles to dinner even when you are not

expected to stay over night) took also a Major General Sir ---- ----. I

was told that he would join me, and I expected to see a portly, ruddy

man of inches, with sweeping whiskers and moustache. I found a short,

slender, meek-looking, pale-faced man; but his bearing was very

military; he was a charming companion and the pink of courtesy. We

entered the drawing-room together of course; but notwithstanding his

rank, he waved me in before him, and my plain Mistership was announced

before his titles. I have seen no men here at all equal in face or

figure to General Hooker, General Hancock, General Augur, or General

Terry, to say nothing of General Scott, who was something out of the

common even with us. And Burnside, and McDowell, and Grant, and

McClellan are all stouter men than you are apt to find here. The

biggest men that I have seen were from the north, Yorkshire and

Northumberland. Those of the south, particularly in Kent, are the

shortest; although, as a Kent man said to me, they are generally

'stocky.'"[3]

[3] Mr. Jennings, late editor of the New York "Times," now London

correspondent of the "World," in a recent letter describing the

opening of Parliament by the Queen in person, on which occasion

the House of Lords was filled with peers and peeresses, writes

thus with regard to the beauty of the women and the presence and

figures of the men:

"On this occasion the ladies overflowed the House. Early as

it still was, the floor was covered with them--large blocks

of the benches were occupied, and the galleries were crowded.

All these ladies were in evening toilets, the peeresses

wearing coronets of diamonds--most of them being fairly

ablaze with diamonds on head and neck. If the daylight was

not very favorable to the shoulders or complexions of some of

these noble dames, the gorgeousness of their costumes and the

glitter of their precious stones served to divert attention

from the defects of nature or the ravages of time.... Not

many of these ladies in the House were very pretty, although

here and there was a face such as makes one stop short and

hold one's breath, and wonder at the divine perfection of

nature's handiwork when she is at her best.... As for the old

bald-headed gentlemen, some of them very short and stumpy,

they looked painfully like a collection of 'senators' in some

opera bouffe. One of them in particular, with four ermine

bars on his cloak, denoting his high rank, was exactly like

the funny-looking dummy Englishman which the French delight

to exhibit in their farces. He had very little hair left to

boast of, and that little was very red, and his face was

round and red also, and he was altogether so comic a little

man that one could not look at him without a smile. I could

not find out who he was till the royal procession entered,

when he suddenly reappeared in great pomp and state, standing

on the throne by the side of her Majesty's chair and carrying

the 'Cap of Maintenance.' Then I knew that he was the Marquis

of Winchester--fourteenth of that ilk--John Paulet by name,

and the Premier Marquis of England. So much for appearances."

Mr. Jennings, it should be remembered, is an Englishman; but he

lived eight or ten years in New York; and I may be pardoned for

saying that he carried away a constant reminder of "American"

beauty, and a standard of comparison which would be likely to

make him fastidious.

A New England man now living in England, who made his house very

delightful to me, first by the presence of himself and his family, and

next by the kindest and most considerate hospitality, is an ever

present rebuke of the stoutest sort to the British notion of the

physical degeneracy of the English race in "America." He, a Yankee of

the old Puritan emigration, is five feet ten and a half inches high, is

forty-eight inches, four good feet, in girth around the chest, weighs

two hundred pounds, and yet has not the least appearance of portliness,

rather the contrary. He is the only man I ever met whose friendly grip

was rather more than I liked to bear. I spoke to his wife about his

strength and his figure, and she told me that when he went to get his

life insured here the surgeons said that they very rarely saw such a

powerful, finely formed, and perfectly healthy man as he is, and never

any finer or healthier. That would be impossible. And as he is so was

his father. Were they exceptions? Only of a sort that constantly occur

among real Yankees--"Americans" whose families have been in the country

for generations, and who are the only proper examples of the influence

of the climate and the social conditions of the country.

I have, perhaps, said too much upon this subject of the comparative

physical condition of the race in the two countries; but I have been

led to do so because of the very great inconsistency I found between

the facts and the common notion as to stout Englishmen and lean

"Americans," blooming, buxom Englishwomen and pale, slender "American"

women--a notion which one writer has repeated, parrot-like, after the

other, until even we ourselves have accepted it without question. Like

many other notions which no one disputes, it is false. But the world

has gone on accepting it and assuming it to be true until it has so

taken possession of the general mind that if in a room full of English

people only one man were found ruddy and burly, and only one woman

blooming and well rounded (and this or something very like it I have

seen more than once), they would be picked out and spoken of as

English-looking, to the disregard of all the others. The exceptions

would be taken as examples of the rule; and this even by the English

themselves, so swayed are we by tradition and authority, even in such

an everyday matter. Nay, even I myself, skeptical and carping, was thus

misled. The steamer, going out, was filled chiefly with English people.

Two of my fellow passengers I selected in my mind as notably and

typically English, not only in person, but in bearing. They proved to

be, one a Massachusetts Yankee and the other a Western man; but both

had from association contracted English habits of dress and of manner.

Two Englishwomen, however, attracted my particular attention. One was,

I think, the very largest human female I ever saw outside of a caravan.

She was a fearful manifestation of the enormous development of solid

flesh which the British fair sometimes attain. As she stood by her

husband she was the taller from the ear upward. She weighed about

twenty stone. I think that a plumb line dropped from the front of her

corsage would have reached the deck without touching her skirts. Her

tread was hippopotamic. And yet she showed traces of beauty, and not

improbably had been a fine fair girl; and even at the present time she

managed to effect a very palpable waist. I mused wonderingly upon the

process by which she did this; but still more upon that sad gradual

enormification by which she passed from a tall blooming beauty into her

present tremendous proportions. The other was exactly the reverse. She

could hardly be called ill looking in the face, but her pale, blank,

unfeatured countenance reminded one instantly of a sheep. She was a

washed-out, and although young, a faded creature, with no more

shoulders or hips than my forefinger. And yet she was a perfect English

type, and so like some of John Leech's women that I could not look at

her without internal laughter. Her husband--for even such women by some

mysterious process known to themselves will get husbands--was like unto

her in face, in feature, and in expression; and yet he was so

strikingly, so aggressively British in look and in manner that I heard

some Yankees on board say that they would like to kick him. And I

somewhat shared their prejudice; of which before we landed I learned to

be ashamed; for I found him a very intelligent, well-informed, pleasant

man, reserved in his manners, and although firm in his opinions, which

were strongly British, very respectful of other men's, and very careful

of giving offence. His union of firmness and courtesy seemed to me

worthy of admiration; and if he did wish to kick any of the Yankees on

board, for which in one or two cases I could have forgiven him, I am

sure that he never let the desire manifest itself in their presence.

Another prevalent notion, which is reciprocal between the people of the

two countries, is mistaken according to my observation. It is generally

believed, or at least very often said in "America," that the men in

England are very much handsomer than the women; and conversely it is

commonly believed in England, or said, that the women in "America" are

handsomer than the men. An absurd and truly preposterous notion, as

will be seen upon a moment's reflection. For the women in both

countries are the mothers of both the men and the women; and the men

are the fathers of both the men and the women; and as some of the women

are of their fathers' types and some of the men of their mothers', the

imputed difference of the two in personal beauty could not be brought

about. It is physiologically impossible that the women of a race should

be handsomer than the men, and _vice versa_.

It is nevertheless true that the men in England are on the whole more

attractive to the eye than the women, and that the women in "America"

are generally much more attractive than the men. The cause of this is a

fact very distinctive of the social surface of the two countries. I

have spoken of the "set up" and the bearing of the men in England. It

is very remarkable, and is far superior to anything of the kind that is

found even among the most cultivated people in this country, except in

comparatively rare individual cases. But in England it is common; it is

the rule. There, from the middle classes up, a slovenly man is a rare

exception. There men are almost universally neat and tidy, and they

carry themselves with a conscious self-respect. They do not slouch.

They do not go about, even in the morning, with coats unbuttoned,

skirts flying, and their hands in their overcoat pockets. They dress

soberly, quietly, with manly simplicity, but almost always in good

taste, and with notable neatness. They are manly looking men, with an

air of conscious manhood. Moreover, in England the man is still

recognized as the superior. England has been called the purgatory of

horses and the paradise of women. But that saying came from the

continent of Europe, where women, except in the very highest and most

cultivated classes, are not treated with that tenderness and

consideration for their weakness and their womanly functions which I am

inclined to think is somewhat peculiar to the English race. I should

call England the paradise of men; for there the world is made for them;

and women are happy in making it so. An Englishman who is the head of a

family is not only master of his house, but of the whole household. His

will is recognized as the law of that household. No one thinks of

disputing it. It is not deemed unreasonable that in the house which he

provides and keeps up his comfort and his convenience should be first

considered, or that, as he is responsible for his household both to the

law and to society, authority should go with responsibility. And

yet--perhaps for this very reason--wives there have the household

affairs more absolutely in their hands than they have here. A man whose

absolute authority is acknowledged, practically as well as

theoretically, is very ready to make concessions and to rid himself of

what at any time he may assume. Real monarchs, like the Czars or like

the Tudors, are careless of the protection of royal etiquette. The

consciousness of this acknowledged or rather unquestioned superiority

shows itself in the men's faces, and in their bearing, simple and

unpretending as their manner is. Besides all this, men in England (I am

leaving out of consideration the lower classes) show the effect of

cultivation, of breeding, of discipline. Even in the middle classes

they are well informed, and, what is of more importance to the present

question, they have been taught to behave themselves respectfully to

others. They do so behave; they feel that they ought to do so and that

they must. There are two gods worshipped in England, and one is

propriety; and a very good god he is, when he is not made a Juggernaut.

The result of all this is a very different man in appearance from him

who generally pervades "America." The latter may be, and generally is,

as handsome physically as the former; he may be, and generally is, as

good morally; but the one generally shows for all that he is and

perhaps for more, and the other does not, and frequently does for less.

And yet again; among such men in England another sort who, for example,

say "hadn't oughter," and "have came," and who spit upon the floor, are

not generally found mingling. They are kept in social pens by

themselves. And thus in judging of English society they are left out.

A comparative estimate of Englishwomen is too serious and far too

complicated a subject to be treated except in an article by itself.

RICHARD GRANT WHITE.

A DEAD VASHTI.

Do we indeed desire the dead should still be near us, at our side?

"I do not know how it is with others," said the spirit, looking away

from the Sunday child to the red and spectral moon that was arising

from the tossing ocean into a mass of heavy, broken clouds; "for since

my death I have been alone; but when I left my human form I left few of

the affections, the passions of life, and thus death has made but

little change in me. I cannot believe, however, that all the dead carry

as much of their old life into the new as I have, for few can be cursed

as I have been with a granted prayer. What my life in the world of

spirits might have been I cannot tell you; but I know that all I have

suffered comes from my folly, my wickedness in praying for my own will!

But my life upon earth had been so complete, so happy, it seemed as if

I might be justified in thinking that it ought to give me the same

bliss if it was made eternal. My love for Philip was so pure and true

that it seemed as fit that it should govern me in one life as in the

other! Other women, I suppose, have loved their husbands as well; but

few would have had the temerity to stake their eternal happiness on

human fidelity as I did! But my love was a part of my being, and I

thought no more of its extent or duration than of the density of the

air I breathed. It was never put to the test of neglect or

misunderstanding, and was never subject to question. Looking back now,

it seems impossible that I ever lived without Philip; for all my days

before I knew him are but fragments of a half-forgotten time. Of his

love I had no doubt. It satisfied me. And we were not only lovers, but

also comrades. I was but an amateur where he was a master, but I

followed him attentively, eagerly. I like to remember those days, when

we wandered like children through the woods, when we climbed, sketched,

laughed, and sang together, and I often wonder if any mortals are as

happy now. At home we had our hours of work, of merry talk, and happy

plans. We had the excitements of the exhibition days, the pleasures of

social life, and then we had also my dear little girl, our Nellie!

Sometimes I fancy that such happiness cannot die; that if our words and

actions perpetuate themselves, such vivid experiences cannot fade away,

and that I may some time find it all passed into an eternal form! But

these are dreams; for every thing has changed, and I know that nothing

can be eternal that is not based upon truth, upon faithfulness.

"You can understand, although you are so young, and are just learning

how love transfigures everything, that my life with my husband was so

complete that we did not dream of any change; we did not comprehend

that we could ever be parted. I have heard women say that they have

trembled when they were very happy, knowing that there must be an end

to their joy; but I had no such fears. Still it came to me, and in a

horrible shape.

"I knew that I was very ill, and that Philip was anxious and wretched,

but I never thought that I might die. My fierce pain gave me no hint of

death, and so it came almost without warning. I would not believe that

I must go away, and that this brief illness meant death was incredible,

preposterous! I shrank from thinking of it; I cried out that I would

not die; I would not leave Philip! I begged my physicians for life; I

entreated Heaven to spare me; I almost broke my husband's heart by my

wild cries for life. It was a bitter struggle! I prayed for

annihilation--for anything but the knowledge that we were separated. Do

not think that I forgot Nellie, or that I did not grieve to part with

her; but other mothers have loved their children for the father's sake,

and I could have surrendered anything to have kept him. I could trust

her to a Higher love, but for us there was nothing but daily, hourly

union.

"The night before I died--for who can thrust away the inevitable!--I

lay close in Philip's arms as he knelt by my bedside. I was almost

helpless, but I clung body and soul to him. It was poor comfort to tell

each other that this was but a temporary separation; that we had yet an

eternity in which to live together. Eternity was indefinite and far

away, while our parting, his lonely life, my waiting hours, were so

near. I cannot forget how he wept as he held me close, closer to him,

and how his courage failed as he realized how fast my hour of departure

was hastening to us! I do not now know how it was that we did not die

together that night! We talked of it, and it seemed so easy and natural

that we thought we could not help it; but the daylight came, and we

were still alive, clinging to each other.

"But this night of agony did more than death alone could have done, for

it shaped my future. Out of our frantic grief there came a prayer that

has fixed me here, and which has taught me of what love is made!

Together that night we besought Heaven to give me no other happiness

than that I had known in life, but to let me linger near my home, and

be with my husband until he died. I cried out that any other existence

would be hell to me; and with desperate hands we beat against the doors

of prayer, and pleaded for power to choose our own future.

"The next night I died. All day I had laid on my bed passive and quiet.

My grief had worn me out, and I could not have spoken had I wished.

Philip sat by me holding my hand, but he too was silent. I felt vaguely

that mine was the easier task; that living could be harder than dying;

but I had no words with which to comfort or strengthen him. I could

faintly smile when he would bend his head, and kiss my nerveless hand,

and I wondered if he knew how much I liked to lie quietly and look at

him. Yet I did not care for it all! I remember the watchful

indifference with which I regarded my physician's face, and followed

the motions of the nurse about the room. I remember my sister's tears,

and how little Nellie sat by me on the bed with her doll, until she

fell asleep on my pillow. I remember how the hours measured themselves

away, how the sunshine deepened and faded, how the night came, and all

grew dim and silent. An absolute hush rested upon the earth. The fire

blazed, but it had ceased its crackling; the watchers moved noiselessly

about the room, the street had become quiet, and everything seemed

awaiting some coming, some solemn change. As Philip leaned over me, and

I saw his lips move, but heard no sound, I fancied that perhaps my

hearing had gone from me, but I cared nothing for it! Then the fire

grew dim, the room seemed full of shadows, the lights faded away, and

my eyes became heavy, but I did not care to shut them, or to brush away

the film that covered them. My breath gained substance, and began to

push its way through my lungs, my throat seemed closing, and then

suddenly everything changed!

"It is not to my purpose, even were I allowed, to tell you anything of

the conditions of my present life, or to explain to you how I can

reveal myself to you, and why it was that Philip could never see me.

All that I am to tell you is connected with this earth.

"After the first surprise was over I turned to Philip, who was kneeling

by the bed. He could not believe that I was dead, but called vehemently

on me to look at him. I remember the joy with which I sprang to his

side, and putting my arms around, tried to turn his head away from the

dead body to my living, happy face! But it was all in vain, in vain! He

was deaf, he was blind to me! Our prayer, our compact was as nothing:

he knew only the dead wife! I was as indifferent to the body as to a

shadow on the wall; but to be clinging to him unrecognized, unfelt,

terrified me, shocked me! I cannot dwell on this, but after all was

over, and the body carried away, he was still ignorant of my presence.

I followed his aimless steps through the house; I stood by his chair as

he sat idly at his easel; I watched with him through the long nights,

but he never suspected that I was there! How often when he has called

me have I answered, and when he has prayed for one glimpse of me have I

clung to him, but had no sign from him to tell me that he even blindly

guessed that our prayer might have been granted! I have put my arms

around him; my head has lain upon his shoulder; I have passionately

called upon him, but still been as empty air! Yet it comforted me to be

with him, and I could not doubt that some time he would come to know of

my presence. It was impossible, I thought, for him to dwell in such an

atmosphere of love and always be unconscious of it. Why, we thought

only of each other, we longed only for each other, and so he must at

last come to know how near I was, and then, I thought with joy, waiting

would lose its pain!

"I could laugh as I now think of this fond and foolish fancy--of my

trust in time, in a man's intuition! Why, I did not even know that men

do not nurse grief as we do; and I was surprised by Philip's resolute

bravery in turning to work, and trying to forget in study all he had

lost in love. But do not think it was easy for him! I was much too

intimately connected with his art not to be always suggested by it; and

my dumb and unknown presence awakened none of the old inspiration of

our talks, our mutual sympathy and interest. Sometimes his desire for

me became so intense that I felt that my time for recognition had

surely come, and I have knelt, clinging to him, waiting for that

blessed smile of knowledge, but all in vain!

"Time, however, smoothes all griefs for mortals, and soon life began to

run tranquilly in the house. Nellie was happy in my sister's care, and

Philip became absorbed in work. The old sparkle and gayety was gone,

but youth and vigor were left, so they lived pleasantly enough, and I

wandered through the rooms lonely, but not forlorn. I could not be

miserable, for I was ever with them. And I could not but be happy in

seeing how tenderly I was remembered, how constantly I was thought of

by them all. Nothing was changed, for even my work-basket kept its

place in Philip's room, and some of my ribbons were still tumbled in

with his collars! Thus some years passed away. Nellie grew tall and

pretty, and Philip became graver, more studious, and was as famous as

he was popular. I do not believe that he ever thought of making any

change in his life, of filling my place in his home or heart. I never

dreamed it was possible! But ignorance is a poor safeguard, and at last

the time came when the shadow began to lift from off his life, to

deepen over mine. I do not know how to tell you more; the thought of

speaking of it almost strikes me dumb; but I must, I must! I am

compelled to do it! And it all came of a picture--a picture of youth

and beauty; and she--Esther--came to sit for it! You need not expect me

to tell you much of her, for some things are impossible; but she had

been as a schoolgirl a pet of mine. She was the daughter of a friend,

and she was pretty; she was rich; she was good and loving: what else

could any mortal ask for? These quiet hours in the studio were pleasant

to both of them, and one day Philip broke the silence of years and

spoke of me to her. She was glad to talk of me, for she had been fond

of me; and she told him of what I had said to her; she brought him a

little drawing I had made of Nellie for her. They spoke of me lovingly

and gently, but I stood off and wrung my hands in anguish. The most

cruel silence would have been better than these confidences which

brought them so close together.

"But what a wonderful picture he painted! How fair, how lovely she

looked upon the canvas, and how happy she was when the painting was

praised! She danced for joy when she first saw it in its frame; but

I--I who knew so well what a success it was--I did not rejoice! I did

not look at the picture, but instead I watched the soft and tender

smile with which Philip regarded her! Need I tell you more?" she said

in a husky voice, standing up and clenching her hands. "Must I repeat

the history of these days as though it was a story I was telling you!

Have I not suffered penance enough in witnessing a grief I could not

comfort, a resignation that I could not share, and a happiness that has

made me desperate; but must I also put it all into words? But there was

one trial spared me. I did not have to witness the growth of this new

love, for I rarely saw them together during the days of courtship. She

did not come often to the house after the picture was finished, and so

I escaped this much. Yet I knew when they saw each other, and he was no

laggard wooer. I never followed him or her, for I could not leave the

home where we had lived; but in thought I was never parted from him.

How often have I paced the floor in lonely agony, waiting for his

return from her house. I have crouched in the corner, fearing, yet

eager to see him enter with the new happiness in his eye, the new

elasticity in his step. I saw him grow brighter and gayer; and as he

whistled or sang at his work I have fled away in helpless agony. Yet he

had not forgotten me; and in the midst of the new life that was

thrilling through him I was still dear to him. I cannot pretend to

understand a man's love, nor to tell you how faithfulness to an old

affection, and desire for one that is new, can dwell in the same heart.

He thought of me tenderly. I was a part of a past too dear to be

forgotten; but I did not belong to the present. He had lived without

me, and I was no longer necessary to him, but this younger love was

very near and real to him.

"At last he brought her home, and with many smiles and happy glances he

led Nellie to her new mother. It seemed very proper to the people who

filled the house that her grace and youth should mate with his dignity

and reputation, and that they should love each other; but none of them

saw, few thought of the disembodied wife who was still chained to his

side by links he had helped to forge, and who, standing unsuspected in

their midst, cursed--not the bride nor her husband--but her own

immorality.

"Yet as I watched the merriment with a most bitter scorn of my

suffering, and a fancy how Philip might well paint a love dancing on a

coffin for his next picture, I yet felt glad to know that I had not

been the one who was false to that dreadful night of vows and prayers.

If he had died, _I_ would have been faithful. My need of love would

have been as great; I might have longed for protection, for even bread;

but I would have had no other husband. I was glad, for it is well to be

faithful. A new love may bring new sweetness and content, but constancy

has its own sweet rewards, and the widowed heart would seek no strange

hand if it did but know what remains to those who are true.

"This was years ago as you count time; but until to-night I have

lingered around my home--my old home that was changed and beautified

for another mistress. I have nothing to tell you of their life, that

does not seem to men to be pleasant. They have been prosperous. They

have known many joys and few sorrows. They have travelled. He is famous

and he is also rich. Is that not enough? And Nellie, too, has been

content. Esther has not allowed the child to miss me; and although

other children claim equal love from her father, they have never robbed

her. Is not this best? your questioning eyes ask me. Perhaps it is. I

have often taken my jealous heart to task; and remembering how solitary

Philip's home would have been, how much he has gained in these new

loves, I have tried to say it _was_ the best. But he was not bound to

me only for life--for my life. Our love reached out toward the other

world and swore eternal fidelity, and I--_I_ have not been freed

from him.

"But this is not all. I might reconcile myself to this and be content.

I love Philip so truly that I think I could sacrifice my dearest, most

selfish wishes to him, and be satisfied to see him prosperous and

happy. But whether it is a keener sight that I possess, whether it is a

natural change that comes to all who submit to the influence of the

world, I know not; but Philip is not the same artist--he is not the

same man; but this, I think, no one knows; that his pictures have

changed is clear to all. Once he worked for the sake of the best; now

he works for 'success'; and Esther rates his paintings at the price

they bring. But had I lived even this might have been. Yet this is not

all. The sting, the bitterness of my bereavement is in my knowledge

that we are parted for ever. If Philip had not grown so far away from

me in the years in which he has not known me, I could expect some happy

reunion with him; but this man will need me no more in Heaven than he

now does upon earth. If I could now return to him and take Esther's

place by his side, I would jar upon him, displease him. He might love

me, but there would be little affinity between us. And I--have I not

changed? has not my ignorance turned to bitterness, my confidence to

disbelief? But it seems to me that a little sunshine would bring back

all that was sweet or good in me--yet I cannot tell. But this I know:

in the future the soul of this man will lay no claim to mine. We get

nothing without its price, and Philip has paid for a second love by the

loss of all he once thought dearest. Still it may be best, it may be

right.

"As for myself, some change is coming to me. It must be so, or I would

not be here to-night. You know what perhaps is to occur; you know how

long I was to linger; but of this I cannot speak. If I shall never see

him again, do you think I can talk of it?

"But, child, it fills me with wonder as I think that the spirit world

in which I have so long dwelt, of which I know nothing, is now,

perhaps, to be revealed to me. I have no fear of it. I believe that

when I enter Paradise--and I cannot believe that its doors are for ever

closed against me--that in some way the lost love of my husband, the

misled affection of my child, will be made up to me. Heaven defrauds us

of nothing; and as we are created to love and be loved, is it not true

that there must be compensation somewhere if it is torn from us, or

denied to us?

"But be that as it may," she said, looking down upon her companion with

sad and tender eyes. "You are a woman, and I have a charge to give you.

I warn you, child, that your love to Heaven cannot be too strong; your

love for man too true; but while you give to man the sweetness and

comfort of your life, you must look to Heaven alone for faithfulness."

* * * * *

When the girl looked up again, the morning star shone over the sea, a

fresh wind blew out of the yellowing sky, but she was alone upon the

sands.

LOUISE STOCKTON.

ON BEING BORN AWAY FROM HOME.

Reading, the other day, in Mr. Stigand's interesting "Life of Heine,"

about the young poet's discontent in Germany, about his long desire

to quit that country and to live in France, and of his final hegira

to Paris, it occurred to me that he might be described, not too

fancifully, as having been born away from home. How many have had the

same fortune, whether for good or ill. But the happier class is the

contrasting one, that of persons who have never suffered from the

stress of the migrating instinct; and surely it is a fortunate thing to

be born in one's own place, as Lamb was born in London, to grow in the

fit soil, to lose no time in striking root. Lamb was the happiest of

men in this respect. A true child of the city, he held that London was

a better place to be born in than any part of the country. "A garden,"

he writes to Wordsworth, "was the primitive prison, till man, with

Promethean boldness and felicity, luckily sinned himself out of it."

For _garden_ if we read _farm_ in this passage, we have, perhaps,

a statement of the feeling which prompts our own country people, and

more and more with successive years, to leave the country and come to

the city--to crowd the towns and desert the fields. Lamb says

again--and one almost trembles to see him thus defying the "poet of

nature" to his face--"Separate from the pleasure of your company, I

don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life.... I do not envy

you. I should pity you did I not know that the mind will make friends

with anything." But Wordsworth, the Laker, was quite as clearly born at

home as Lamb, the Londoner; and, as we know, he came back to his native

hills after no long wanderings, not to quit them again. It is because

Lamb hardly wandered at all that he seems so truly autochthonous, so

peculiarly a child of the soil. He struck deep root into the

intellectual alluvium of London, and until he was fifty years old he

suffered nothing from transplantation except when he changed his

lodgings or paid his somewhat reluctant visits to friends in the

country; and when, at fifty, he ventured away from London, it was no

further than to the margin of the city of Paradise--to Enfield,

Edmonton--the latter a place which he calls "a little teasing image of

a town," where "the country folks do not look like country folks," and

where "the very blackguards are degenerate." It was only in London that

Lamb's spirit really nourished itself and grew.

And why is it in old countries that the mind seems to strike its most

vigorous fibres into the soil, to draw up its most potent juices,

bringing to blossom such flowers as Wordsworth's "Poems of Childhood,"

such pansies as Elia's thoughts? Lamb suggests country images; even

though he was of the city, his essays have an outdoor freshness and

tenderness. They take us into the open fields, and show us the soft

counterchange of shadows and sunlight, bright spaces and pursuing

swarths of shade. And where did he learn the longing homesickness of a

child for the country? "How I would wake weeping," Elia says, "and in

the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne, in Wiltshire!"

Whether in country or city, surely it is in old lands that one gets the

fullest home feeling, the complete benefits of soil, and atmosphere,

and acquaintance with the various geniuses of the place. Would that we

had been Londoners, we say, to know the ancient streets, or Parisians

for the sake of the great libraries and of Notre Dame!

That, however, is but a melancholy _utinam_; there has been no lack of

fortunate migrations among people who have been born far away from

their fitting homes, and who have found their way thither in course of

time. So the "rising young men" of our own colonial days returned to

England to make their career; and sometimes we may trace the features

of their childhood's "environment" in their developed genius. Our

painters, for whom the new country was not yet a quite satisfactory

place, displayed perhaps the strongest homing tendency. Copley, West,

and Stuart, for instance, all American born, had to seek an older home

of art. West returned in youth to England, and Copley in early manhood;

there they made their careers, there they lived and died; while Stuart,

after passing fifteen years in Europe, came back to settle in America.

But none of these artists quite severed himself from his native

country. American themes served each of them for some of his best known

works: as in Stuart's famous "Washington," West's "Death of General

Wolfe," and Copley's first historical picture, so called, the "Youth

Rescued from a Shark."[4]

[4] Now, I believe, in the Boston Athenæum.

There, too, was Copley's son, born, like his father, in New England.

In 1774 he was taken to London, where he too made his career, a

distinguished one; for the Boston boy lived to become Baron Lyndhurst

and Lord Chancellor. But as the eminent nobleman to be, at the time of

his demigration, was but two years old, it is difficult to point out

any traits of distinctively American statesmanship in his career.

And that other American nobleman, Count Rumford, of whom Mr. Ellis has

recently written the first good biography--his was a notable case of

birth away from home. It is a little odd to think of the famous Count

Rumford, Franklin's compeer in genius, and born but a few miles from

Franklin's birthplace, as plain Benjamin Thompson of North Woburn,

Massachusetts. His parents were plain New England people, but he was

ambitious, and had a handsome person; he had, too, what his neighbors

might have called "uppish" ways; for he pretended to peculiar

knowledge, and was always making strange researches and experiments; in

short, I fear that he was not quite enough of a democrat to suit his

neighbors. There was a distinction about him that they did not like; he

was too original in his character and tastes; and consequently he was a

marked man in that community. His fortunes seemed well enough, I

presume, when, at twenty, he quitted school-teaching to marry a rich

widow, thirteen years older than himself, Sarah Rolfe of Concord, New

Hampshire; appearing on the wedding day, it is noted, in a splendid

scarlet suit, to the astonishment and scandal of the young man's

friends. But that was in 1772, and his troubles were not far ahead. At

the outbreak of the colonial quarrel he was accused of being a Tory,

and charged with disloyalty to the American cause. He protested his

innocence in vain. He was arrested, tried--and acquitted; for nothing

could be proven against him. Indeed, there was nothing to prove; it was

his character that was the real cause of offence to the good people of

Concord. They were not tolerant of superiority; and there must have

been an intolerable superiority in young Thompson's personal beauty, in

his manners, in his passion for study and scientific experiment. In

spite of his acquittal, he remained _un homme suspect_; and finally the

Concord mob visited his house to take their will of him; but he had

fled, never to return. Had he not been forewarned, I fear there would

never have been any Count Rumford. The patriots of Concord might not

have put him to death, but one does not easily make noblemen of persons

who have been tarred and feathered. It is better to admit a tradesman

now and then, or even a dentist, to the ranks of the nobility, as it

has happened to some of our countrymen more recently. Very luckily,

then, young Thompson escaped the tar and feathers; at twenty-two he

left family, home, and estate, and fled from the Concord mob, never to

return. His property was confiscated, and in August, 1775, after having

suffered imprisonment as a Tory, he decided to quit the country. One

would think that he had sufficient reasons. He wrote thus to his

father-in-law: "I am determined," he says, "to seek for that _peace_

and _protection_ in foreign lands, and among strangers, which is deny'd

me in my native country. I cannot any longer bear the insults that are

daily offered me. I cannot bear to be looked upon and treated as the

_Achan_ of society." Thompson showed a true instinct for the

opportunity in choosing this course. He entered the British service,

and thenceforward, says Mr. Ellis, "the rustic youth became the

companion of gentlemen of wealth and culture, of scientific

philosophers, of the nobility, and of princes." Perhaps it gives a

wrong impression to speak of him as a "rustic youth"; for besides a

winning address, we are told that he had "a noble and imposing figure,"

and that he was a natural courtier; so that the familiar story of his

rapid promotion is not surprising. Under-Secretary of State at

twenty-eight, he was knighted by George III. at thirty; and eight years

later, by the pleasure of the King of Bavaria, Benjamin Thompson, of

Woburn, Massachusetts, was transformed into Count Rumford, having

already taken rank as a European celebrity. But he did not forget his

early home and friends, and it is pleasant to find him deriving his

title from the name given to Concord by the early settlers--a name, by

the way, that these patriots misspelled from _Romford_, the village

near London whence some of them came.

Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, never saw America or Sarah Rolfe

again. He never saw his only daughter, born after his flight from

Concord, until, at the age of twenty, she too left the forests of New

England to meet him in London. From the Continent she wrote those

interesting letters which his biographer has made accessible, the

record of a singular experience--that of a bright but untrained New

England girl introduced, without the least preparation, to courtly

European life. She relates her blunders and misadventures very frankly;

how she filled her father with consternation by making her best

courtesy to a housekeeper; how she ordered costly goods without

inquiring the prices; how--but I see that this _naïve_ young woman

is likely to lead us from our subject, for Miss Thompson evidently went

away from home when she left New England.

As for her father, he lived to marry a second widow, the brilliant and

distinguished woman who had been the wife of Lavoisier. We cannot say

that Count Rumford's good fortune kept to him in the matter of this

second marriage. It was an unhappy one; it reminds us of Dr. Johnson's

genial remark that second marriages are made to illustrate "the triumph

of hope over experience." My lord and my lady did not suit each other;

they quarrelled in the midst of their splendor, and in ways not always

the most decorous. Poor Benjamin Thompson! I fancy that after Madame

had "poured hot water" on the choicest flowers in your garden, you

wished that you were taking your ease in Concord again, the Revolution

being now safely ended, and no further question of tar and feathers

being likely to arise!

Alexander Hamilton was another eminent American who migrated in search

of a home; but seeking, not quitting, our dear country. Born of English

parentage in another British colony, the West Indies, he spent his

boyhood cursing the fate which had doomed him, apparently, to what he

called the "grovelling condition of a clerk" in the North Caribbee

islands. He longed to escape from trade; boy-like, he longed for a war,

for the opportunity of distinction in affairs. Nor did he have to wait

until age, or even until maturity, for verification of the saying of

his contemporary, Goethe, about the final fulfilment of the desires of

youth. What Hamilton desired in boyhood came to him promptly, almost as

by the rubbing of the lamp. We all know the story: how at fifteen he

found his way to New Jersey, whence extricating himself he went to

Columbia college; and how, while he was there, the Revolutionary war

broke out, making the lad drop his books at once to accept his

appointment as a major of artillery; and how naturally his career

flowed from that initial point. And in our own times Thackeray was

another product of a British colony, having been born in Calcutta, and

spending the first seven years of his childhood there. I will not

venture to say that I trace much colonial influence in his writings. He

may have been a true Indian at heart, but his novels are certainly

those of a club-man and a Londoner; and none of his essays disclose

very much of the Hindoo. Sainte-Claire Deville, again, one of the

truest of Frenchmen, was born, like Hamilton, in the Antilles.

But how many have there been who never found a real home, though they

sought it painfully and with tears! Byron, the predestinate wanderer,

and Rousseau, who never found rest, who complained that his birth was

but the beginning of his misfortunes, _le premier de mes

malheurs_--these are types of the less fortunate class. But we need

not multiply examples; it is the old story of wandering and

homelessness. How often is the homing effort made in vain! One would

fancy the air filled with piloting spirits that endeavor to find ways

of escape for the languishing body, spirits constantly coming and going

between the rock of exile and the far distant home. Sometimes the

effort succeeds, as we have seen; and sometimes it fails; the spirit

wastes itself in vain endeavor, passes away like the unnoticed melting

of a cloud. To spirits thus aspiring, thus failing, life is indeed what

old Desportes calls it, a bitter and thorny blossom, _une fleur

espineuse et poignante_. For what is the loss of opportunity but the

loss of the soul? and the conscious loss of opportunity may go on for a

lifetime, a protracted martyrdom. Take the case of any intelligent

exile, some wanderer in the Macerian desert, some refined person

unluckily born in Patagonia, who rejects the Patagonian ideals, who no

longer craves the most succulent of limpets gathered at the lowest

tide: in our own comfort and satisfaction cannot we extend a little

compassion to him? Not that I have the least prejudice against

Patagonia; but we need some name for the better concentration of our

sympathy. The intelligent but discontented Patagonian, then, who

rejects the Patagonian ideals, whose thoughts are not the thoughts of

Patagonia, whose ways are not Patagonian ways, he to whom even the most

successful popular career in Patagonia would seem a humiliation,

because it would associate him with the Patagonian character, and so

compromise him before the extra-Patagonian world--his, I say, is not a

happy case. His exile must end like other banishments for life--either

in escape or in death. For while he lives he must do without spiritual

light and heat, without the intellectual climate that he needs.

Do you call this a morbid state of mind in the Patagonian? Well, it may

be that he should imitate the repose, the serenity of the limpet; it

may be his duty to rest contented with the beach at low tide, with the

estate to which he was born; and yet I say that his feeling is not

devoid of a certain distinction; it may be, indeed, very blamable, but

it is a feeling that is no trait of ignoble natures.

And there is, too, a sanative quality in that feeling. His critical

attitude may help the exile to keep before him higher standards,

whether in thought or in conduct, whether in his "Hellenizing" or his

"Hebraizing" tendencies, as Mr. Arnold calls them, than he might

entertain were he living comfortably at the very centre. His

privations may thus be more effective than the maceration of the

recluse in keeping him in sympathy with culture, with the best things

of the mind; and surely that is some compensation for living in

Patagonia! There is still another: there is a fortunate exemption for

such exiles--fortunate we may safely call it, though it is but a

negative beatitude--the exemption from envy. That is worth not a

little. In Paris, in London, in Pekin, how many provocatives to envy

beset even the philosopher! For in those cities he must see many

undeniably superior persons about him--persons superior to himself not

only in fortune, but in ability! There, in attainment of all sorts, he

meets his rivals; and if he is a real philosopher, he will remember

Creon's caution--"not to get the idea fixed in your head that what you

say and nothing else is right."[5] Still, philosopher or not, he will

be likely to envy some of the desirable things that he sees; and the

fault is perhaps excusable: at any rate an occasional touch of the

claw, an _effleurement_ now and then of the passion, need not surprise

us, even when we do not excuse it, in London or Pekin. But in the

Patagonian civilization, however important it may be to the progress

of the world, what does such a man find to envy? Surely the higher

provocatives to that weakness are not abundant. Hereditary wealth,

ancient family dignities, culture, scholarship, imposing genius--these

do not surround him, these do not confront him with his inferiority as

they do, let us say, in this country. It is we, then, who are the

unhappy ones in this respect; but we can understand, at least, the

weakness of brethren who may be a little shaken by the contemplation

of all the desirable things in which the richer civilizations abound.

[5] [Greek: Mê nyn en êthos mounon en sautô phorei,

Hôs phês sy, kouden allo, tout' orthôs echein.]

--_Antigone_.

Yes, the careers which we may observe from day to day may certainly

prove stumbling blocks to some of us. The thriving politician or

contractor, for instance, Dives in his barouche, the blooming members

of literary cliques, the fashionable clergymen and poets, chorusing

gently to feminine audiences, who listen intent, perhaps even "weeping

in a rapturous sense of art," as Heine tells us the women of his day

wept when they heard the sweet voices of the evirates singing of

passion, of

Liebes fehnen,

Von Lieb' und Liebeserguss--

how admirable are all these characters! These, indeed, are careers to

move any but the steadfast mind.

And yet, even in Philistia, it is not every one that will yearn after

successes like these. In Philistia, far from the promised land, the

exile may yet contemplate without desire all these desirable things,

envying neither them nor their possessors. He may even indulge in a

saving scorn of them, a scorn of the main achievements, the popular men

of the Philistine community; bathing himself in irony as a tonic

against the spiritual malaria. Such a man I once knew, a man of

Askelon. He lived in that rich city as a recluse, and according to any

standard recognized in Askelon, he was not rich. On this text he would

sometimes quote delightful old Rutebeuf:

Je ne sai par ou je coumance,

Tant ai de matyère abondance

Por parleir de ma povretei.

Yet this man was not without his pleasures. One of them, I remember,

came from his interest in the study of architecture. For Askelon was a

finely built city; and he used to walk much in the streets of it,

gazing upon the fronts of the costly houses, all patterned, as I

understood, after the purest Greek orders. He used to walk around

admiring, and making me admire. But this man had a wonderful eye, a

visual gift which must have been, I think, much the same thing as the

second sight or clairvoyance of which we read; for upon the fronts of

these fine houses he saw more than what the delicate taste, the cunning

hand of the builder had placed there. I have heard him say that he was

"a Sunday's child," referring to some superstition not current in that

community--and he certainly made out writing upon those walls and doors

which I, for one, could never see, though I have no doubt that it was

really there. But they were legends which would have startled the

residents could they have been audibly published in the streets of

Askelon. "What inscriptions upon these door plates!" he would sometimes

remark, walking down the Pentodon, the most fashionable street in the

place: "Let me read you a few that I discern in this neighborhood"; and

as we passed slowly before the Greek houses he pronounced, one by one,

these remarkable words, reading them off, as it seemed, from the

lintels of the very finest edifices. I cannot give all of them, but

these, if I remember, were some: Charlatan, Tartufe, Peculator,

Sharper, Parthis mendacior; and when we came to one of the corner

houses, or "palaces," as they called them in Askelon, he said: "One of

our furtive men lives there--one of our men of three letters. We have

as many of them here in Askelon as ever existed in Plautus's time, and

they are quite as able now as they then were to live in fine houses to

which they have not quite the most honest claim in the world." While he

spoke the man of three letters came out and ran down the marble

staircase, smiling, and offering, I thought, to salute my friend as he

stepped into his chariot; but my friend, though he had clear sight for

the palace, did not see the owner.

But you were surely too severe, poor friend of mine. There were just

men even in Askelon--upright, religious, and intelligent, full of good

works. What if this clever conveyancer had appropriated to himself

enough to buy him a fine house? Was it not in the very air of Askelon

that he should do such a thing--that he, like others, should at any

rate establish himself comfortably? and will not some honester man than

himself live after him in the fine house? Come now, confess, I used to

say, that you yourself, in his place, might not have done much better:

confess, at least, that when you were a boy you put your fingers into

the sugar-bowl when you should have kept them out, when you well knew

that you ought to keep them out! And then my friend would confess the

pressure of the "environment," the power of the "Zeit-Geist," as we

have learned to call it since then. Poor man! That was long ago; and

things have changed greatly in Askelon of latter years. They tell me

that everybody there has now grown honest, and that nobody goes around

any more reading invisible writing on the houses. And all the fine

buildings are still standing, it appears; though the journals of that

city remark that some of the Grecian architecture has peeled off from

the fronts of the houses in the Pentodon, having been insecurely

fastened on, it seems, at first. And how my poor friend used to

criticise those very palaces in his dry, technical way! One thing in

particular that he said I remember by the antithesis, the turn of it;

he used to say that the architects of Askelon were never certain

whether to construct ornament or to ornament construction.

Well, he is gone now; he will never blame Askelon again, or run down

Gath. He died in Philistia. Perhaps he served his purpose there, but I

am sure he would have done more if he had been a little less Quixotic

in his notions.

But let us not grow tristful again. How many a happy escape, as we

said, has been made from Philistia; how many a clear spirit has made

its way out of the darkness to a true honor. If many who have had the

higher endowments have perished in the shadow, princes dying behind the

iron mask, yet not all have failed; some have broken away to a career.

Of two such in particular let us conclude by speaking--Winckelmann and

Heine. Both were Prussians, and each one migrated from the north into a

southern country, a fugitive from "the power of the night, the press of

the storm." Each waited long before his opportunity came; each learned

that the "tardiest of the immortals are the boon Hours." But each found

his opportunity; and by what an instinctive escape! For Winckelmann it

was his first journey out of Prussia, when, in 1755, he set his face

toward Rome; still it was a homing flight like that of a carrier

pigeon; for in Rome he found his appointed place, and there he spent in

congenial work the remaining years of his life. Yet he could say, in

the bitterness of his spirit, on reaching Rome, "I have come into the

world and into Italy too late." Nor may we contradict that bitter cry,

even in view of Winckelmann's great critical achievement; we have to

ask, Might it not have been greater still, had he not been thus _serus

studiorum_, as Horace phrases it--thus unluckily belated in his

culture?

All the traits of these migrations of men of genius are interesting,

and we may dwell for a moment, though at the risk of some digression,

upon Winckelmann's disappointment on his arrival in the city of his

desire. It was a pathetic disappointment, but one of a kind not

infrequent with sensitive minds. Long detained by poverty in the north,

it was not until the age of thirty-eight that he reached Italy; and

when at last he arrived in Rome, the longed-for city wore a strange

look for him--had an aspect for which he was not prepared. It was there

that his emotion broke out as we have seen. We can understand his

disappointment if we bear in mind the cruel treatment to which our

fancies are commonly subjected at the hands of the fact. How swiftly,

how silently, like the irrevocable sequence of images in a dissolving

view, our premonitions vanish under the light of the reality! The

actual Rome, the living man, the painting, the landscape which we

travel far to see--these dispel at once the preconception; a glance,

and the dream is gone, however long domesticated in the mind, however

brightly glowing but now in the imagination. Fact is a careless

bedfellow, and overlays the tender child Fancy; and even when nature

contrives the change less rudely, we can hardly resign our poor,

familiar fancies without regret. But sometimes, happily, we can do what

Winckelmann did not do; we can retain the old fancies and compare them

with the experience. Let me give a personal instance: I remember

framing the distinctest image of the lakes of Killarney from my

childhood readings in Peter Parley's veritable histories. There was the

cool spring, shaded with bushes, and pouring out abundant waters; and

there was the blessed Saint Patrick, standing by the rocky edge of the

spring, clasping down the stout lid of an iron-bound chest upon the

last of the unhappy serpents of Erin, and saying, "Be aisy, darlints!"

just before casting the box into the depths of the lake. It was a

pleasant scene, a clear imaginative microcosm; never was a distincter

picture in my mind than that of this fancied Killarney. The real

Killarney I saw many years after reading those histories of Peter

Parley, yet that first vivid picture did not vanish at the sight; the

fancied lake held its place against the reality; nay, even at this day,

I can call up the two pictures at will, the imagined and the real, and

compare the two--the scene of my early fancies with the humorous Celtic

saint standing beside the spring and snapping down the lid of his box

upon the tail of the last snake, on the one hand, and the broader

landscape of reality, in which there were no saints, but many Patricks.

But Winckelmann, if he did not find the visionary Rome, soon became

reconciled to the real one. The city put on the homelike look for him,

and it was not long before it became profoundly endeared to him. It was

with the authentic pang of homesickness that he left it, finally, to

make that northward journey from which he was never to return.

How different was Heine's first experience of his newly-found home,

Paris! For that other migrating spirit there was no such initiatory

disappointment. For Heine his adopted city was from the first a

spiritual home, a true city of refuge, an island of the blessed. For

years, lingering in his cold city of the north, _verdammtes Hamburg_,

as he called it, he had longed in vain to escape; and to what vivid

expressions of his suffering he gives utterance! In one place he

compares himself to the white swans at the public garden, whose wings

were broken on the approach of winter that they should not fly away to

the south:

"The waiter at the Pavilion declared that they were comfortable there,

and that the cold was healthy for them. But that is not true. It is not

good for one to be imprisoned hopelessly in a cold pool, and there to

be frozen up; to have one's wings broken so that one can no longer fly

forth to the fair South, where the beautiful flowers are, and the

golden sunlight, and the blue mountain lakes. Alas! to me once was Fate

not much kinder."

While still pent up in Hamburg he had written thus to a friend: "I am

no German, as you well know.... There are but three civilized

people--the French, the Chinese, and the Persian.... Ah, how I yearn

for Ispahan! Alas! I, poor fellow, am far from its lovely minarets and

odoriferous gardens! Ah, it is a terrible fate for a Persian poet that

he must wear himself out in your base, rugged German tongue.... O

Firdusi! O Ischami! O Saadi! how miserable is your brother!"

As Goethe is said to have thought of doing when he was in love with

"Lili," Heine at this time thought of retiring to the United States, "a

land which I loved before I knew it," as he wrote from Heligoland in

1830. How he knew it does not appear, but he decided against us; he

calls this country a "frightful dungeon of freedom, where the invisible

chains gall still more painfully than the visible ones at home, and

where ... the mob exercises its coarse dominion!" Meanwhile, as he

tells us somewhere, "In Hamburg it was my only consolation to think

that I was better than other people."

Heine reached Paris in his thirty-first year; and never was the city

better appreciated and enjoyed than by this young wanderer during the

earlier time of his residence there. Everything in it pleased him: the

intellectual life, the interest in ideas, not less than the gayety and

charm. But he found much pleasure in the courtesy of Parisian manners.

Parisian manners were then, as even now, distinguishable from Prussian

by the careful observer. "Sweet pineapple odors of politeness!" he

says, "how beneficially didst thou console my sick spirit, which had

swallowed down in Germany so much tobacco vapor!... Like the melodies

of Rossini did the pretty phrases of apology of a Frenchman sound in my

ear, who had gently pushed me in the street on the day of my arrival. I

was almost frightened at such sweet politeness--I who had been

accustomed to boorish German knocks in the ribs without any apology at

all." If any one jostled Heine roughly in the street, and made no

apology, he would say, "I knew that that man was one of my

countrymen."[6]

[6] I quote from the translations in Stigand's "Life."

But Paris is somewhat more than a city of pleasure; it is a city of

opportunity. To many Americans it is a stumbling-block, to many

Englishmen foolishness; but Heine was one of the true children of

Paris, though wandering at first far from the centre, and he found

fitting work there. They were busy as well as joyous years, those that

he first spent in that bright capital. O Paris, city of opportunity,

how many other of thy children are still wandering far from the centre!

Some of them live upon the sierras of Patagonia, some in the stonier

streets of Askelon, some inhabit caves in the deserts of Maceria.

Living an anchorite's life in German villages, in Pacific colonies, on

Cape Cod or Kerguelen's Land, the delicate French spirit wastes itself

away. And yet some of these exiles have found their way to that centre

of blithe intellectual activity.

Heine was such a one; he spent in Paris the most productive and happy

period of his life, the bright interval between his cloudy morning and

the shadows that were to gather around him before their time; and how

he glowed in the warmth and light of the capital! And while he carried

his pleasures to excess, yet he did not go pleasuring like the vulgar.

In a valid sense his very extravagances had an intelligible principle

in them; one might say that he dissipated himself upon ethical grounds.

Yet his were the reasons of a poetic, not of an analytic thinker. The

popular religion, he said, has dishonored the flesh; let us restore it

to honor. To restore joyousness to modern life, something of the

antique innocence to pleasure, to make it reputable as well as

delightful, to readjust the conscience of a community which looked upon

pleasure as essentially wrong, and yet pursued it, so thinking, at the

expense of its conscience, to relieve pleasure somewhat from the ban,

to augment, in a word, the permitted happiness of life--that was

Heine's aim; that was what he understood by his favorite doctrine of

restoring the flesh to honor--_la réhabilitation de la chair_.

Do you call that an easy creed, a comfortable practice? I will not deny

it, but do not let us lose the distinction, the trait by which Heine's

doctrine was discriminated from that of some other easy-going apostles.

Heine was intellectually sincere; he had a genuine purpose; he did not

go to Paris, for instance, as some of our missionaries have gone of

late years to Florence and Madrid, with commissions to labor among the

"nominal Christians," as they call the Catholic residents of those

comfortable capitals, to convert them to the true Christianity of

American Protestantism. No; Heine had too much directness, too much

intellectual verity for a situation of that sort: his mistakes were

honest mistakes, and he paid an honest penalty for them.

And surely the reinstatement of the flesh, the restoration of the body

to honor and to perfection, is, as I have said elsewhere, an admirable

purpose. It is only through the wise reinstatement of the flesh, if I

am not mistaken, that the condition of men is likely to be much

bettered; for it grows clearer every year that educating will not

accomplish this, or medicine, or penalties, or perhaps even preaching.

But Heine was no theorist in these matters: he was poet before all,

and he was too absolutely, too completely a poet for the justest

thought, or for his own good. Heine's nature lacked that tonic bent

toward accurate knowledge, toward dispassionate observation and

thought, which was the salvation, for instance, of Goethe, and which

has been the salvation of all great natures who have sought to excel

in character as well as in art. The spring of clear, untroubled

intelligence did not flow for Heine, the stream which should flow upon

the homestead of every poet, the _fons Baudusiæ splendidior vitro_.

In those invigorating waters he seldom refreshed his spirit as

the greatest poets have done--in meditation, in discipline, in

dispassionate inquiry. These are the spiritual antiseptics that are

needful at least for the more carnal poetic temperaments. Am I using

fanciful metaphors? I mean that the poet who may undertake to put

forth a new gospel of conduct, must first think long and strictly. But

Heine did not think strictly, and his critical theory of life need not

detain us. Heine thought of pleasure, for instance, as Mr. Ruskin

thinks of work, that it is a thing to be had for the asking; the fact

being in any state of society yet established inexorably the

reverse--namely, that neither work nor pleasure is commonly to be had

on demand.

But it was a part of the new creed that enjoyment was to be had for the

asking, and the _propaganda_ already existed. "There was a little

society of devotees, if I may call them so--Michel Chevalier, Olinde,

Enfantin, and others--who were zealously preaching the rehabilitation

of the flesh"; and Heine devoted himself with assiduity to the pleasing

cultus--with all the more assiduity, we may fairly suppose, as being a

stranger in Paris. I fear that his labors were in the main of a carnal

and unscientific sort; certainly they never won him any reputation for

religious zeal. Nor was Paris the field before all others where

laborers of this sort were needed. In Paris, indeed, the doctrine and

practice of pleasure had been attended to, with no lack of zeal, for at

least three centuries before the time of Heine's arrival there. Would

that Heine had taken up his creed with somewhat more of reserve; that

he had been content with a less many-sided experience of pleasure! For

he surfeited himself somewhat with this experience; he knew its dangers

perfectly well, but what ardent young man is deterred by knowing the

danger? We bite at the hook just the same, as M. Renan says:

_L'hameçon est évident, et néanmoins on y a mordu, on y mordra

toujours_. And with all his love of delicacy, with all his

distinction of spirit, he also relished harsh things. Sharp aliments,

rank flavors, draining ecstasies that mingle the last drop of pleasure

with pain and faintness, seemed necessary to complete the round of this

man's life--of Heine the singer, Heine the man of all his time in whom

the delicate blossoms of poetry were most fragrant. No poet could

better deal than he with the exquisite joyances of the heart and soul;

and he well knew that this bloom does not gather upon the fruit of

coarse experience. He knew that the most delicate vintage is yielded to

the gentle pressure. But with this he was not content. He crushed the

grape harshly; he made it yield up its harsher juices; the flavors of

rind and seed are expressed in the wine of his life, and mingle with

the cup that he pours out.

And his life was spent as wine is poured upon the ground. Heine ended

where the ascetics began, in pain, privation, mortification of the

flesh; and it was a mortification that had not even the consolation of

being the sufferer's own choice, for it was involuntary. Better for him

would it have been had he gone out to dwell in the wilderness, as St.

Jerome left the Paris of his day, and retired into the desert of

Chalcis. For a strange penalty was to be his--one of which the joyous

apostle of pleasure could hardly have dreamed before the blow fell. A

paralytic touch converted the man of pleasure into a man of pain, his

bed a living tomb. No more for ever, for Heine, was there to be any

reinstatement of the flesh.

This dark closing period of Heine's life has a fascination about it; it

holds the attention like the background of a Rembrandt etching, with

its dimly-seen forms that appear to stir in the gloom, ghostly,

half-alive; such a contrast there is between his gloomy close and the

bright projection of his earlier career. Shall we call his life a

failure as regards himself, his personal success and happiness? Upon

that point we may not pronounce too confidently. He would have chosen

it had the choice been offered him with full knowledge of the

alternatives; he would have preferred it to any commonplace existence.

There will always be those who hold that such careers as Byron's or

Heine's, such fitful careers, with their fierce tempests, their

ecstatic sunshine, their "awful brevity," are preferable to any serener

life, however long; and least of all may we pity Heine. With what scorn

would he look down upon our pity!

Heine's life has a peculiar value for the student of modern life, in

that it has what we may call an exemplary interest. For Heine made that

costly sacrificial experiment of which the old examples never suffice

us; the experiment which each new generation requires anew, in which

nature in her wasteful way insists on consuming the finest geniuses. As

Byron had attempted just before him, so Heine attempted to think and to

live without reserves, to compass the round of sentiment and sensation,

to touch the entire range of experience. Like Byron, he could not pass

through the fire; he fell, the flame licked him up. And yet, far more

truly than many a martyr, Byron and Heine gave their lives for us. Not,

indeed, in the professed spirit of the martyr, not purposing the

sacrifice, but for that very reason making it the more significant.

They experimented lavishly, daringly with life, and in their poems they

give us real life as no other poets since have done. They are real

passion, real thought, the ruddy drops of the sad heart. Heine's "Book

of Songs" is his own body and blood. One feels of it what Whitman says

of his "Leaves of Grass": "This is no book; who touches this touches a

man."

And Heine and Byron, in giving their lives for us, did what the

greatest poets and the strongest men have seldom done. Though they have

always suffered, yet for us these have rather toiled than suffered.

Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe--what exalted, what demiurgic

creations have they bequeathed to us, what power to move, what beauty

to ponder with unapproachable longing! But these creations have an

awing beauty; they keep an unattainable distance and height. When we

consider the lives of these greatest spirits, we find them walking

apart in the fastnesses of the hills, pursuing arduous ways where few

or none may bear them company. Their paths gain upward upon the

heights; they gain so far and high that the tinge of that mountain

remoteness falls upon them--an airy distance, a deterring shadow; and

if ever their voices seem to say, "Follow us," they have not pointed

out the way.

But though Byron and Heine were thus rapt up into the mountain in

visions, their daily walk and life were in the world; its dust and

soilure cling to them, we see them wavering and going astray. Their

very wanderings bring them nearer to us, who sojourn; their desire,

their aspiration, their failures make the wiser use of opportunity

possible to any of us who may have been born away from home.

TITUS MUNSON COAN.

THE HOME OF MY HEART.

Not here in the populous town,

In the playhouse or mart,

Not here in the ways gray and brown,

But afar on the green-swelling down,

Is the home of my heart.

There the hillside slopes down to a dell

Whence a streamlet has start;

There are woods and sweet grass on the swell,

And the south winds and west know it well:

'Tis the home of my heart.

There's a cottage o'ershadowed by leaves

Growing fairer than art,

Where under the low sloping eaves

No false hand the swallow bereaves:

'Tis the home of my heart.

And there as you gaze down the lea,

Where the trees stand apart,

Over grassland and woodland may be

You will catch the faint gleam of the sea

From the home of my heart.

And there in the rapturous spring,

When the morning rays dart

O'er the plain, and the morning birds sing,

You may see the most beautiful thing

In the home of my heart;

For there at the casement above,

Where the rosebushes part,

Will blush the fair face of my love:

Ah, yes! it is this that will prove

'Tis the home of my heart.

F. W BOURDILLON.

THE SOUTH, HER CONDITION AND NEEDS.

Sir Robert Peel, shortly before his death, said that what he had seen

and heard in public life had left upon his mind a prevailing impression

of gloom and grief. What impressed the mind of the English statesman so

painfully in reference to his own country must be felt correspondingly

by Americans who contemplate the South; for its present condition

awakens the anxious solicitude of every thoughtful patriot. A brief

mention of some of the evils that afflict her may help toward the

ascertainment and application of adequate remedies. Let it be premised

that this discussion proceeds in no degree from disloyalty to the

Government, nor from unwillingness to accept the legitimate

consequences of the war.

Betwixt the North and the South there lingers much estrangement. One

serious cause of irritation at the South, which seems irremediable, is

the distrust with which those who sustained the Confederate States are

regarded by a large number of Northern people. Our motives are

habitually misrepresented, our purposes misunderstood, our actions

perverted, our character maligned. On our conduct have been placed

constructions which seem to spring from direst hate or malice. By

representative men Southern States are spoken of as outside the Union;

and "a solid South" has been the party appeal most efficacious for

arousing sectional and vindictive passion. Every Southern citizen who

followed his convictions, and affiliated with the 1,640,000 Democrats

of the North, is suspected of disloyalty or treason. No protestations

of men or parties, no avowals of governors or legislatures, are

accepted as sincere unless accompanied by a support of the Republican

party. Party platforms, the support of an Abolitionist like Mr.

Greeley, organic laws, are regarded as deceptive because the shibboleth

of disloyalty and patriotism is "Republicanism." These persistent

efforts to brand us as inferiors, to make us unequals as citizens, to

coerce the support of an administration and a party, are based upon our

unfitness, morally or intellectually, to decide for ourselves what is

best for the country's welfare and perpetuity. We are loyal, and

patriotic, and honest only when we sing pæans to the Administration and

its favorites. Practically the war has been prolonged, and this policy

of disunion alienates, embitters, and prohibits the growth of fraternal

sentiments. To prevent a complete and durable reconciliation seems the

settled policy of a large party. This proscription and ostracism have

helped to create a hopelessness as to the future. A nightmare paralyzes

our energies.

The South, if conquered, and honestly accepting the results of the war,

needed encouragement and material help instead of discriminating

injuries. Her condition was deplorable. All wars are destructive of

property and production. To the South the war between the States was

exhausting to the utmost degree. Its destructiveness is not computable

by figures. The numerical inferiority of the army made it necessary to

put into the effective military force every available boy and man; and

these were thus withdrawn from productive labor. Much of the labor that

remained was applied, not to the production of wealth, but to such

manufactures as were needful only in war. For four dreadful years, like

the _triste noche_ described by Prescott, with ports closed, and under

the imperious necessity of evoking and utilizing every possible warlike

agency, this cessation of wealth-producing industry, this drain upon

material resources, this decimation of our best men, this waste of

capital and exhaustion of the country from the Rio Grande to the

Chesapeake bay, continued remorselessly. Superadd the emancipation of

4,000,000 slaves, the sudden extinction of $1,600,000,000 of property,

the disorganization of the labor system, the upheaval of society, the

"stupendous innovation" upon habits, modes of thought, allegiance,

amounting almost to a change of civilization, and it will be easy to

see that the South started upon her new career with nothing but genial

climate, fertile soil, and brave hearts. Absence of capital, of

concentrated wealth, made it necessary to begin _de novo_. Slavery and

profitableness of crops had prevented diversity of pursuits.

Agriculture, applied to a few products, was almost our sole occupation.

Former habits had disinclined to mechanical pursuits or manual labor,

and our towns, since 1865, have been crowded with young men, who have

sought in clerkships, agencies, and professions the means of support.

These employments, if furnishing remunerative wages, are not

wealth-producing, add nothing to capital, and have aggravated the

general impoverishment.

These evils have been intensified by vicious legislation and bad

government. Federal legislation has been much in the interest of

stock-jobbers, speculators, monopolists, so that "corners" have been

fostered, and labor has paid heavy and depressing tribute to fatten

greedy cormorants. The present system of banking violates the

established principles of currency, and is in utter contradiction to

what, for a decade, by consent of all parties and financiers, was the

policy of the Government. Bad as the system is inherently by injurious

legislation, its benefits are secured to a favored class, and by

combination with other corporations, notably railroad companies, the

business of the country is largely in the control of a few monopolists,

who rule and grow rich in spite of the laws of political economy.

Promissory notes, printed with pictures on fine paper, have been

substituted for the money of the Constitution, and our young people are

growing up with the notion that this rag currency is a legitimate

measure of value and a legal solvent of debts.

So marked has been this class legislation in the interest of capital,

that a Senator of the United States, Mr. Wallace of Pennsylvania, says,

"From the beginning of the present Administration down to the

adjournment of Congress in August, 1876, every financial statute has

had but one purpose, and that purpose to increase the value of the

bonded indebtedness of the Government." Statistics show how insecure is

business, on what vicious principles it is transacted, and how rapidly

property is concentrating in the hands of a few. In 1874 there were

5,830 failures for a total of $155,000,000, and in 1875 the failures

increased to 7,740, aggregating a loss of $201,000,000. In both North

and South there has been a frightful increase of indebtedness by towns

and cities, counties and States--thirty-eight States owe an aggregate

of $382,000,000--so that taxpayers groan in purse and spirit, and are

deeply concerned to find a way of honest payment.

Taxation has been and is a potent instrument of wrong and corruption.

To pay the national debt increased taxation was, of course, necessary

and proper, but taxation should have been adjusted to the rights of

honest creditors and the lessened pecuniary ability of taxpayers. The

Federal and local taxes of the last eleven years, according to high

authority, amount to not less than $7,500,000,000. Never in modern

times was revenue collected in such a complicated and ruinous manner.

Mr. Curtis tells us one-fourth of the revenue is lost in the

collection. If the collection and expenditure of revenue be the tests

for determining the wisdom of a government, then ours is not "the best

the world ever saw."

Extravagant expenditure is closely connected with enormous revenues.

Economy of administration is a lost art. Federal expenditure in 1860,

exclusive of payment of public debt, was $1.94 per head. In 1870 it was

$3.52 per head, and in 1875 $3.38. The $4,500,000,000 of Federal

taxes[7] of the last eleven years have not been exclusively

appropriated to reduction of debt and defraying necessary expenditures.

Officials have been needlessly multiplied, jobs have been created,

peculation is common, and millions have been squandered on contracts

made with hungry partisans. Such an exhaustion of national resources is

governmental robbery. In the purer days it was a political maxim that

no more money was to be taken from the people than was necessary for

the constitutional and economical wants of the Government. Large

revenues and large expenditures are mutually recreative. Mr. Calhoun,

the most sagacious and philosophical statesman of this century, said,

in 1839, "I am disposed to regard it as a political maxim in free

States, that an impoverished treasury, once in a generation at least,

is almost indispensable to the preservation of their institutions and

liberty." All experience shows that excessive revenue and large

expenditures increase the patronage of the government and corrupt

public and private morals. Some palliation may be found in the fact

that wars are demoralizing, necessitate much assumption of power, and

that our conflict was gigantic; but after all due allowances the

corruptions in America must find a parallel in that period of English

history when the sovereign was the pensioner of a foreign potentate.

The centennial anniversary of our republic finds a record so scandalous

that all honest men blush, and the Fourth of July eulogists have to

make the humiliating confession of much of vice and shame in our

national life, of a decline from the former high standard of political

and moral purity, and of the blister of corruption in high places, upon

Executive and judiciary, upon laws, and on the acts of prominent

officials. (See speeches of Dr. Storrs and Hon. C. F. Adams.)

[7] This is somewhat in excess of the actual amount, which is,

however, quite large enough, $3,809,722,765; viz., customs,

$1,973,589,621; internal revenue, $1,826,185,813; direct tax,

$9,947,331. It is well to remember, too, that the expenditures of

the Government have decreased one-half in this period; viz., from

$520,809,417, in 1866, to $258,469,797 in 1876. Of this decrease,

thirty-three millions is in the interest on the public

debt.--ED. GALAXY.

As cause and consequence of oppressive taxes, and wasteful and corrupt

extravagance, I may instance the centripetal tendencies of the Federal

Government. The patriot must deprecate the rapid strides toward

consolidation. Our government was designed as a government of

clearly-defined limitations upon power. It is now practically absolute.

In its complex character, a division of powers mutually exclusive

betwixt Federal and State governments, "divisibility of sovereignty,"

as some phrase it, was contemplated. Now the States are provinces

dependent on, submissive to, the central head, just as the Colonies

were looked upon, prior to our independence, as a species of

feudatories for the benefit of the mother country. By popular vote, by

elastic constructions or palpable violations of the Constitution, by

unprecedented assumptions, our Federal system has been revolutionized.

It is the height of absurdity to talk of the restrictions of a written

Constitution, when a dominant majority interprets finally that

instrument, and there are no remedies to protect against invasion or

encroachment.[8] It is a mere glittering generality to boast of a

constitutional republic, if a President can violate the organic law

with impunity, or if Congress is restrained in its assumptions only by

its own sense of justice. Much recent executive, legislative, and

judicial action has tended to absorb State rights and prerogatives. Mr.

Boutwell's proposition to remand a State to territorial pupilage would

be but the legal enactment and the logical sequence of what has had the

enthusiastic approval of a large number of citizens. Encroachments have

been so numerous and violent, submission has been so tame, that

governors are coolly set aside on the demand of a petty marshal, and

legislatures on the bidding of Mr. Jones. Once States were supposed to

have the right of eminent domain; to have exclusive control of

education, of litigation among its own citizens; to determine the

elective franchise; to regulate the relations of parent and child,

husband and wife, guardian and ward; but that was in the purer days of

the republic, when States were not mere counties, but political

communities, with, a large residuum of undelegated powers. The earlier

amendments to the Constitution imposed checks and limitations upon the

general Government, because of the watchful jealousy on the part of the

States of their sovereignty and independence. Following the tendency to

centralize, to despotize, the late amendments are in the direction of

consolidation, and take away from the States what was once universally

regarded as their _exclusive_ prerogative in reference to the elective

franchise. Now, under amendments and "_appropriate_ legislation for

carrying them into effect," the _national_ Government can control

voting, make a registration of voters, and very soon, if there be no

arrest of tyranny, the ballot box will be under the guardianship of

Presidential appointees. Federal election laws thus degrade States into

petty municipalities and subvert liberty.

[8] Not only that government is tyrannical which is tyrannically

administered, but all governments are tyrannical which have not

in their constitution a sufficient security against arbitrary

power.--_Burgh's Pol. Disquis._, 378.

Passing from these grievances, applicable to the whole Union, I

approach what is to my apprehension the most unmatchable outrage ever

inflicted by a civilized people. Some acts, like the partition of

Poland, stand out on the pages of history as disgraceful national

crimes; but most of them shade into minor offences compared with the

crime-breeding, race-endangering, liberty-imperiling savagery of

conferring the right of suffrage upon the negroes _en masse_. In other

countries liberty has been not so much a creation as a growth. In

conservative England, suffrage has been slowly, temperately enlarged,

always preserving restrictions so as not to commit the destinies of the

kingdom to an ignorant mob. Giving the elective franchise to the

suddenly emancipated negroes, placing the government of States in the

hands of such a class, wholly unprepared by education or experience, if

not such a repeating crime, would be a farce for the ages. Every person

of the least intelligence knows that generally the voting of the

negroes is a mere sham. He votes as a machine. He is the tool of the

demagogue, the pawn of a political party. That men with no intelligent

understanding of rights and duties, unable to read, untrained in

political affairs, wholly ignorant of the commonest matters pertaining

to government, superstitious, credulous, victims of impostors, paying

no capitation tax, should decide upon grave questions of organic or

statute law, upon the financial or foreign policy of the country,

should control counties, cities, States, is an offence that will stink

in the nostrils of coming centuries. What has occurred since the

Presidential election is demonstration that both parties at the North

regard unlimited negro suffrage as subversive of the principle of

reliance upon moral worth and clear intelligence. The presence of the

military in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, the hurrying to and

fro of partisans, the secret conclaves and cabalistic telegrams, the

jealous superintendence of the counting of votes, the criminations and

recriminations in reference to fraud and intimidation, are the

legitimate results of the attempt to sustain a party by such extreme

medicine. Our novel experiment of free government cannot endure many

more such tests. Prof. Huxley, speaking to Americans during his late

visit, said: "You and your descendants have to ascertain whether the

great mass of people will hold together under the forms of a republic

and the despotic reality of universal suffrage; whether centralization

will get the better without the actual or disguised monarchy; whether

shifting corruption is better than a permanent bureaucracy." It need

not take long to work out the problem if the ballot box is to be

controlled by ignorance. Sometimes we are lectured to be grateful to

the North for its magnanimity toward the South. Legislation does not

sustain the self-eulogy. It is alleged that mercy was shown to "rebels

and traitors." Passing over the _petitio principii_ in the phraseology,

a thousand times better it would have been to have hung President, and

Cabinet, and every Congressman, and every general, than to have

fastened upon us this incurable cancer, eating up the life-blood of the

Union.

In the South, the administration of government in some instances has

been marked by oppressive tyranny and open corruption. Incompetent and

dishonest men have been appointed to positions, and with full knowledge

of their wrong doings have been retained to accomplish party ends. This

injustice and tyranny have demoralized somewhat our own people. Tyranny

always corrupts. A lower standard of morality is first tolerated, and

then becomes popular. Lax motives of honor are taking the place of

chivalrous integrity. Payment of honest debts is evaded. Grinding

poverty has made some unduly covetous of riches. Enormous taxation,

selfish and immoral legislation, have partially undermined the

foundations of private virtue. The ease and frequency with which the

rewards of honest toil are filched away give insecurity to property and

take away much of the stimulus to diligent toil. Some have sunk into

despair, while others, with more of unsubdued energy, are willing for

almost anything to turn up which gives promise or possibility of

change.

The South in seeking relief need not delude herself by reliance upon

any _party_ to reform evils and restore prosperity. Some difficulties

are independent of party action, or even political policy, and have

their origin in more general causes. A portion of the commercial and

financial troubles is probably due to some "wider misadjustment of

labor and capital" than can be rectified by one country, and requires

broad and sound statesmanship. The Republican party is held together,

in part, by the "cohesive power of public plunder," or compacted into

unity by distrust or hatred of the South. The Democratic party, as

unsound as its antagonist on the vital questions of tariff, currency,

finances, and the character of the General Government, has practised

the fatal maxim that "to the victors belong the spoils," and, in

special localities, has been implicated in corruption. The history of

parties in England and the United States shows that any party long in

power will become corrupt. To rely upon any party, or the wisdom or

sense of justice of any government, for protection of property or

guaranty of civil or religious liberty, is to lean upon a broken reed;

for rights never enforce themselves, and are soon gone unless sustained

by more potent means than the justice or honor of those in power. A

President is impotent of himself, soon passes into private life, and is

at best but a man.

Alike futile is the notion, sometimes finding audible expression, that

an arbitrary government or a monarchy would bring relief. Our fathers,

in throwing off a kingly government and setting up a constitutional

republic, acted in the full light thrown on popular rights by all

preceding history. They did not live in prehistoric or barbaric times,

but acted with rare wisdom and patriotism. More sagacious men never

planned a government, and blindly and suicidally would we act to prefer

or accept a monarchy. The centuries of the past are eloquent with

wisdom and plethoric with instructive examples on this subject. God has

never given any exclusive rights to special families, and all

historical records confirm, with the Scriptures, the folly of choosing

a king. How often in such governments is public policy dependent on

royal whims, on palace intrigues, on the taste or caprice of the

boudoir! Monarchy has been the rule of violence; inequality and

centralization are of its essence. The rebellion in England and the

French revolution were the long-delayed protests of outraged peoples

against ruinous taxation and hurtful tyranny and cankerous corruption.

When the disgraceful crimes by men in high places were exposed last

year European journals made themselves merry over the corruptions which

they alleged were the legitimate outgrowths of democratic institutions.

In the first place, our Government is not a democracy, and never was

intended to be. Secondly, monarchies are not in a condition to cast the

first stone. Italy, Spain, Austria, Russia, and France have had

corruption enough to make them blush. As England is held up for our

copying, and is less censurable than the others, I cite a few instances

from her history. May, in "Constitutional History of England," Vol. I.,

p. 299 says: "Our Parliamentary history has been tainted with this

disgrace of vulgar bribes for political support from the reign of

Charles II. far into that of George III." For shamefulness of public

life Charles II. stands without a rival. He was a pensioner of the King

of France, and applied to his own privy purse large sums of money which

had been appropriated by Parliament for carrying on the war. The

equipoise designed to be secured in the National Legislature by the

House of Commons was defeated because the House was at once dependent

and corrupt. Borough nominations, places, pensions, contracts, shares

in loans and lotteries, and even pecuniary bribes, secured the

ascendency of Crown and Lords in the councils and government of the

State. Sunderland, Secretary of State under James II., stipulated to

receive 25,000 crowns from the King of France for services to be

rendered. Walpole's and Pelham's administrations were notorious for the

very audacity of their corruptions. In the reign of Anne Parliamentary

corruption was extensive and unblushing. Sir John Trevor, the Speaker,

accepted a bribe and did the dirty work of bribing other members. In

the reign of George I., during his first Parliament, 271 members held

offices, pensions, and sinecures; in the first of George II., 257. In

1776 Lord Chatham accused the ministers of "servility, incapacity,

corruption." Macaulay says Lord North's administration was supported by

vile and corrupt means, and the King, George III., was not only

cognizant of Parliamentary bribery, but advised it and contributed

money to it. Although there has been much improvement in the character

and purity of the public men, yet as late as 1829 the pension list was

above £750,000.

The principle of a representative constitutional republic is right.

Much of the evil which afflicts us is the result of a departure from

our original system; is an accident rather than essential, and is

certainly not to be cured by a monarchical government.

In suggesting some remedies or palliatives for present ills it is not

needful to startle by novelties. Truth is generally commonplace,

honesty always. A return to justice and right, frugality and economy,

as applicable to the body politic and to individual life, a recurrence

to fundamental principles, are of prime importance.

As a people we must, if possible, preserve what remains of the

Constitution and of the federative system. Sober, honest purpose can

reform some abuses. Imperious necessity will compel the North to take

effective steps for restoring the violated purity of the Government. If

present tendencies are not arrested, liberty will be sacrificed. As the

tendency of every government is to excess, a constitution is more or

less perfect according as it is full of limitations of authority. The

grant and the distribution of public functions should be accompanied

with safeguards. Our Federal Constitution cautiously delegates to

various public functionaries certain powers of government, defines and

limits the powers thus delegated, and reserves to the people of the

States their sovereignty over all things not delegated. Our organic law

thus seeks to restrain the Government within narrow and prescribed

limits, to guard weaker and dissimilar interests against inequality, to

interpose efficient checks, to prevent the stronger from oppressing the

weaker. Ours is a government under a written compact, and _in its

purity the best ever devised_. The war between the States is much

misunderstood. It was a gigantic conflict of _political_ ideas, a

controversy, not for or between dynasties, but on the nature and

character and power of the Federal Government. Three things were

settled by the war:

1. Emancipation and citizenship of the negroes.

2. The surrender of any claim of resort to secession in case of dispute

as to powers of the Government, or as a remedy for violated compact.

3. The recognition of such a person as a citizen of the United States,

independent of citizenship in a State.

Besides these, nothing else of a political character was settled, and

the second was determined only by the stern arbitrament of war. The

right of search was, however, similarly adjusted, and the treaty of

peace effected at Ghent, on December 24, 1814, contains no allusion to

the _casus belli_. There are few, if any, who do not rejoice at the

accomplishment of the first. The mode of emancipation was not such as

we would have chosen; but as the problem baffled the wisdom of all the

statesmen of the past, we may as well be grateful that African slavery

no longer exists to perplex and confound patriots and Christians. The

opinions of the framers of the Constitution were reversed on these

three subjects by the war. All else remains intact, or can be put _in

statu quo ante bellum_. The Constitution was not abolished. No vital

principle of the Federal system, State interposition excepted, was

destroyed. "The invasions of the Constitution have resulted from

administrative abuses," says Governor Jenkins, "and not from structural

changes in the government. This distinction should be kept constantly

in view. In a complex government like our own let it never be conceded

that a power once usurped is thenceforth a power transferred, nor that

a right once suppressed is for that cause a right extinguished, nor

that a Constitution a thousand times violated becomes a Constitution

abolished." The war did not decide that the powers of the Federal

Government were indefinite and unlimited. That is subsequent

usurpation. The war did not decide that State lines were to be

obliterated, State flags torn down, State governments reduced to

municipalities, and the elements of civil authority fused into one

conglomerate and centralized mass. Whatever may be the fate or the

construction of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, they cannot

mean the concentration of all power at Washington and the complete

control of the States by the general Government. Our Constitution-makers

could not have contemplated political irresponsibility; that the

minority should be at the mercy of the majority; and that the residuary

mass of undelegated powers was to be swallowed up by the delegated.

The fathers felt that no body of men could be safely entrusted with

unrestrained authority, and they knew that "all restrictions on

authority unsustained by an equal antagonist power must for ever prove

wholly inefficient in practice." That a mere party majority can rule as

they please, is hateful despotism. A majority, unhindered by any rule

but their discretion, is anything but free government; for human nature

cannot endure unlimited power, and bodies of men are not more discreet

in their tyranny than individual tyrants. The distinction between the

granting and the executing, the Constitution-making and the law-making

power, is to be reaffirmed. The general Government and the States have

separate and distinct objects and peculiar interests--"the States,

acting separately, representing and protecting the local and peculiar

interests, and acting jointly, through one general government,

representing and protecting the interests of the whole; and thus

perfecting, by an admirable but simple arrangement, the great principle

of representation and responsibility, without which no government can

be free or just."--_VI. Calhoun_, 66.

We need civil service reform in the United States, States, and cities,

reducing the number, increasing the competency and responsibility of

office-holders, and abolishing the pestiferous maxim that to the

victors in a party contest belong of right the offices of the country.

We need rigid economy, public and private, civic purity, honest

administration. To take a citizen's money, except for the just and

economical administration of affairs, is governmental robbery. Economy

is not possible in Federal, or State, or municipal governments, with

high taxes. Men will steal. The Bible says that the love of money is

the root of all evil. Handling large sums of the people's money is a

temptation before which many have yielded. "Economy and accountability

are virtues without which free and popular governments cannot long

endure."

Closely allied is the good old homely virtue of honesty. Under the

temptation of loss of property, men have sought to accumulate by any

methods and get back to ante-secession pecuniary condition. Public

corruption has been contagious. Men contract debts loosely and

improvidently, and wipe out easily by bankrupt laws. Tweedism has

fastened itself upon elections. False registration, ballot-box

stuffing, the machinery and appliances for fraud, are not the exclusive

practice of one section or party. "Cheating never thrives." It is as

true in politics as in religion that there is no good in sin. It is

essentially and always evil. Party is a great tyrant at best, and the

caucus system enslaves men, and few have the courage to disobey its

edicts and encounter its vengeance; but when party to the terrible

enginery of a caucus, controlled by the vulgar and the vicious, adds

fraud and bribery, woe be to our republic and to our civilization!

An indispensable factor to the product of the South's upbuilding is the

introduction of a more healthful public opinion as a positive element

in politics. It ought to be an ever-present and a permanent force in

elections and the choice of candidates. Any thing like union of church

and State, or the prescribing of a Christian profession as a test for

office, is not to be thought of, except to resist the first hint at

such a possibility; but such opposition should not prevent moral and

Christian men from demanding honesty in officials, fairness and

openness in party machinery, and common decency and morality in

candidates. In cities, political preferment and success in nominating

caucuses are largely the result of party machinery by "pot-house

politicians," by grog shops and gambling saloons, and by men not

conspicuous for virtue or intelligence. So foul is the atmosphere of

party politics, to such dishonoring and degrading practices are

applicants for office often reduced, so necessary is it to spend

money corruptly and to pension the _claqueurs_ and intriguers and

wire-pullers, that the virtuous and patriotic are often disgusted, and

many Christians are unwilling to peril spiritual health and life by

contact with such impurities. The complications and "trimming"

expediences often deter the pure and refined from political

associations, and those who control American politics are quite content

to dispense with the presence, except at the ballot-box, of those who

ought to give tone and direction to public opinion. Moral character,

sobriety, decency, chastity, are not the elements of availability in

the selection of candidates. Drunkards, profligates, connivers at

fraud, plotters, are apparently as acceptable for nomination and

election as those whose intelligence and virtues should commend them to

public approval. Macaulay has a sentiment which ought to be printed on

satin and hung up in every house to be memorized by every voter: "The

practice of begging for votes is absurd, pernicious, and altogether at

variance with the true principles of representative government. The

suffrage of an elector ought not to be asked, or to be given, as a

personal favor. It is as much for the interests of constituents to

choose well as it can be for the interest of a candidate to be

chosen.... A man who surrenders his vote to caresses and supplications

forgets his duty as much as if he sold it for a bank-note. I hope to

see the day when an Englishman (an American) will think it as great an

affront to be courted and fawned upon in his capacity of elector as in

his capacity of juryman."

Not lightly fall

Beyond recall

The written scrolls a breath can float:

The crowning fact,

The kingliest act

Of freedom is the freeman's vote.

The too common practice in all portions of the Union honors vice and

gives scant encouragement to noblest qualities. If a community bestow

its rewards and honors on inferior or vicious men, higher qualities

will decay and perish or seek other fields. If honors and rewards be

allotted to the noble and the good, the demand will develop

intelligence and nobility. In America there is lamentably a plentiful

lack of great men. Whatever may be the demand, the supply is

inadequate. Woe to the country, said Metternich, whose condition and

institutions no longer produce great men to manage its affairs. The

country needs men of earnest convictions and noble aims, "to whom power

is not a possession to be grasped, but a trust to be fulfilled." A

nation can have no purer wealth than the stainless honor of its public

men. The philosophic Macintosh enunciated almost a maxim when he said,

"There can be no scheme or measure as beneficial to the State as the

mere existence of men who would not do a base act for any public

advantage." By some, politics seems to be regarded as a game in which

the sharpest are to win. Federal, State, or municipal government can

never be safely committed to any party or men as the result of fraud or

connivance at fraud.

Since the Federal Government dispensed with a period of probation as

preparatory to suffrage, and refused to leave the whole question of

suffrage to the States where it properly belongs, the presence of the

negroes becomes to the South fearfully ominous of peril. Giving the

right to vote to the ignorant and incapable is only a part of the evils

associated with the inhabitancy of such a multitude of citizens of a

different and inferior race. Such is the climate of the South, the

fertility of soil, the ease of bare subsistence, that little labor and

but scant clothing and shelter are needed by the negroes, with their

thriftlessness, and without taste or desire for any large measure of

artificial comforts, and with few incentives to patient industry. Their

presence will prevent any early or large immigration of Europeans. The

removal of the negroes is an obvious suggestion, but the policy pursued

toward the Indians, undesirable, as coinhabitants, but as capable as

negroes of free government, seems impracticable from want of territory

for colonization and because of the large number of the negroes. This

displacement at present may be impossible, and would certainly be

tedious and expensive. Close contact of the two races becomes a

necessity of this coöccupancy of territory. The Southern white people

should cultivate kindliest feelings and make wise and strenuous efforts

for the improvement of their former slaves. Already the whites bear the

expense of educating the blacks. In the last six years the expenditure

in Virginia for "colored schools" has amounted to near $1,668,000, and

it would be safe to say that one and a half millions of this sum were

paid by white citizens. So also we take care of their blind, and deaf,

and dumb, and idiotic, pay for the trial and safe-keeping of their

criminals, and bear the burdens of government. Impartial justice should

be administered without reference to race, color, or previous

condition; freedom and the right to hold and inherit property should be

guaranteed; protection against all violence or wrong should be

afforded; but there should be formed no party nor other affiliations

which may tend to efface the line of social separation, or ignore the

predestined distinction of color. The attempt in Africa to Europeanize

the negro and ignore his idiosyncrasies as a race has utterly failed.

The races here should be kept from abnormal admixture. Rigid laws,

springing from and enforced by an inflexible public opinion, should

prevent intermarriage. Miscegenation will degrade the Caucasian. Red

and white deteriorate, _a fortiori_, white and black. The fusion

would lower the white race in the scale of civilization, of moral and

mental power, and would reproduce the ignorance, superstition,

priestcraft, and chronic revolutions of Mexico with her mongrel

population.

A felt want of the South is the restoration of old-fashioned love of

country. A sore need is to feel in our souls, as a passion, that this

is _our_ country; that _we_ have part and lot in it; and to be

deeply interested in its welfare and perpetuity. To keep alive

animosities is unchristian. Brooke found it impossible to frame an

indictment against a whole people. It ought to be equally hard to

involve a whole party, or geographical section, in sweeping accusations

of injustice, and tyranny, and fraud. Strong as is the provocation at

times to bitterness and hatred, the South should not cherish

resentment, but rather seek that which makes for peace and

reconciliation. It is better, as far as possible, to obliterate

unpleasant memories, to practise toleration and forgiveness, to

cultivate a genuine patriotism, ardent love for this ancient birth land

of the free. It is easy by cheap rhetoric to open wounds afresh and

inflame hostility; but every true son and daughter of the South should

strive not to transmit a legacy of hate, nor make our land a Poland or

an Ireland. The noble ambition ought rather to be to lift up the South

and the United States to the level of its privileges, and in the future

to harmonize the ideal and the actual. The South needs the development

of her material resources, the diversification of industry, the

construction of permanent highways, the power of machinery in its

manifold applications, sounder notions of labor, rigid economy and

responsibility in all offices. The whole country should encourage

universal education in universities, colleges, academies, and public

schools; elevate the tone of a free press; preserve an able and

independent judiciary; insist upon juster and more enlarged ideas of

official duty; maintain the principles of constitutional liberty and

absolute freedom of religion, and above all, a spirit of subordination

to the divine law, and a reverent acknowledgment of Him in whose hands

are the destinies of nations.

J. L. M. CURRY.

DRIFT-WOOD.

TALK ABOUT NOVELS.