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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. X.—JULY, 1862.—NO. LVII.

SOME SOLDIER-POETRY.

It is certain that since the time of Homer the deeds and circumstances of war have not been felicitously sung. If any ideas have been the subject of the strife, they seldom appear to advantage in the poems which chronicle it, or in the verses devoted to the praise of heroes. Remove the "Iliad," the "Nibelungenlied," some English, Spanish, and Northern ballads, two or three Old-Bohemian, the war-songs composed by Ziska, and one or two Romaic, from the field of investigation, and one is astonished at the scanty gleaning of battle-poetry, camp-songs, and rhymes that have been scattered in the wake of great campaigns, and many of the above-mentioned are more historical or mythological than descriptive of war. The quantity of political songs and ballads, serious and satirical, which were suggested by the great critical moments of modern history, is immense. Every country has, or might have, its own peculiar collections. In France the troubles of the League gave an impulse to song-writing, and the productions of Desportes and Bertaut are relics of that time. Historical and revolutionary songs abound in all countries; but even the "Marseillaise," the gay, ferocious "Carmagnole," and the "Ça Ira," which somebody wrote upon a drum-head in the Champ de Mars, do not belong to fighting-poetry. The actual business of following into the field the men who represent the tendencies of any time, and of helping to get through with the unavoidable fighting-jobs which they organize, seems to inspire the same rhetoric in every age, and to reproduce the same set of conventional war-images. The range of feeling is narrow; the enthusiasm for great generals is expressed in pompous commonplaces; even the dramatic circumstances of a campaign full of the movement and suffering of great masses of men, in bivouac, upon the march, in the gloomy and perilous defile, during a retreat, and in the hours when wavering victory suddenly turns and lets her hot lips be kissed, are scarcely seen, or feebly hinted at. The horizon of the battle-field itself is limited, and it is impossible to obtain a total impression of the picturesque and terrible fact. After the smoke has rolled away, the historian finds a position whence the scenes deliberately reveal to him all their connection, and reenact their passion. He is the real poet of these solemn passages in the life of man. [1]

[Footnote 1: There is a little volume, called Voices from the Ranks, in which numerous letters written by privates, corporals, etc., in the Crimea, are collected and arranged. They are full of incident and pathos. Suffering, daring, and humor, the love of home, and the religious dependence of men capable of telling their own Iliad, make this a very powerful book. In modern times the best literature of a campaign will be found in private letters. We have some from Magenta and Solferino, written by Frenchmen; the character stands very clear in them. And here is one written by an English lad, who is describing a landing from boats in Finland, when he shot his first man. The act separated itself from the whole scene, and charged him with it. Instinctively he walked up to the poor Finn; they met for the first time. The wounded man quietly regarded him; he leaned on his musket, and returned the fading look till it went out.]

One would think that a poet in the ranks would sometimes exchange the pike or musket for the pen in his knapsack, and let all the feelings and landscapes of war distil through his fine fancy from it drop by drop. But the knapsack makes too heavy a draught upon the nervous power which the cerebellum supplies for marching orders; concentration goes to waste in doing porter's work; his tent-lines are the only kind a poet cares for. If he extemporizes a song or hymn, it is lucky if it becomes a favorite of the camp. The great song which the soldier lifts during his halt, or on the edge of battle, is generally written beforehand by some pen unconscious that its glow would tip the points of bayonets, and cheer hearts in suspense for the first cannon-shot of the foe. If anybody undertakes to furnish songs for camps, he prospers as one who resolves to write anthems for a prize-committee to sit on: it is sutler's work, and falls a prey to the provost-marshal.

Nor are poets any more successful, when they propose to make camp-life and soldiers' feelings subjects for aesthetic consideration. Their lines are smooth, their images are spirited; but as well might the campaign itself have been conducted in the poet's study as its situations be deliberately transferred there to verse. The "Wallenstein's Camp" of Schiller is not poetry, but racy and sparkling pamphleteering. Its rhyming does not prevent it from belonging to the historical treatment of periods that are picturesque with many passions and interests, that go clad in jaunty regimental costumes, and require not to be idealized, but simply to be described. Goethe, in his soldier's song in "Faust," idealizes at a touch the rough work, the storming and marauding of the mediaeval Lanzknecht; set to music, it might be sung by fine dilettanti tenors in garrison, but would be stopped at any outpost in the field for want of the countersign. But when Goethe describes what he saw and felt in the campaign in France, with that lucid and observant prose, he reproduces an actual situation. So does Chamisso, in that powerful letter which describes the scenes in Hameln, when it was delivered to the French. But Chamisso has written a genuine soldier's song, which we intend to give. The songs of Körner are well known already in various English dresses. [2]

[Footnote 2: See translations of Von Zedlitz's Midnight Review,
of Follen's Blücher's Ball, of Freihgrath's Death of
Grabbe, of Rückert's Patriot's Lament, of Arndt's
Field-Marshal Blücher, of Pfeffel's Tobacco-Pipe, of
Gleim's War Song, of Tegner's Veteran, (Swedish,) of
Rahbek's Peter Colbjornsen, (Danish,) The Death-Song of
Regner Lodbrock, (Norse,) and Körner's Sword-Song, in Mr.
Longfellow's Poets and Poetry of Europe. See all of Körner's
soldier songs well translated, the Sword-Song admirably, by
Rev. Charles T. Brooks, in Specimens of Foreign Literature, Vol.
XIV. See, in Robinson's Literature of Slavic Nations, some
Russian and Servian martial poetry.]

But the early poetry which attempts the description of feats at arms which were points in the welfare of nations—when, for instance, Germany was struggling to have her middle class against the privileges of the barons—is more interesting than all the modern songs which nicely depict soldiers' moods. Language itself was fighting for recognition, as well as industrial and social rights. The verses mark successive steps of a people into consciousness and civilization. Some of this battle-poetry is worth preserving; a few camp-rhymes, also, were famous enough in their day to justify translating. Here are some relics, of pattern more or less antique, picked up from that field of Europe where so many centuries have met in arms. [3]

[Footnote 3: Among such songs is one by Bayard Taylor, entitled Annie Laurie, which is of the very best kind.]

The Northern war-poetry, before the introduction of Christianity, is vigorous enough, but it abounds in disagreeable commonplaces: trunks are cleft till each half falls sideways; limbs are carved for ravens, who appear as invariably as the Valkyrs, and while the latter pounce upon the souls that issue with the expiring breath, the former banquet upon the remains. The celebration of a victory is an exulting description of actual scenes of revelling, mead-drinking from mounted skulls, division of the spoils, and half-drunken brags[4] of future prowess. The sense of dependence upon an unseen Power is manifested only in superstitious vows for luck and congratulations that the Strong Ones have been upon the conquering side. There is no lifting up of the heart which checks for a time the joy of victory. They are ferociously glad that they have beaten. This prize-fighting imagery belongs also to the Anglo-Saxon poetry, and is in marked contrast with the commemorative poetry of Franks and Germans after the introduction of Christianity. The allusions may be quite as conventional, but they show that another power has taken the field, and is willing to risk the fortunes of war. Norse poetry loses its vigor when the secure establishment of Christianity abolishes piracy and puts fighting upon an allowance. Its muscle was its chief characteristic. We speak only of war-poetry.

[Footnote 4: Braga was the name of the goblet over which the Norse drinkers made their vows. Probably no Secessionist ever threatened more pompously over his whiskey. The word goes back a great distance. Paruf is Sanscrit for rough, and Ragh, to be equal to. In reading the Norse poetry, one can understand why Brága was the Apollo of the Asa gods, and why the present made to a favorite Scald was called Bragar-Laun (Lohn). Bravo is also a far-travelled form.]

Here, for instance, is the difference plainly told. Hucbald, a monk of the cloister St. Amand in Flanders, wrote "The Louis-Lay," to celebrate the victory gained by the West-Frankish King Louis III. over the Normans, in 881, near Saucourt. It is in the Old-High-German. A few lines will suffice:—

The King rode boldly, sang a holy song,
And all together sang, Kyrie eleison.
The song was sung; the battle was begun;
Blood came to cheeks; thereat rejoiced the Franks;
Then fought each sword, but none so well as Ludwig,
So swift and bold, for 't was his inborn nature;
He struck down many, many a one pierced through,
And at his hands his enemies received
A bitter drink, woe to their life all day.
Praise to God's power, for Ludwig overcame;
And thanks to saints, the victor-fight was his.
Homeward again fared Ludwig, conquering king,
And harnessed as he ever is, wherever the need may be,
Our God above sustain him with His majesty!

Earlier than this it was the custom for soldiers to sing just before fighting. Tacitus alludes to a kind of measured warcry of the Germans, which they made more sonorous and terrific by shouting it into the hollow of their shields. He calls it barditus by mistake, borrowing a term from the custom of the Gauls, who sang before battle by proxy,—that is, their bards chanted the national songs. But Norse and German soldiers loved to sing. King Harald Sigurdson composes verses just before battle; so do the Skalds before the Battle of Stiklestad, which was fatal to the great King Olaf. The soldiers learn the verses and sing them with the Skalds. They also recollect older songs,—the "Biarkamal," for instance, which Biarke made before he fought.[5] These are all of the indomitable kind, and well charged with threats of unlimited slaughter. The custom survived all the social and religious changes of Europe. But the wild war-phrases which the Germans shouted for mutual encouragement, and to derive, like the Highlanders, an omen from the magnitude of the sound, became hymns: they were sung in unison, with the ordinary monkish modulations of the time. The most famous of these was written by Notker, a Benedictine of St. Gall, about the year 900. It was translated by Luther in 1524, and an English translation from Luther's German can be found in the "Lyra Germanica," p. 237.

[Footnote 5: Laing's Sea-Kings of Norway, Vol. II. p. 312; Vol.
III. p. 90.]

William's minstrel, Taillefer, sang a song before the Battle of Hastings: but the Normans loved the purely martial strain, and this was a ballad of French composition, perhaps a fragment of the older "Roland's Song." The "Roman de Rou," composed by Master Wace, or Gasse, a native of Jersey and Canon of Bayeux, who died in 1184, is very minute in its description of the Battle of Val des Dunes, near Caen, fought by Henry of France and William the Bastard against Guy, a Norman noble in the Burgundian interest. The year of the battle was 1047. There is a Latin narrative of the Battle of Hastings, in eight hundred and thirty-five hexameters and pentameters. This was composed by Wido, or Guido, Bishop of Amiens, who died in 1075.

The German knights on their way to Jerusalem sang a holy psalm, beginning, "Fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of the earth." This was discovered not long ago in Westphalia; a translation of it, with the music, can be found in Mr. Richard Willis's collection of hymns.

One would expect to gather fragments of war-poetry from the early times of the Hungarians, who held the outpost of Europe against the Turks, and were also sometimes in arms against the imperial policy of Germany. But De Gerando informs us that they set both victories and defeats to music. The "Rákótzi" is a national air which bears the name of an illustrious prince who was overcome by Leopold. "It is remarkable that in Hungary great thoughts and deep popular feelings were expressed and consecrated, not by poetry, but by national airs. The armed Diets which were held upon the plain of Rákos were the symbol of ancient liberty to the popular apprehension; there is the 'Air of Rákos,' also the 'Air of Mohács,' which recalls the fall of the old monarchy, and the 'Air of Zrinyi,' which preserves the recollection of the heroic defence of Szigeth."[6] These airs are not written; the first comer extemporized their inartificial strains, which the feeling of the moment seized upon and transmitted by tradition. Among the Servians, on the contrary, the heroic ballad is full of fire and meaning, but the music amounts to nothing.

[Footnote 6: A. De Gerando, La Transylvanie et ses Habitants,
Tom. II. p. 265, et seq.]

The first important production of the warlike kind, after Germany began to struggle with its medieval restrictions, was composed after the Battle of Sempach, where Arnold Struthalm of Winkelried opened a passage for the Swiss peasants through the ranks of Austrian spears. It is written in the Middle-High-German, by Halbsuter, a native of Lucerne, who was in the fight. Here are specimens of it. There is a paraphrase by Sir Walter Scott, but it is done at the expense of the metre and naïve character of the original.

In the thousand and three hundred and six and eightieth year
Did God in special manner His favor make appear:
Hei! the Federates, I say,
They get this special grace upon St. Cyril's day.

That was July 9, 1386. The Swiss had been exasperated by the establishment of new tolls by the nobility, who were upheld in it by the Duke of Austria. The Federates (Confederates can never again be used in connection with a just fight) began to attack the castles which sheltered the oppressive baronial power. The castle behind the little town of Willisow is stormed and burned. Thereupon the nobles swear to put these Swiss free peasants down and get them a master. The poet tells all this, and proceeds to describe their excesses and pride. Then,—

Ye Lowland lords are drawing hither to the
Oberland,
To what an entertainment ye do not understand:
Hei! 't were better for shrift to call,
For in the mountain-fields mischances may
befall.

To which the nobles are imagined to reply,—

"Indeed! where sits the priest, then, to grant this needful gift?" In the Schweitz he is all ready,—he'll give you hearty shrift: Hei! he will give it to you sheer, This blessing will he give it with sharp halberds and such gear.

The Duke's people are mowing in the fields near Sempach. A knight insolently demands lunch for them from the Sempachers: a burgher threatens to break his head and lunch them in a heavy fashion, for the Federates are gathering, and will undoubtedly make him spill his porridge. A cautious old knight, named Von Hasenburg, rides out to reconnoitre, and he sees enough to warn the Duke that it is the most serious business in which he ever engaged.

Then spake a lord of Ochsensteín, "O Hasenburg,
hare-heart!"
Him answereth Von Hasenburg, "Thy words
bring me a smart:
Hei! I say to you faithfully,
Which of us is the coward this very day you'll see."

So the old knight, not relishing being punned upon for his counsel, dismounts. All the knights, anticipating an easy victory, dismount, and send their horses to the rear, in the care of varlets who subsequently saved themselves by riding them off. The solid ranks are formed bristling with spears. There is a pause as the two parties survey each other. The nobles pass the word along that it looks like a paltry business:—

So spake they to each other: "Yon folk is
very small,—
In case such boors should beat us, 't will bring
no fame at all:
'Hei! fine lords the boors have mauled!'"
Then the honest Federates on God in heaven
called.

"Ah, dear Christ of Heaven, by Thy bitter
death we plead,
Help bring to us poor sinners in this our strait
and need;
Hei! and stand by us in the field,
And have our land and people beneath Thy
ward and shield."

The shaggy bull (of Uri) was quite ready to meet the lion (Leopold), and threw the dust up a little with its hoof.

"Hei! will you fight with us who have beaten you before?"

To this the lion replies,—

"Thank you for reminding me. I have many a knight and varlet here to pay you off for Laupen, and for the ill turn you did me at Morgarten; now you must wait here till I am even with you."

Now drew the growling lion his tail in for a spring: Then spake the bull unto him, "Wilt have your reckoning? Hei! then nearer to us get, That this green meadow may with blood be growing wet."

Then they began a-shooting against us in the
grove,
And their long lances toward the pious Federates
move:
Hei! the jest it was not sweet,
With branches from the lofty pines down rattling
at their feet.

The nobles' front was fast, their order deep
and spread;
That vexed the pious mind; a Winkelried he
said,
"Hei! if you will keep from need
My pious wife and child, I'll do a hardy
deed.

"Dear Federates and true, my life I give to
win:
They have their rank too firm, we cannot break
it in:
Hei! a breaking in I'll make.
The while that you my offspring to your protection
take."

Herewith did he an armful of spears nimbly take;
His life had an end, for his friends a lane did make:
Hei! he had a lion's mood,
So manly, stoutly dying for the Four Cantons' good.

And so it was the breaking of the nobles' front began
With hewing and with sticking,—it was God's holy plan:
Hei! if this He had not done,
It would have cost the Federates many an honest one.

The poem proceeds now with chaffing and slaughtering the broken enemy, enjoining them to run home to their fine ladies with little credit or comfort, and shouting after them an inventory of the armor and banners which they leave behind. [7]

[Footnote 7: It is proper to state that an attack has lately been made in Germany upon the authenticity of the story of Winkelried, on the ground that it is mentioned in no contemporaneous document or chronicle which has yet come to light, and that a poem in fifteen verses composed before this of Halbsuter's does not mention it. Also it is shown that Halbsuter incorporated the previous poem into his own. It is furthermore denied that Halbsuter was a citizen of Lucerne. In short, there was no Winkelried! Perhaps we can afford to "rehabilitate" villains of every description, but need therefore the heroic be reduced to déshabillé? That we cannot so well afford. We can give up William Tell's apple as easily as we can the one in Genesis, but Winkelreid's "sheaf of Austrian spears" is an essential argument against original sin, being an altogether original act of virtue.]

Veit Weber, a Swiss of Freiburg, also wrote war-verses, but they are pitched on a lower key. He fought against Charles the Bold, and described the Battle of Murten, (Morat,) June 22, 1476. His facetiousness is of the grimmest kind. He exults without poetry. Two or three verses will be quite sufficient to designate his style and temper. Of the moment when the Burgundian line breaks, and the rout commences, he says,—

One hither fled, another there,
With good intent to disappear,
Some hid them in the bushes:
I never saw so great a pinch,—
A crowd that had no thirst to quench
Into the water pushes.

They waded in up to the chin,
Still we our shot kept pouring in,
As if for ducks a-fowling:
In boats we went and struck them dead,
The lake with all their blood was red,—
What begging and what howling!

Up in the trees did many hide,
There hoping not to be espied;
But like the crows we shot them:
The rest on spears did we impale,
Their feathers were of no avail,
The wind would not transport them.

He will not vouch for the number of the killed, but gives it on hearsay as twenty-six thousand drowned and slain; but he regrets that their flight was so precipitate as to prevent him from recording a more refreshing total. He is specially merry over the wealth and luxurious habits of Charles, alludes to his vapor-baths, etc.:—

His game of chess was to his cost,
Of pawns has he a many lost,
And twice[8] his guard is broken;
His castles help him not a mite,
And see how lonesome stands his knight!
Checkmate's against him spoken.

[Footnote 8: Once, the year before, at Granson.]

The wars of the rich cities with the princes and bishops stimulated a great many poems that are full of the traits of burgher-life. Seventeen princes declared war against Nuremberg, and seventy-two cities made a league with her. The Swiss sent a contingent of eight hundred men. This war raged with great fierceness, and with almost uninterrupted success for the knights, till the final battle which took place near Pillerent, in 1456. A Nuremberg painter, Hans Rosenplül, celebrated this in verses like Veit Weber's, with equal vigor, but downright prosaic street-touches. Another poem describes the rout of the Archbishop of Cologne, who attempted to get possession of the city, in 1444. All these Low-German poems are full of popular scorn and satire: they do not hate the nobles so much as laugh at them, and their discomfitures in the field are the occasion of elaborate ridicule.

The Lanzknechts were foot-soldiers recruited from the roughs of Germany, and derived their name from the long lance which they carried;[9] but they were also armed subsequently with the arquebuse. They were first organized into bodies of regular troops by George Frundsberg of Mindelheim, a famous German captain, whose castle was about twenty miles south-west of Augsburg. It was afterwards the centre of a little principality which Joseph I. created for the Duke of Marlborough,[10] as a present for the victory of Hochstädt (Blenheim). Frundsberg was a man of talent and character, one of the best soldiers of Charles V. He saved the Imperial cause in the campaign of 1522 against the French and Swiss. At Bicocco he beat the famous Swiss infantry under Arnold of Winkelried, a descendant, doubtless, of one of the children whom Arnold Struthabn left to the care of his comrades. At Pavia a decisive charge of his turned the day against Francis I. And on the march to Rome, his unexpected death so inflamed the Lanzknechts that the meditated retreat of Bourbon became impossible, and the city was taken by assault. His favorite mottoes were, Kriegsrath mit der That, "Plan and Action," and Viel Feinde, viel Ehre, "The more foes, the greater honor." He was the only man who could influence the mercenary lancers, who were as terrible in peace as in war.

[Footnote 9: It is sometimes spelled landsknecht, as if it meant country-fellows, or recruits,—men raised at large. But that was a popular misapprehension of the word, because some of them were Suabian bumpkins.]

[Footnote 10: The French soldier-song about Marlborough is known to every one.]

The Lanzknecht's lance was eighteen feet long: he wore a helmet and breastplate, and was taught to form suddenly and to preserve an impenetrable square. Before him all light and heavy cavalry went down, and that great arm of modern war did not recover from its disgrace and neglect till the time of Frederic. But his character was very indifferent: he went foraging when there was no campaign, and in time of peace prepared for war by systematic billeting and plundering. It was a matter of economy to get up a war in order to provide employment for the Lanzknecht.

Hans Sachs wrote a very amusing piece in 1558, entitled, "The Devil won't let Landsknechts come to Hell." Lucifer, being in council one evening, speaks of the Lanzknecht as a new kind of man; he describes his refreshing traits of originality, and expresses a desire to have one. It is agreed that Beelzebub shall repair as a crimp to a tavern, and lie in wait for this new game. The agent gets behind a stove, which in Germany would shield from observation even Milton's Satan, and listens while the Lanzknechts drink. They begin to tell stories which make his hair stand on end, but they also God-bless each other so often, at sneezing and hiccupping, that he cannot get a chance at them. One of them, who had stolen a cock and hung it behind the stove, asks the landlord to go and fetch the poor devil. Beelzebub, soundly frightened, beats a hasty retreat, expressing his wonder that the Lanzknecht should know he was there. He apologizes to Lucifer for being unable to enrich his cabinet, and assures him that it would be impossible to live with them; the devils would be eaten out of house and home, and their bishopric taken from them. Lucifer concludes on the whole that it is discreet to limit himself to monks, nuns, lawyers, and the ordinary sinner.

The songs of the Lanzknecht are cheerful, and make little of the chances of the fight. Fasting and feasting are both welcome; he is as gay as a Zouave.[11] To be maimed is a slight matter: if he loses an arm, he bilks the Swiss of a glove; if his leg goes, he can creep, or a wooden leg will serve his purpose:—

It harms me not a mite,
A wooden stump will make all right;
And when it is no longer good,
Some spital knave shall get the wood.

But if a ball my bosom strikes,
On some wide field I lie,
They'll take me off upon their pikes,—
A grave is always nigh;
Pumerlein Pum,—the drums shall say
Better than any priest,—Good day!

[Footnote 11: Who besings himself thus, in a song from the Solferino campaign:—

"Quand l'zouzou, coiffé de son fez,
A par hasard queuqu' goutt' sous l'nez,
L'tremblement s'met dans la cambuse;
Mais s'il faut se flanquer des coups,
Il sait rendre atouts pour atouts,
Et gare dessous,
C'est l'zouzou qui s'amuse!
Des coups, des coups, des coups,
C'est l'zouzou qui s'amuse.">[

There is a very characteristic piece, without date or name of the writer, but which, to judge from the German, was written after the time of Luther. Nothing could better express the feeling of a people who have been saved by martial and religious enthusiasm, and brought through all the perils of history. It is the production of some Meistersinger, who introduced it into a History of Henry the Fowler, (fought the Huns, 919-935,) that was written by him in the form of a comedy, and divided into acts. He brings in a minstrel who sings the song before battle. The last verse, with adapted metre and music, is now a soldier's song.

Many a righteous cause on earth
To many a battle growing,
Of music God has thought them worth,
A gift of His bestowing.
It came through Jubal into life;
For Lamech's son inventing
The double sounds of drum and fife,
They both became consenting.
For music good
Wakes manly mood,
Intrepid goes
Against our foes.
Calls stoutly, "On!
Fall on! fall on!
Clear field and street
Of hostile feet,
Shoot, thrust them through, and cleave,
Not one against you leave!"

Elias prophecy would make
In thirsty Israel's passion:
"To me a minstrel bring," he spake,
"Who plays in David's fashion."
Soon came on him Jehovah's hand,
In words of help undoubted,—
Great waters flowed the rainless land,
The foe was also routed.

Drom, Druri, Drom,
Pom, Pom, Pom, Pom,
Drumming and fifing good
Make hero-mood;
Prophets upspring,
Poets, too, sing;
Music is life
To peace and strife,—
And men have ever heeded
What chief by them is needed.

In Dorian mood when he would sing,
Timotheus the charmer,
'Tis said the famous lyre would bring
All listeners into armor:
It woke in Alexander rage
For war, and nought would slake it,
Unless he could the world engage,
And his by conquest make it.
Timotheus
Of Miletus
Could strongly sing
To rouse the King
Of Macedon,
Heroic one,
Till, in his ire
And manly fire,
For shield and weapon rising,
He went, the foe chastising.

For what God drives, that ever goes,—
So sang courageous Judith;
No one can such as He oppose;
There prospers what He broodeth.
Who has from God a martial mood,
Through all resistance breaking,
Can prove himself 'gainst heroes good,
On foes a vengeance taking.
Drums, when we droop;
Stand fast, my troop!
Let dart and sabre
The air belabor;
Give them no heed,
But be agreed
That flight be a breach of honor:
Of that be hearty scorner.

Although a part, as haps alway,
Will faintly take to fleeing,
A lion's heart have I to-day
For Kaiser Henry's seeing.
The wheat springs forth, the chaff's behind;[12]
Strike harder, then, and braver;

[Footnote 12: This was first said by Rudolph of Erlach at the Battle of Laupen, in 1339, fought between citizens of Berne and the neighboring lords. The great array of the nobles caused the rear ranks of the Bernese to shrink. "Good!" cried Erlach, "the chaff is separated from the wheat! Cowards will not share the victory of the brave." —Zschokke's History of Switzerland, p. 48, Shaw's translation.]

Perhaps they all will change their mind,
So, brothers, do not waver!
Kyrie eleison!
Pidi, Pom, Pom, Pom,
Alarum beat,
There's no retreat;
Wilt soon be slashed,
Be pierced and gashed:
But none of these things heeding,
The foe, too, set a-bleeding.

Many good surgeons have we here,
Again to heal us ready;
With God's help, then, be of good cheer,
The Pagans grow unsteady:
Let not thy courage sink before
A foe already flying;
Revenge itself shall give thee more,
And hearten it, if dying.
Drom, Drari, Drom,
Kyrie eleison!
Strike, thrust,—for we
Must victors be;
Let none fall out,
Keep order stout;
Close to my side,
Comrade, abide!
Be grace of God revealed now,
And help us hold the field now!

God doth Himself encamp us round,
Himself the tight inspiring;
The foe no longer stands his ground,
On every side retiring;
Ye brothers, now set boldly on
The hostile ranks!—they waver,—
They break before us and are gone,—
Praise be to God the Saver!
Drom, Drari, Drom,
Come, brother, come!
Drums, make a noise!
My troops, rejoice!
Help now pursue
And thrust and hew;
Pillage restrain,—
The spoils remain
In reach of every finger,
But not a foe wilt linger.

Ye bold campaigners, praise the Lord,
And strifeful heroes, take now
The prize He doth to us accord,
Good cheer and pillage make now:
What each one finds that let him take,
But friendly share your booty,
For parents', wives', and children's sake,
For household use or beauty.
Pidi, Pom, Pom, Pom,
Field-surge on come,
My gash to bind,
Am nearly blind,—
The arrows stick,
Out pull them quick,—
A bandage here,
To save my ear,—
Come, bind me up,
And reach a cup,—
Ho, here at hand,
I cannot stand,—
Reach hither what you're drinking,
My heart is 'neath me sinking.

War-comrades all, heart's-brothers good,
I spare no skill and labor,
For these your hurts in hero-mood
You got from hostile sabre.
Now well behave, keep up thy heart,
God's help itself will tend thee;
Although at present great the smart,
To dress the wound will mend thee;
Wash off the blood,
Time makes it good,—
Reach me the shear,—
A plaster here,—
Hold out your arm,
'T is no great harm,—
Give drink to stay,
He limps away:
Thank God, their wounds all tended,
Be dart- and pike-hole mended!

Three faces does a surgeon wear:
At first God is not higher;
And when with wounds they illy fare,
He comes in angel's tire;
But soon as word is said of pay,
How gracelessly they grieve him!
They bid his odious face away,
Or knavishly deceive him:
No thanks for it
Spoils benefit,
Ill to endure
For drugs that cure;
Pay and respect
Should he collect,
For at his art
Your woes depart;
God bids him speed
To you in need;
Therefore our dues be giving,
God wills us all a living.

No death so blessed in the world
As his who, struck by foeman,
Upon the airy field is hurled,
Nor hears lament of woman;
From narrow beds death one by one
His pale recruits is calling,
But comrades here are not alone,
Like Whitsun blossoms falling.
'T is no ill jest
To say that best
Of ways to die
Is thus to lie
In honor's sleep,
With none to weep:
Marched out of life
By drum and fife
To airy grave,
Thus heroes crave
A worthy fame,—
Men say his name
Is Fatherland's Befriender,
By life and blood surrender.

With the introduction of standing armies popular warlike poetry falls away, and is succeeded by camp-songs, and artistic renderings of martial subjects by professed poets. The people no longer do the fighting; they foot the bills and write melancholy hymns. Weckerlin (1584-1651) wrote some hearty and simple things; among others, Frisch auf, ihr tapfere Soldaten, "Ye soldiers bold, be full of cheer." Michael Altenburg, (1583-1640,) who served on the Protestant side, wrote a hymn after the Battle of Leipsic, 1631, from the watch word, "God with us," which was given to the troops that day. His hymn was afterwards made famous by Gustavus Adolphus, who sang it at the head of his soldiers before the Battle of Lützen, November 16, 1632, in which he fell. Here it is. (Verzage nicht, du Häuflein klein.)

Be not cast down, thou little band,
Although the foe with purpose stand
To make thy ruin sure:
Because they seek thy overthrow,
Thou art right sorrowful and low:
It will not long endure.

Be comforted that God will make
Thy cause His own, and vengeance take,—
'T is His, and let it reign:
He knoweth well His Gideon,
Through him already hath begun
Thee and His Word sustain.

Sure word of God it is to fell
That Satan, world, and gates of hell,
And all their following,
Must come at last to misery:
God is with us,—with God are we,—
He will the victory bring.

Here is certainly a falling off from Luther's Ein feste Burg, but his spirit was in the fight; and the hymn is wonderfully improved when the great Swedish captain takes it to his death.

Von Kleist (1715-1759) studied law at Königsberg, but later became an officer in the Prussian service. He wrote, in 1759, an ode to the Prussian army, was wounded at the Battle of Künersdorf, where Frederic the Great lost his army and received a ball in his snuff-box. His poetry is very poor stuff. The weight of the enemy crushes down the hills and makes the planet tremble; agony and eternal night impend; and where the Austrian horses drink, the water fails. But his verses were full of good advice to the soldiers, to spare, in the progress of their great achievements, the poor peasant who is not their foe, to help his need, and to leave pillage to Croats and cowards. The advice was less palatable to Frederic's troops than the verses.

But there were two famous soldier's songs, of unknown origin, the pets of every camp, which piqued all the poets into writing war-verses as soon as the genius of Frederic kindled such enthusiasm among Prussians. The first was an old one about Prince Eugene, who was another hero, loved in camps, and besung with ardor around every watchfire. It is a genuine soldier's song.

Prince Eugene, the noble captain,
For the Kaiser would recover
Town and fortress of Belgrade;
So he put a bridge together
To transport his army thither,
And before the town parade.

When the floating bridge was ready,
So that guns and wagons steady
Could pass o'er the Danube stream,
By Semlin a camp collected.
That the Turks might be ejected,
To their great chagrin and shame.

Twenty-first of August was it,
When a spy in stormy weather
Came, and told the Prince and swore
That the Turks they all amounted,
Near, at least, as could be counted,
To three hundred thousand men, or more.

Prince Eugenius never trembled
At the news, but straight assembled
All his generals to know:
Them he carefully instructed
How the troops should be conducted
Smartly to attack the foe.

With the watchword he commanded
They should wait till twelve was sounded
At the middle of the night;
Mounting then upon their horses,
For a skirmish with the forces,
Go in earnest at the fight.

Straightway all to horseback getting,
Weapons handy, forth were setting
Silently from the redoubt:
Musketeers, dragooners also,
Bravely fought and made them fall so,—
Led them such a dance about.

And our cannoneers advancing
Furnished music for the dancing,
With their pieces great and small;
Great and small upon them playing,
Heathen were averse to staying,
Ran, and did not stay at all.

Prince Eugenius on the right wing
Like a lion did his fighting,
So he did field-marshal's part:
Prince Ludwig rode from one to th' other,
Cried, "Keep firm, each German brother,
Hurt the foe with all your heart!"

Prince Ludwig, struck by bullet leaden,
With his youthful life did redden,
And his soul did then resign:
Badly Prince Eugene wept o'er him,
For the love he always bore him,—
Had him brought to Peterwardein.

The music is peculiar,—one flat, 3/4 time,—a very rare measure, and giving plenty of opportunity for a quaint camp-style of singing.

The other song appeared during Frederic's Silesian War. It contains some choice reminiscences of his favorite rhetoric.

Fridericus Rex, our master and king,
His soldiers altogether to the field would bring,
Battalions two hundred, and a thousand squadrons clear,
And cartridges sixty to every grenadier.

"Cursed fellows, ye!"—his Majesty began,—
"For me stand in battle, each man to man;
Silesia and County Glatz to me they will not grant,
Nor the hundred millions either which I want.

"The Empress and the French have gone to be allied,
And the Roman kingdom has revolted from my side,
And the Russians are bringing into Prussia war;—
Up, let us show them that we Prussians are!

"My General Schwerin, and Field-Marshal Von Keith,
And Von Ziethen, Major-General, are ready for a fight;
Turban-spitting Element! Cross and Lightning get
Who has not found Fritz and his soldiers out yet!

"Now adieu, Louisa![13]—Louisa, dry your eyes!
There's not a soldier's life for every ball that flies;
For if all the bullets singly hit their men,
Where could our Majesties get soldiers then?

"Now the hole a musket-bullet makes is small,—
'T is a larger hole made by a cannon-ball;
But the bullets all are of iron and of lead,
And many a bullet goes for many overhead.

"'T is a right heavy calibre to our artillery,
And never goes a Prussian over to the enemy,
For 't is cursed bad money that the Swedes have to pay;
Is there any better coin of the Austrian?—who can say?

"The French are paid off in pomade by their king,
But each week in pennies we get our reckoning;
Sacrament of Cross and Lightning! Turbans, spit away!
Who draws so promptly as the Prussian his pay?"

With a laurel-wreath adorned, Fridericus my King,
If you had only oftener permitted plundering,
Fredericus Rex, king and hero of the fight,
We would drive the Devil for thee out of sight!

[Footnote 13: His queen]

Among the songs which the military ardor of this period stimulated, the best are those by Gleim, (1719-1803) called "Songs of a Prussian Grenadier." All the literary men, Lessing not excepted, were seized with the Prussian enthusiasm; the pen ravaged the domain of sentiment to collect trophies for Father Friedrich. The desolation it produced in the attempt to write the word Glory could be matched only by the sword. But Gleim was a man of spirit and considerable power. The shock of Frederic's military successes made him suddenly drop the pen with which he had been inditing Anacreontics, and weak, rhymeless Horatian moods. His grenadier-songs, though often meagre and inflated, and marked with the literary vices of the time, do still account for the great fame which they acquired, as they went marching with the finest army that Europe ever saw. Here is a specimen:—

VICTORY-SONG AFTER THE BATTLE NEAR PRAGUE.

Victoria! with us is God;
There lies the haughty foe!
He falls, for righteous is our God;
Victoria! he lies low.

'T is true our father[14] is no more,
Yet hero-like be went,
And now the conquering host looks o'er
From high and starry tent.

The noble man, he led the way
For God and Fatherland,
And scarce was his old head so gray
As valiant his hand.

With fire of youth and hero-craft
A banner snatching, he
Held it aloft upon its shaft
For all of us to see;

And said,—"My children, now attack,—
Take each redoubt and gun!"
And swifter than the lightning track
We followed, every one.

Alas, the flag that led the strife
Falls with him ere we win!
It was a glorious end of life:
O fortunate Schwerin!

And when thy Frederic saw thee low,
From out his sobbing breath
His orders hurled us on the foe
In vengeance for thy death.

Thou, Henry,[15] wert a soldier true,
Thou foughtest royally!
From deed to deed our glances flew,
Thou lion-youth, with thee!

A Prussian heart with valor quick,
Right Christian was his mood:
Red grew his sword, and flowing thick
His steps with Pandourt[16]-blood.

Full seven earth-works did we clear,
The bear-skins broke and fled;
Then, Frederic, went thy grenadier
High over heaps of dead:

Remembered, in the murderous fight,
God, Fatherland, and thee,—
Turned, from the deep and smoky night,
His Frederic to see,

And trembled,—with a flush of fear
His visage mounted high;
He trembled, not that death was near,
But lest thou, too, shouldst die:

Despised the balls like scattered seed,
The cannon's thunder-tone,
Fought fiercely, did a hero's deed,
Till all thy foes had flown.

Now thanks he God for all His might,
And sings, Victoria!
And all the blood from out this fight
Flows to Theresia.

And if she will not stay the plague,
Nor peace to thee concede,
Storm with us, Frederic, first her Prague,
Then, to Vienna lead!

[Footnote 14: Marshal Schwerin, seventy years of age, who was killed at the head of a regiment, with its colors in his hand, just as it crossed through the fire to the enemy's intrenchments.]

[Footnote 15: The King's brother.]

[Footnote 16: A corps of foot-soldiers in the Austrian service, eventually incorporated in the army. They were composed of Servians, Croats, etc., inhabitants of the military frontier, and were named originally from the village of Pandúr in Lower Hungary, where probably the first recruits were gathered.]

The love which the soldiers had for Frederic survived in the army after all the veterans of his wars had passed away. It is well preserved in this camp-song:—

THE INVALIDES AT FATHER FREDERIC'S GRAVE.

Here stump we round upon our crutches, round our Father's grave we go, And from our eyelids down our grizzled beards the bitter tears will flow.

'T was long ago, with Frederic living, that we
got our lawful gains:
A meagre ration now they serve us,—life's no
longer worth the pains.

Here stump we round, deserted orphans, and
with tears each other see,—
Are waiting for our marching orders hence,
to be again with thee.

Yes, Father, only could we buy thee, with our
blood, by Heaven, yes,—
We Invalides, forlorn detachment, straight
through death would storming press!

When the German princes issued to their subjects unlimited orders for Constitutions, to be filled up and presented after the domination of Napoleon was destroyed, all classes hastened, fervid with hope and anti-Gallic feeling, to offer their best men for the War of Liberation. Then the poets took again their rhythm from an air vibrating with the cannon's pulse. There was Germanic unity for a while, fed upon expectation and the smoke of successful fields. Most of the songs of this period have been already translated. Ruckert, in a series of verses which he called "Sonnets in Armor," gave a fine scholarly expression to the popular desires. Here is his exultation over the Battle of Leipsic:—

Can there no song
Roar with a might
Loud as the fight
Leipsic's region along?

Three days and three nights,
No moment of rest,
And not for a jest,
Went thundering the fights.

Three days and three nights
Leipsic Fair kept: Frenchmen who pleasured
There with an iron yardstick were measured,
Bringing the reckoning with them to rights.

Three days and all night
A battue of larks the Leipsicker make;
Every haul a hundred he takes,
A thousand each flight.

Ha! it is good,
Now that the Russian can boast no longer
He alone of us is stronger
To slake his steppes with hostile blood.

Not in the frosty North alone,
But here in Meissen,
Here at Leipsic on the Pleissen,
Can the French be overthrown.

Shallow Pleissen deep is flowing;
Plains upheaving,
The dead receiving,
Seem to mountains for us growing.

They will be our mountains never,
But this fame
Shall be our claim
On the rolls of earth forever.

What all this amounted to, when the German people began to send in their constitutional cartes-blanches, is nicely taken off by Hoffman von Fallersleben, in this mock war-song, published in 1842:—

All sing.

Hark to the beating drum!
See how the people come!
Flag in the van!
We follow, man for man.
Rouse, rouse
From earth and house!
Ye women and children, good night!
Forth we hasten, we hasten to the fight,
With God for our King and Fatherland.

A night-patrol of 1813 sings.

O God! and why, and why,
For princes' whim, renown, and might,
To the fight?
For court-flies and other crows,
To blows?
For the nonage of our folk,
Into smoke?
For must-war-meal and class-tax,
To thwacks?
For privilege and censordom—
Hum—
Into battle without winking?
But—I was thinking—

All sing.

Hark to the heating drum!
See how the people come!
Flag in the van!
We follow, man for man:
In battle's roar
The time is o'er
To ask for reasons,—hear, the drum
Again is calling,—tum—tum—tum,—
With God for King and Fatherland.

Or to put it in two stanzas of his, written on a visit to the Valhalla, or Hall of German Worthies, at Regensburg:—

I salute thee, sacred Hall,
Chronicle of German glory!
I salute ye, heroes all
Of the new time and the hoary!

Patriot heroes, from your sleep
Into being could ye pass!
No, a king would rather keep
Patriots in stone and brass.

The Danish sea-songs, like those of the English, are far better than the land-songs of the soldiers: but here is one with a true and temperate sentiment, which the present war will readily help us to appreciate. It is found in a book of Danish popular songs. [17]

[Footnote 17: Sange til Brug før blandede Selskaber, samlade af FREDERIK SCHALDEMOSE. 1816. Songs for Use in Social Meetings, etc.] (Herlig er Krigerens Faerd.)

Good is the soldier's trade,
For envy well made:
The lightning-blade
Over force-men he swingeth;
A loved one shall prize
The honor he bringeth;
Is there a duty?
That's soldier's booty,—
To have it he dies.

True for his king and land
The Northman will stand;
An oath is a band,—
He never can rend it;
The dear coast, 't is right
A son should defend it;
For battle he burneth,
Death's smile he returneth,
And bleeds with delight.

Scars well set off his face,—
Each one is a grace;
His profit they trace,—
No labor shines brighter:
A wreath is the scar
On the brow of a fighter;
His maid thinks him fairer,
His ornament rarer
Than coat with a star.

Reaches the king his hand,
That makes his soul grand,
And fast loyal band
Round his heart it is slinging;
From Fatherland's good
The motion was springing:
His deeds so requited,
Is gratefully lighted
A man's highest mood.

Bravery's holy fire,
Beam nobler and higher,
And light our desire
A path out of madness!
By courage and deed
We conquer peace-gladness:
We suffer for that thing,
We strike but for that thing,
And gladly we bleed.

But our material threatens the space we have at command. Four more specimens must suffice for the present. They are all favorite soldier-songs. The first is by Chamisso, known popularly as the author of "Peter Schlemihl's Shadow," and depicts the mood of a soldier who has been detailed to assist in a military execution:—

The muffled drums to our marching play.
How distant the spot, and how long the way!
Oh, were I at rest, and the bitterness through!
Methinks it will break my heart in two!

Him only I loved of all below,—
Him only who yet to death must go;
At the rolling music we parade,
And of me too, me, the choice is made!

Once more, and the last, he looks upon
The cheering light of heaven's sun;
But now his eyes they are binding tight:
God grant to him rest and other light!

Nine muskets are lifted to the eye,
Eight bullets have gone whistling by;
They trembled all with comrades' smart,—
But I—I hit him in his heart!

The next is by Von Holtei:—

THE VETERAN TO HIS CLOAK.

Full thirty years art thou of age, hast many a
storm lived through,
Brother-like hast round me tightened,
And whenever cannons lightened,
Both of us no terror knew.

Wet soaking to the skin we lay for many a
blessed night,
Thou alone hast warmth imparted,
And if I was heavy-hearted,
Telling thee would make me light.

My secrets thou hast never spoke, wert ever still and true;
Every tatter did befriend me,
Therefore I'll no longer mend thee,
Lest, old chap, 't would make thee new.

And dearer still art thou to ma when jests about thee roll;
For where the rags below are dropping,
There went through the bullets popping,—
Every bullet makes a hole.

And when the final bullet comes to stop a German heart,
Then, old cloak, a grave provide me,
Weather-beaten friend, still hide me,
As I sleep in thee apart.

There lie we till the roll-call together in the grave:
For the roll I shall be heedful,
Therefore it will then be needful
For me an old cloak to have.

The next one is taken from a student-song book, and was probably written in 1814:—

THE CANTEEN.

Just help me, Lottie, as I spring;
My arm is feeble, see,—
I still must have it in a sling;
Be softly now with me!
But do not let the canteen slip,—
Here, take it first, I pray,—
For when that's broken from my lip,
All joys will flow away.

"And why for that so anxious?—pshaw!
It is not worth a pin:
The common glass, the bit of straw,
And not a drop within!"
No matter, Lottie, take it out,—
'T is past your reckoning:
Yes, look it round and round about,—
There drank from it—my King!

By Leipsic near, if you must know,—
'T was just no children's play,—
A ball hit me a grievous blow,
And in the crowd I lay;
Nigh death, they bore me from the scene,
My garments off they fling,
Yet held I fast by my canteen,—
There drank from it—my King!

For once our ranks in passing through
He paused,—we saw his face;
Around us keen the volleys flew,
He calmly kept his place.
He thirsted,—I could see it plain,
And courage took to bring
My old canteen for him to drain,—
He drank from it—my King!

He touched me on the shoulder here,
And said, "I thank thee, friend,
Thy liquor gives me timely cheer,—
Thou didst right well intend."
O'erjoyed at this, I cried aloud,
"O comrades, who can bring
Canteen like this to make him proud?—
There drank from it—my King!"

That old canteen shall no one have,
The best of treasures mine;
Put it at last upon my grave,
And under it this line:
"He fought at Leipsic, whom this green
Is softly covering;
Best household good was his canteen,—
There drank from it—his King!"

And finally, a song for all the campaigns of life:—

Morning-red! morning-red!
Lightest me towards the dead!
Soon the trumpets will be blowing,
Then from life must I be going,
I, and comrades many a one.

Soon as thought, soon as thought,
Pleasure to an end is brought;
Yesterday upon proud horses,—
Shot to-day, our quiet corses
Are to-morrow in the grave.

And how soon, and how soon,
Vanish shape and beauty's noon!
Of thy cheeks a moment vaunting,
Like the milk and purple haunting,—
Ah, the roses fade away!

And what, then, and what, then,
Is the joy and lust of men?
Ever caring, ever getting,
From the early morn-light fretting
Till the day is past and gone.

Therefore still, therefore still
I content me, as God will:
Fighting stoutly, nought shall shake me:
For should death itself o'ertake me,
Then a gallant soldier dies.

FROUDE'S HENRY THE EIGHTH.

The spirit of historical criticism in the present age is on the whole a charitable spirit. Many public characters have been heard through their advocates at the bar of history, and the judgments long since passed upon them and their deeds, and deferentially accepted for centuries, have been set aside, and others of a widely different character pronounced. Julius Caesar, who was wont to stand as the model usurper, and was regarded as having wantonly destroyed Roman liberty in order to gratify his towering ambition, is now regarded as a political reformer of the very highest and best class,—as the man who alone thoroughly understood his age and his country, and who was Heaven's own instrument to rescue unnumbered millions from the misrule of an oligarchy whose members looked upon mankind as their proper prey. He did not overthrow the freedom of Rome, but he took from Romans the power to destroy the personal freedom of all the races by them subdued. He identified the interests of the conquered peoples with those of the central government, so far as that work was possible,—thus proceeding in the spirit of the early Roman conquerors, who sought to comprehend even the victims of their wars in the benefits which proceeded from those wars. This view of his career is a sounder one than that which so long prevailed, and which enabled orators to round periods with references to the Rubicon. It is not thirty years since one of the first of American statesmen told the national Senate that "Julius Caesar struck down Roman liberty at Pharsalia," and probably there was not one man in his audience who supposed that he was uttering anything beyond a truism, though they must have been puzzled to discover any resemblance between "the mighty Julius" and Mr. Martin Van Buren, the gentleman whom the orator was cutting up, and who was actually in the chair while Mr. Calhoun was seeking to kill him, in a political sense, by quotations from Plutarch's Lives. We have learnt something since 1834 concerning Rome and Caesar as well as of our own country and its chiefs, and the man who should now bring forward the conqueror of Gaul as a vulgar usurper would be almost as much laughed at as would be that man who should insist that General Jackson destroyed American liberty when he removed the deposits from the national bank. The facts and fears of one generation often furnish material for nothing but jests and jeers to that generation's successors; and we who behold a million of men in arms, fighting for or against the American Union, and all calling themselves Americans, are astonished when we read or remember that our immediate predecessors in the political world went to the verge of madness on the Currency question. Perhaps the men of 1889 may be equally astonished, when they shall turn to files of newspapers that were published in 1862, and read therein the details of those events that now excite so painful an interest in hundreds of thousands of families. Nothing is so easy as to condemn the past, except the misjudging of the present, and the failure to comprehend the future.

Men of a very different stamp from the first of the Romans have been allowed the benefits that come from a rehearing of their causes. Robespierre, whose deeds are within the memory of many yet living, has found champions, and it is now admitted by all who can effect that greatest of conquests, the subjugation of their prejudices, that he was an honest fanatic, a man of iron will, but of small intellect, who had the misfortune, the greatest that can fall to the lot of humanity, to be placed by the force of circumstances in a position which would have tried the soundest of heads, even had that head been united with the purest of hearts. But the apologists of "the sea-green incorruptible," it must be admitted, have not been very successful, as the sence of mankind revolts at indiscriminate murder, even when the murderer's hands have no other stain than that which comes from blood,—for that is a stain which will not "out"; not even printer's ink can erase or cover it; and the attorney of Arras must remain the Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones of history. Benedict Arnold has found no direct defender or apologist; but those readers who are unable to see how forcibly recent writers have dwelt upon the better points of his character and career, while they have not been insensible to the provocations he received, must have read very carelessly and uncritically indeed. Mr. Paget has all but whitewashed Marlborough, and has shaken many men's faith in the justice of Lord Macauley's judgement and in the accuracy of his assertions. Richard III., by all who can look through the clouds raised by Shakespeare over English history of the fifteenth century, is admitted to have been a much better man and ruler than were the average of British monarchs from the Conquest to the Revolution, thanks to the labors of Horace Walpole and Caroline Halsted, who, however, have only followed in the path struck out by Sir George Buck at a much earlier period. The case of Mary Stuart still remains unsettled, and bids fair to be the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case of history; but this is owing to the circumstance that that unfortunate queen is so closely associated with the origin of our modern parties that justice where her reputation is concerned is scarcely to be looked for. Little has been said for King John; and Mr. Woolryche's kind attempt to reconcile men to the name of Jeffreys has proved a total failure. Strafford has about as many admirers as enemies among those who know his history, but this is due more to the manner of his death than to any love of his life: of so much more importance is it that men should die well than live well, so far as the judgement of posterity is concerned with their actions.

Strafford's master, who so scandalously abandoned him to the headsman, owes the existence of the party that still upholds his conduct to the dignified manner in which he faced death, a death at which the whole world "assisted," or might have done so. Catiline, we believe, has found no formal defender, but the Catilinarian Conspiracy is now generally admitted to have been the Popish Plot of antiquity, with an ounce of truth to a pound of falsehood in the narratives of it that have come down to us from Rome's revolutionary age, in political pamphlets and party orations. Cicero's craze on the subject, and that tendency which all men have to overrate the value of their own actions, have made of the business in his lively pages a much more consequential affair than it really was. The fleas in the microscope, and there it will ever remain, to be mistaken for a monster. Truly, the Tullian gibbeted the gentleman of the Sergian gens. It must be confessed that Catiline was a proper rascal. How could he have been anything else, and be one of Sulla's men? And a proper rascal is an improper character of the very worst kind. Still, we should like to have had his marginal "notes" on Cicero's speeches, and on Sallust's job pamphlet. They would have been mighty interesting reading,—as full of lies, probably, as the matter commented on, but not the less attractive on that account. What dull affairs libraries would be, if they contained nothing but books full of truth! The Greek tyrants have found defenders, and it has been satisfactorily made out that they were the cleverest men of their time, and that, if they did occasionally bear rather hard upon individuals, it was only because those individuals were so unreasonable as not to submit to be robbed or killed in a quiet and decorous manner. Mr. Grote's rehabilitation of the Greek sophists is a miracle of ingenuity and sense, and does as much honor to the man who wrote it as justice to the men of whom it is written.

Of the doubtful characters of history, royal families have furnished not a few, some of whom have stood in as bad positions as those which have been assigned to Robespierre and his immediate associates. Catharine de' Medici and Mary I. of England, the "Bloody Mary" of anti-Catholic localities, are supposed to be models of evil, to be in crinoline; but if you can believe Eugenio Albèri, Catharine was not the harlot, the tyrant, the poisoner, the bigot, and the son-killer that she passes for in the common estimation, and he has made out a capital defence for the dead woman whom he selected as his client. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew was not an "Italian crime," but a French coup d'état, and was as rough and coarse as some similar transactions seen by our grandfathers, say the September prison-business at Paris in 1792. As to Mary Tudor, she was an excellent woman, but a bigot; and if she did turn Mrs. Rogers and her eleven children out to the untender mercies of a cold world, by sending Mr. Rogers into a hot fire, it was only that souls might be saved from a hotter and a huger fire,—a sort of argument the force of which we always have been unable to appreciate, no doubt because we are of the heretics, and never believed that persons belonging to our determination ought to be roasted. The incense of the stake, that was so sweet in ecclesiastical nostrils three hundred years ago, and also in vulgar nostrils wherever the vulgar happened to be of the orthodox persuasion, has become an insufferable stench to the more refined noses of the nineteenth century, which, nevertheless, are rather partial to the odor of the gallows. Miss Strickland and other clever historians may dwell upon the excellence of Mary Tudor's private character with as much force as they can make, or with much greater force they may show that Gardiner and other reactionary leaders were the real fire-raisers of her reign; but the common mind will ever, and with great justice, associate those loathsome murders with the name and memory of the sovereign in whose reign they were perpetrated.

The father of Mary I. stands much more in need of defence and apology than does his daughter. No monarch occupies so strange a position in history as Henry VIII. A sincere Catholic, so far as doctrine went, and winning from the Pope himself the title of Defender of the Faith because of his writing against the grand heresiarch of the age, he nevertheless became the chief instrument of the Reformation, the man and the sovereign without whose aid the reform movement of the sixteenth century would have failed as deplorably as the reform movements of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries had failed. A legitimate king, though the heir of a successful usurpation, and holding the royal prerogative as high as any man who ever grasped the sceptre, he was the tool of the mightiest of revolutionists, and poured out more royal and noble blood than ever flowed at the command of all the Jacobins and Democrats that have warred against thrones and dynasties and aristocracies. He is abhorred of Catholics, and Protestants do not love him; for he pulled down the old religious fabric of his kingdom, and furnished to the Reformers a permanent standing-place from which to move the world, while at the same time he slaughtered Protestants as ruthlessly as ever they were disposed of by any ruler of the Houses of Austria and Valois. Reeking with blood, and apparently insensible to anything like a humane feeling, he was yet popular with the masses of his subjects, and no small share of that popularity has descended to our time, in which he is admired by the unreflecting because of the boldness and dash of his actions and on account of the consequences of those actions, so that he is commonly known as "bluff King Hal," a title that speaks more as to the general estimate of his character than would a whole volume of professed personal panegyric, or of elaborate defence of his policy and his deeds. But this is not sufficient for those persons who would have reasons for their historical belief, and who seek to have a solid foundation for the faith they feel in the real greatness of the second Tudor king of England. Men of ability have occasionally sought to create an intelligible Henry VIII., and to cause us to respect one whose doings have so potently affected human affairs through ten generations, and the force of whose labors, whether those labors were blindly or rationally wrought, is apparently as unspent as it was on that day on which, having provided for the butchery of the noblest of his servants, he fell into his final sleep. At the head of these philosophic writers, and so far ahead of them as to leave them all out of sight, is Mr. James Anthony Froude, whose "History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth" has been brought down to the death of Mary I., in six volumes,—another proof of the grand scale on which history is now written, in order that it may be read on the small scale; for it is not given to many men to have the time for study which even a moderate modern course of history requires in these active days. Mr. Froude is a very different writer from Dr. Nares, but the suggestions made to the heavy Doctor by Macaulay might be borne in mind by the lively historian. He should remember that "the life of man is now threescore years and ten," and not "demand from us so large a portion of so short an existence" as must necessarily be required for the perusal of a history which gives an octavo volume for every five years of the annals of a small, though influential monarchy.

Mr. Froude did not commence his work in a state of blind admiration of his royal hero,—the tone of his first volume being quite calm, and on the whole as impartial as could reasonably have been expected from an Englishman writing of the great men of a great period in his country's history; but so natural is it for a man who has assumed the part of an advocate to identify himself with the cause of his client, that our author rapidly passes from the character of a mere advocate to that of a partisan, and by the time that he has brought his work down to the execution of Thomas Cromwell, Henry has risen to the rank of a saint, with a more than royal inability to do any wrong. That "the king can do no wrong" is an English constitutional maxim, which, however sound it may be in its proper place, is not to be introduced into history, unless we are desirous of seeing that become a mere party-record. The practice of publishing books in an incomplete state is one that by no means tends to render them impartial, when they relate to matters that are in dispute. Mr. Froude's first and second volumes, which bring the work down to the murder of Anne Boleyn, afforded the most desirable material for the critics, many of whom most pointedly dissented from his views, and some of whom severely attacked his positions, and not always unsuccessfully. They were, naturally, not disposed to think that an act bad in itself changed its character when it became the act of Henry VIII. It was contrary to all human experience to suppose that Henry was in all cases in the right, while his opponents and his victims were as invariably in the wrong. If there ever had lived and reigned a man who could not do wrong, it was preposterous to look for him in one who had been a wife-killer, a persecutor, the slayer of the nobility of his kingdom, the exterminator of the last remnants of an old royal race, the patron of fagots and ropes and axes, and a hard-hearted and selfish voluptuary, who seems never to have been open to one kind or generous feeling. Most of those tyrants that have been hung up on high, by way of warning to despots, have had their "uncorrupted hours," in which they vindicated their claim to humanity by the performance of some good deeds. Gratitude for some such acts is supposed to have caused even the tomb of Nero to be adorned with garlands. But Henry VIII. never had a kind moment. He was the same moral monster at eighteen, when he succeeded to his sordid, selfish father, that he was at fifty-six, when he, a dying man, employed the feeble remnants of his once Herculean strength to stamp the death-warrants of innocent men. No wonder that Mr. Froude's critics failed to accept his estimate of Henry, or that they arrayed anew the long list of his shocking misdeeds, and dwelt with unction on his total want of sympathy with ordinary humanity. As little surprising is it that Mr. Froude's attachment to the kingly queen-killer should be increased by the course of the critics. That is the usual course. The biographer comes to love the man whom at first he had only endured. To endurance, according to the old notion, succeeds pity, and then comes the embrace. And that embrace is all the warmer because others have denounced the party to whom it is extended. It is fortunate that no man of talent has ever ventured to write the biography of Satan. Assuredly, had any such person done so, there would have been one sincere, enthusiastic, open, devout Devil-worshipper on earth, which would have been a novel, but not altogether a moral, spectacle for the eyes of men. A most clear, luminous and unsatisfactory account of the conduct of Satan in Eden would have been furnished, and it would have been logically made out that all the fault of the first recorded son was with Eve, who had been the temptress, not the tempted, and who had taken advantage of the Devil's unsophisticated nature to impose upon his innocence and simplicity, and then had gone about among "the neighbors" to scandalize his character at tea-tables and quilting-parties.

Mr. Froude is too able a man to seek to pass crude eulogy of Henry VIII. upon the world. He knows that the reason why this or that or the other thing was done is what his readers will demand, and he does his best to meet their requirements. Very plausible, and very well sustained by numerous facts, as well as by philosophical theory, is the position which he assumes in reference to Henry's conduct. Henry, according to the Froudean theory, was troubled about the succession to the throne. His great purpose was to prevent the renewal of civil war in England, a war for the succession. When he divorced Catharine of Aragon, when he married Anne Boleyn, when he libelled and murdered Anne Boleyn, when he wedded Jane Seymour, when he became disgusted with and divorced Anne of Cleves, when he married and when he beheaded Catharine Howard, when he patronized, used, and rewarded Cromwell, and when he sent Cromwell to the scaffold and refused to listen to his plaintive plea for mercy, when he caused Plantagenet and Neville blood to flow like water from the veins of old women as well as from those of young men, when he hanged Catholics and burned Protestants, when he caused Surrey to lose the finest head in England,—in short, no matter what he did, he always had his eye steadily fixed across that boiling sea of blood that he had created upon one grand point, namely, the preservation of the internal peace of England, not only while he himself should live, but after his death. His son, or whoso should be his heir, must succeed to an undisputed inheritance, even if it should be necessary to make away with all the nobility of the realm, and most of the people, in order to secure the so-much-desired quiet. Church-yards were to be filled in order that all England might be reduced to the condition of a church-yard. That Red Spectre which has so often frightened even sensible men since 1789, and caused some remarkably humiliating displays of human weakness during our generation and its immediate predecessor, was, it should seem, ever present to the eyes of Henry VIII. He saw Anarchy perpetually struggling to get free from those bonds in which Henry VIII. had confined that monster, and he cut off nearly every man or woman in whose name a plea for the crown could be set up as against a Tudor prince or princess. Like his father, to use Mr. Froude's admirable expression, "he breathed an atmosphere of suspended insurrection," and he was fixed and firm in his purpose to deprive all rebelliously disposed people of their leaders, or of those to whom they would naturally look for lead and direction. The axe was kept continually striking upon noble necks, and the cord was as continually stretched by ignoble bodies, because the King was bent upon making insurrection a failing business at the best. Men and women, patrician and plebeian, might play at rebellion, if they liked it, but they should be made to find that they were playing the losing game.

Now, this succession-question theory has the merit of meeting the very difficulty that besets us when we study the history of Henry's reign, and it is justified by many things that belong to English history for a period of more than two centuries,—that is to say, from the deposition of Richard II., in 1399, to the death of Elizabeth, in 1603. It is a strangely suggestive satire on the alleged excellence of hereditary monarchy as a mode of government that promotes the existence of order beyond any other, that England should not have been free from trouble for two hundred years, because her people could not agree upon the question of the right to the crown, and so long as that question was left unsettled, there could be no such thing as permanent peace for the castle or the cottage or the city. Town and country, citizen, baron, and peasant, were alike dependent upon the ambition of aspiring princes and king-makers for the condition of their existence. The folly of Richard II. enabled Henry of Bolingbroke to convert his ducal coronet into a royal crown, and to bring about that object which his father, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, seems to have ever had at heart. Henry IV. was a usurper, in spite of his Parliamentary title, according to all ideas of hereditary right; for, failing heirs of the body to Richard II., the crown belonged to the House of Mortimer, in virtue of the descent of its chief from the Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III, the Duke of Lancaster being fourth son of that monarch. Henry IV. felt the force of the objection that existed to his title, and he sought to evade it by pretending to found his claim to the crown on descent from Edmund of Lancaster, whom he assumed to have been the elder brother of Edward I.; but no weight was attached to this plea by his contemporaries, who saw in him a monarch created by conquest and by Parliamentary action. The struggle that then began endured until both Plantagenets and Tudors had become extinct, and the English crown had passed to the House of Stuart, in the person of James I., who was descended in the female line from the Duke of Clarence, through Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of Edward IV., and wife of Henry VII. Intrigues, insurrections, executions, and finally great civil wars, grew out of the usurpation of the throne by the line of Lancaster. We find the War of the Roses spoken of by nearly all writers on it as beginning in 1455, when the first battle of St. Albans was fought, but in fact the contest of which that war was but the extreme utterance began nearly sixty years earlier than the day of the Battle of St. Albans, its commencement dating from the time that Henry IV. became King. A variety of circumstances prevented it from assuming its severest development until long after all the actors in its early stages had gone to their graves. Henry IV. was a man of superior ability, which enabled him, though not without struggling hard for it, to triumph over all his enemies; and his early death prevented a renewal of the wars that had been waged against him. His son, the overrated Henry V., who was far inferior to his father as a statesman, entered upon a war with France, and so distracted English attention from English affairs; and had he lived to complete his successes, all objection to his title would have disappeared. Indeed, England herself would have disappeared as a nation, becoming a mere French province, a dependency of the House of Plantagenet reigning at Paris. But the victor of Agincourt, like all the sovereigns of his line, died young, comparatively speaking, and left his dominions to a child who was not a year old, the ill-fated Henry VI. Then would have broken out the quarrel that came to a head at the beginning of the next generation, but for two circumstances. The first was, that the King's uncles were able men, and maintained their brother's policy, and so continued that foreign distraction which prevented the occurrence of serious internal troubles for some years. The second was, that the Clarence or Mortimer party had no leader.

There is a strange episode in the history of Henry V., which shows how unstable was the foundation of that monarch's throne. While he was preparing, at Southampton, for the invasion of France, a conspiracy was discovered to have been formed to take the throne from him. The chief actor in it was the Earl of Cambridge, who was speedily tried, convicted, and beheaded, sharing the fate of his associates. Cambridge was a son of the Duke of York, fifth son of Edward III., and he had married Anne Mortimer, daughter of Roger Earl of March; and the intention of the conspirators was to have raised that lady's brother, Edmund Earl of March, to Henry's place. March was a feeble character, and Cambridge is believed to have looked to his own wife's becoming Queen-Regnant of England. The plot, according to one account, was betrayed by March to the King, and the latter soon got rid of one whose daring character and ambitious purpose showed that he must be dangerous as an opposition chief. Henry's enemies were thus left without a head, in consequence of their leader's having lost his head; and the French war rapidly absorbing men's attention, all doubts as to Henry's title were lost sight of in the blaze of glory that came from the field of Agincourt. The spirit of opposition, however, revived as soon as the anti-Lancastrians obtained a leader, and public discontent had been created by domestic misrule and failure in France. That leader was the Duke of York, son of that Earl of Cambridge who had been executed for his part in the Southampton conspiracy, which conspiracy has been called by an eminent authority the first spark of the flame which in the course of time consumed the two Houses of York and Lancaster. Left an infant of three years, it was long before York became a party-leader, and probably he never would have disputed the succession but for the weakness of Henry VI, which amounted to imbecility, and the urging of stronger-minded men than himself. As it was, the open struggle began in 1455, and did not end until the defeat and capture of the person called Perkin Warbeck, in 1497. The greatest battles of English history took place in the course of these campaigns, and the greater part of the royal family and most of the old nobility perished in them, or by assassination, or on the scaffold.

But the Yorkist party, though vanquished, was far from extinguished by the military and political successes of Henry VII. It testifies emphatically to the original strength of that party, and to the extent and the depth of its influence, that it should be found a powerful faction as late as the last quarter of Henry VIII.'s reign, fifty years after the Battle of Stoke. "The elements of the old factions were dormant," says Mr. Froude, "but still smouldering. Throughout Henry's reign a White-Rose agitation had been secretly fermenting; without open success, and without chance of success so long as Henry lived, but formidable in a high degree, if opportunity to strike should offer itself. Richard de la Pole, the representative of this party, had been killed at Pavia, but his loss had rather strengthened their cause than weakened it, for by his long exile he was unknown in England; his personal character was without energy; while he made place for the leadership of a far more powerful spirit in the sister of the murdered Earl of Warwick, the Countess of Salisbury, mother of Reginald Pole. This lady had inherited, in no common degree, the fierce nature of the Plantagenets; born to command, she had rallied round her the Courtenays, the Nevilles, and all the powerful kindred of Richard the King-Maker, her grandfather. Her Plantagenet descent was purer than the King's; and on his death, without a male child, half England was likely to declare either for one of her sons, or for the Marquis of Exeter, the grandson of Edward IV." Of the general condition of the English mind at about the date of the fall of Wolsey Mr. Froude gives us a very accurate picture. "The country," he says, "had collected itself; the feuds of the families had been chastened, if they had not been subdued; while the increase of wealth and material prosperity had brought out into obvious prominence those advantages of peace which a hot-spirited people, antecedent to experience, had not anticipated, and had not been able to appreciate. They were better fed, better cared for, more justly governed, than they had ever been before; and though, abundance of unruly tempers remained, yet the wiser portion of the nation, looking back from their new vantage-ground, were able to recognize the past in its true hatefulness. Henceforward a war of succession was the predominating terror with English statesmen, and the safe establishment of the reigning family bore a degree of importance which it is possible that their fears exaggerated, yet which in fact was the determining principle of their action. It was therefore with no little anxiety that the council of Henry VIII. perceived his male children, on whom their hopes were centred, either born dead, or dying one after another within a few days of their birth, as if his family were under a blight. When the Queen had advanced to an age which precluded hope of further offspring, and the heir presumptive was an infirm girl, the unpromising aspect became yet more alarming. The life of the Princess Mary was precarious, for her health was weak from her childhood. If she lived, her accession would be a temptation to insurrection; if she did not live, and the King had no other children, a civil war was inevitable. At present such a difficulty would be disposed of by an immediate and simple reference to the collateral branches of the royal family; the crown would descend with even more facility than the property of an intestate to the next of kin. At that time, if the rule had been recognized, it would only have increased the difficulty, for the next heir in blood was James of Scotland; and gravely as statesmen desired the union of the two countries, in the existing mood of the people, the very stones in London streets, it was said, would rise up against a king of Scotland who claimed to enter England as sovereign. Even the Parliament itself declared in formal language that they would resist any attempt on the part of the Scotch king 'to the uttermost of their power.'"

There can be no doubt that Mr. Froude has made out his case, and that "the predominating terror," not only of English statesmen, but of the English people and their King, was a war of succession. If we were not convinced by what the historian says, we should only have to look over the reign of Elizabeth, and observe how anxious the statesmen of that time were to have the succession question settled, and how singular was the effect of that question's existence and overshadowing importance on the conduct of the Great Queen. The desire that she should marry, and the pertinacity with which she was urged to abandon her maiden state by Parliament, which strike us of the nineteenth century as being not simply indelicate, but utterly gross even in the coarse sixteenth century, must in fairness be attributed to the fear that prevailed throughout England that that country might again become the theatre of a civil conflict as extensive, as bloody, and as destructive of material prosperity and moral excellence as had been the Wars of the Roses,—a fear which the existence of the contest between Catholicism and Protestantism was well calculated to exaggerate to a very alarming extent. The coquetry and affectation of the Queen, which have been held to detract largely from her claim to be considered a woman of sense and capacity, become natural in her and intelligible to us when we consider them in connection with the succession question. She could not positively declare that she would under no circumstances become a wife, but at the same time she was firm in her heart never to have a husband. So she followed the politician's common plan: she compromised. She allowed her hand to be sought by every empty-handed and empty-headed and hollow-hearted prince or noble in Europe, determined that each in his turn should go empty away; and so she played off princes against her own people, until the course of years had left no doubt that she had become, and must ever remain, indeed "a barren stock." Her conduct, which is generally regarded as having been ridiculous, and which may have been so in its details, and looked upon only from its feminine side, throws considerable light upon the entire field of English politics under the Tudor dynasty.

If it could be established that the conduct of Henry VIII. toward his people, his church, his nobles, and his wives was regulated solely with reference to the succession question, and by his desire to preserve the peace of his kingdom, we believe that few men would be disposed to condemn most of those of his acts that have been long admitted to blacken his memory, and which have placed him almost at the very head of the long roll of heartless tyrants. That the end justifies the means is a doctrine which everybody condemns by word of mouth, but the practice founded upon which almost all men approve in their hearts, whenever it applies to their own schemes, or to schemes the success of which promises to benefit them, either individually or in the mass. As the apologists of the French Jacobins have argued that their favorites were cruel as the grave against Frenchmen only that they might preserve France from destruction, so might the admirers of Henry plead that he was vindictively cruel only that the English masses might live in peace, and be protected in quietly tilling their fields, manuring them after their own fashion, and not having them turned up and fertilized after the fashion of Bosworth and Towton and Barnet. Surely Henry Tudor, second of that name, is entitled to the same grace that is extended to Maximilien Robespierre, supposing the facts to be in his favor.

But are the facts, when fairly stated, in his favor? They are not. His advocates must find themselves terribly puzzled to reconcile his practice with their theory. They prove beyond all dispute that the succession question was the grand thought of England in Henry's time; but they do not prove, because they cannot prove, that the King's action was such as to show that he was ready, we will not say to make important sacrifices to lessen the probabilities of the occurrence of a succession war, but to do anything in that way that required him to control any one of the gross passions or grosser appetites of which he was throughout his loathsome life the slave and the victim. He seems to have passed the last twenty years of his reign in doing deeds that give flat contradiction to the theory set up by his good-natured admirers of after-times, that he was the victim of circumstances, and that, though one of the mildest and most merciful of men in fact, those villanous circumstances did compel him to become a tyrant, a murderer, a repudiator of sacramental and pecuniary and diplomatic obligations, a savage on a throne, and a Nebuchadnezzar for pride and arrogance, only that, unfortunately for his subjects in general, and for his wives in particular, he was not turned out to grass. A beast in fact, he did not become a beast in form. Scarcely one of his acts, after the divorce of Catharine of Aragon, was of a character to favor the continuance of peace in England, while many of them were admirably calculated to bring about a war for the regal succession. Grant that he was justified in putting away his Spanish wife,—a most excellent and eminently disagreeable woman, a combination of qualities by no means uncommon,—where was the necessity of his taking Anne Boleyn to wife? Why could he not have given his hand to some foreign princess, and so have atoned to his subjects for breaking up the Spanish alliance, in the continuance of which the English people had no common political interest, and an extraordinary commercial interest? Why could he not have sent to Germany for some fair-haired princess, as he did years later, and got Anne of Cleves for his pains, whose ugly face cost poor Cromwell his head, which was giving the wisest head in England for the worst one out of it? Henry, Mr. Froude would have us believe, divorced Catharine of Aragon because he desired to have sons, as one way to avoid the breaking out of a civil war; and yet it was a sure way to bring Charles V. into an English dispute for the regal succession, as the supporter of any pretender, to repudiate the aunt of that powerful imperial and royal personage. The English nation, Mr. Froude truly tells us, was at that time "sincerely attached to Spain. The alliance with the House of Burgundy" (of which Charles V. was the head) "was of old date; the commercial intercourse with Flanders was enormous,—Flanders, in fact, absorbing all the English exports; and as many as fifteen thousand Flemings were settled in London. Charles himself was personally popular; he had been the ally of England in the late French war; and when, in his supposed character of leader of the anti-Papal party in Europe, he allowed a Lutheran army to desecrate Rome, he had won the sympathy of all the latent discontent which was fomenting in the population." Was it not a strange way to proceed for the preservation of peace in England to offend a foreign sovereign who stood in so strong and influential a position to the English people? Charles was not merely displeased because of the divorce of his relative, his mother's sister, a daughter of the renowned Isabella, who had wrought such great things for Christendom,—promoting the discovery of America, and conquering Granada,—but he was incensed at the mere thought of preferring to her place a private gentlewoman, who would never have been heard of, if Henry had not seen fit to raise her from common life, first to the throne, and then to the scaffold. That was an insult to the whole Austro-Burgundian family, whose dominions rivalled those of the Roman Caesars, and whose chief had just held a King of France captive and a Pope of Rome besieged. The Emperor might, perhaps, have been sooted, had his relative's place been bestowed upon some lady of corresponding blueness of blood; but it offended his pride, when he reflected on her being supplanted by Mrs. Boleyn. The aristocratical morgue was too strong in him to bear such an insult with fortitude. Yet none other than Mrs. Boleyn would Henry have, notwithstanding the certainty of enraging Charles, and with the equal certainty of disgusting a majority of his own subjects. If it had been simply a wife that he desired, and if he was thinking merely of the succession, and so sought only for an opportunity to beget legitimate children, why did he so pertinaciously insist upon having no one but "Mistress Anne" for the partner of his throne and bed?

When he married Jane Seymour on the 20th of May, 1536, having had Anne's head cut off on the 19th, Mr. Froude sees in that infamous proceeding—a proceeding without parallel in the annals of villany, and which would have disgraced the worst members of Sawney Bean's unpromising family—nothing but a simple business-transaction. The Privy Council and the peers, troubled about the succession, asked Henry to marry again without any delay, when Anne had been prepared for condemnation. The King was graciously pleased to comply with this request, which was probably made in compliance with suggestions from himself,—the marriage with Jane Seymour having been resolved upon long before it took place, and the desire to effect it being the cause of the legal assassination of Anne Boleyn, which could be brought about only through the "cooking" of a series of charges that could have originated nowhere out of her husband's vile mind, and which led to the deaths of six innocent persons. "The indecent haste" of the King's marriage with the Seymour, Mr. Froude says, "is usually considered a proof entirely conclusive of the cause of Anne Boleyn's ruin. To myself the haste is an evidence of something very different. Henry, who waited seven years for Anne Boleyn, was not without some control over his passions; and if appetite had been the moving influence with him, he would scarcely, with the eyes of all the world fixed upon his conduct, have passed so extravagant an insult upon the nation of which he was the sovereign. The precipitancy with which he acted is to me a proof that he looked on matrimony as an indifferent official act which his duty required at the moment. This was the interpretation which was given to his conduct by the Lords and Commons of England. In the absence of any evidence, or shadow of evidence, that among contemporaries who had means of knowing the truth another judgment was passed upon it, the deliberate assertion of an Act of Parliament must be considered a safer guide than modern unsupported conjecture." [Footnote: Mr. Froude mentions that a request that the King would marry, similar to that which he received after the fall of Anne Boleyn, was urged by the Council on the death of Jane Seymour; but, as he allowed more than two years to elapse between the date of Jane's death and the date of his marriage with Anne of Cleves, which marriage he refused to consummate, is not the inference unavoidable that he wedded Jane Seymour so hurriedly merely to gratify his desire to possess her person, and that in 1537-39 he was singularly indifferent to the claims of a question upon his attention?]

We submit that the approving action of men who were partakers of Henry's guilt is no proof of his innocence. Their conduct throughout the Boleyn business simply proves that they were slaves, and that the slaves were as brutal as their master. If Henry was so indifferent in the matter of matrimony as to look upon all women with the same feelings, if he married officially as the King, and not lovingly as a man, how came it to pass that he was thrown into such an agony of rage, when, being nearly fifty years old, ugly Anne of Cleves was provided for him? His disappointment and mortification were then so great that they hastened that political change which led to Cromwell's fall and execution. When Henry first saw the German lady, he was as much affected as George, Prince of Wales, was when he first saw Caroline of Brunswick, but he behaved better than George in the lady's presence. Much as he desired children, he never consummated his marriage with Anne of Cleves, though he must have known that the world would be but ill-peopled, if none but beautiful women were to be married. Had he fulfilled the contract made with her, he might have had many sons and daughters, and the House of Tudor might have been reigning over England at this day. Both his fifth and sixth wives, Catharine Howard and Catharine Parr, were fine women; and if he had lived long enough to get rid of the latter, he would, beyond all question, have given her place to the most beautiful woman whom he could have prevailed upon to risk his perilous embraces preliminarily to those of the hangman.

If Henry had married solely for the purpose of begetting children, he never would have divorced and slaughtered Anne Boleyn. During her brief connection with him, she gave birth to two children, one a still-born son, and the other the future Queen Elizabeth, who lived to her seventieth year, and whose enormous vitality and intellectual energy speak well for the physical excellence of her mother. The miscarriage that Anne experienced in February, 1536, was probably the occasion of her repudiation and murder in the following May, as Henry was always inclined to attribute disappointments of this kind to his wives, who ever dwelt in the valley of the shadow of death.[Footnote: Henry thought of divorcing Catharine of Aragon some years before she had become too old to bear children. She was born in the last month of 1485, and the "King's secret matter," as the divorce question was called, was in agitation as early as the first half of 1527, and probably at an earlier period. Catharine was the mother of five children, but one of whom lived, namely, the Princess Mary, afterward Mary I.] The most charitable view that can be taken of Henry's abominable treatment of his second wife is, that he was led by his superstitious feelings, which he called religion, to sacrifice her to the manes of his first wife, whom Anne had badly treated, and who died on the 7th of January, 1536. Henry, after his fashion, was much moved by Catharine's death, and by perusal of the letter which she wrote him from her dying bed; and so he resolved to make the only atonement of which his savage nature was capable, and one, too, which the bigoted Spanish woman would have been satisfied with, could she have foreseen it. As the alliance between the royal houses of England and Spain was sealed with the blood of the innocent Warwick, who was sent to the scaffold by Henry VII. to satisfy Catharine's father, Ferdinand of Aragon, so were the wrongs of Catharine to be acknowledged by shedding the innocent blood of Anne Boleyn. The connection, as it were, began with the butchery of a boy, reduced to idiocy by ill-treatment, on Tower Hill, and it ended with the butchery of a woman, who had been reduced almost to imbecility by cruelty, on the Tower Green. Heaven's judgement would seem to have been openly pronounced against that blood-cemented alliance, formed by two of the greatest of those royal ruffians who figured in the fifteenth century, and destined to lead to nothing but misery to all who were brought together in consequence of it's having been made. If one were seeking for proofs of the direct and immediate interposition of a Higher Power in the ordering of human affairs, it would be no difficult matter to discover them in the history of the royal houses of England during the existence of the Lancastrian, the York, and the Tudor families. Crime leads to crime therein in regular sequence, the guiltless suffering with the guilty, and because of their connection with the guilty, until the palaces of the Henries and the Edwards become as haunted with horrors as were the halls of the Atridae. The "pale nurslings that had perished by kindred hands," seen by Cassandra when she passed the threshold of Agamemnon's abode, might have been paralleled by similar "phantom dreams," had another Cassandra accompanied Henry VII. when he came from Bosworth Field to take possession of the royal abodes at London. She, too, might have spoken, taking the Tower for her place of denunciation, of "that human shamble-house, that bloody floor, that dwelling abhorred by Heaven, privy to so many horrors against the most sacred ties." And she might have seen in advance the yet greater horrors that were to come, and that hung "over the inexpiable threshold; the curse passing from generation to generation."

Mr. Froude thinks that Catharine Howard, the fifth of Henry's wives, was not only guilty of antenuptial slips, but of unfaithfulness to the royal bed. It is so necessary to establish the fact of her infidelity, in order to save the King's reputation,—for he could not with any justice have punished her for the irregularities of her unmarried life, and not even in this age, when we have organized divorce, could such slips be brought forward against a wife of whom a husband had become weary,—that we should be careful how we attach credit to what is called the evidence against Catharine Howard; and her contemporaries, who had means of weighing and criticizing that evidence, did not agree in believing her guilty. Mr. Froude, who would, to use a saying of Henry's time, find Abel guilty of murder of Cain, were that necessary to support his royal favorite's hideous cause, not only declares that the unhappy girl was guilty throughout, but lugs God into the tragedy, and makes Him responsible for what was, perhaps, the cruellest and most devilish of all the many murders perpetrated by Henry VIII. The luckless lady was but a child at the time she was devoured by "the jaws of darkness." At most she was but in her twentieth year, and probably she was a year or two younger than that age. Any other king than Henry would have pardoned her, if for no other reason, then for this, that he had coupled her youth with his age, and so placed her in an unnatural position, in which the temptation to error was all the greater, and the less likely to be resisted, because of the girl's evil training,—a training that could not have been unknown to the King, and on the incidents of which the Protestant plot for her ruin, and that of the political party of which she was the instrument, had been founded. But of Henry VIII., far more truly than of James II., could it have been said by any one of his innumerable victims, that, though it was in his power to forgive an offender, it was not in his nature to do so.

No tyrant ever was preceded to the tomb by such an array of victims as Henry VIII. If Shakspeare had chosen to bring the highest of those victims around the last bed that Henry was to press on earth, after the fashion in which he sent the real or supposed victims of Richard III. to haunt the last earthly sleep of the last royal Plantagenet, he would have had to bring them up by sections, and not individually, in battalions, and not as single spies. Buckingham, Wolsey, More, Fisher, Catharine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Rocheford, Cromwell, Catharine Howard, Exeter, Montague, Lambert, Aske, Lady Salisbury, Surrey,—these, and hundreds of others, selected principally from the patrician order, or from the officers of the old church, might have led the ghostly array which should have told the monarch to die and to despair of redemption; while an innumerable host of victims of lower rank might have followed these more conspicuous sufferers from the King's "jealous rage." Undoubtedly some of these persons had justly incurred death, but it is beyond belief that they were all guilty of the crimes laid to their charge; yet Mr. Froude can find as little good in any of them as of evil in Henry's treatment of them. He would have us believe that Henry was scrupulously observant of the law! and that he allowed Cromwell to perish because he had violated the laws of England, and sought to carry out that "higher law" which politicians out of power are so fond of appealing to, but which politicians in power seldom heed. And such stuff we are expected to receive as historical criticism, and the philosophy of history! And pray, of what breach of the law had the Countess of Salisbury been guilty, that she should be sent to execution when she had arrived at so advanced an age that she must soon have passed away in the course of Nature? She was one of Cromwell's victims, and as he had been deemed unfit to live because of his violations of the laws of the realm, it would follow that one whose attainder had been procured through his devices could not be fairly put to death. She suffered ten months after Cromwell, and could have committed no fresh offence in the interval, as she was a prisoner in the Tower at the time of her persecutor's fall, and so remained until the day of her murder. The causes of her death, however, are not far to seek: she was the daughter of George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV., and Henry hated every member of that royal race which the Tudors had supplanted; and she was the mother of Reginald Pole, whom the King detested both for his Plantagenet blood and for the expositions which he made of the despot's crimes.

One of the victims sacrificed by Mr. Froude on the altar of his Moloch even he must have reluctantly brought to the temple, and have offered up with a pang, but whose character he has blackened beyond all redemption, as if he had used upon it all the dirt he has so assiduously taken from the character of his royal favorite. There are few names or titles of higher consideration than that of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. It is sufficient to name Surrey to be reminded of the high-born scholar, the gallant soldier, one of the founders of English literature, and a poet of equal vigor of thought and melodiousness of expression. His early and violent death, at the behest of a tyrant, who himself had not ten days to live when he stamped—for he could no longer write—the death-warrant of his noblest subject, has helped to endear his memory for three centuries; and many a man whose sympathies are entirely with the Reformation and the "new men" of 1546, regrets the untimely death of the Byron of those days, though the noble poet was at the head of the reactionary party, and desired nothing so much as to have it in his power to dispose of the "new men," in which case he would have had the heads of Hertford and his friends chopped off as summarily as his own head fell before the mandate of the King. Everything else is forgotten in the recollection of the Earl's youth, his lofty origin, his brilliant talents, his rank as a man of letters, and his prompt consignment to a bloody grave, the last of the legion of patricians sent by Henry to the block or the gallows. Yet it is Surrey upon whom Mr. Froude makes his last attack, and whom he puts down as a dirty dog, in order that Henry VIII may not be seen devoting what were all but his very latest hours to the task of completing the judicial murder of one whom he hated because he was so wonderfully elevated above all the rest of his subjects as to be believed capable of snatching at the crown, though three of the King's children were then alive, and there were several descendants of two of his sisters in both Scotland and England. Because, of all men who were then living, Surrey most deserved to reign over England, the jealous tyrant supposed there could be no safety for his youthful son until the House of Howard had been humiliated, and both its present head and its prospective head ceased to exist. Not satisfied with attributing to him political offences that do not necessarily imply baseness in the offender, Mr. Froude indorses the most odious charges that have been brought against Surrey, and which, if well founded, utterly destroy all his claims to be considered, we will not say a man of honor, but a man of common decency. Without having stated much that is absolutely new, Mr. Froude has so used his materials as to create the impression that Surrey, the man honored for three centuries as one of the most chivalrous of Englishmen, and as imbued with the elevating spirit of poetry, was a foul fellow, who sought to engage his sister in one of the vilest intrigues ever concocted by courtier, in order that she might be made a useful instrument in the work of changing the political condition of England. Henry's illegitimate son, Henry Fitz-Roy, Duke of Richmond, whom he had at one time thought of declaring his successor, died, leaving a widow, who was Surrey's sister. This lady told Sir Gawin Carew that her brother had advised her so to bear herself toward the King that possibly "his Majesty might cast some love unto her, whereby in process she should bear as great a stroke about him as Madame d'Estampes did about the French king." Madame d'Estampes was the most notorious and influential of Francis I.'s many mistresses; and if Carew's evidence is to be depended upon, we see what was the part assigned by Surrey to his sister in the political game the old aristocracy and the Catholics were playing. She, the widow of the King's son, was to seduce the King, and to become his mistress! Carew's story was confirmed by another witness, and Lady Richmond had complained of Surrey's "language to her with abhorrence and disgust, and had added, 'that she defied her brother, and said that they should all perish, and she would cut her own throat, rather than she would consent to such villany.'" On Surrey's trial, Lady Richmond also confirmed the story, and "revealed his deep hate of the 'new men,' who, 'when the King was dead,' he had sworn 'should smart for it.'" Such is the tale, and such is the evidence upon which it rests. Its truth at first appears to be beyond dispute, but it is possible that all the witnesses lied, and that the whole process was a made-up thing to aid in reconciling the public to the summary destruction of so illustrious a man as Surrey; and it was well adapted to that end,—the English people having exceeded all others in their regard for domestic decencies and in reverence for the family relations of the sexes. Should it be said that it is more probable that Surrey was guilty of the moral offence charged upon him than that his sister could be guilty of inventing the story and then of perjuring herself to support it, we can but reply, that Lady Rocheford, wife of Anne Boleyn's brother, testified that Anne had been guilty of incest with that brother, and afterward, when about to die, admitted that she had perjured herself. Of the two offences, supposing Lady Richmond to have sworn away her brother's life, that of Lady Rocheford was by far the more criminal, and it is beyond all doubt. So long as there is room for doubting Surrey's guilt, we shall follow the teaching of the charitable maxim of our law, and give him the benefit of the doubt which is his due.

The question of the guilt or innocence of Anne Boleyn is a tempting one, in connection with Henry VIII.'s history; but we have not now the space that is necessary to treat it justly. We may take it up another time, and follow Mr. Froude through his ingenious attempts to show that Anne must have been guilty of incest and adultery, or else—dreadful alternative!—we must come to the conclusion that Henry VIII. was not the just man made perfect on earth.

* * * * *

WHY THEIR CREEDS DIFFERED.

Bedded in stone, a toad lived well,
Cold and content as toad could be;
As safe from harm as monk in cell,
Almost as safe from good was he

And "What is life?" he said, and dozed;
Then, waking, "Life is rest," quoth he:
"Each creature God in stone hath closed,
That each may have tranquillity.

"And God Himself lies coiled in stone,
Nor wakes nor moves to any call;
Each lives unto himself alone,
And cold and night envelop all."

He said, and slept. With curious ear
Close to the stone, a serpent lay.
"'T is false," he hissed with crafty sneer,
"For well I know God wakes alway.

"And what is life but wakefulness,
To glide through snares, alert and wise,—
With plans too deep for neighbors' guess,
And haunts too close for neighbors' eyes?

"For all the earth is thronged with foes,
And dark with fraud, and set with toils:
Each lies in wait, on each to close,
And God is bribed with share of spoils."

High in the boughs a small bird sang,
And marvelled such a creed should be.
"How strange and false!" his comment rang;
"For well I know that life is glee.

"For all the plain is flushed with bloom,
And all the wood with music rings,
And in the air is scarcely room
To wave our myriad flashing wings.

"And God, amid His angels high,
Spreads over all in brooding joy;
On great wings borne, entranced they lie,
And all is bliss without alloy."

"Ah, careless birdling, say'st thou so?"
Thus mused a man, the trees among:
"Thy creed is wrong; for well I know
That life must not be spent in song.

"For what is life, but toil of brain,
And toil of hand, and strife of will,—
To dig and forge, with loss and pain,
The truth from lies, the good from ill,—

"And ever out of self to rise
Toward love and law and constancy?
But with sweet love comes sacrifice,
And with great law comes penalty.

"And God, who asks a constant soul,
His creatures tries both sore and long:
Steep is the way, and far the goal,
And time is small to waste in song."

He sighed. From heaven an angel yearned:
With equal love his glances fell
Upon the man with soul upturned,
Upon the toad within its cell.

And, strange! upon that wondrous face
Shone pure all natures, well allied:
There subtlety was turned to grace,
And slow content was glorified;

And labor, love, and constancy
Put off their dross and mortal guise,
And with the look that is to be
They looked from those immortal eyes.

To the faint man the angel strong
Beached down from heaven, and shared his pain:
The one in tears, the one in song,
The cross was borne betwixt them twain.

He sang the careless bliss that lies
In wood-bird's heart, without alloy;
He sang the joy of sacrifice;
And still he sang, "All life is joy."

But how, while yet he clasped the pain,
Thrilled through with bliss the angel smiled,
I know not, with my human brain,
Nor how the two he reconciled.

* * * * *

PRESENCE.

It was a long and terrible conflict,—I will not say where, because that fact has nothing to do with my story. The Revolutionists were no match in numbers for the mercenaries of the Dictator, but they fought with the stormy desperation of the ancient Scythians, and they won, as they deserved to win: for this was another revolt of freedom against oppression, of conscience against tyranny, of an exasperated people against a foreign despot. Every eye shone with the sublimity of a great principle, and every arm was nerved with a strength grander and more enduring than that imparted by the fierceness of passion or the sternness of pride. As I flew from one part of the field to another, in execution of the orders of my superior officer, I wondered whether blood as brave and good dyed the heather at Bannockburn, or streamed down the mountain-gorge where Tell met the Austrians at Morgarten, or stained with crimson glare the narrow pass held by the Spartan three hundred.

Suddenly my horse, struck by a well-aimed ball, plunged forward in the death-struggle, and fell with me, leaving me stunned for a little time, though not seriously hurt. With returning consciousness came the quickened perception which sometimes follows a slight concussion of the brain, daguerreotyping upon my mind each individual of these fiery ranks, in vivid, even painful clearness. As I watched with intensified interest the hurrying panorama, the fine figure and face of my friend Vilalba flashed before me. I noted at once the long wavy masses of brown hair falling beneath the martial cap; the mouth, a feature seldom beautiful in men, blending sweetness and firmness in rare degree, now compressed and almost colorless; but the eyes! the "empty, melancholy eyes"! what strange, glassy, introspective fixedness! what inexplicable fascination, as if they were riveted on some object unseen by other mortals! A glance sufficed to show to myself, at least, that he was in a state of tense nervous excitation, similar to that of a subject of mesmerism. A preternatural power seemed to possess him. He moved and spoke like a somnambulist, with the same insulation from surrounding minds and superiority to material obstacles. I had long known him as a brave officer; but here was something more than bravery, more than the fierce energy of the hour. His mien, always commanding, was now imperial. In utter fearlessness of peril, he assumed the most exposed positions, dashed through the strongest defences, accomplished with marvellous dexterity a wellnigh impossible coup-de-main, and all with the unrecognizing, changeless countenance of one who has no choice, no volition, but is the passive slave of some resistless inspiration.

After the conflict was over, I sought Vilalba, and congratulated him on his brilliant achievement, jestingly adding that I knew he was leagued with sorcery and helped on by diabolical arts. The cold evasiveness of his reply confirmed my belief that the condition I have described was abnormal, and that he was himself conscious of the fact.

Many years passed away, during which I met him rarely, though our relations were always those of friendship. I heard of him as actively, even arduously employed in public affairs, and rewarded by fortune and position. The prestige of fame, unusual personal graces, and high mental endowments gave him favor in social life; and women avowed that the mingled truth and tenderness of his genial and generous nature were all but irresistible. Nevertheless they were chagrined by his singular indifference to their allurements; and many a fair one, even more interested than inquisitive, vainly sought to break the unconquerable reticence which, under apparent frankness, he relentlessly maintained. He had, indeed, once been married, for a few years only; but his wife was not of those who can concentrate and absorb the fulness of another soul, wedding memory with immortal longing. Thus the problem of my friend's life-long reserve continued to provoke curiosity until its solution was granted to me alone, and, with it, the explanation of his mesmeric entrancement on the occasion to which I have alluded. I repeat the story because it is literally true, and because some of its incidents may be classed among those psychological phenomena which form the most occult, the most interesting, and the least understood of all departments of human knowledge.

During a period of summer recreation I induced Vilalba to renew our interrupted acquaintance by passing a month with me in my country home. The moonlight of many years had blended its silver with his still abundant locks, and the lines of thought were deepened in his face, but I found him in other respects unchanged. He had the same deep, metallic voice, so musical that to hear him say the slightest things was a pleasure, the same graceful courtesy and happy elasticity of temperament; and was full as ever of noble purposes, and the Roman self-conviction of power to live them out. One of those nights that "are not made for slumber" found us lingering beneath the odorous vines which interlocked their gay blossoms around the slight columns of the veranda, until even the gray surprise of dawn,—the "soft, guileless consolations" of our cigars, as Aeschylus says of certain other incense, the cool, fragrant breezes, gentle as remembered kisses upon the brow, the tremulous tenderness of the star-beams, the listening hush of midnight, having swayed us to a mood of pensiveness which found a reflex in our conversation. From the warning glare of sunlight the heart shuts close its secrets; but hours like these beguile from its inmost depths those subtile emotions, and vague, dreamy, delicious thoughts, which, like plants, waken to life only beneath the protecting shadows of darkness. "Why is it," says Richter, "that the night puts warmer love in our hearts? Is it the nightly pressure of helplessness, or is it the exalting separation from the turmoils of life,—that veiling of the world in which for the soul nothing then remains but souls,—that causes the letters in which loved names are written to appear like phosphorus-writing by night, on fire, while day, in their cloudy traces, they but smoke?"

Insensibly we wandered into one of those weird passages of psychological speculation, the border territory where reason and illusion hold contested sway,—where the relations between spirit and matter seem so incomprehensibly involved and complicated that we can only feel, without being able to analyze them, and even the old words created for our coarse material needs seem no more suitable than would a sparrow's wings for the flight of an eagle.

"It is emphatically true of these themes," I remarked, after a long rambling talk, half reverie, half reason, "that language conceals the ideas, or, rather, the imaginations they evolve; for the word idea implies something more tangible than vagaries which the Greek poet would have called 'the dream of the shadow of smoke.' But yet more unsatisfactory than the impotence of the type is the obscurity of the thing typified. We can lay down no premises, because no basis can be found for them,—and establish no axioms, because we have no mathematical certainties. Objects which present the assurance of palpable facts to-day may vanish as meteors to-morrow. The effort to crystallize into a creed one's articles of faith in these mental phantasmagoria is like carving a cathedral from sunset clouds, or creating salient and retreating lines of armed hosts in the northern lights. Though willing dupes to the pretty fancy, we know that before the light of science the architecture is resolved into mist, and the battalions into a stream of electricity."

"Not so," replied Vilalba. "Your sky-visions are a deceit, and you know it while you enjoy them. But the torch of science is by no means incendiary to the system of psychology. Arago himself admits that it may one day obtain a place among the exact sciences, and speaks of the actual power which one human being may exert over another without the intervention of any known physical agent; while Cuvier and other noted scientists concede even more than this."

"Do you, then, believe," I asked, "that there is between the silent grave and the silent stars an answer to this problem we have discussed to-night, of the inter-relation between spirit and matter, between soul and soul? To me it seems hopelessly inscrutable, and all effort to elucidate it, like the language of the Son of Maia, 'by night bringeth darkness before the eyes, and in the daytime nought clearer.' I shall as soon expect to wrest her buried secrets from the Sphinx, or to revive the lost mysteries of the Egyptian priesthood."

"And yet, most of those marvels," answered my friend, "as well as the later oracles of Greece, and the clairvoyance, mesmerism, etc., of modern times, were probably the result of a certain power of the mind to shake off for a time its fetters in defiance of physical impediments, and even to exert its control over the senses and will and perception of another. I do not doubt that in certain conditions of the mind there arise potentialities wonderful as any ever conceived by fiction, and that these are guided by laws unannounced as yet, but which will be found in some future archives, inducted in symmetrical clearness through the proper process of phenomena, classification, and generalized statement. My own experience suffices to myself for both assurance and prophecy. Although the loftiest, sweetest music of the soul is yet unwritten, its faint articulations interblend with the jangling discords of life, as the chimes of distant bells float through the roar of winds and waves, and chant to imperilled hearts the songs of hope and gladness."

His voice fell to the low, earnest tone of one who has found in life a pearl of truth unseen by others; and as his eye gleamed in the starlight, I saw that it wore the same speculative expression as on the battle-field twenty years before. A slight tremor fled through his frame, as though he had been touched by an invisible hand, and a faint smile of recognition brightened his features.

"How can we explain," continued he, after a brief pause, "this mystery of PRESENCE? Are you not often conscious of being actually nearer to a mind a thousand miles distant than to one whose outer vestments you can touch? We certainly feel, on the approach of a person repulsive, not necessarily to our senses, but to our instincts,—which in this case are notes of warning from the remote depths of the soul,—as if our entire being intrenched itself behind a vitally repellent barrier, in absolute security that no power in the universe can break through it, in opposition to our will. For the will does not seem to create the barrier, but to guard it; and, thus defended, material contact with the individual affects us no more than the touch of a plaster statue. We are each, and must remain, mutually unknowing and unknown. On the other hand, does not fixed and earnest thought upon one we love seem to bring the companion-spirit within the sacred temple of our own being, infolded as a welcome guest in our warm charities and gentle joys, and imparting in return the lustre of a serene and living beauty? If, then, those whom we do not recognize as kindred are repelled, even though they approach us through the aid and interpretation of the senses, why may not the loved be brought near without that aid, through the more subtile and more potent attraction of sympathy? I do not mean nearness in the sense of memory or imagination, but that actual propinquity of spirit which I suppose implied in the recognition of Presence. Nor do I refer to any volition which is dependent on the known action of the brain, but to a hidden faculty, the germ perhaps of some higher faculty, now folded within the present life like the wings of a chrysalis, which looks through or beyond the material existence, and obtains a truer and finer perception of the spiritual than can be filtered through the coarser organs of sight and hearing."

"Vilalba, you are evidently a disciple of Des Cartes. Your theory is based on the idealistic principle, 'I think, therefore I am.' I confess that I could never be satisfied with mere subjective consciousness on a point which involves the cooperation of another mind. Nothing less than the most positive and luminous testimony of the senses could ever persuade me that two minds could meet and commune, apart from material intervention."

"I know," answered Vilalba, "that it is easier to feel than to reason about things which lie without the pale of mathematical demonstration. But some day, my friend, you will learn that beyond the arid abstractions of the schoolmen, beyond the golden dreams of the poets, there is a truth in this matter, faintly discerned now as the most dim of yonder stars, but as surely a link in the chain which suspends the Universe to the throne of God. However, your incredulity is commendable, for doubt is the avenue to knowledge. I admit that no testimony is conclusive save that of the senses, and such witness I have received.

"You speak perpetual enigmas, and I suspect you—for the second time—of tampering with the black arts. Do you mean to say that you are a believer in the doctrine of palpable spiritual manifestation?"

"I might say in its favor," was the reply, "that apart from the pretences and the plausibilities of to-day, many of which result from the independent action of the mind through clairvoyance, and others from mere excitation of the nervous sensibilities, the truth of that theory is possibly implied in the wants of the soul; for a want proves the existence of an antidote as effectually as a positive and negative interchangeably bear witness to each other's existence. But if you will have patience to listen to a story of my own life, I can better explain how my convictions have been beguiled into the credence which appears to you unphilosophical, if not absurd."

"I will listen with pleasure,—first lighting another cigar to dispel the weird shapes which will probably respond to your incantation."

Vilalba smiled slightly.

"Do not be disturbed. The phantoms will not visit you, not, I fear, myself either. But you must promise faith in my veracity; for I am about to tell you a tale of fact, and not of fancy.

"It happened to me many years ago,—how flatteringly that little phrase seems to extend the scale of one's being!—when I had just entered on the active duties of manhood, that some affairs called me to New Orleans, and detained me there several months. Letters of friendship gave me admission into some of the most agreeable French families of that quasi Parisian city, and in the reception of their hospitality I soon lost the feeling of isolation which attends a stranger in a crowded mart. My life at that time was without shadows. I had health, friends, education, position,—youth, as well, which then seemed a blessing, though I would not now exchange for it my crown of years and experience. Fortune only I then had not; and because I had it not, I am telling you, to-night, this story.

"It chanced, one day, that I was invited to dine at the house of an aristocratic subject of the old French régime. I did not know the family, and a previous engagement tempted me to decline the invitation; but one of those mysterious impulses which are in fact the messengers of Destiny compelled me to go, and I went. Thus slight may be the thread which changes the entire web of the future! After greeting my host, and the party assembled in the drawing-room, my attention was arrested by a portrait suspended in a recess, and partly veiled by purple curtains, like Isis within her shrine. The lovely, living eyes beamed upon me out of the shrine, radiant with an internal light I had never before seen on canvas. The features were harmonious, the complexion pure and clear, and the whole picture wore an air of graceful, gentle girlhood, glowing, like Undine, with the flush of 'the coming soul.' I hardly knew whether the face was strictly beautiful according to the canons of Art; for only a Shakspeare can be at the same time critical and sympathetic, and my criticism was baffled and blinded by the fascination of those wondrous eyes. They reminded me of what a materialist said of the portraits of Prudhon,—that they were enough to make one believe in the immortality of the soul. Life multiplied by feeling into a limitless dream of past and future was mirrored in their clear depths; the questful gaze seemed reading the significance of the one through the symbols of the other, and pondering the lesson with sweetness of assent and ever-earnest longing for fuller revelation.

"As I lingered before this fair shadow, I heard my name pronounced, and, turning, beheld the not less fair original, the daughter of my host. Now do not fear a catalogue of feminine graces, or a lengthened romance of the heart, tedious with such platitudes as have been Elysium to the actors, and weariness to the audience, ever since the world began. The Enchanted Isles wear no enchantment to unanointed vision; their skies of Paradise are fog, their angels Harpies, perchance, or harsh-throated Sirens. Besides, we can never describe correctly those whom we love, because we see them through the heart; and the heart's optics have no technology. It is enough to say, that, from almost the first time I looked upon Blanche, I felt that I had at last found the gift rarely accorded to us here,—the fulfilment of a promise hidden in every heart, but often waited for in vain. Hitherto my all-sufficing self-hood had never been stirred by the mighty touch of Love. I had been amused by trivial and superficial affections, like the gay triflers of whom Rasselas says, 'They fancied they were in love, when in truth they were only idle.' But that sentiment which is never twice inspired, that new birth of

'A soul within the soul, evolving it sublimely,'

had never until now wakened my pulses and opened my eyes to the higher and holier heritage. Perhaps you doubt that Psychal fetters may be forged in a moment's heat; but I believe that the love which is deepest and most sacred, and which Plato calls the memory of divine beings whom we knew in some anterior life, that recognition of kindred natures which precedes reason and asks no leave of the understanding, is not a gradual and cautious attraction, like the growth of a coral reef, but sudden and magnetic as the coalescence of two drops of mercury.

"During several following weeks we met many times, and yet, in looking back to that dream of heaven, I cannot tell how often, nor for how long. Time is merely the measure given to past emotions, and those emotions flowed over me in a tidal sweep which merged all details in one continuous memory. The lone hemisphere of my life was rounded into completeness, and its feverish unrest changed to deep tranquillity, as if a faint, tremulous star were transmuted into a calm, full-orbed planet. Do you remember that story of Plato's—I recall the air-woven subtilties of the delightful idealist, to illustrate, not to prove—that story of the banquet where the ripe wines of the Aegean Isles unchained the tongues of such talkers as Pausanias and Socrates and others as witty and wise, until they fell into a discourse on the origin of Love, and, whirling away on the sparkling eddies of fancy, were borne to that preëxistent sphere which, in Plato's opinion, furnished the key to all the enigmas of this? There they beheld the complete and original souls, the compound of male and female, dual and yet one, so happy and so haughty in their perfection of beauty and of power that Jupiter could not tolerate his godlike rivals, and therefore cut them asunder, sending the dissevered halves tumbling down to earth, bewildered and melancholy enough, until some good fortune might restore to each the alter ego which constituted the divine unity. 'And thus,' says Plato, 'whenever it happens that a man meets with his other half, the very counterpart of himself, they are both smitten with strong love; they recognize their ancient union; they are powerfully attracted by the consciousness that they belong to each other; and they are unwilling to be again parted, even for a short time. And if Vulcan were to stand over them with his fire and forge, and offer to melt them down and run them together, and of two to make them one again, they would both say that this was just what they desired!'

"I dare say you have read—unless your partiality for the soft Southern tongues has chased away your Teutonic taste—that exquisite poem of Schiller's, 'Das Geheimnitz der Reminiscenz,' the happiest possible crystallization of the same theory. I recall a few lines from Bulwer's fine translation:—

"'Why from its lord doth thus my soul depart?
Is it because its native home thou art?
Or were they brothers in the days of yore,
Twin-bound both souls, and in the links they bore
Sigh to be bound once more?

"'Were once our beings blent and intertwining,
And therefore still my heart for thine is pining?
Knew we the light of some extinguished sun,—
The joys remote of some bright realm undone,
Where once our souls were ONE?

"'Yes, it is so! And thou wert bound to me
In the long-vanished eld eternally!
In the dark troubled tablets which enroll
The past my Muse beheld this blessed scroll,—
'One with thy love, my soul'!"

"Now the Athenian dreamer builded better than he knew. That phantom which perpetually attends and perpetually evades us,—the inevitable guest whose silence maddens and whose sweetness consoles,—whose filmy radiance eclipses all beauty,—whose voiceless eloquence subdues all sound,—ever beckoning, ever inspiring, patient, pleading, and unchanging,—this is the Ideal which Plato called the dearer self, because, when its craving sympathies find reflex and response in a living form, its rapturous welcome ignores the old imperfect being, and the union only is recognized as Self indeed, complete and undivided. And that fulness of human love becomes a faint type and interpreter of the Infinite, as through it we glide into grander harmonies and enlarged relations with the Universe, urged on forever by insatiable desires and far-reaching aspirations which testify our celestial origin and intimate our immortal destiny.

"'Lo! arm in arm, through every upward grade,
From the rude Mongol to the starry Greek,
everywhere we seek
Union and bond, till in one sea sublime
Of love be merged all measure and all time!"

"I never disclosed in words my love to Blanche. Through the lucid transparency of Presence, I believed that she knew all and comprehended all, without the aid of those blundering symbols. We never even spoke of the future; for all time, past and to come, seemed to converge and centre and repose in that radiant present. In the enchantment of my new life, I feared lest a breath should disturb the spell, and send me back to darkness and solitude.

"Of course, this could not last forever. There came a time when I found that my affairs would compel me to leave New Orleans for a year, or perhaps a little longer. With the discovery my dream was broken. The golden web which had been woven around me shrank beneath the iron hand of necessity, and fell in fragments at my feet. I knew that it was useless to speak to Blanch of marriage, for her father, a stern and exacting man in his domestic relations, had often declared that he would never give his daughter to a husband who had no fortune. If I sought his permission to address her now, my fate was fixed. There was no alternative, therefore, but to wait until my return, when I hoped to have secured, in sufficient measure, the material passport to his favor. Our parting was necessarily sudden, and, strange as it may seem, some fatal repression sealed my lips, and withheld me from uttering the few words which would have made the future wholly ours, and sculptured my dream of love in monumental permanance. Ah! with what narrow and trembling planks do we bridge the abyss of misery and despair! But be patient while I linger for a moment here. The evening before my departure, I went to take leave of her. There were other guests in the drawing-room, the atmosphere was heated and oppressive, and after a little time I proposed to her to retreat with me, for a few moments, to the fragrant coolness of the garden. We walked slowly along through clustering flowers and under arching orange-trees, which infolded us tenderly within their shining arms, as in tremulous silence we waited for words that should say enough and yet not too much. The glories of all summer evenings seemed concentred in this one. The moon now silvered leaf and blossom, and then suddenly fled behind a shadowing cloud, while the stars shone out with gladness brief and bright as the promises of my heart. Skilful artists in the music-room thrilled the air with some of those exquisite compositions of Mendelssohn which dissolve the soul in sweetness or ravish it with delight, until it seems as if all past emotions of joy were melted in one rapid and comprehensive reëxperience, and all future inheritance gleamed in promise before our enraptured vision, and we are hurried on with electric speed to hitherto unsealed heights of feeling, whence we catch faint glimpses of the unutterable mysteries of our being, and foreshadowings of a far-off, glorified existence. The eloquence of earth and sky and air breathed more than language could have uttered, and, as my eyes met the eyes of Blanche, the question of my heart was asked and answered, once for all. I recognized the treasured ideal of my restless, vagrant heart, and I seemed to hear it murmuring gently, as if to a long-lost mate, 'Where hast thou stayed so long?' I felt that henceforth there was for us no real parting. Our material forms might be severed, but our spirits were one and inseparate.

"'On the fountains of our life a seal was set
To keep their waters clear and bright
Forever.'

"And thus, with scarce a word beside, I said the 'God be with you!' and went out into the world alone, yet henceforth not alone.

"Two years passed away. They had been years of success in my worldly affairs, and were blessed by memories and hopes which grew brighter with each day. I had not heard of Blanche, save indirectly through a friend in New Orleans, but I never doubted that the past was as sacred, the future as secure, in her eyes as in my own. I was now ready to return, and to repeat in words the vows which my heart had sworn long before. I fixed the time, and wrote to my friend to herald my coming. Before that letter reached him, there came tidings which, like a storm of desolation, swept me to the dust. Blanche was in France, and married,—how or when or to whom, I knew not, cared not. The relentless fact was sufficient. The very foundations of the earth seemed to tremble and slide from beneath me. The sounds of day tortured, the silence of night maddened me. I sought forgetfulness in travel, in wild adventure, in reckless dissipation. With that strange fatality which often leads us to seek happiness or repose where we have least chance of finding it, I, too, married. But I committed no perjury. I offered friendship, and it sufficed. Love I never professed to give, and the wife whom I merely esteemed had not the mental or the magnetic ascendancy which might have triumphed for a time over the image shrined in my inmost heart. I sought every avenue through which I might fly from that and from myself. I tried mental occupation, and explored literature and science, with feverish ardor and some reward. I think it is Coleridge who recommends to those who are suffering from extreme sorrow the study of a new language. But to a mind of deep feeling diversion is not relief. If we fly from memory, we are pursued and overtaken like fugitive slaves, and punished with redoubled tortures. The only sure remedy for grief is self-evolved. We must accept sorrow as a guest, not shun it as a foe, and, receiving it into close companionship, let the mournful face haunt our daily paths, even though it shut out all friends and dim the light of earth and heaven. And when we have learned the lesson which it came to teach, the fearful phantom brightens into beauty, and reveals an 'angel unawares,' who gently leads us to heights of purer atmosphere and more extended vision, and strengthens us for the battle which demands unfaltering heart and hope.

"Do you remember the remark of the child Goethe, when his young reason was perplexed by attempting to reconcile the terrible earthquake at Lisbon with the idea of infinite goodness? 'God knows very well that an immortal soul cannot suffer from mortal accident.' With similar faith there came to me tranquil restoration. The deluge of passion rolled back, and from the wreck of my Eden arose a new and more spiritual creation. But forgetfulness was never possible. In the maddening turbulence of my grief and the ghastly stillness of its reaction, the lovely spirit which had become a part of my life seemed to have fled to the inner temple of my soul, breaking the solitude with glimmering ray and faint melodious murmur. And when I could bear to look and listen, it grew brighter and more palpable, until at last it attended me omnipresently, consoling, cheering, and stimulating to nobler thought and action.

"Nor was it a ghost summoned by memory, or the airy creation of fancy. One evening an incident occurred which will test your credulity, or make you doubt my sanity. I sat alone, and reading,—nothing more exciting, however, than a daily newspaper. My health was perfect, my mind unperturbed. Suddenly my eye was arrested by a cloud passing slowly back and forth several times before me, not projected upon the wall, but floating in the atmosphere. I looked around for the cause, but the doors and windows were closed, and nothing stirred in the apartment. Then I saw a point of light, small as a star at first, but gradually enlarging into a luminous cloud which filled the centre of the room. I shivered with strange coldness, and every nerve tingled as if touched by a galvanic battery. From the tremulous waves of the cloud arose, like figures in a dissolving view, the form and features of my lost love,—not radiant as when I last looked upon them, but pale and anguish-stricken, with clasped hands and tearful eyes; and upon my ears fell, like arrows of fire, the words, You have been the cause of all this; oh, why did you not'—The question was unfinished, and from my riveted gaze, half terror, half delight, the vision faded, and I was alone.

"Of course you will pronounce this mere nervous excitement, but, I pray you, await the sequel. Those burning words told the story of that mistake which had draped in despair our earthly lives. They were no reflection from my own mind. In the self-concentration of my disappointment, I had never dreamed that I alone was in fault,—that I should have anchored my hope on somewhat more defined than the voiceless intelligence of sympathy. But the very reproach of the mysterious visitor brought with it a conviction, positive and indubitable, that the spiritual portion of our being possesses the power to act upon the material perception of another, without aid from material elements. From time to time I have known, beyond the possibility of deception, that the kindred spirit was still my companion, my own inalienable possession, in spite of all factitious ties, of all physical intervention.

"Have you heard that among certain tribes of the North-American Indians are men who possess an art which enables them to endure torture and actual death without apparent suffering or even consciousness? I once chanced to fall in with one of these tribes, then living in Louisiana, now removed to the far West, and was permitted to witness some fantastic rites, half warlike, half religious, in which, however, there was nothing noticeable except this trance-like condition, which some of the warriors seemed to command at pleasure, manifested by a tense rigidity of the features and muscles, and a mental exaltation which proved to be both clairvoyant and clairoyant: a state analogous to that of hypnotism, or the artificial sleep produced by gazing fixedly on a near, bright object, and differing only in degree from the nervous or imaginative control which has been known to arrest and cure disease, which chained St. Simeon Stylites to his pillar, and sustains the Hindoo fakirs in their apparently superhuman vigils. These children of Nature had probed with direct simplicity some of the deep secrets which men of science often fail to discern through tortuous devices. I was assured that this trance was merely the result of a concentrative energy of the will, which riveted the faculties upon a single purpose or idea, and held every nerve and sense in absolute abeyance. We are so little accustomed to test the potency of the will out of the ordinary plane of its operation, that we have little conception how mighty a lever it may be made, or to what new exercise it may be directed; and yet we are all conscious of periods in our lives when, like a vast rock in ocean, it has suddenly loomed up firm and defiant amid our petty purposes and fretful indecisions, waxing grander and stronger under opposition, a something apart from, yet a conscious portion of ourselves,—a master, though a slave,—another revelation of the divinity within.

"I will confess that curiosity led me long ago to slight experiments in the direction in which you say the diabolic lies, but my mind was never concentrated on any one idea of sufficient interest to command success, until, in some periods of mingled peril and excitement, the memory of Blanche, and the conscious, even startling nearness of that sweet presence, have lent to my will unwonted energy and inspiration.

"Twenty years passed slowly away. It is common to speak of the flight of time. For me, time has no wings. The days and years are faltering and tardy-footed, laden with the experiences of the outer and the problems of the inner world, which seem perpetually multiplied by reflection, like figures in a room mirrored on all sides. Meanwhile, my wife had died. I have never since sought women beyond the formal pale of the drawing-room: not from insensibility to loveliness, but because the memory, 'dearer far than bliss,' of one irretrievable affection shut out all inferior approach,—like a solitary planet, admitting no dance of satellites within its orbit.

"At last the long silence was broken. I heard that Blanche was free, and, with mingled haste and hesitation, I prepared to seek her. The ideal should be tested, I said to myself, by the actual, and if proved a deceit, then was all faith a mockery, all promise and premonition a glittering lie. As soon as winds and waves could carry me, I was in Louisiana, and in the very dwelling and at the same hour which had witnessed our parting. Again was it a soft summer evening. The same faint golden rays painted the sun's farewell, and the same silver moon looked eloquent response, as on the evening breeze floated sweet remembered odors of jessamine and orange. Again the ideal beauty of the lovely portrait met my gaze and seemed to melt into my heart; and once more, softly, lightly, fell a footstep, and the Presence by which I had never been forsaken, which I could never forsake, stood before me in 'palpable array of sense.' It was indeed the living Blanche, calm and stately as of old,—no longer radiant with the flush of youth, but serene in tenderest grace and sweet reserve, and beautiful through the lustre of the inner light of soul. She uttered a faint cry of joy, and placing her trembling hand in mine, we stood transfixed and silent, with riveted gaze, reading in each other's eyes feelings too sacred for speech, too deep for smiles or tears. In that long, burning look, it seemed as if the emotions of each were imparted to the other, not in slow succession as through words and sentences, but daguerreotyped or electrotyped in perfected form upon the conscious understanding. No language could have made so clear and comprehensible the revelation of that all-centring, unconquerable love which thrilled our inmost being, and pervaded the atmosphere around us with subtile and tremulous vibrations. In that moment all time was fused and forgotten. There was for us no Past, no Future; there was only the long-waited, all-embracing Now. I could willingly have died then and there, for I knew that all life could bring but one such moment. My heart spoke truly. A change passed over the countenance of Blanche,—an expression of unutterable grief, like Eve's retrospective look at Eden. Quivering with strange tremor, again she stood before me, with clasped hands and tearful eyes, in the very attitude of that memorable apparition, and again fell upon my ears the mysterious plaint and the uncompleted question,—'You have been the cause of all this; oh, why did you not'—

"Now, my friend, can your philosophy explain this startling verification, this reflex action of the vision, or the fantasy, or whatever else you may please to term it, whose prophetic shadow fell upon my astonished senses long years before? In all the intervening time, we were separated by great distance, no word or sign passed between us, nor did we even hear of each other except indefinitely and through chance. Is there, then, any explanation of that vision more rational than that the spirit thus closely affined with my own was enabled, through its innate potencies, or through some agency of which we are ignorant, to impress upon my bodily perceptions its uncontrollable emotions? That this manifestation was made through what physiologists call the unconscious or involuntary action of the mind was proved by the incredulity and surprise of Blanche when I told her of the wonderful coincidence.

"I need not relate, even if I could do so, the outpouring of long-pent emotions which relieved the yearning love and haunting memories of sad, silent, lingering years. It is enough to tell you briefly of the story which was repeated in fragments through many hours of unfamiliar bliss. Soon after my departure from New Orleans, the father of Blanche, with the stern authority which many parents exercise over the matrimonial affairs of their daughters, insisted upon her forming an alliance to which the opposition of her own heart was the only objection. So trifling an impediment was decisively put aside by him, and Blanche, having delayed the marriage as long as possible, until the time fixed for my return was past, and unable to plead any open acknowledgment on my part which could justify her refusal, had no alternative but to obey. 'I confess,' said she, in faltering tones, 'that, after my fate was fixed, and I was parted from you, as I believed for life, I tried to believe that the love which had given so slight witness in words to its truth and fervor must have faded entirely away, and that I was forgotten, and perhaps supplanted. And therefore, in the varied pursuits and pleasures of my new sphere, and in the indulgence and kindness which ministered to the outer, but, alas! never to the inner life, I sought happiness, and I, too, like yourself, strove to forget. Ah! that art of forgetting, which the Athenian coveted as the best of boons,—when was it ever found through effort or desire? In all scenes of beauty or of excitement, in the allurements of society, in solitude and in sorrow, my heart still turned to you with ceaseless longing, as if you alone could touch its master-chord, and waken the harmonies which were struggling for expression. By slow degrees, as I learned to dissever you from the material world, there came a conviction of the nearness of your spirit, sometimes so positive that I would waken from a reverie, in which I was lost to sights and sounds around me, with a sense of having been in your actual presence. I was aware of an effect rather than of an immediate consciousness,—as if the magnetism of your touch had swept over me, cooling the fever of my brain, and charming to deep tranquillity my troubled heart. And thus I learned, through similar experience, the same belief as yours. I have felt the continuous nearness, the inseparable union of our spirits, as plainly as I feel it now, with my hand clasped in yours, and reading in your eyes the unutterable things which we can never hope to speak, because they are foreshadowings of another existence.

"What I possess I see afar off lying,
And what I lost is real and undying."

The material presence is indeed very dear, but I believe that it is not essential to the perpetuity of that love which is nurtured through mutual and perfect understanding.'

"'It is not essential,' I replied, 'but it is, as you say, very, very dear, because it is an exponent and participant of the hidden life which it was designed to aid and to enframe. Blanche, it was you who first wakened my soul to the glorious revelation, the heavenly heritage of love. It was you who opened to me the world which lies beyond the mere external, who gently allured me from the coarse and clouding elements of sense, and infolded me in the holy purity of that marriage of kindred natures which alone is hallowed by the laws of God, and which no accidents of time or place can rend asunder. Apart from the bitterness of this long separation, the lesson might not have been learned; but now that it is ineffaceably engraven on both our hearts, and confirmed in the assurance of this blessed reunion, may I not hope that for the remainder of our earthly lives we may study together in visible companionship such further lessons as may be held in reserve for us?'

"Her face glowed with a soft crimson flush, and again her eyes were suffused with tears, through which beamed a look of sweet, heavenly sorrow,—such as might have shone in the orbs of the angel who enforced upon Adam the sentence of expulsion from Paradise, and who, while sharing the exile's grief, beheld in the remote horizon, far beyond the tangled wilderness of Earth, another gate, wide opening to welcome him to the Immortal Land. She was silent for a little time, and then she murmured, lingering gently on the words, 'No, it must not be. We are, indeed, inalienably one, in a nearer and dearer sense than can be expressed by any transient symbol. Let us not seek to quit the spiritual sphere in which we have long dwelt and communed together, for one liable to discord and misinterpretation. I have an irresistible impression that my life here will be very brief. While I remain, come to me when you will, let me be the Egeria of your hours of leisure, and a consoler in your cares,—but let us await, for another and a higher life, the more perfect consummation of our love. For, oh, believe, as I believe, faith is no mockery, nor is the heart's prophecy a lie. We were not born to be the dupes of dreams or the sport of chance. The voice which whispered to me long ago the promise fulfilled in this hour tells me that in a bright Hereafter we shall find compensation for every sorrow, reality for every ideal, and that there at last shall be resolved in luminous perception the veiled and troubled mystery of PRESENCE!'"

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CHIEFLY ABOUT WAR-MATTERS.

BY A PEACEABLE MAN.

There is no remoteness of life and thought, no hermetically sealed seclusion, except, possibly, that of the grave, into which the disturbing influences of this war do not penetrate. Of course, the general heart-quake of the country long ago knocked at my cottage-door, and compelled me, reluctantly, to suspend the contemplation of certain fantasies, to which, according to my harmless custom, I was endeavoring to give a sufficiently life-like aspect to admit of their figuring in a romance. As I make no pretensions to state-craft or soldiership, and could promote the common weal neither by valor nor counsel, it seemed, at first, a pity that I should be debarred from such unsubstantial business as I had contrived for myself, since nothing more genuine was to be substituted for it. But I magnanimously considered that there is a kind of treason in insulating one's self from the universal fear and sorrow, and thinking one's idle thoughts in the dread time of civil war; and could a man be so cold and hard-hearted, he would better deserve to be sent to Fort Warren than many who have found their way thither on the score of violent, but misdirected sympathies. I remembered the touching rebuke administered by King Charles to that rural squire the echo of whose hunting-horn came to the poor monarch's ear on the morning before a battle, where the sovereignty and constitution of England were to be set at stake. So I gave myself up to reading newspapers and listening to the click of the telegraph, like other people; until, after a great many months of such pastime, it grew so abominably irksome that I determined to look a little more closely at matters with my own eyes.

Accordingly we set out—a friend and myself—towards Washington, while it was still the long, dreary January of our Northern year, though March in name; nor were we unwilling to clip a little margin off the five months' winter, during which there is nothing genial in New England save the fireside. It was a clear, frosty morning, when we started. The sun shone brightly on snow-covered hills in the neighborhood of Boston, and burnished the surface of frozen ponds; and the wintry weather kept along with us while we trundled through Worcester and Springfield, and all those old, familiar towns, and through the village-cities of Connecticut. In New York the streets were afloat with liquid mud and slosh. Over New Jersey there was still a thin covering of snow, with the face of Nature visible through the rents in her white shroud, though with little or no symptom of reviving life. But when we reached Philadelphia, the air was mild and balmy; there was but a patch or two of dingy winter here and there, and the bare, brown fields about the city were ready to be green. We had met the Spring half-way, in her slow progress from the South; and if we kept onward at the same pace, and could get through the Rebel lines, we should soon come to fresh grass, fruit-blossoms, green peas, strawberries, and all such delights of early summer.

On our way, we heard many rumors of the war, but saw few signs of it. The people were staid and decorous, according to their ordinary fashion; and business seemed about as brisk as usual,—though, I suppose, it was considerably diverted from its customary channels into warlike ones. In the cities, especially in New York, there was a rather prominent display of military goods at the shopwindows,—such as swords with gilded scabbards and trappings, epaulets, carabines, revolvers, and sometimes a great iron cannon at the edge of the pavement, as if Mars had dropped one of his pocket-pistols there, while hurrying to the field. As railway-companions, we had now and then a volunteer in his French-gray great-coat, returning from furlough, or a new-made officer travelling to join his regiment, in his new-made uniform, which was perhaps all of the military character that he had about him,—but proud of his eagle-buttons, and likely enough to do them honor before the gilt should be wholly dimmed. The country, in short, so far as bustle and movement went, was more quiet than in ordinary times, because so large a proportion of its restless elements had been drawn towards the seat of conflict. But the air was full of a vague disturbance. To me, at least, it seemed so, emerging from such a solitude as has been hinted at, and the more impressible by rumors and indefinable presentiments, since I had not lived, like other men, in an atmosphere of continual talk about the war. A battle was momentarily expected on the Potomac; for, though our army was still on the hither side of the river, all of us were looking towards the mysterious and terrible Manassas, with the idea that somewhere in its neighborhood lay a ghastly battlefield, yet to be fought, but foredoomed of old to be bloodier than the one where we had reaped such shame. Of all haunted places, methinks such a destined field should be thickest thronged with ugly phantoms, ominous of mischief through ages beforehand.

Beyond Philadelphia there was a much greater abundance of military people. Between Baltimore and Washington a guard seemed to hold every station along the railroad; and frequently, on the hill-sides, we saw a collection of weather-beaten tents, the peaks of which, blackened with smoke, indicated that they had been made comfortable by stove-heat throughout the winter. At several commanding positions we saw fortifications, with the muzzles of cannon protruding from the ramparts, the slopes of which were made of the yellow earth of that region, and still unsodded; whereas, till these troublous times, there have been no forts but what were grass-grown with the lapse of at least a lifetime of peace. Our stopping-places were thronged with soldiers, some of whom came through the cars, asking for newspapers that contained accounts of the battle between the Merrimack and Monitor, which had been fought the day before. A railway-train met us, conveying a regiment out of Washington to some unknown point; and reaching the capital, we filed out of the station between lines of soldiers, with shouldered muskets, putting us in mind of similar spectacles at the gates of European cities. It was not without sorrow that we saw the free circulation of the nation's life-blood (at the very heart, moreover) clogged with such strictures as these, which have caused chronic diseases in almost all countries save our own. Will the time ever come again, in America, when we may live half a score of years without once seeing the likeness of a soldier, except it be in the festal march of a company on its summer tour? Not in this generation, I fear, nor in the next, nor till the Millennium; and even that blessed epoch, as the prophecies seem to intimate, will advance to the sound of the trumpet.

One terrible idea occurs, in reference to this matter. Even supposing the war should end to-morrow, and the army melt into the mass of the population within the year, what an incalculable preponderance will there be of military titles and pretensions for at least half a century to come! Every country-neighborhood will have its general or two, its three or four colonels, half a dozen majors, and captains without end,—besides non-commissioned officers and privates, more than the recruiting-offices ever knew of,—all with their campaign-stories, which will become the staple of fireside-talk forevermore. Military merit, or rather, since that is not so readily estimated, military notoriety, will be the measure of all claims to civil distinction. One bullet-headed general will succeed another in the Presidential chair; and veterans will hold the offices at home and abroad, and sit in Congress and the State legislatures, and fill all the avenues of public life. And yet I do not speak of this deprecatingly, since, very likely, it may substitute something more real and genuine, instead of the many shams on which men have heretofore founded their claims to public regard; but it behooves civilians to consider their wretched prospects in the future, and assume the military button before it is too late.

We were not in time to see Washington as a camp. On the very day of our arrival sixty thousand men had crossed the Potomac on their march towards Manassas; and almost with their first step into the Virginia mud, the phantasmagory of a countless host and impregnable ramparts, before which they had so long remained quiescent, dissolved quite away. It was as if General McClellan had thrust his sword into a gigantic enemy, and, beholding him suddenly collapse, had discovered to himself and the world that he had merely punctured an enormously swollen bladder. There are instances of a similar character in old romances, where great armies are long kept at bay by the arts of necromancers, who build airy towers and battlements, and muster warriors of terrible aspect, and thus feign a defence of seeming impregnability, until some bolder champion of the besiegers dashes forward to try an encounter with the foremost foeman, and finds him melt away in the death-grapple. With such heroic adventures let the march upon Manassas be hereafter reckoned. The whole business, though connected with the destinies of a nation, takes inevitably a tinge of the ludicrous. The vast preparation of men and warlike material,—the majestic patience and docility with which the people waited through those weary and dreary months,—the martial skill, courage, and caution, with which our movement was ultimately made,—and, at last, the tremendous shock with which we were brought suddenly up against nothing at all! The Southerners show little sense of humor nowadays, but I think they must have meant to provoke a laugh at our expense, when they planted those Quaker guns. At all events, no other Rebel artillery has played upon us with such overwhelming effect.

The troops being gone, we had the better leisure and opportunity to look into other matters. It is natural enough to suppose that the centre and heart of Washington is the Capitol; and certainly, in its outward aspect, the world has not many statelier or more beautiful edifices, nor any, I should suppose, more skilfully adapted to legislative purposes, and to all accompanying needs. But, etc., etc. [Footnote: We omit several paragraphs here, in which the author speaks of some prominent Members of Congress with a freedom that seems to have been not unkindly meant, but might be liable to misconstruction. As he admits that he never listened to an important debate, we can hardly recognize his qualification to estimate these gentlemen, in their legislative and oratorical capacities.]

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We found one man, however, at the Capitol, who was satisfactorily adequate to the business which brought him thither. In quest of him, we went through halls, galleries, and corridors, and ascended a noble staircase, balustraded with a dark and beautifully variegated marble from Tennessee, the richness of which is quite a sufficient cause for objecting to the secession of that State. At last we came to a barrier of pine boards, built right across the stairs. Knocking at a rough, temporary door, we thrust a card beneath; and in a minute or two it was opened by a person in his shirt-sleeves, a middle-aged figure, neither tall nor short, of Teutonic build and aspect, with an ample beard of a ruddy tinge and chestnut hair. He looked at us, in the first place, with keen and somewhat guarded eyes, as if it were not his practice to vouchsafe any great warmth of greeting, except upon sure ground of observation. Soon, however, his look grew kindly and genial, (not that it had ever been in the least degree repulsive, but only reserved,) and Leutze allowed us to gaze at the cartoon of his great fresco, and talked about it unaffectedly, as only a man of true genius can speak of his own works. Meanwhile the noble design spoke for itself upon the wall. A sketch in color, which we saw afterwards, helped us to form some distant and flickering notion of what the picture will be, a few months hence, when these bare outlines, already so rich in thought and suggestiveness, shall glow with a fire of their own,—a fire which, I truly believe, will consume every other pictorial decoration of the Capitol, or, at least, will compel us to banish those stiff and respectable productions to some less conspicuous gallery. The work will be emphatically original and American, embracing characteristics that neither art nor literature have yet dealt with, and producing new forms of artistic beauty from the natural features of the Rocky-Mountain region, which Leutze seems to have studied broadly and minutely. The garb of the hunters and wanderers of those deserts, too, under his free and natural management, is shown as the most picturesque of costumes. But it would be doing this admirable painter no kind office to overlay his picture with any more of my colorless and uncertain words; so I shall merely add that it looked full of energy, hope, progress, irrepressible movement onward, all represented in a momentary pause of triumph; and it was most cheering to feel its good augury at this dismal time, when our country might seem to have arrived at such a deadly stand-still.

It was an absolute comfort, indeed, to find Leutze so quietly busy at this great national work, which is destined to glow for centuries on the walls of the Capitol, if that edifice shall stand, or must share its fate, if treason shall succeed in subverting it with the Union which it represents. It was delightful to see him so calmly elaborating his design, while other men doubted and feared, or hoped treacherously, and whispered to one another that the nation would exist only a little longer, or that, if a remnant still held together, its centre and seat of government would be far northward and westward of Washington. But the artist keeps right on, firm of heart and hand, drawing his outlines with an unwavering pencil, beautifying and idealizing our rude, material life, and thus manifesting that we have an indefeasible claim to a more enduring national existence. In honest truth, what with the hope-inspiring influence of the design, and what with Leutze's undisturbed evolvement of it, I was exceedingly encouraged, and allowed these cheerful auguries to weigh against a sinister omen that was pointed out to me in another part of the Capitol. The freestone walls of the central edifice are pervaded with great cracks, and threaten to come thundering down, under the immense weight of the iron dome,—an appropriate catastrophe enough, if it should occur on the day when we drop the Southern stars out of our flag.

Everybody seems to be at Washington, and yet there is a singular dearth of imperatively noticeable people there. I question whether there are half a dozen individuals, in all kinds of eminence, at whom a stranger, wearied with the contact of a hundred moderate celebrities, would turn round to snatch a second glance. Secretary Seward, to be sure,—a pale, large-nosed, elderly man, of moderate stature, with a decided originality of gait and aspect, and a cigar in his mouth,—etc., etc.

[Footnote: We are again compelled to interfere with our friend's license of personal description and criticism. Even Cabinet Ministers (to whom the next few pages of the article were devoted) have their private immunities, which ought to be conscientiously observed,—unless, indeed, the writer chanced to have some very piquant motives for violating them.]

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Of course, there was one other personage, in the class of statesmen, whom I should have been truly mortified to leave Washington without seeing; since (temporarily, at least, and by force of circumstances) he was the man of men. But a private grief had built up a barrier about him, impeding the customary free intercourse of Americans with their chief magistrate; so that I might have come away without a glimpse of his very remarkable physiognomy, save for a semi-official opportunity of which I was glad to take advantage. The fact is, we were invited to annex ourselves, as supernumeraries, to a deputation that was about to wait upon the President, from a Massachusetts whip-factory, with a present of a splendid whip.

Our immediate party consisted only of four or five, (including Major Ben Perley Poore, with his note-book and pencil.) but we were joined by several other persons, who seemed to have been lounging about the precincts of the White House, under the spacious porch, or within the hall, and who swarmed in with us to take the chances of a presentation. Nine o'clock had been appointed as the time for receiving the deputation, and we were punctual to the moment; but not so the President, who sent us word that he was eating his breakfast, and would come as soon as he could. His appetite, we were glad to think, must have been a pretty fair one; for we waited about half an hour in one of the antechambers, and then were ushered into a reception-room, in one corner of which sat the Secretaries of War and of the Treasury, expecting, like ourselves, the termination of the Presidential breakfast. During this interval there were several new additions to our group, one or two of whom were in a working-garb, so that we formed a very miscellaneous collection of people, mostly unknown to each other, and without any common sponsor, but all with an equal right to look our head-servant in the face. By-and-by there was a little stir on the staircase and in the passageway, etc., etc.

[Footnote: We are compelled to omit two or three pages, in which the author describes the interview, and gives his idea of the personal appearance and deportment of the President. The sketch appears to have been written in a benign spirit, and perhaps conveys a not inaccurate impression of its august subject; but it lacks reverence, and it pains us to see a gentleman of ripe age, and who has spent years under the corrective influence of foreign institutions, falling into the characteristic and most ominous fault of Young America.]

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