DECEMBER.
Vol. IV. No. 5
THE
INTERNATIONAL
MAGAZINE.

[Contents for December.]

THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE Of Literature, Art, and Science.

Vol. IV. NEW-YORK, DECEMBER 1, 1851. No. V.

[NAUVOO AND DESERET.]

IMPOSTURE AND HISTORY OF THE MORMONS.

Among the many extraordinary chapters in the history of the Nineteenth Century none will seem in the next age more incredible and curious than that in which is related the Rise and Progress of Mormonism. The creed of the Latter Day Saints, as they style themselves, is not, indeed, more absurd and ridiculous than that of the Millerites, but this last sect had but a very brief existence, and is now almost forgotten; while the imposture of Smith and his associates, commencing before Miller began his prophecies, is still successful, and represented by missionaries in almost every state throughout the world.

THE MORMON EXODUS: PASSING THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS.

It has been observed with some reason, that had a Rabelais or a Swift told the story of the Mormons under the veil of allegory, the sane portion of mankind would probably have entered a protest against the extravagance of the satirist. The name of the mock hero, his own and his family's ignorance and want of character, the low cunning of his accomplices, the open and shameless vices in which they indulged, and the extraordinary success of the sect they founded, would all have been thought too obviously conceived with a view to ludicrous effects. Yet the Mormon movement has assumed the condition of an important popular feature, and after much suffering and many reverses, its authors have achieved a condition of eminent industrial prosperity. In twenty years the company, consisting of the impostor and his father and brother, has increased to nearly half a million; they occupy one of the richest portions of this continent, have a regularly organized government, and are represented in the Congress of the United States by a delegate having all the powers usually conferred on the members for territories. With missions in every part of the country, in every capital of Europe, in Mecca, in Jerusalem, and among the islands of the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, all of whom are charged with the duty of making converts and gathering them to the Promised Land of Deseret, they must very soon have a population sufficiently large to claim admission as an equal member to the Union, and perhaps to hold the balance of power in its affairs.

To illustrate the energy and success with which their missions are prosecuted, we may cite the statement contained in a work just published in London, The Mormons, or Latter Day Saints, a Contemporary History, that more than fourteen thousand persons have left Great Britain since 1840 for the "Holy City." The emigrants passing through Liverpool in 1849, amounted to 2,500, generally of the better class of mechanics and farmers, and it was estimated that at least 30,000 converts remained behind. In June, 1850, there were in England and Scotland, 27,863, of whom London contributed 2,529; Liverpool, 1,018; Manchester, 2,787; Glasgow, 1,846; Sheffield, 1,920; Edinburgh, 1,331; Birmingham, 1,909; and Wales, 4,342. And the Mormon census was again taken last January, giving the entire number in the British Isles at 30,747. In fourteen years, more than 50,000 had been baptized in England, of whom nearly 17,000 had "emigrated to Zion." Although the Mormon emigration is commonly of the better class, there are also poor Mormons; and that these as well as their more prosperous brethren may be "gathered to the holy city," there is now amassed in Liverpool a very large fund, under the control of officers appointed by the "Apostles," destined exclusively for the equipment and transportation of converts to their place of Refuge.

The interest which recent events have attracted to the community in Deseret or Utah, will render interesting a more particular survey of its origin, progress, and condition.

In 1825 there lived near the village of Palmyra, in New-York, a family of small farmers of the name of Smith. They were of bad repute in the neighborhood, notorious for being continually in debt, and heedless of their business engagements. The eldest son, Joseph, says one of his friends, "could read without much difficulty, wrote a very imperfect hand, and had a very limited understanding of the elementary rules of arithmetic." Associated in some degree with Sidney Rigdon, who comes before us in the first place as a journeyman printer, he was the founder of the new faith. The early history of the conspiracy of these worthies is imperfectly known; but it is evident that Rigdon must have been in Smith's confidence from the first. Rigdon, indeed, probably had more to do with the matter than even Smith; but it was the latter who was first put conspicuously forward, and who managed to retain the pre-eminence. The account of the pretended revelation, as given by Smith, is as follows: He all at once found himself laboring in a state of great darkness and wretchedness of mind—was bewildered among the conflicting doctrines of the Christians, and could find no comfort or rest for his soul. In this state, he resorted to earnest prayer, kneeling in the woods and fields, and after long perseverance was answered by the appearance of a bright light in heaven, which gradually descended until it enveloped the worshipper, who found himself standing face to face with two supernatural beings. Of these he inquired which was the true religion? The reply was, that all existing religions were erroneous, but that the pure doctrine and crowning dispensation of Christianity should at a future period be miraculously revealed to himself. Several similar visitations ensued, and at length he was informed that the North American Indians were a remnant of Israel; that when they first entered America they were a powerful and enlightened people; that their priests and rulers kept the records of their history and doctrines, but that, having fallen off from the true worship, the great body of the nation were supernaturally destroyed—not, however, until a priest and prophet named Mormon, had, by heavenly direction, drawn up an abstract of their records and religious opinions. He was told that this still existed, buried in the earth, and that he was selected as the instrument for its recovery and manifestation to all nations. The record, it was said, contained many prophecies as to these latter days, and instructions for the gathering of the saints into a temporal and spiritual kingdom, preparatory to the second coming of the Messiah, which was at hand. After several very similar visions, the spot in which the book lay buried was disclosed. Smith went to it, and after digging, discovered a sort of box, formed of upright and horizontal flags, within which lay a number of plates resembling gold, and of the thickness of common tin. These were bound together by a wire, and were engraved with Egyptian characters. By the side of them lay two transparent stones, called by the ancients, "Urim and Thummim," set in "the two rims of a bow." These stones were divining crystals, and the angels informed Smith, that by using them he would be enabled to decipher the characters on the plates. What ultimately became of the plates—if such things existed at all—does not appear. They were said to have been seen and handled by eleven witnesses. With the exception of three persons, these witnesses were either members of Smith's family, or of a neighboring family of the name of Whitmer. The Smiths, of course, give suspicious testimony. The Whitmers have disappeared, and no one knows any thing about them. Another witness, Oliver Cowdrey, was afterwards an amanuensis to Joseph; and another, Martin Harris, was long a conspicuous disciple. There is some confusion, however, about this person. Although he signs his name, as a witness who has seen and handled the plates, he assured Professor Anthon that he never had seen them, that "he was not sufficiently pure of heart," and that Joseph refused to show him the plates, but gave him instead a transcript on paper of the characters engraved on them. It is difficult to trace the early advances of the imposture. Every thing is vague and uncertain. We have no dates, and only the statements of the prophet and his friends.

Meantime, Smith must have worked successfully on the feeble and superstitious mind of Martin Harris. This man, as we have just said, received from him a written transcript of the mysterious characters, and conveyed it to Professor Anthon, a competent philological authority. Dr. Anthon's account of the interview is one of the most important parts of the entire history. Harris told him he had not seen the plates, but that he intended to sell his farm and give the proceeds to enable Smith to publish a translation of them. This statement, with what follows, shows that Smith's original intention, quoad the alleged plates, was to use them as a means for swindling Harris. The Mormons have published accounts of Professor Anthon's judgment on the paper submitted to him, which he himself states to be "perfectly false." The Mormon version of the interview represents Dr. Anthon "as having been unable to decipher the characters correctly, but as having presumed that, if the original records could be brought, he could assist in translating them." On this statement being made, Dr. Anthon described the document submitted to him as having been a sort of pot-pourri of ancient marks and alphabets. "It had evidently been prepared by some person who had before him a book containing various alphabets; Greek and Hebrew letters, crosses and flourishes, Roman letters, inverted or placed sideways, were arranged in perpendicular columns, and the whole ended in a rude delineation of a circle, divided into various compartments, decked with numerous strange marks, and evidently copied after the Mexican Calendar given by Humboldt, but copied in such a way as not to betray the source whence it was derived." This account disposes of the statement that the characters were Egyptian, while the very jumble of the signs of different nations, languages, and ages, proves that the impostor was deficient both in tact and knowledge. The scheme seems to have been, at all events, in petto when Smith communicated with Harris; but a satisfactory clue to the fabrication is lost in our ignorance of the time and circumstances under which Smith and Rigdon came together. It must have been subsequent to that event that the "translation," by means of the magic Urim and Thummim, was begun. This work Smith is represented as having labored at steadily, assisted by Oliver Cowdrey, until a volume was produced containing as much matter as the Old Testament, written in the Biblical style, and containing, as Smith said the Angel had informed him, a history of the lost tribes in their pilgrimage to and settlement in America, with copious doctrinal and prophetic commentaries and revelations.

The devotion of Harris to the impostor secured a fund sufficient for defraying the cost of printing the pretended revelation, and the sect began slowly to increase. The doctrines of Smith were not at first very clearly defined; it is probable that neither he nor Rigdon had determined what should be their precise character; but like their early contemporary the prophet Matthias (the interesting history of whose career was published in New-York several years ago by the late Colonel Stone), they had no hesitation in deciding on one cardinal point, that the revelations made to Smith at any time should be received with unquestioning and implicit faith, and the earliest of these revelations contemplated a liberal provision for all the prophet's personal necessities. Thus, in February, 1831, it was revealed to the disciples that they should immediately build the prophet a house; on another occasion it was enjoined that, if they had any regard for their own souls, the sooner they provided him with food and raiment, and every thing he needed, the better it would be for them; and in a third revelation, Joseph was informed that "he was not to labor for his living." All these "revelations" were received, and though the impostor seemed to intelligent men little better than a buffoon, his followers soon learned to regard him as almost deserving of adoration, and he began to revel in whatever luxury and profligacy was most agreeable to his vulgar taste and ambition. As in the case of the scarcely more respectable pretender, Andrew Jackson Davis, it was asserted that his original want of cultivation precluded the notion of his having by the exercise of any natural or acquired faculties produced his "revelations." Everywhere his followers said, "The prophet is not learned in a human sense: how could he have become acquainted with all the antiquarian learning here displayed, if it were not supernaturally communicated to him?" But to this question there was soon an answer equally explicit and satisfactory. The real author of the Book of Mormon was a Rev. Solomon Spaulding, who wrote it as a romance. Its entire history and the means by which it came into the possession of Smith are described, in the following statement, by Mr. Spaulding's widow:—

CROSSING THE MISSOURI.

"Since the Book of Mormon, or Golden Bible (as it was originally called), has excited much attention, and is deemed by a certain new sect of equal authority with the sacred Scriptures, I think it a duty to the public to state what I know of its origin.... Solomon Spaulding, to whom I was married in early life, was a graduate of Dartmouth college, and was distinguished for a lively imagination, and great fondness for history. At the time of our marriage, he resided in Cherry Valley, New York. From this place, we removed to New Salem, Ashtabula County, Ohio, sometimes called Conneaut, as it is situated on Conneaut Creek. Shortly after our removal to this place, his health failed, and he was laid aside from active labors. In the town of New Salem there are numerous mounds and forts, supposed by many to be the dilapidated dwellings and fortifications of a race now extinct. These relics arrest the attention of new settlers, and become objects of research for the curious. Numerous implements were found, and other articles evincing skill in the arts. Mr. Spaulding being an educated man, took a lively interest in these developments of antiquity; and in order to beguile the hours of retirement, and furnish employment for his mind, he conceived the idea of giving an historical sketch of the long-lost race. Their antiquity led him to adopt the most ancient style, and he imitated the Old Testament as nearly as possible. His sole object in writing this imaginary history was to amuse himself and his neighbors. This was about the year 1812. Hull's surrender at Detroit occurred near the same time, and I recollect the date well from that circumstance. As he progressed in his narrative, the neighbors would come in from time to time to hear portions read, and a great interest in the work was excited among them. It claimed to have been written by one of the lost nation, and to have been recovered from the earth; and he gave it the title of 'The Manuscript Found.' The neighbors would often inquire how Mr. Spaulding advanced in deciphering the manuscript; and when he had a sufficient portion prepared, he would inform them, and they would assemble to hear it read. He was enabled, from his acquaintance with the classics and ancient history, to introduce many singular names, which were particularly noticed by the people, and could be easily recognized by them. Mr. Solomon Spaulding had a brother, Mr. John Spaulding, residing in the place at the time, who was perfectly familiar with the work, and repeatedly heard the whole of it. From New Salem we removed to Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania. Here Mr. Spaulding found a friend and acquaintance, in the person of Mr. Patterson, an editor of a newspaper. He exhibited his manuscript to Mr. Patterson, who was much pleased with it, and borrowed it for perusal. He retained it a long time, and informed Mr. Spaulding that if he would make out a title-page and preface, he would publish it, and it might be a source of profit. This Mr. Spaulding refused to do. Sidney Rigdon, who has figured so largely in the history of the Mormons, was at that time connected with the printing office of Mr. Patterson, as is well known in that region, and, as Rigdon himself has frequently stated, became acquainted with Mr. Spaulding's manuscript, and copied it. It was a matter of notoriety and interest to all connected with the printing establishment. At length the manuscript was returned to its author, and soon after we removed to Amity, Washington county, where Mr. Spaulding died, in 1816. The manuscript then fell into my hands, and was carefully preserved. It has frequently been examined by my daughter, Mrs. M'Kenstry, of Monson, Massachusetts, with whom I now reside, and by other friends. After the Book of Mormon came out, a copy of it was taken to New Salem, the place of Mr. Spaulding's former residence, and the very place where the 'Manuscript Found' was written. A woman appointed a meeting there; and in the meeting read copious extracts from the Book of Mormon. The historical part was known by all the older inhabitants, as the identical work of Mr. Spaulding, in which they had all been so deeply interested years before. Mr. John Spaulding was present, and recognized perfectly the production of his brother. He was amazed and afflicted that it should have been perverted to so wicked a purpose. His grief found vent in tears, and he arose on the spot, and expressed to the meeting his sorrow that the writings of his deceased brother should be used for a purpose so vile and shocking. The excitement in New Salem became so great, that the inhabitants had a meeting, and deputed Dr. Philastus Hurlbut, one of their number, to repair to this place, and to obtain from me the original manuscript of Mr. Spaulding, for the purpose of comparing it with the Mormon Bible—to satisfy their own minds and to prevent their friends from embracing an error so delusive. This was in the year 1834. Dr. Hurlbut brought with him an introduction and request for the manuscript, which was signed by Messrs. Henry, Lake, Aaron Wright, and others, with all of whom I was acquainted, as they were my neighbors when I resided at New Salem. I am sure that nothing would grieve my husband more, were he living, than the use which has been made of his work. The air of antiquity which was thrown about the composition doubtless suggested the idea of converting it to the purposes of delusion. Thus, an historical romance, with the addition of a few pious expressions, and extracts from the sacred Scriptures, has been construed into a new Bible, and palmed off upon a company of poor deluded fanatics as Divine."

Similar evidence as to the Spaulding MS. was given by several private friends, and by the writer's brother, all of whom were familiar with its contents. The facts thus graphically detailed have of course been denied, but have never been disproved. Indeed, without them it is impossible to explain the hold which Rigdon always possessed on the Prophet; for he was a poor creature, without education and without talents. At one time—a critical moment in the history of the new church—a quarrel arose between the accomplices; but it ended in Smith's receiving a "revelation," in which Rigdon was raised by divine command to be equal with himself, having plenary power given to him to bind and loose both on earth and in heaven.

A MORMON CARAVAN ON THE PRAIRIES.

The remaining history of the Mormons is eminently interesting. Ignorant and superstitious as have been the chief part of the disciples, and atrocious as have been the tricks of the knaves who have led them on amid all the varieties of their good and evil fortune, there have occasionally been displayed among them an enthusiasm and bravery of endurance that demand admiration. Nearly from the beginning the leaders of the sect seem to have contemplated settling in the thinly populated regions of the western states, where lands were to be purchased for low prices, and after a short residence at Kirkland, in Ohio, they determined to found a New Jerusalem in Missouri. The interests of the town were confided to suitable officers, and Smith spent his time in travelling through the country and preaching, until the real or pretended immoralities of the sect led to such discontents that in 1839 they were forcibly and lawlessly expelled from the state. We are inclined to believe that they were not only treated with remarkable severity, but that there was not any reason whatever to justify an interference in their affairs.

THE MORMON TEMPLE AT NAUVOO.

From Missouri the saints proceeded to Illinois, and on the sixth of April, 1841, with imposing ceremonies, laid at their new city of Nauvoo the corner-stone of the Temple,[1] an immense edifice, without any architectural order or attraction, which in a few months was celebrated every where as not inferior in size and magnificence to that built by Solomon in Jerusalem. Nauvoo is delightfully situated in the midst of a fertile district, and a careful inquirer will not be apt to deny that it became the home of a more industrious, frugal, and generally moral society, than occupied any other town in the state. Whatever charges were preferred against Smith and his disciples, to justify the outrages to which they were subjected, the history of their expulsion from Nauvoo is simply a series of illustrations of the fact that the ruffian population of the neighboring country set on foot a vast scheme of robbery in order to obtain the lands and improvements of the Mormons without paying for them. We have not room for a particular statement of the discontents and conspiracies which grew up in the city, nor for any detail of the aggressions from without. On the 27th of June, 1844, Joseph and Hyrum Smith were murdered, while under the especial protection of the authorities of the state. A writer in the Christian Reflector newspaper, soon after, observed of Joseph Smith:

"Various are the opinions concerning this singular personage; but whatever may be thought in reference to his principles, objects, or moral character, all agree that he was a most remarkable man.... Notwithstanding the low origin, poverty, and profligacy of these mountebanks, they have augmented their numbers till more than 100,000 persons are now numbered among the followers of the Mormon Prophet, and they never were increasing so rapidly as at the time of his death. Born in the very lowest walks of life, reared in poverty, educated in vice, having no claims to even common intelligence, coarse and vulgar in deportment, the Prophet Smith succeeded in establishing a religious creed, the tenets of which have been taught throughout America; the Prophet's virtues have been rehearsed in Europe; the ministers of Nauvoo have found a welcome in Asia; Africa has listened to the grave sayings of the seer of Palmyra; the standard of the Latter-Day Saints has been reared on the banks of the Nile; and even the Holy Land has been entered by the emissaries of this impostor. He founded a city in one of the most beautiful situations in the world, in a beautiful curve of the 'Father of Waters,' of no mean pretensions, and in it he had collected a population of twenty-five thousand, from every part of the world. The acts of his life exhibit a character as incongruous as it is remarkable. If we can credit his own words and the testimony of eye-witnesses, he was at the same time the vicegerent of God and a tavern-keeper—a prophet and a base libertine—a minister of peace, and a lieutenant-general—a ruler of tens of thousands, and a slave to all his own base passions—a preacher of righteousness, and a profane swearer—a worshipper of Bacchus, mayor of a city, and a miserable bar-room fiddler—a judge on the judicial bench, and an invader of the civil, social, and moral relations of men; and, notwithstanding these inconsistencies of character, there are not wanting thousands willing to stake their souls' eternal salvation on his veracity. For aught we know, time and distance will embellish his life with some new and rare virtues, which his most intimate friends failed to discover while living with him. Reasoning from effect to cause, we must conclude that the Mormon Prophet was of no common genius: few are able to commence and carry out an imposition like his, so long, and so extensively. And we see, in the history of his success, most striking proofs of the credulity of a large portion of the human family."

[1] The temple was of white limestone, 128 feet long, 83 feet wide, and 60 feet high. Its style will be seen in the above engraving. It was destroyed by fire, on the 19th of November, 1848. The town of Nauvoo is now occupied by another class of socialists, the Icarians, under M. Cabet, of Paris.

THE EXPULSION FROM NAUVOO.

After some dissensions, in which the party of Brigham Young triumphed over that of Sidney Rigdon, the sect were reorganized and for some time were permitted quietly to prosecute their plans at Nauvoo. But early in 1846 they were driven out of their city and compelled in mid winter to seek a new home beyond the farthest borders of civilization. The first companies, embracing sixteen hundred persons, crossed the Mississippi on the 3d February, 1846, and similar detachments continued to leave until July and August, travelling by ox-teams towards California, then almost unknown, and quite unpeopled by the Anglo-Saxon race. Their enemies asserted that the intention of the Saints was to excite the Indians against the government, and that they would return to take vengeance on the whites for the indignities they had suffered. Nothing appears to have been further from their intentions. Their sole object was to plant their Church in some fertile and hitherto undiscovered spot, where they might be unmolested by any opposing sect. The war against Mexico was then raging, and, to test the loyalty of the Mormons, it was suggested that a demand should be made on them to raise five hundred men for the service of the country. They consented, and that number of their best men enrolled themselves under General Kearney, and marched 2,400 miles with the armies of the United States. At the conclusion of the war they were disbanded in Upper California. They allege that it was one of this band who, in working at a mill, first discovered the golden treasures of California; and they are said to have amassed large quantities of gold before the secret was made generally known to the "Gentiles." But faith was not kept with the Mormons who remained in Nauvoo. Although they had agreed to leave in detachments, as rapidly as practicable, they were not allowed necessary time to dispose of their property; and in September, 1846, the city was besieged by their enemies upon the pretence that they did not intend to fulfil the stipulations made with the people and authorities of Illinois. After a three days' bombardment, the last remnant was finally driven out.

The terrible hejira of the Mormon emigrants over the Rocky Mountains has been described by Mr. Kane of Philadelphia, in an interesting pamphlet, which is honorable to his own character for good sense and for benevolent feeling. No religious emigration was ever attended by more suffering, no emigration of any kind was ever prosecuted with more bravery. It resulted in the permanent establishment of the "Commonwealth of the New Covenant," in Utah, or Deseret, one of the most attractive portions of the interior of this Continent, near its western border. Of this territory Mr. Kane says:

Deseret is emphatically a new country; new in its own characteristic features, newer still in its bringing together within its limits the most inconsistent peculiarities of other countries. I cannot aptly compare it to any. Descend from the mountains, where you have the scenery and climate of Switzerland, to seek the sky of your choice among the many climates of Italy, and you may find welling out of the same hills the freezing springs of Mexico and the hot springs of Iceland, both together coursing their way to the Salt Sea of Palestine, in the plain below. The pages of Malte Brun provide me with a less truthful parallel to it than those which describe the Happy Valley of Rasselas, or the Continent of Ballibarbi.

GREAT SALT LAKE CITY OR NEW JERUSAL'M.

The history of the Mormons has ever since been an unbroken record of prosperity. It has looked as though the elements of fortune, obedient to a law of natural re-action, were struggling to compensate their undue share of suffering. They may be pardoned for deeming it miraculous. But, in truth, the economist accounts for it all, who explains to us the speedy recuperation of cities, laid in ruin by flood, fire, and earthquake. During its years of trial, Mormon labor had subsisted on insufficient capital, and under many difficulties, but it has subsisted, and survives them now, as intelligent and powerful as ever it was at Nauvoo; with this difference, that it has in the mean time been educated to habits of unmatched thrift, energy, and endurance, and has been transplanted to a situation where it is in every respect more productive. Moreover, during all the period of their journey, while some have gained by practice in handicraft, and the experience of repeated essays at their various halting-places, the minds of all have been busy framing designs and planning the improvements they have since found opportunity to execute. Their territory is unequalled as a stock-raising country; the finest pastures of Lombardy are not more estimable than those on the east side of the Utah Lake and its tributary rivers, and it is scarcely less rich in timber and minerals than the most fortunate portions of the continent.

From the first the Mormons have had little to do in Deseret, but attend to mechanical and strictly agricultural pursuits. They have made several successful settlements; the farthest north is distant more than forty miles, and the farthest south, in a valley called the Sanpeech, two hundred, from that first formed. A duplicate of the Lake Tiberias empties its waters into the innocent Dead Sea of Deseret, by a fine river, which they have named the Western Jordan. It was on the right bank of this stream, on a rich table land, traversed by exhaustless waters falling from the highlands, that the pioneers, coming out of the mountains in the night of the 24th of July, 1847, pitched their first camp in the Valley, and consecrated the ground. This spot proved the most favorable site for their chief settlement, and after exploring the whole country, they founded on it their city of the New Jerusalem. Its houses are diffused, to command as much as possible the farms, which are laid out in wards or cantons, with a common fence to each. The farms in wheat already cover a space nearly as large as Rhode Island. The houses of New Jerusalem, or Great Salt Lake City, as it is commonly called, are distributed over an area nearly as great as that of New York. The foundations have been laid for a temple more vast and magnificent than that which was erected at Nauvoo. The Deseret News, a paper established under the direction of the ecclesiastical authority came to us lately with several columns descriptive of the fourth anniversary celebration of the arrival of the disciples in their Promised Land.

Since the preceding paragraphs were written some important information has been received from Utah, justifying apprehensions that the ambition of the chief of the sect, and territorial governor, Brigham Young, will be continually productive of difficulties. It appears that in consequence of his unwarrantable assumptions of authority, the larger and most respectable portion of the territorial officers, including B. O. Harris, Secretary of the Territory, G. K. Brandenburg, Chief Justice, E. P. Bracchas, Associate Justice, H. R. Day, Indian Agent, and Messrs. Gillette and Young, were preparing to leave for the Atlantic States.

The particulars of the difficulty are not stated, but it is said that $20,000 appropriated by Congress for territorial purposes had been squandered by Young, and an attempt made by him to take $24,000 from the Treasurer, who refused, and applied to the Court to support him. This was done, and an injunction granted restraining the proceedings of the Governor.

WINDSOR CASTLE.

Of the numerous objects of interest with which the banks of the Thames are so thickly studded, none are of such surpassing grandeur and regal magnificence as Windsor Castle, with its adjacent chapel of St. George, and Eton College. This massive and stately pile is richly storied with poetic associations, and venerable for its antiquity, in having proudly defied the ravages of Time for some eight centuries. Here kings were born; here they kept royal state amid the blaze of fashion and luxurious indulgence; and here in the adjoining mausoleum, they were buried. Here deeds of chivalry and high renown that shine on us from ancient days were enacted; and it is here the most exemplary of England's monarchy still prefers to hold her suburban residence. This brave old fortress, unlike the Tower of London, with its dark records of crime, is rife with pleasant memories. Not only is the edifice itself, with its gigantic towers, its broad bastions, and its kingly halls, sacred with incident and story, but Shakespeare has also rendered classical the very ground on which it stands.

DISTANT VIEW OF WINDSOR CASTLE.

Windsor Forest, with its magnificent old oaks and its richly variegated scenery, of "upland, lawn and stream," has afforded a fruitful theme for the pens of Gray and the poet of "The Seasons;" and Pope, it will be remembered, has felicitously pictured forth its changeful beauties. As far back as the days of the Saxons we have records of palatial residence at Old Windsor, or as its name then was, Windleshora, so called from the windings of the Thames in its vicinity. William the Norman built some portions of the Castle, which, until the time of Richard I., seems ever to have been the peaceful abode of royalty. During the civil wars, of which Windsor was a principal scene, the Castle became the most important military establishment in the kingdom. The sanguinary struggles connected with the signing of Magna Charta, are familiar to the reader. The birth of Edward III., which took place at Windsor, forms another epoch in its history—that prince having reconstructed the greater part of the Castle, and very largely extended it. William of Wykeham was the architect, with the liberal salary of a shilling a day. It is said he and six hundred workmen employed on the building, at the rate of one penny a day. It was here Richard II. heard the appeal of high treason, brought by the Duke of Lancaster against Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, which resulted in the former becoming Henry IV. It was here the Earl of Surrey, imprisoned for the high crime of eating flesh in Lent, beguiled his solitude, with his muse; and here was the last prison of that unfortunate monarch, Charles I. In Windsor Castle also resided the haughty Elizabeth; and along its terrace might have been seen in the days of the Commonwealth the stern figure of the lion-hearted Cromwell. It was the residence of Henry VIII., and the prison of James I. of Scotland. It is indebted for most of its modern splendor, to the luxurious taste and prodigal expenditure of George IV., who obtained from the House of Commons the sum of £300,000 for the purpose. The suites of royal apartments at present in use by the Queen are superb in the extreme, especially the state drawing rooms, in which are nine pictures by Zuccarelli; and St. George's Hall—a vast apartment in which the state banquets are given.

The long walk, extending about three miles in a direct line to the Palace, presents the finest vista of its kind in the world. It extends from the grand entrance of the Castle, to the top of a commanding hill in the Great Park, which affords a panoramic view of enchanting beauty, including many places memorable in history. On the right is the Thames, seen beyond Charter Island, and the plain of Runnymede, where the Barons extorted Magna Charta, whilst in the hazy distance are the rising eminences of Harrow and Hampstead. On the summit of this hill stands the equestrian statue of George III. Near the avenue called Queen Elizabeth's Walk, tradition still points out a withered tree as the identical oak of "Herne the Hunter," who, as the tale goes,

"Sometimes a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,
Walk round the oak, with great ragged horns."

[We derive this article from an interesting and beautifully illustrated volume of "Memories of the Great Metropolis," by Frederic Saunders, to be issued in a few days by one of our leading publishers. We shall notice it again.]

MR. GERARD, THE LION KILLER,

AND M. LE BARON MUNCHAUSEN, WHO BEAT HIM.

Jules Gerard is an officer in the famous army of Africa, who has a passion for lion killing. He is the Gordon Cumming of France. He follows lions alone; hunts them like sheep, for miles; sleeps near them; and patiently awaits their coming. Last year we published (article "Wild Sports in Algeria," International, vol. ii. p. 121,) an account of one of his exploits, to which he now refers us. His last adventure is sufficiently exciting, and incredibly daring. It is told in a letter to a friend, and published in the Journal des Chasseurs:—

"My dear Léon,—In my narrative of the month of August, 1850, I spoke of a large old lion which I had not been able to fall in with, and of whose sex and age I had formed a notion from his roarings. On the return of the expeditionary column from Kabylia, I asked permission from General St. Armand to go and explore the fine lairs situated on the northern declivity of Mount Aures, in the environs of Klenchela, where I had left my animal. Instead of a furlough, I received a mission for that country, and accordingly had during two months to shut my ears against the daily reports that were brought to me by the Arabs of the misdeeds of the solitary. In the beginning of September, when my mission was terminated, I proceeded to pitch my tent in the midst of the district haunted by the lion, and set about my investigations round about the douars to which he paid the most frequent visits. In this manner I spent many a night beneath the open sky, without any satisfactory result, when, on the 15th, in the morning, after a heavy rain which had lasted till midnight, some natives, who had explored the cover, came and informed me that the lion was ensconced within half a league of my tent. I set out at three o'clock, taking with me an Arab to hold my horse, another carrying my arms, and a third in charge of a goat most decidedly unconscious of the important part it was about to perform. Having alighted at the skirt of the wood, I directed myself towards a glade situated in the midst of the haunt, where I found a shrub to which I could tie the goat, and a tuft or two to sit upon. The Arabs went and crouched down beneath the cover, at a distance of about 100 paces. I had been there about a quarter of an hour, the goat meanwhile bleating with all its might, when a covey of partridges got up behind me, uttering their usual cry when surprised. I looked about me in every direction, but could see nothing. Meanwhile the goat had ceased crying, and its eyes were intently fixed at me. She made an attempt to break away from the fastening, and then began trembling in all her limbs. At these symptoms of fright I again turned round, and perceived behind me, about fifteen paces off, the lion stretched out at the foot of a juniper-tree, through the branches of which he was surveying us and making wry faces. In the position I was in, it was impossible for me to fire without facing about. I tried to fire from the left shoulder but felt awkward. In turning gently round without rising, I was in a favorable position, and just as I was levelling my piece the lion stood up and began to show me all his teeth, at the same time shaking his head, as much as to say, 'What the devil are you doing there?' I did not hesitate a moment, and fired at his mouth. The animal fell on the spot as if struck by lightning. My men ran up at the shot; and as they were eager to lay hands on the lion, I fired a second time between the eyes, in order to secure his lying perfectly still. The first bullet had taken the course of the spine throughout its entire length, passing through the marrow, and had come out at the tail. I had never before fired a shot that penetrated so deeply, and yet I had only loaded with sixty grains. It is true the rifle was one of Devisme's and the bullets steel-pointed. The lion, a black one and among the oldest I have ever shot, supplied the kettles of four companies of infantry who were stationed at Klenchela. Receive, my dear Léon, the assurance of my devoted affection.

Jules Gerard."

The exploit of 1850 was the chasing of two lions, one of which he killed; the other, supposed to be the one now shot, running away from him and escaping, after a vigorous chase of many miles. Some one—a celebrated author, indeed, with whose astonishing adventures we have been familiar from boyhood—envious of the recent fame of Mr. Arthur Gordon Cumming and M. Jules Gerard, has sent the following letter to the editor of the London Times:

Sir,—The exploit of M. Jules Gerard, recorded in The Times of the 14th inst., is certainly very wonderful, but by no means equals one performed by myself in South Africa. Observing on one occasion a large black lion, about 18 feet in length, reposing under a caoutchouc tree, I fired, and the bullet, like that of M. Gerard, went right through the backbone and came out at the tail; but, wonderful to relate, it hit against the tree, and rebounding, came back the same way and went straight into the barrel of my rifle, just after I had reloaded with powder. I instantly presented my piece at the lioness, which was reposing by the side of her lord, and fired; and thus I killed two animals (so large that they supplied three regiments of the line and 200 irregular cavalry with food for nearly a week) with one and the same bullet. In case any of your readers should doubt the truth of this statement, I eschew the usual fashion of writing under a false name, and subscribe myself, your very obedient servant,

BARON MUNCHAUSEN.

London, Oct. 15.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

We present to the readers of the International Magazine, this month, from a recent Daguerrotype by Brady, the best portrait ever published of the greatest living poet who writes the English language.

William Cullen Bryant was born on the third of November, 1794, in the village of Cummington, Massachusetts. His father, Dr. Peter Bryant of that place, one of the most eminent physicians of the day, was possessed of extensive literary and scientific acquirements, an unusually vigorous and well-disciplined mind, and an elegant and refined taste. He was fond of study, and sought to infuse into the minds of his young and growing family, those habits of intellectual exertion which had been to himself a source of so much exalted pleasure. It was fortunate for the subject of this notice, that such was his character; for when his own genius began to discover signs of its power, he found in his father an able and skilful instructor, who chastened, improved, and encouraged the first rude efforts of his boyhood. That parent did not, like the father of Petrarch, burn the poetic library of his son, amid the tears and groans of the boy; nor, like the relatives of Alfieri, suppress, for nearly one-third of his existence, the poetic fervor which consumed his heart; but, looking upon poetry as a high, perhaps the highest of arts, and poetic eminence as the noblest fame, he nourished with cheerful care the least indications of its presence, and supplied the youth with the means of its culture and growth. Nor were his services unrewarded, as it appears from Mr. Bryant's solemn Hymn to Death, by the subsequent gratitude and success of his pupil.

When only ten years of age, Mr. Bryant produced several small poems, which, though of course marked by the defects and puerilities of so immature an age, were yet thought to possess sufficient merit to be published in the newspaper of a neighboring village—the Hampshire Gazette. His friends, though pleased with these early evidences of talent, did not injure him with injudicious flattery, but, in the spirit of Dryden's simile, treated them

"As those who unripe veins in mines explore,
On the rich bed again the warm turf lay,
Till time digests the yet imperfect ore,
Knowing it would be gold another day."

Mr. Bryant acquired the rudiments of his school education under the care, first of the Rev. Mr. Snell of Brookfield, and then under that of the Rev. Mr. Hallock of Plainfield, Massachusetts. They found in him a sprightly and intelligent pupil, better pleased to lay up knowledge from books, and the silent meditation of nature, than to join in the ordinary pastimes of children. He was quick of apprehension, and diligent in pursuit. He rapidly ran through the usual preliminary studies; and in 1810, then in the sixteenth year of his age, was entered a member of the sophomore class of Williams' College. In that institution, he continued his studies with the same ardor and enthusiasm. He was particularly noted for his fondness for the classics, and in a little while made himself master of the more interesting portions of the literature of Greece and Rome. But he had not been in college more than a year or two, when he asked and procured an honorable dismission, for the purpose of devoting himself to the study of the law. This he did in the office of Judge Howe of Worthington, and afterwards in that of the Hon. William Baylies of Bridgewater, and, in 1815, was admitted to practice at the bar of Plymouth.

But, during the period of his studies, Mr. Bryant had not neglected the cultivation of his poetic abilities. In 1808, before he went to college, he had published, in Boston, a satirical poem, which attracted so much attention, that a second edition was demanded in the course of the next year. "When it is remembered," observes Mr. Leggett, "that this work was given to the public by an author who had not completed his fourteenth year, it cannot but be considered a remarkable instance of early maturity of mind. Pope's Ode to Solitude was written at twelve years of age; but it possesses neither fancy nor feeling, and except for the harmony of its versification, is entitled to no particular praise. His Translation of Sappho to Phaon is indeed an extraordinary production, and has uniformly received the warmest commendation from the critics. Yet, it is but a translation, while the poem of our author, written still earlier in life, is an original effort, and as such cannot but be received with greater surprise, on account of the wonderful precocity of judgment, wit, and fancy it exhibits. Like Cowley's Poetical Blossoms, it must have been composed when the writer was little more than thirteen; but in point of merit, it is decidedly superior to these effusions of unripened genius." Certain political strictures on Mr. Jefferson and his party, which this poem contained, have given rise, since Mr. Bryant has become conspicuous as an ardent friend of democracy, to charges of political inconsistency and faithlessness. They are charges, however, that require no refutation; and we refer to them now only to remark, that it is a singular evidence of Mr. Bryant's integrity and discernment, that the only point of attack which embittered enemies have found in his whole life, are his unconsidered mutterings when a stripling of only thirteen, living in times of high political excitement, and among a people who were all of one way of thinking. How few pass through life with characters so pure and unassailable!

But what chiefly contributed to give Mr. Bryant rank as a poet, was the publication, in the North American Review of 1816, of the poem of Thanatopsis, written four years before, in 1812. That a young man, not yet nineteen, should have produced a poem so lofty in conception, and so beautiful in execution, so full of chaste language, and delicate and striking imagery—and above all, so pervaded by a noble and cheerful religious philosophy—may well be regarded as one of the most wonderful events of literary history. And the wonder is increased when we learn, that this sublime lyric was followed, in the course of the few next years, by the "Inscription for an Entrance into a Wood," written in 1813, and published in the North American in 1817; by the "Waterfowl," written in in 1816, and published in 1818; and by the "Fragment of Simonides," written in 1811, and published in 1818. In 1821, he wrote his largest poem, "The Ages," which was delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College, and soon after published at Boston, in a small volume, in connection with the poems we have already mentioned, and some others. The appearance of this volume at once established the fame of Mr. Bryant as a poet.

In the same year Mr. Bryant married a young and amiable lady, Miss Fairchild, of Great Barrington, Mass., whither he had removed to prosecute his profession. He was both skilful and successful as a lawyer, but the labor of the vocation clashing with his poetic and moral sensibilities, induced him, after a ten years' practice, to remove, in 1825, to the city of New-York, to commence a career of literary effort. His fame, which had preceded him, soon procured him the editorship of the New-York Review, which he managed, in connection with other gentlemen, with great industry and talent. About the same time he joined Mr. Gulian C. Verplanck, Mr. Robert Sands, and Fitz-Greene Halleck, and several young artists of the city, in the production of an Annual called "The Talisman," which for beauty and variety of contents, has not been surpassed, even in these more prolific days of Annuals. Some of Mr. Bryant's contributions to it place him as a prose writer beside the best of any nation. The narrative of the "Whirlwind," for accurate description, condensed energy and eloquence of expression, and touching incident, has always struck us as one of the master-pieces of writing.

In 1827, Mr. Bryant became an editor of the New-York Evening Post, and since then, with the exception of the years 1834 and '49, when he travelled with his family in Europe, has had the almost exclusive control of that journal. It is by his conduct in this capacity, that he has acquired his standing as a politician.

We have cause, then, to speak of Mr. Bryant's political character. When he first undertook the management of the Evening Post, that paper had taken no decided stand in the politics of the day. Its leanings, however, were towards the aristocratic party. Mr. Bryant soon infused into its columns some portion of his native originality and spirit. Its politics assumed a higher tone, its disquisitions on public measures became daily more pointed and stirring, and, finally, it declared with great boldness on what was considered the more liberal side. From that day to this, it has taken a leading part in political controversies, and exerted a controlling influence over public opinion. In the fierce excitement kindled by General Jackson's attack upon the United States Bank, in the hot debates of the tariff and internal improvement questions, and in the deeply-agitating, almost convulsive contest which prostrated the banking system, the Evening Post maintained the strongest ground, was generally in advance of its day, and never faltered or flinched in the assertion of the severest tenets of the democratic creed. Unlike most journals, it did not satisfy itself with an undiscriminating defence of the temporary doctrines of party, but, regardless alike of friend and foe, yet cautiously and calmly, it expressed the whole truth in its length and breadth.

The manner in which Mr. Bryant has conducted these controversies is in the highest degree honorable to him. He has disdained the miserable arts by which small minds achieve the triumphs of their party or their own profit. Drawing his principles from the independent conclusions of his own mind, he has not shifted with every wind of doctrine. He has regarded politics, not as the strife of opposing interests, nor as a factious struggle for party supremacy, nor yet as a predatory warfare for the spoils of success, but as the solemn conflict of great principles. He has studied it as a comprehensive science, in which the rights and happiness of millions of men are interested, and which has issues and dependencies spreading over the events of many years. In this light, he has sought to teach its truths, with conscientious fidelity.

His intellectual adaptation to his calling is in many respects a striking one. With a mind of quick sagacity, strong reasoning powers, ready wit, and an inexhaustible fertility, he has been able to perform its incessant and laborious duties with signal success. Disciplined, as well as enriched by severe study, he has added to the learning of books the attainments of extensive observation and travel. His style is remarkable for its purity and elegance, no less than for the felicity of its illustrations. In controversy, he most frequently resorts to a caustic but graceful irony. He is playful without being vulgar, pointed without grossness, sharp as a Damascus blade, and just as polished. Nor are the compactness and strength of his expression less to be admired, than his uniform perspicuity and ease. That he is sometimes unnecessarily cutting, as some complain, is a fault, if it exist, that springs from the native integrity of his mind, and the secluded and refined nature of his pursuits. It has seemed to us, however, that this alleged severity is no more than the spirit of justice as it manifests itself in a pure and honest mind. For we doubt if a man more perfectly just, and less liable to be warped by the questionable compliances of society, ever lived.

We shall not enter into any criticism of Mr. Bryant's poetry here, because it has been so fully estimated before, that there is no need of doing so again; but there is one view which has been taken of it, on which we shall offer a few remarks. That view occurs in the following passage of Mr. J. R. Lowell's Fable for Critics:

"There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified,
As a smooth, silent iceberg that never is ignified,
Save when by reflection 'tis kindled o' nights
With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights.
He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation,
(There's no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-olation,)
Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,
But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on,—
He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on:
Unqualified merits, I'll grant, if you choose, he has 'em,
But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm;
If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,
Like being stirred up with the very North Pole,
"He is very nice reading in summer, but inter
Nos, we don't want extra freezing in winter;
Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is,
When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices.
But, deduct all you can, there's enough that's right good in him,
He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him;
And his heart in the midst of brick walls, or where'er it is,
Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities—
To you mortals that delve in this trade-ridden planet?
No, to old Berkshire's hills, with their limestone and granite.
If you're one who in loco (add foco here) desipis,
You will get out of his outermost heart (as I guess) a piece;
But you'd get deeper down if you came as a precipice,
And would break the last seal of its inwardest fountain,
If you could only palm yourself off for a mountain.
Mr. Quivis, or somebody quite as discerning,
Some scholar who's hourly expecting his learning,
Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but Wordsworth
Is worth near as much as your whole tuneful herd's worth.
No, don't be absurd, he's an excellent Bryant;
But, my friends, you'll endanger the life of your client,
By attempting to stretch him up into a giant:
If you choose to compare him, I think there are two persons
fit for a parallel—Thomson and Cowper;
I don't mean exactly,—there's something of each,
There's T.'s love of nature, C.'s penchant to preach;
Just mix up their minds so that C.'s spice of craziness
Shall balance and neutralize T.'s turn for laziness,
And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet,
Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot,—
A brain like a permanent strait-jacket put on
The heart which strives vainly to burst off a button,—
A brain which, without being slow or mechanic,
Does more than a larger less drilled, more volcanic;
He's a Cowper condensed, with no craziness bitten,
And the advantage that Wordsworth before him has written.

Now, what is the main charge here: that Mr. Bryant, while he has great sympathy with external nature, with mountains and precipices, has no sympathy with his fellow-man. 'Tis a weighty charge—the weightiest that can be made against a man or a poet. It says virtually that he has no soul, no heart, no impulse, no feeling, except for brutes and vegetables; in short, that he is no better than a heathen savage, a regular worshipper of stocks and stones, without natural affection, or without God in the world. "For," as the apostle queries very wisely, "if he love not man, whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen?" Your lines, then, Mr. Quiz, imply nothing less than black, bleak, barren, unredeemed practical Atheism!

But can there be the remotest semblance of truth in them? Is our Bryant such a heathen or atheist as not to know his fellow-men except they present themselves in the disguise of mountains, or he see them, like the prophet, as trees walking? We appeal to you, young ladies, who have been melted into tears by his pathos. We appeal to you, young men, whose every purpose of good has been quickened into livelier action by his words; and to you, old heads, whose experience has learned a riper and mellower wisdom from his fine meditative views of the ends and aims of life.

Yet, before you render your concurrent answers, with somewhat of indignation that anybody could put you upon the task, let us, in good American sort, begin with a few statistics. This is a question of fact, and since it has been raised, we will determine it by facts.

There are, in Carey & Hart's splendid edition of Bryant—we mean splendid as to the typography and paper, and not inclusive of those ill-drawn sketches of Leutze, who has made the women all German and given Mr. William Tell of Switzerland a straddle as wide as the Dardanelles, to say nothing of the hideous face of Rizpah and that Monk so excessively huge as to stand some forty feet from the pillar against which he leans—this splendid edition, we say, contains just one hundred and thirty-two poems, all told, to which,—stand up and listen, to the sentence, Mr. Lowell!—more than seventy refer wholly to subjects of an exclusively human interest—man in his being and doing, while nine out of ten of the rest, though occupied primarily with some phase of external nature, are yet so managed as to weave a deep and beautiful human philosophy,—with the dull and dead proceedings of the mechanical world. Yes, Mr. Critic, we say that there is a very fine, a very rich, a very noble and very touching vein of human sentiment, which runs through all of Bryant's writings, whereby, even as much as Wordsworth, he makes these mountains and precipices a part of our human life, and whereby, too, he makes the whole of us, who read him lovingly, that is, who read him at all, much better men and women, in our several spheres. No human sympathies forsooth! Why there are hundreds, nay, thousands, of us, who have derived many of their tenderest and noblest humanities from this very cold-blooded He-Daphne; this fleshless marble Apollo,—this Ice-Palace and Alpine glacier,—far shining brilliant, but oh how frigid!

By poems of an exclusive human interest, we mean, such as bear directly on man's experience and duties and relations in this life: such as the Ages, for instance, which commemorates the progress of humanity, through all its trials and triumphs: such as Thanatopsis, which makes the grave glorious, and pours the light of a lofty and serene religion around our darkest hour: such as the Old Man's Funeral, more divine in its descriptive beauty than the best sermon we ever heard: such as the Battle Field, which animates us with the voice of trumpet to meet the stern struggles of daily warfare: and such as many others in the same vein, to say nothing of the Murdered Traveller, the Massacre at Scio, the Hunter of the Prairies, the Living Lost, the Crowded Street, the Greek Boy, the Arctic Lover, the African Chief, the Child's Funeral, &c., &c. These could only have been prompted by a strong feeling of sympathy with man, and though executed with the nicest finish of art, are yet full of touching pathos and sentiment. The best proof of this is, that they invariably excite the emotions they were intended to excite—and that, too, in no milk and waterish way. They sink straight into the heart; they open the fountains of the feelings; they send the salt water to the eyes (if that be needed); they make the blood tingle; in short, they produce that all-overishness which comes upon one when he sees a fine action on the stage, or reads a noble passage in an oration, or looks at Lentze's Washington. Try it on yourself, if you don't believe it, or, what is better, try it on your little girl and boy, whose feelings are not yet case-hardened or frozen over! It will be a queer kind of frigidity that they will be witness to. Why, bless your soul, Mr. Lowell, we are free to confess that we have ourselves long, long ago, cried over the Indian Girl's Lament, and the Death of the Flowers,—yes, cried, and we say it without shame,—indeed, with a strange sense of regret that we cannot cry now over things of that sort. Eheu, eheu fugaces, &c.

More than that, we have asseverated that even in poems which are not immediately emotional, which are directed to some phase of mere external nature, the humanitary tendencies of Bryant break out, or shine through as veins of silver from the rocks. It is, in fact, one of his most charming peculiarities, that he habitually connects great moral and social truths with the various aspects of nature. His muse is never satisfied with celebrating the pomp and glory of the external world; she must find a deeper meaning in all than what the eye sees or the ear hears; she must trace some beautiful analogy, some spiritual significance on which both mind and heart can repose. Bryant's descriptions of nature, it is granted, are accurate to a line; what he speaks he knows; he finds no nightingales nor cowslips just three thousand miles away from where it is possible for them to live; and he never writes from his memory of books; yet his descriptions are more than mere descriptions,—dull scientific catalogues of quantities,—herbariums of dried plants,—museums of withered lifeless twigs, and of stuffed animals standing thereupon! They have all a meaning under them—a hidden wisdom—a genial yet profound human soul. It is thus that he has wound our affections around the North Star, the Winds, Monument Mountain, and even the Ruffled Grouse. How often, too, in the midst of his general meditations and philosophizings, does some touching individual allusion creep in, to show that the poet's heart is all alive with sensibility: as in the Hymn to Death, which closes with that solemn monody on the Departure of his Father:

"Alas! I little thought that the stern Power,
Whose fearful praise I sung, would try me thus,
Before the strain was ended. It must cease.—
For he is in his grave, who taught my youth
The art of verse, and in the bud of life
Offered me to the Muses. Oh, cut off
Untimely! when the reason in its strength
Ripened by years of toil and studious search,
And watch of Nature's silent lessons, taught
The hand to practice best the lenient art,
To which thou gavest thy laborious days,
And last, thy life. And, therefore, when the earth
Received thee, tears were in unyielding eyes,
And on hard cheeks, and they who deemed thy skill
Delayed their death hour, shuddered and turned pale
When thou wert gone. This faltering verse which thou
Shalt not, as wont, o'erlook, is all I have
To offer at thy grave,—this—and the hope
To copy thy example, and to leave
A name of which the wretched shall not think
As of an enemy's, whom they forgive
As all forgive the dead. Rest, therefore, thou
Whose early guidance trained my infant steps—
Rest, on the bosom of God, till the brief sleep
Of Death is over—and a happier life
Shall dawn to waken thine insensible dust!"

Does an iceberg write in that strain, we should like to know? Or does it mourn the death of the flowers, in this wise:

"And then I think of one, who in her youthful beauty died,
The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side,
In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forest cast the leaf,
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief.
Yet not unmeet it was that one like that young friend of ours,
So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers."

Or do icebergs yearn thus for communion in the after world with the beloved spirits of this:

"In meadows fanned by Heaven's life-breathing wind
In the resplendence of that glorious sphere,
And larger movements of the unfettered mind
Wilt thou forget the love that joined us here?

The love that lived through all the stormy past,
And meekly with my harsher nature bore,
And deeper grew and tenderer to the last,
Shall it expire with life and be no more?"

Truly, that iceberg theory must be surrendered, it must melt and give way before the gentle warmth of these words, and the thousand other such words which any reader of Bryant will instantly recall.

But, having convinced and confuted Mr. Critic, we will proceed to observe that there is after all a foundation of truth—a slender one—for his towering superstructure of ridicule. It is this: that in the outset of his career, Mr. Bryant's sympathies were, not too much with external Nature, but too little with Man. At the same time, we maintain that he has been constantly correcting this fault, and has written more and more, the older he has grown, to the human heart. He is not, and we hope never will be, a passionate writer, like Byron: he is not one who deals, like Burns, with the warm, gushing, homely affections of the poor every where: he has none of Schiller's energy of conviction: none of the naive, playful garrulous bonhomie of Beranger; simply, because he is of another order of man from all these. He is quiet, gentle, contemplative, modest,—wise. Yet if no lava-tides of passion burn through his veins, as were said to run through the veins of Alfieri; if he is not, as Carlyle said of Dante, "a red-hot cone of fire" shooting steadily up into the sky; if he cannot, with Shakespeare, or Goethe, make the blood quiver and thrill for weeks by a single word; he is still not a frigid, heartless writer, not altogether an ice mountain, which dazzles always but never warms. He is too earnest, too truthful, too good for that; too deeply penetrated by the spiritual realities of life, too democratic in his aspirations for our race, too hopeful of the future developments of society, in short, too finely touched with that feminine element which is the characteristic of genius. Besides, the great internal fires of the Earth, which shoot up in terrific and explosive violence, stupendous as they are, do not nurse the tender bud into life, nor cover the earth with verdure and fruit. This is left to the genial sunshine and the warm summer rains.

In private intercourse, Mr. Bryant is what all his writings, poetical as well as prose, indicate. His life is that of a student of elegant and lofty literature. He is reserved in his manner, almost to repulsiveness, yet in the social circle is witty, amiable, and affectionate. When his sympathies are interested, the spirit of tenderness and benevolence gleams like a flame from his eyes, and plays around his features in a beautiful radiance. In his opinions of men, he endeavors to be just; but when he is not just, the leaning is towards the side of mercy. A strong natural irritability has been disciplined by stern effort into the subjection of reason; and his tastes and habits, though refined by careful culture, are as simple as those of a child. Those who know him best are at a loss which most to admire, the superiority of his faculties, or the modesty of his deportment.

[SLIDING SCALES OF DESPAIR.]

The London Morning Chronicle, after an observation that a hurriedly written epitaph always appears, in the course of time, to require revisal, expresses its admiration for the good sense of a Parisian sculptor, who, when he took his instructions for a monument, insisted upon the veuve inconsolable or the heartstricken husband penning the intended inscription, and even signing the holograph, as a further authority to him for immortalizing so much utter despair. "The day before the record was actually to be cut for eternity, his habit was to send the inscription book to the mourner's house, lest any correction should be desired. The havoc which, upon receiving back the volume, he usually found made among laudatory adjectives and adverbs of infinity, was, to a good man, a delightful evidence of the cooling and healing powers of time."

[DEATH IN YOUTH.]

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

BY H. W. PARKER.

'Tis sad to leave the lovely world,
The blazoned banner of the sky,
And all the Earth's sublimity,
Are, day by day, in light unfurled,
In glory float before the eye.
The practised ear and eye are clearer,
The heart is deeper, Nature dearer,
From year to year: 'tis sad to die.

'Tis hard to leave the busy world—
To feel our courage mounting high
On thoughts that just begin to fly,
Then arrow-struck and swiftly hurled
Downward to dim obscurity.
Our life is always a beginning,
A hope of honor worth the winning;
We hope to do, and hoping, die.

'Tis hard to leave a stormy world,
When every watcher may descry
A happy Future drawing nigh,
And all the nations, onward whirled,
Behold the sunny shores that lie
Beyond that ever-heaving ocean—
The Present, with its wild commotion;
Alas, to see, to sink, to die.

And yet to leave a weary earth
For higher life, is well, we know,
Our being is a constant flow,
And death itself is newer birth;
The seed decays that it may grow;
A world sublime awaits the dying
Who purely lived. Away with sighing;
The Past is passed; 'tis well to go.

[A GERMAN HAND-BOOK OF AMERICA.]

We have at present in our hands several recently published European works relative to America, all of which possess more than ordinary claims to attention. We have, however, chosen the most unpretending as the subject of our present remarks, since, for the thinking majority of our readers, it will undoubtedly prove the most interesting. The volume to which we allude is entitled, Des Auswanderers' Handbuch, or, The Emigrants' Hand-book: a True Sketch of the United States of North America, and Reliable Counsellor for Men of every Rank and Condition who propose Emigrating Thither: by George M. von Ross, of North America, Editor of the "Allgemeinen Auswanderungs-Zeitung" (Universal Emigration Journal). Published at Elberfeld and Iserlohn, by Julius Baedeker.

The author, according to his preface, is an American by birth, and was for many years a farmer in the eastern, western, and southwestern sections of the United States. That he is not without learning and ability is evinced by his remarkably excellent work entitled Taschen-Fremdwörterbuch, oder Verdeutschung von mehr als 16,000 Fremdwörter—(i. e. a Pocket Dictionary of Foreign Words, or the adoption into German of more than Sixteen Thousand Foreign Words). This book is familiar in Germany, and exhibits great philological acumen, as well as a thorough knowledge of German in its minutest difficulties. At one time Mr. Ross distinguished himself by attacking Schröter's well-known pamphlet relative to the Catholic emigration to St. Mary's, in Pennsylvania, and he has since published a smaller work for emigrants, entitled Rathschlage und Warnungen, or, Counsels and Warning.

The performance now before us is written in that straightforward practical style which may be best characterized by the statement that "He had something to say, and he said it." That it is impartial is not its least merit. A foreigner, it is true, may occasionally be found who passes unprejudiced judgments on another country, but that any one still retaining home-born sympathies and feelings with his native land should do so is a wonder. And we deem it a creditable thing in this work, that where he is called upon to describe any calling, trade, or profession, he is not afraid to say boldly—In this calling the German cannot succeed—in that, he is unapt—in a third, the American surpasses him; while, on the other hand, he amply encourages the emigrant as regards occupations for which he is qualified. Many writers of such books have cast a couleur de rose light over every thing (well knowing that by such means their books would be more saleable), and induced industrious men, following callings unheard of in this country, to emigrate, in the absurd hope of finding more constant and better paid employment here than at home. An intelligent American, who would not cross the Atlantic, or hardly ascend in a balloon, without previously calculating the time and chances of arrival or descent, and who certainly would do neither without first informing himself as to every imaginable particular of his ultimate destination, can hardly conceive the vast necessity of such books. He would, by every means, gather information from those who had visited in person the destined land. Not so the common German emigrant. Thousands embark in the belief that New-York is some mysterious golden-glowing Indian city, surrounded by orange groves and palm-trees. In the village of Weinsberg, in Suabia, several years since, a well-educated student was overheard to remark of some peasants, "Tell them that in your country the people have two heads, and they'll believe you."

Let us now, by extracts, give our readers an idea of the manner in which Mr. Von Ross describes the land of his birth to the land of his adoption. The first item of interest is his sketches of the respective characteristics of the Yankee and Southerner.

"Superficial observers have spoken of the inhabitant of the Northern States as if money were his only aim—as if he were inspired only by selfishness and avarice—and as if he estimated men by the weight of their purses. But those who regard him closely, and judge otherwise than by first appearances, will discover in him a calculating (berechnenden), enterprising, thoroughly practical man, caring little for pleasure, and seeking his recreation (erholung) in the domestic circle. They will find in him a man who, with iron industry, fights his way through life, esteeming wealth, it is true—not the inherited, however, but the earned, which testifies to the ability of its possessor. A man, in fine, who with unbending courage bears the blow of destiny, and is thereby only stimulated to new exertions. The Southerner, on the contrary, is more chivalresque—he lives to live. The climate in which he is born has also a material influence upon his manners, customs, and character: effecting, in reality, the same difference which we observe between the cool, reflective, tough North German, and the jovial, genial, easily excited South German, or Frenchman. We would hardly have deemed it necessary to inform the reader that in thus sketching the inhabitants of the United States in light outlines, we do not include the mixed and Europeanized population of the Atlantic cities, had we not learned by experience that many travellers slightly acquainted only with the Atlantic States and their vicinity, have from these sketched all North America and its people. He who would know the American, must also know the cities of the interior.

"If, in addition to these characteristics, we should describe the personal and distinctive appearance of the Northerner and Southerner, we would say that the first are, generally speaking, large, tall, and spare—their ladies beautiful and of delicate complexion; while the Southerners are broad-shouldered and powerful—the female sex being voluptuously formed and beautiful, but when not subject to the influence of exercise and fresh air of a sallow complexion.

"Every North American is—and who has a better right so to be—an enthusiastic honorer (vereher) of his fatherland, but he does not measure out by inches the limits of his native land, or bound his patriotism by the clod on which his cradle rested—for to him the roar of the Rio del Norte, the thunder-peal of Niagara, and the murmur of the Pacific or Atlantic oceans have equally a familiar, home-like sound. Nor less than the land of his birth does he esteem its laws, constitution, and institutions, and regards them in nowise as oppressive, but as protective. Those laws he made for himself, and chose himself as their executor. Respect for the Law is to the American self-respect.

"The so often blamed national pride of the American, if not really praiseworthy, is at least pardonable; for a nation which could rise like a single man, and, at every sacrifice, throw off the yoke of England—a nation which has given birth to such men as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and many others whose names are mentioned with wonder all over this world—a nation which occupies the first rank in trade, commerce, and industry, may be proud, and must be proud, as long as its power is free from sloth and lethargy."

And here we may be permitted to interrupt for an instant our noble Man of Ross (the reader will observe that he wears the aristocratic von), for the sake of saying a good word over this honest, hard-fisted go-ahead eulogium of our country. There be those ultra-Europeanized, or soi-disant refinedly educated Americans, who will complacently smile at this recapitulation of United States excellencies, and if slangily inclined, brand it as "pea-nut," "stump eloquence," and "Fourth-of-Julyism." The sum-total being, that it is vulgar rhodomontade. With all due respect, we think differently. Let the reader remember that this is addressed to a German—a foreign—audience, who are greatly in need just at present of a few scraps of such oratory as this, were it only to counteract the malignant influences of the English tourists, whose works are far more extensively read in Germany than we imagine. Mrs. Trollope's work on America, which, at the present day, is regarded only with contempt or laughter by the educated in England, has been, and is even yet, read with a feeling akin to wonder by the honest simple-hearted Germans. A wonder indeed so intense, at the marvellous marvels therein narrated, that it generally results in inspiring in the mind of the reader credulous enough to believe, an intense desire to visit the land of liberty.

"In no part of the world are ladies treated with so much respect as in North America. They can make, by land or water, the longest journeys without the apprehension of having their sense of delicacy offended by hearing an improper expression, and, as far as public opinion is concerned, the law allows them privileges greater than they obtain in any other country. By marriage, the wife enters at once into equal possession of her husband's property; the simple testimony of a woman is of the same force as the oath of a man, and the testimony of a woman when confirmed by oath, can only be neutralized by the oaths of three men. The ill-treatment of a wife by her husband is severely punished; but such cases are as unusual of occurrence as that a woman takes undue advantage of her rights. It may moreover be confidently asserted, that America is the true home of connubial love. The consciousness of her rights gives the American lady a dignity of manner which admirably blends with the amiable attractions of her sex. Not a little of the fascination so peculiar to the ladies of North America is, however, due to the circumstance that no woman—not even the poorest—is ever obliged to perform any task based upon merely physical strength. She rules at home undisputed; and this is the reason why the poorest house in America is a model of neatness and order."

"'Help yourself' (aid yourself), is a favorite phrase of the American, and which has given him the character of wanting in charity, while in fact it is nothing but a simple indication of the means by which every man in sound health can in that country relieve his poverty. Work in America is neither difficult to obtain, nor is it hemmed in and oppressed by the regulations and requirements of guilds, unions, and peculiar laws. Beggars and vagabonds find indeed no favor in his eyes; but unfortunate guiltless poverty invariably meets with his warmest aid, as is evidenced by the numerous hospitals, institutions, &c., which would astonish any one reflecting on the youth of the country. Kindness and hospitality may also be included among his virtues.

"From which the reader may justly infer, that beggary and theft are rare in the United States; and though it may be alleged that such occurrences are frequent in the large cities, it may be at the same time remembered that these are the rendezvous of the scum of all nations, while on the other hand the fact, that in the country, and even in the villages, locks are rare on house and stable doors, affords the strongest confirmation that America presents by far fewer instances of robbery than the greater part of Europe."

After which, Herr Von Ross indulges in a few attractive remarks on the facility of marriage in America, which would, however, prove far less astonishing to our American, than to his German readers: concluding with the following paragraph, which is not devoid of a certain degree of observation:

"Young married couples whose means will not permit them to keep house, pass their first year of wedded life in boarding-houses, by which means the facilities to marriage are greatly extended."

The following passages on our alleged want of sociability identify us to a certain degree, and to our minds not unpleasantly, with our English cousins. Of all persons, those to be most pitied or despised are "the weak brethren," who, devoid of internal or intellectual resources, or manly self-reliance, declaim against a nation or a society at large because its members, forsooth, do not receive them with open arms. The true citoyen du monde—the genuine cosmopolite, never has occasion to make this complaint against any country. For the more a man depends on himself and the less on others for happiness, just in that proportion will it be his luck to attract sympathy and sociability when among strangers. Narrow-minded Spaniards, and those of other nations, who travel for the express purpose of getting into fashionable society, are peculiarly liable to this reproach. Such a foreigner have we heard, minutely and boringly detailing to a stern circle of impregnable natives, the noble and munificent style of hospitality with which they would be treated, were they visitors in his fatherland: "In my contree 'spose you come strangére in one cittee, a gentleman take you in hees house. In ze morning come one buttiful gairl wiz coffees. Zen dey send you one horse carriage for make de promenàde. Aftair dinner come buttiful gairls again wiz ticket on silvare waiter for whole opera box! Wat you sink of dat, hey?" "Think!" replied a native, "why I think that you take great pains to make a strange gentleman feel very uncomfortable." But to return to our writer.

"Strangers who have hastily travelled and superficially examined America, and those who have judged by the statements of others rather than by their own experience, have ascribed to the American a want of sociability and a stiff and repulsive manner towards strangers. True it is that in America it is no very easy matter to become intimate with a man or establish one's self in his family circle—but he who has once attained this point, becomes a home friend in the fullest sense of the word, and will find hidden beneath the stern, earnest exterior of the American, a warm heart, and in his conversation a remarkable degree of familiar confidence. Those who have detected in the confident manner and sense of independence which the American manifests, any thing approaching to presumption, must assuredly have been the newly arrived, who could not accustom themselves to the idea that even laborers should consider that they had with others equal right to express their opinions. The man, however, who is free from prejudice will not fail to admire a nation, wherein the poorest is on an equality with the richest, and where the rich, at least, do not take it on themselves to assert their superiority. Seldom, indeed, do we find a native American, conscious of his right to equality, giving a stranger (his possible superior in intelligence or education) to understand that he considers himself quite as good as any one—the right is to him a thing so natural, that it never even occurs to him to boast of it. This is, unfortunately, far from being the case with the majority of the more ignorant German emigrants, accustomed in their own country to oppressive laws, and not unfrequently hard treatment, yet without learning the orderly conduct which these should have taught, and who think that in America they have a right to do as they please. The American Germans seem to entertain the opinion that it is their republican duty, at all times, with or without occasion or provocation, to give to every man belonging in Europe to the higher classes, to understand and feel that the difference of rank is not recognized—as if indeed, in America far more than in Europe, education and culture did not of themselves indicate the rank which a man occupies. These American Germans all nourish the jealousy of trade (Brodneid) the miserable little hatreds, and the whole range of German disunity or local enmities, which they brought over with them, with a care and zeal worthy of a better cause. Seldom indeed do we hear a German there call himself German, he remains as of old a Prussian, a Bavarian, a Hanoverian, a Hessian, or an Altenburger. Even the irritation between North and South Germans still continues, but let one of them only get together so many scraps of English as will barely render him intelligible, then he denies his fatherland—Americanizes both Christian and surnames—adopts tobacco chewing, and other evil customs of the New World, and draws on himself with full justice the contempt of his more sensible fellow-countrymen and the ridicule of the Americans. Let no one misunderstand us, we pronounce this hard judgment not against the entire German population of North America, but still a great—a very great portion thereof are with the fullest justice obnoxious to these charges, and he who has lived any time in the German districts of North America, and more particularly among the German, or German descended population of Pennsylvania, will agree with us with all his heart."

These are not amiable words, even if merited, but we must still admire the energy with which the blow is given. Often have we despised the contemptible and weak spirit which could induce so many almost newly arrived Germans to change fine sounding and easily enunciable names, into vulgar, snobbish appellatives for which no child would thank them. Often have we wondered at the pitiable impertinence with which ignorant Deutschers have taken it upon themselves, in the second rate American-German journals to abuse our national observance of the Sabbath, or our respect for women, and despised the small-minded eagerness with which they caught up any petty disrespect toward females, and cited it complacently as a proof that this noble attribute was on the wane in the land of their adoption. Often have we been amazed at the readiness with which illiterate rascals, whose ideas of government or political liberty, were at home bounded by the word: "Polizei," "Strafe," "Wanderbuch," "Zuchthaus," and "Fechten" take it upon themselves to curse, ban and vilify the only land in the world where they could find bread or protection. But again, with Mr. Ross, we earnestly protest that we do not believe that such conduct or such foolish ingratitude can ever with justice be attributed to any respectable or well educated Germans. Some few there have been, indeed, who, urged by the selfish stimulant of a desire for popularity, have thus flattered the prejudices of their more ignorant fellow-countrymen, but none who have thus spoken from the heart.

In conclusion, we may remark that if, as has generally been said, we are a sensitive race, attaching undue importance to the good opinion of our neighbors, and striving infinitely more than we need to keep up a good national reputation, we ought to be much obliged to all who, like Mr. Ross, preach to other countries in their own tongue and with such a peculiarly distinct enunciation, their candid and unbiased opinion of their native land. What must strike the reader is indeed the remarkably unembarrassed and independent air with which he addresses his audience, and the coolness with which, on their own ground, he points out their own defects, and their general inferiority to the freemen of "this great and glorious country." He tells them that America is a land of hard work—a church-going, Sabbath-keeping, God-fearing, moral land, for which they must prepare themselves; and no Methodist ever assured his flock of his solemn conviction that they were all irreclaimable sinners, with greater earnestness than Mr. Ross announces to his public, in the plainest terms, that the great majority of the German emigrants to America are a pack of graceless, narrow-minded, ignorant, fatherland-denying knaves; ending with an earnest appeal to all whom it may concern, or are therein informed, to know if they do not with heart and soul (aus vollum Flerzen) coincide with him in these views. But the American reader who for an instant imagines that Mr. Ross will lose either popularity or reputation among his auditors, is decidedly mistaken. Accustomed as we are to regard with nervous anxiety the slightest opinion of the most insignificant foreigner regarding our country, and to raise high very tornadoes of indignation against such writers as have abused our own manners and customs, we can hardly conceive that an author after "giving it" to his readers in such a remarkably hot-and-heavy style, and, to make all perfectly intelligible, concluding with the assurance that it is from his very heart, can still proceed quietly, editing a paper, keeping up his list, and remaining unmobbed.

But we trust that the day is not distant when foreigners will no longer be able to taunt us with undue sensitiveness. So rapidly have we of late years increased in power, in wealth, in influence, that our conviction of our own might has not kept pace with its growth. Like the young giant in Rabelais, we have lain in our cradle without an attempt to break the chain. But with the consciousness of our vast and immovable moral and political superiority (a consciousness which despite the good self-opinion so generally attributed to Americans, has hitherto scarce dawned on us), will come a quiet disregard of the united abuse and laughter of all Europe. A Dickens may then issue his "Notes"—a Marryatt, publish his "Diary"—without attracting the attention or anger of the American press from Maine to Mexico.

And why need such works irritate our entire public now? Nay, we believe the period of our extravagant sensibility to foreign opinions must at length be considered as past, and that hereafter we shall be more in peril of excess of recklessness and bravado. The effect of this loss of a national characteristic we shall not here speculate upon. But a brief period will be necessary for its illustration.

[GONDOLETTAS.]

A RECOLLECTION OF MENDELSSHON'S "SONGS WITHOUT WORDS."

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

BY ALICE B. NEAL.

THE PARTING.

Far out in the moonlight how softly we glide!
Scarce knowing, scarce heeding the lapse of the tide.
I watch the light shadows steal over thy face,
And pillow thy head in a last, long embrace.

Thy heart keeps low music still beating to mine,
Thy white arms around me I slowly entwine—
I part the wild tresses that shroud thy pale cheek,
I kiss thee—I clasp thee—no word dare I speak.

Alas! that star-light should fade from the sky!
Alas for the parting that draweth so nigh!
Glide slowly—ye ripples—flow softly, oh tide!
For the silence of death, must the living divide.

MEMORIES.

Again, but alone, I am out on the sea—
I come, where so often I floated with thee;
I list for the tones of thy low evening hymn—
But the breeze hath a moan—and the starlight is dim.

I think of thee here, of thy deep mournful eyes,
That spoke to my own in mute, thrilling replies;
Of thy gentle caress, and thy cold brow, so pale,
When I pressed that last kiss—but I utter no wail!

I garner in silence the memories of years,
With yearnings too tender, too hopeless for tears;
For down 'neath the stillness and hush of its waves,
The tide of my life, like the sea, hath its graves!

[THE DUTCH GOVERNORS OF NEW AMSTERDAM.]

COMMUNICATED TO THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE

BY JOHN ROMEYN BRODHEAD.[2]

In the year 1649, there appeared in Holland a small anonymous pamphlet of forty-two pages, bearing the imprint of Antwerp, and entitled Breeden Raedt, aen de Vereenighde Nederlandeche Provintien, or Plain Counsels to the United Netherlands' Provinces. It is very rare; the only copy I know of, in this country, is the one with which I have been kindly furnished by my friend Mr. Campbell, the Deputy Librarian at the Hague.

[2] The substance of this interesting article was read by Mr. Brodhead at the last meeting of the Historical Society.—Ed. International.

It purports to be a conversation between ten Dutch interlocutors, respecting the trade of the Netherlands West India Company. The chief speaker, is a Dutch "schipper," who had been in New Netherland. In the course of his remarks, he gives many very interesting and novel details, concerning the two directors, Kieft and Stuyvesant, and their respective administrations. As some of these particulars have never before been known to our historians, I propose to translate a few of the most interesting. It is very evident, however, that the narrator was not a mere schipper of a merchant vessel. He was intimately acquainted with the details of the local politics of New Netherland; and evidently was personally unfriendly both to Kieft and Stuyvesant. From internal evidence, and for various other reasons, I have been led to believe that this little work was prepared by or under the superintendence of Cornelius Melyn, who had been one of the foremost and most consistent advocates of the popular cause under Kieft, and who suffered gross injustice from the tyrannical and oppressive conduct of Stuyvesant. The title-page of the tract states that it was "prepared and compiled from divers true and veritable memorials, by 'I. A.,'" who is described as G.W.O., perhaps Gezaghebber, or Director of the West India Company. Whoever these initials, I. A., are meant to represent, the author seems to have fully adopted the views and expressed the feelings of Melyn. While, therefore, some allowance should be made for occasional exhibitions of personal bitterness, the statements in the Breeden Raedt appear to be entitled to full credit, respecting the facts which they relate. Some of these are entirely novel; others are confirmatory of what we have before known; all of them seem to be entirely harmonious with the story of New Netherland.

The antecedents of director Kieft, (of whom we have heretofore known little or nothing previously to his arrival at Manhattan in 1638), are thus related: "William Kieft was born at Amsterdam. From youth he was educated as a merchant; and, after having taken charge of, or rather neglected, his own and his master's business, for a certain time, at Rochelle, he happened to fail there. Upon which, according to custom, his portrait was stuck upon the gallows there, as several living witnesses, who have seen it with their own eyes, can yet testify. This man, having been for some time out of business, was employed to ransom several Christian prisoners out of Turkey. To such a bankrupt the money was intrusted. He went and freed some, for whom there was the least to pay; but the others, whose friends had contributed the most money, he left in bondage. For these, their parents and friends were once more obliged to raise funds. This fine brother was appointed by the directors, to be Director over the inhabitants and trade of New Netherland in the year 1637."

The events of the Indian war in 1643, are referred to with a distinctness which leaves little doubt that the narrator was himself, one of the witnesses of them. In these respects, the Breeden Raedt confirms the statements of De Vries and other authorities in the Holland documents at Albany. With respect to the transactions on Long Island in 1644, and the civil and religious difficulties which divided the people against director Kieft until his successor arrived in 1647, the pamphlet exhibits several interesting and novel details.

Stuyvesant is described as "the son of a clergyman in Friesland, and who formerly, at Franiker (the seat of a famous high school, now extinct), had robbed the daughter of his own landlady. Being caught in the fact, he had been let off for his father's sake; otherwise it would perhaps have been there, that he must have paid the penalty of his first offence." On his arrival in New Netherland, Stuyvesant is described as conducting himself as arrogantly as the "Grand Duke of Moscovy," and as promptly taking the side of his predecessor Keift, against Melyn and Kuyter, the leaders of the popular party. In this, the Breeden Raedt confirms our official accounts. The two patriots were tried, convicted, and sentenced to be fined, and transported to Holland. They were sent as prisoners on board the ship Princess, in which the late director Kieft, and Dominie Everardus Bogardus, the first clergyman in New Netherland also embarked. The ship struck on the English coast, "where this ungodly Kieft seeing death before his eyes, sighing very deeply, dubiously addressed both these (Kuyter and Melyn): 'Friends, I have done you wrong, can you forgive me?' The ship being broken into eight fragments, drove the whole night in the water. By daybreak, the greater part (of passengers) were drowned. Cornelius Melyn lost his son. Dominie Bogardus, Kieft, Captain John De Vries, and a great number of people were drowned. There was swallowed up a great treasure with Kieft, for the ship was returning with more than four hundred thousand guilders. Joachim Petersen Kuyter remained alone on one of the fragments of the ship, upon which there was a piece of cannon sticking out of a port, with which he was saved at daylight. He had taken it for a man and had spoken to it, but receiving no answer thought he was dead. In the end, he was thrown on shore with it, to the great astonishment of the English, who came down to the strand by thousands, and who set up the piece of cannon as a lasting memorial. Melyn floating on his back in the sea, fell in with others who were clinging to a part of the wreck, and was driven on a sand bank, which became dry with the ebb tide." From this place they made their escape to the shore. Kuyter and Melyn, after saving their lives, became most solicitous to secure their papers, which were to serve for their defence in Holland against the sentences which had been pronounced on them in New Netherland. After three days' labor, they fished up a box containing these valued papers. With these they proceeded to Amsterdam, and laid their case before the States General, which granted them an appeal, and meanwhile suspended Stuyvesant's sentence.

After describing the escape of the "patriots," Kuyter and Melyn, and their safe arrival in Holland with their papers, the Breeden Raedt continues its review of the Provincial administration, and gives some particulars respecting the chief officers and public affairs in New Netherland, to be found no where else. The narrative is brought down to August, 1649, at which time Melyn, who had returned to New Netherland, seems to have embarked a second time for Holland, to bring his case again before the States General. He appears to have sailed in the same vessel which conveyed Van der Donck, Couwenhoven, and Bont, the delegates who had been commissioned to carry over the "Vertoogh," or remonstrance of the commonalty of New Netherland, against Stuyvesant's arbitrary government. The Breeden Raedt appears to have been printed soon after Melyn's return to the Fatherland. As it contains very severe reflections upon official persons in the Province, and as it was an anonymous tract, it was perhaps judged prudent to publish it with the imprint of Antwerp. I think, however, that it was actually printed in Holland. The Breeden Raedt was one of the earliest, if not the very earliest separate pamphlet respecting New Netherland. It was followed in 1650, by the Vertoogh; in 1651, by Hartger's description; and in 1655, by Van der Donck's larger work, and by De Vries's Journal printed at Alckmaer.

[AN AUTUMN BALLAD.]

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

BY W. A. SUTLIFFE.

Come, say the Ave-Mary prayer.
And chant the Miserere!
The autumn frosts have chilled the air,
The winter groweth dreary!
The willow, bending o'er the tomb,
Moans dolefully for ever,—
The north-wind bloweth in the gloom,
The morning cometh never!

Avaunt, thou memory, springing up
Like demon bold uprising!
Full cold and bitter is our cup,
Nor needeth thine apprising!
The Future glimmereth in the dark,
We hear the billows roaring,
The wind beleaguereth our barque,
The storm will soon be pouring.

Of all the visions of our youth,
The mind is disenchanted;
When manhood sternly paints the truth,
The soul is sadly haunted.
The sun is sepulchred of night,
The flower in autumn bendeth;
Fair fruitfulness has soonest blight—
All beauty graveward tendeth.

The world is petrified at heart,
No sympathy is welling;
Each plays in mine his soulless part,
Too woful 'tis for telling.
Then say the Ave-Mary prayer,
And chant the Miserere!
The autumn frosts have chilled the air—
The winter groweth dreary!

Bethink ye that He made ye all!
The same God bends above ye!
The same God spreads the light or pall,
The same God deigns to love ye!
The wind that blows the cultured lea.
And through the rich man's hedges,
Sighs round the poor man pleasantly,
And o'er the barren ledges.

The rich go up on Fortune's wheel.
The poor are crushed beneath it;
Oppression draws the bloody steal,
Alas, when will she sheathe it!
Then say the Ave-Mary prayer,
And chant the Miserere!
The autumn frosts have chilled the air,
The winter groweth dreary!

The beldame sitteth at her loom,
She weepeth 'mid the weaving;
The orphan lingers at the tomb,
He's mickle cause for grieving.
The dust is laid with dropping tears;
The slave cowers 'neath the scourging;
Each day is filled with busy fears,
Like restless spirits urging.

O, God! within the Heaven unseen!
When will the sun be shining;
Until the spring-time cometh green,
Forgive us for our pining!
Then say the Ave-Mary prayer,
And chant the Miserere!
The autumn frosts have chilled the air,
The winter groweth dreary!

[CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING][3]

No work has yet appeared this season in which the better portion of the reading public have felt so deep an interest as in the Life of John Sterling, by Thomas Carlyle. But this is less a consequence of the subject than of the authorship. Any thing from the hand of Carlyle is sure of a large audience, but he has hitherto done nothing in which his personality was likely to be so much involved as in this life of his friend "Archæus." We copy from the London Spectator the following reviewal of it:

"The domain of political economy is not unlimited; the laws of supply and demand are not the only or the strongest forces at work in nature. Here is a man whom the world would have been well content to leave quiet in his early grave by the sea-shore in the sweetest of English islands; to leave him there to the soft melodies of the warm wind and the gentle rain, and the pious visits now and then of those who knew and loved him when his eye was bright and his voice eloquent with sparkling thoughts and warm affections. He had done nothing that the public cared for; had left no traces on the sands of Time that the next tide would not have effaced. But he lived amongst men who write books, amongst some of the very best of such; and two of the foremost of them loved him so well, that they could not let his memory die,—thought that the positive actual results of his life made known to the public were but faint indications of the power that lay in him though sorely foiled and baffled, and that he in his individual spiritual progress typified better than most the struggle that the age is passing through, its processes, and its results. But the two men, though united in affection for Sterling, were so different in other respects, that the memorial raised by the one could scarcely fail to be unsatisfactory to the other. Archdeacon Hare, the author of the earlier biography, is a man of encyclopœdic knowledge,—a profound classical scholar, the most learned and philosophical of modern English theologians, at once accurate and wide in his acquaintance with European history and literature. And this large survey of the forms under which the men of the past have thought and acted, has not led in him to an indifference to all forms, but rather to a keener sense of the organic vitality of forms, especially of national institutions, whether civil or ecclesiastical polities, states or churches. Moreover, apart from this general characteristic, which would lead to an intellectual and practical reverence for the institutions of his own land, and a hesitating caution in the introduction of constitutional changes, Mr. Hare is an English churchman of no ordinary cast. He has passed from the region of traditional belief, has skirted the bogs and quicksands of doubt and disbelief, and has found firm footing where alone it seems possible, in a revelation whose letter is colored by the human media through which it has passed, and in a faith whose highest mysteries are not only harmonious with but necessary complements to the truths of reason. The English Church is to him the purest embodiment of his religious idea, as the English constitution was to him, in common with Niebuhr, Coleridge, and other great thinkers, of the idea of a state. Such a man could not write a life like Sterling's without feeling that his relation to Christianity and the Church was the great fact for him as for all of us; and that the change in him, from hearty acceptance of Christian doctrine and church organization to a rejection of the former and something very like contempt for the latter, needed explanation. That explanation he has sought in the overthrow of the balance of Sterling's life through repeated attacks of illness, which shut him out from practical duties, and threw him entirely upon speculation, thereby disproportionately developing the negative side of him, already too strong from early defects of education: and few persons will, we should think, be found to deny Mr. Hare's general position, that the pursuit of speculative philosophy as the business of life has this tendency; Mr. Carlyle, we should have supposed least of all men. But a special cause interferes with Mr. Carlyle's recognition of the principle as applicable to Sterling. Christianity, as understood commonly perhaps everywhere, except, it may be, at Weimar and Chelsea, and church formulas certainly as understood everywhere, he is in the habit of classing under a category which in his hands has become an extensive one—that of shams. He calls them by various forcible but ugly names,—as "old clothes," "spectral inanities," "gibbering phantoms," or, with plainer meaning, "huge unveracities and unrealities." That Sterling at any time of his life accepted these for "eternal verities" he cannot consider a step from the "no" to the "yes," nor their repudiation as a step backwards from the "yes" to the "no." Let him speak for himself. He is commenting on Sterling's entry into orders as Mr. Hare's curate at Hurstmonceaux:

"Concerning this attempt of Sterling's to find sanctuary in the old Church, and desperately grasp the hem of her garment in such manner, there will at present be many opinions; and mine must be recorded here in flat reproval of it, in mere pitying condemnation of it, as a rash, false, unwise and unpermitted step. Nay, among the evil lessons of his time to poor Sterling, I cannot but account this the worst; properly indeed, as we may say, the apotheosis, the solemn apology and consecration, of all the evil lessons that were in it to him. Alas! if we did remember the divine and awful nature of God's Truth, and had not so forgotten it as poor doomed creatures never did before,—should we, durst we in our most audacious moments, think of wedding it to the world's untruth, which is also, like all untruths, the devil's? Only in the world's last lethargy can such things be done, and accounted safe and pious! Fools! 'Do you think the living God is a buzzard idol,' sternly asks Milton, 'that you dare address Him in this manner?' Such darkness, thick sluggish clouds of cowardice and oblivious baseness, have accumulated on us; thickening as if towards the eternal sleep! It is not now known, what never needed proof or statement before, that Religion is not a doubt; that it is a certainty,—or else a mockery and horror. That none or all of the many things we are in doubt about, and need to have demonstrated and rendered probable, can by any alchemy be made a 'Religion' for us; but are and must continue a baleful, quiet or unquiet, Hypocrisy for us; and bring—salvation, do we fancy? I think it is another thing they will bring; and are, on all hands, visibly bringing, this good while!—--"

Herein consists the whole difference between Hare and Carlyle in their views of Sterling's career. They looked at it from such opposite points that what is the zenith to one is the nadir to the other. What Sterling himself thought of it, was strikingly expressed to his brother, Captain Anthony Sterling, by a comparison, of his case "to that of a young lady who has tragically lost her lover, and is willing to be half-hoodwinked into a convent, or in any noble or quasi-noble way to escape from a world which has become intolerable." The truth seems to be, that Sterling went into orders under the combined influence of remorse for the share he had inadvertently had in causing the disastrous fate of a near relative (Mr. Boyd, who was shot with Torrijos in Spain), and of a gradual disenchantment from trust in mere political schemes for the regeneration of mankind,—a disease more common to the genial young men of his time than of ours. That while in the exercise of his duties as a parish-priest he was energetic, useful, and happy, the evidence in Mr. Hare's book is fully sufficient to show. It is impossible to say whether his scepticism would have come upon him had he continued in that active career; but it is certainly a gratuitous supposition of Mr. Carlyle that the ill-health which put an end to it was only the outward and ostensible cause of its termination, and does not appear to be borne out by a single letter or expression of Sterling's own. Indeed, for years after he left Hurstmonceaux, he seemed to continue as firm in his attachment to Christianity as when he was there; though, on the other hand, it may well be doubted whether a man of Sterling's intellect, who would surrender his beliefs to Strauss's Leben Jesu, is likely in the present day to keep them under any conceivable circumstances. We think that Mr. Hare on the one hand has attributed too exclusive an influence to Sterling's forced inactivity, and Mr. Carlyle has certainly not taken it sufficiently into account as a determining cause of his skepticism.

[3] The Life of John Sterling. By Thomas Carlyle. Published by Chapman & Hall. [Boston, republished by Ticknor, Reed & Fields, 1851.]

But whatever subject Mr. Carlyle takes up, and whether he be right or wrong in his opinions, he is sure to write an interesting book. He is never wearisome, and whether his tale have been twice told or not, he clothes it by his original treatment with an attractive charm that few writers can lend even to an entirely new subject. The maxim of the author of Modern Antiquity, that

"True genius is the ray that flings
A novel light o'er common things,"

has seldom been better illustrated than by this life of Sterling. The facts are most of them neither new nor of a nature in themselves to excite any very strong interest, but the details of the life are told with such simplicity, and yet with such constant reference to the grand educational process which they collectively make up, that one seems listening to a narrative by Sterling's guardian angel, loving enough to sympathize in the smallest minutiæ, and wise enough to see in each of them the greatness of the crowning result. Nor is this impression in the least impaired by the insignificance of the sum total of Sterling's actual achievements. For had they been tenfold greater than they were, they would have been as nothing in the presence of that which Mr. Carlyle looks to as the soul's great achievement—heroic nobleness of struggle and a calm abiding of the issue. After noticing the purity of Sterling's character, and his conformity to "the so-called moralities," his biographer goes on to say:

"In clear and perfect fidelity to Truth wherever found, in childlike and soldierlike, pious and valiant loyalty to the Highest, and what of good and evil that might send him,—he excelled among good men. The joys and the sorrows of his lot he took with true simplicity and acquiescence. Like a true son, not like a miserable mutinous rebel, he comported himself in this Universe. Extremity of distress—and surely his fervid temper had enough of contradiction in this world,—could not tempt him into impatience at any time. By no chance did you ever hear from him a whisper of those mean repinings, miserable arraignings and questionings of the Eternal Power, such as weak souls even well disposed will sometimes give way to in the pressure of their despair; to the like of this he never yielded, or showed the least tendency to yield;—which surely was well on his part. For the Eternal Power, I still remark, will not answer the like of this, but silently and terribly accounts it impious, blasphemous, and damnable, and now as heretofore will visit it as such. Not a rebel but a son, I said; willing to suffer when Heaven said, Thou shalt;—and withal, what is perhaps rarer in such a combination, willing to rejoice also, and right cheerily taking the good that was sent, whensoever or in whatever form it came.

"A pious soul we may justly call him; devoutly submissive to the will of the Supreme in all things: the highest and sole essential form which Religion can assume in man, and without which all forms of religion are a mockery and a delusion in man."

Every one not personally acquainted with Sterling will feel that the great interest of the book is in the light thrown by it on Mr. Carlyle's own belief. For good or evil, Mr. Carlyle is a power in the country; and those who watch eagerly the signs of the times have their eyes fixed upon him. What he would have us leave is plain enough, and that too with all haste, as a sinking ship that will else carry us—state, church, and sacred property—down along with it. But whither would he have us fly? Is there firm land, be it ever so distant? or is the wild waste of waters, seething, warring round as far as eye can reach, our only hope? the pilot-stars, shining fitfully through the parting of the storm-clouds, our only guidance? There are hearts on this land almost broken, whose old traditional beliefs, serving them at least as moral supports, Mr. Carlyle and teachers like him have undermined. Some betake themselves to literature, as Sterling did; some fill up the void with the excitement of politics; others feebly bemoan their irreparable loss, and wear an outward seeming of universal irony and sarcasm. Mr. Carlyle has no right, no man has any right, to weaken or destroy a faith which he cannot or will not replace with a loftier. We have no hesitation in saying, that the language which Mr. Carlyle is in the habit of employing towards the religion of England and of Europe is unjustifiable. He ought to have said nothing, or he ought to have said more. Scraps of verse from Goethe, and declamations, however brilliantly they may be phrased, are but a poor compensation for the slightest obscuring of "the hope of immortality brought to light by the gospel," and by it conveyed to the hut of the poorest man, to awaken, his crushed intelligence and lighten the load of his misery. Mr. Carlyle slights, after his contemptuous fashion, the poetry of his contemporaries: one of them has uttered in song some practical wisdom which he would do well to heed:

"O thou that after toil and storm
May'st seem to have reached a purer air,
Whose faith has centre everywhere,
Nor cares to fix itself to form,

"Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
Her early heaven, her happy views;
Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.

"Her faith through form is pure as thine,
Her hands are quicker unto good.
Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood
To which she links a truth divine!

"See thou, that countest reason ripe
In holding by the law within,
Thou fail not in a world of sin,
And even for want of such a type."

This life of Sterling will be useful to the class whose beliefs have given way before Mr. Carlyle's destroying energies; because it furnishes hints, not to be mistaken though not obtrusive, as to the extent to which they must be prepared to go if they would really be his disciples. If the path has in its very dangers an attraction for some, while others are shudderingly repelled, in either case the result is desirable, as it is the absence of certainty which causes the pain and paralyzes the power of action. At any rate, the doctrines of this teacher must be so much more intelligible to the mass when applied, as they are here, in commentary upon a life all whose details are familiar, because it is the life of a contemporary and a countryman, that all who read must inevitably be impressed with that great lesson of the philosophic poet—

"The intellectual power through words and things
Goes sounding on, a dim and perilous way."

Though John Sterling is of course the principal figure in the composition, and Mr. Carlyle's treatment the great attraction of the book, yet the figures in the background will be those to make most impression on the general reader. Coleridge stands there in striking but caricatured likeness; and even his most devoted admirers will not be sorry to see a portrait of their master by such a hand: and all will curiously observe the contrast between the sarcastic bitterness which colors the drawing of the philosophic Christian, and the kindly allowance through which the character of John Sterling's father, the famous "Thunderer" of the Times, is delineated. We half suspect that Coleridge would have appeared to Mr. Carlyle a much greater man, if he had allowed him to declaim—"Harpocrates-Stentor," as Sterling calls him—with trumpet voice and for time unlimited on the divine virtues of Silence. There are besides, as in all Mr. Carlyle's works, passages of wise thought expressed in most felicitous language: of which not the least important is this advice given to Sterling in reference to his poetic aspirations:

"You can speak with supreme excellence; sing with considerable excellence you never can. And the Age itself, does it not, beyond most ages, demand and require clear speech; an Age incapable of being sung to, in any but a trivial manner, till these convulsive agonies and wild revolutionary overturnings readjust themselves? Intelligible word of command, not musical psalmody and fiddling, is possible in this fell storm of battle. Beyond all ages, our Age admonishes whatsoever thinking or writing man it has: Oh speak to me, some wise intelligible speech; your wise meaning, in the shortest and clearest way; behold, I am dying for want of wise meaning, and insight into the devouring fact: speak, if you have any wisdom! As to song so-called, and your fiddling talent,—even if you have one, much more if you have none,—we will talk of that a couple of centuries hence, when things are calmer again. Homer shall be thrice welcome; but only when Troy is taken: alas, while the siege lasts, and battle's fury rages every where, what can I do with the Homer? I want Achilleus and Odysseus, and am enraged to see them trying to be Homers!—"

These bricks from Babylon convey but scanty intimation of the varied interest of the book. However the readers of it may differ from its opinions, they cannot but find, even in Mr. Carlyle's misjudgments and prejudices, ample matter for serious reflection: for if he misjudges, it is generally because he is looking too intently at a single truth, or a single side of a truth; and such misjudgments are more suggestive than the completest propositions of a less earnest, keen-sighted, and impassioned thinker. He is indeed more a prophet than a logician or a man of science. And one lesson we may all learn from this, as from everything he writes,—and it is a lesson that interferes with no creed,—that honesty of purpose, and resoluteness to do and to say the thing we believe to be the true thing, will give heart to a man's life, when all ordinary motives to action and all ordinary supports of energy have failed like a rotten reed.

[SONGS OF THE CASCADE.]

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

BY A. OAKEY HALL.

I.
THE CASCADE VAUNTETH ITSELF.

Over my pebbly bed I flow:
Till foaming—now splashing,
Soon leaping—then dashing
Into the chasm's bowl below,
Where my pearl drops glittering,
Rival the driven snow.

The chains of Winter I spurn!
All Summer and Spring
Through the grove I sing,
Gladdening lily and fern,
And the tired bird who kisses my cheek
With a dainty touch of his thirsty beak.

And when from the mountain side
The sunshines of May
Charm the snows away—
The torrent's impulsive tide
Mingles its turbid strength with mine,
Marking the thicket with surging line.

Then as the grove I enter,
The tree-tops shake,
The granite beds quake,
Into their very centre;
Whilst the birds around on the soaking ground
Hush their song at my thunder sound!

Man never with puny arm
My power shall curb,
My flow disturb!
Ha! ha! for nature's charm:
Powerful in the rock
That human strength doth mock!

Long as stern Father Time
Shall harvest future years—
Garnering joys and tears—
In every land and clime:
So long shall I from the moss-clad steep,
Bubble or vaunt in the foaming leap!

II.
THE CASCADE HUMBLETH ITSELF.

Under the dams I go,
With sullen plash,
And humbled dash,
On giant wheels below,
That proudly turn where huge fires burn,
Mocking the sunset glow!

As the "feeders" I enter,
High windows shake,
And brick walls quake,
Deep to their very centre,
While I painfully sob to the taunting throb
In the heart of my mill tormentor.

Afar up the arid hill,
Huger wheels are turning—
Fiercer fires are burning—
The mountain torrent is still!
And I mourn me now for the thicket's green
In the grove where our surging line was see.

Man with his stalwart arms,
Plying the axe and spade—
Reft the grove of its shade,
Dissolving nature's charms;
With genius to plan it blasted the granite,
As involving the earthquake's aid.

Nothing of freedom now I know!
For the glare of the brick,
The machinery click,
And the mist from the wheels below,
Blindeth and stunneth—I faint—I reel.
I yield my charm to the spell of steel!

[HERMAN MELVILLE'S WHALE.][4]

The new nautical story by the always successful author of Typee, has for its name-giving subject a monster first introduced to the world of print by Mr. J. N. Reynolds, ten or fifteen years ago, in a paper for the Knickerbocker, entitled Mocha Dick. We received a copy when it was too late to review it ourselves for this number of the International, and therefore make use of a notice of it which we find in the London Spectator:

"This sea novel is a singular medley of naval observation, magazine article writing, satiric reflection upon the conventionalisms of civilized life, and rhapsody run mad. So far as the nautical parts are appropriate and unmixed, the portraiture is truthful and interesting. Some of the satire, especially in the early parts, is biting and reckless. The chapter-spinning is various in character; now powerful from the vigorous and fertile fancy of the author, now little more than empty though sounding phrases. The rhapsody belongs to wordmongering where ideas are the staple; where it takes the shape of narrative or dramatic fiction, it is phantasmal—an attempted description of what is impossible in nature and without probability in art; it repels the reader instead of attracting him.

[4] The Whale. By Herman Melville, Author of "Typee," "Omoo," "Redburn," "Mardi," "White Jacket." In three volumes. Published by Bentley.

[Moby Dick, or the Whale: By Herman Melville: 1 vol. 12mo. New-York, Harper & Brothers.]

"The elements of the story are a South Sea whaling voyage, narrated by Ishmael, one of the crew of the ship Pequod, from Nantucket. Its 'probable' portions consist of the usual sea matter in that branch of the industrial marine; embracing the preparations for departure, the voyage, the chase and capture of whale, with the economy of cutting up, &c., and the peculiar discipline of the service. This matter is expanded by a variety of digressions on the nature and characteristics of the sperm whale, the history of the fishery, and similar things, in which a little knowledge is made the excuse for a vast many words. The voyage is introduced by several chapters in which life in American seaports is rather broadly depicted.

"The 'marvellous' injures the book by disjointing the narrative, as well as by its inherent want of interest, at least as managed by Mr. Melville. In the superstition of some whalers, (grounded upon the malicious foresight which occasionally characterizes the attacks of the sperm fish upon the boats sent to capture it,) there is a white whale which possesses supernatural power. To capture or even to hurt it is beyond the art of man; the skill of the whaler is useless; the harpoon does not wound it; it exhibits a contemptuous strategy in its attacks upon the boats of its pursuers; and happy is the vessel were only loss of limb, or of a single life, attends its chase. Ahab, the master of the Pequod—a mariner of long experience, stern resolve, and indomitable courage, the high hero of romance, in short, transferred to a whale-ship—has lost his leg in a contest with the white whale. Instead of daunting Ahab, the loss exasperates him; and by long brooding over it his reason becomes shaken. In this condition, he undertakes the voyage; making the chase of his fishy antagonist the sole abject of his thoughts, and, so far as he can without exciting overt insubordination among his officers, the object of his proceedings.

"Such a groundwork is hardly natural enough for a regular-built novel, though it might form a tale, if properly managed. But Mr. Melville's mysteries provoke wonder at the author rather than terror at the creation; the soliloquies and dialogues of Ahab, in which the author attempts delineating the wild imaginings of monomania, and exhibiting some profoundly speculative views of things in general, induce weariness or skipping; while the whole scheme mars, as we have said, the nautical continuity of story—greatly assisted by various chapters of a bookmaking kind.

"Perhaps the earliest chapters are the best although they contain little adventure. Their topics are fresher to English readers than the whale-chase, and they have more direct satire. One of the leading personages in the voyage is Queequeg, a South Sea Islander, that Ishmael falls in with at New-Bedford, and with whom he forms a bosom friendship.

"Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.

"While yet a new-hatched savage, running wild about his native woodlands in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green sapling,—even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul lurked a strong desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His father was a high chief, a king; his uncle a high priest; and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth.

"A Sag Harbour ship visited his father's bay; and Queequeg sought a passage to Christian lands. But the ship having her full complement of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father's influence could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets, that grew out into the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out—gained her side—with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe—climbed up the chains—and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go though hacked in pieces.

"In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard—suspended a cutlass over his naked wrists: Queequeg was the son of a king, and Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage—this sea Prince of Whales—never saw the captain's cabin. They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But, like the Czar Peter content to toil in the ship-yards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might haply gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen. For at bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were, and more than that, still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked, infinitely more so than all his father's heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbour, and seeing what the sailors did there, and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians: I'll die a Pagan.

"The strongest point of the book is its 'characters.' Ahab, indeed, is a melodramatic exaggeration, and Ishmael is little more than a mouthpiece; but the harpooners, the mates, and several of the seamen, are truthful portraitures of the sailor as modified by the whaling service. The persons ashore are equally good, though they are soon lost sight of. The two Quaker owners are the author's means for a hit at the religious hypocrisies. Captain Bildad, an old sea-dog, has got rid of every thing pertaining to the meeting-house save an occasional 'thou' and 'thee.' Captain Peleg, in American phrase, 'professes religion.' The following extract exhibits the two men when Ishmael is shipped:

"I began to think that it was high time to settle with myself at what terms I would be willing to engage for the voyage. I was already aware that in the whaling business they paid no wages, but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares of the profits, called lays; and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship's company. I was also aware that, being a green hand at whaling, my own lay would not be very large: but, considering that I was used to the sea, could steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that, from all I had heard, I should be offered at least the two hundred and seventy-fifth lay—that is, the two hundred and seventy-fifth part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might eventually amount to. And though the two hundred and seventy-fifth lay was what they called a rather long lay, yet it was better than nothing; and if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear out on it, not to speak of my three years' beef and board, for which I would not have to pay one stiver.

"It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely fortune: and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am one of those that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the world is ready to board and lodge me while I am putting up at this grim sign of the Thunder-cloud. Upon the whole, I thought that the two hundred and seventy-fifth lay would be about the fair thing, but would not have been surprised had I been offered the two hundredth, considering I was of a broad-shouldered make.

"But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about receiving a generous share of the profits, was this: ashore, I had heard something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony Bildad; how that they, being the principal proprietors of the Pequod, therefore the other and more in considerable and scattered owners left nearly the whole management of the ship's affairs to these two. And I did not know but that the stingy old Bildad might have a deal to say about shipping hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod, quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his Bible, as if at his own fireside. Now, while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small surprise, considering that he was such an interested party in these proceedings—Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to himself out of his book, 'Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth—'

"'Well, Captain Bildad,' interrupted Peleg, 'what d'ye say—what lay shall we give this young man?'

"'Thou knowest best,' was the sepulchral reply; 'the seven hundred and seventy-seventh wouldn't be too much—would it—'where moth and rust do corrupt, but lay—'

"Lay indeed, thought I, and such a lay!—the seven hundred and seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one, shall not lay up many lays here below, where moth and rust do corrupt. It was an exceedingly long lay that, indeed; and though from the magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet the slightest consideration will show that, though seven hundred and seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet when you come to make a teenth of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons. And so I thought at the time.

"'Why, b—— t your eyes, Bildad!' cried Peleg, 'thou dost not want to swindle this young man! he must have more than that?'

"'Seven hundred and seventy-seventh,' again said Bildad, without lifting his eyes; and then went on mumbling—'for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.'

"'I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,' said Peleg; 'do ye hear that, Bildad? The three hundredth lay, I say.'

"Bildad laid down his book, and, turning solemnly towards him, said, 'Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship—widows and orphans, many of them; and that, if we too abundantly reward the labors of this young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg.'

"'Thou Bildad!' roared Peleg, starting up, and clattering about the cabin, 'B—— t ye, Captain Bildad; if I had followed thy advice in these matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape Horn.'

"'Captain Peleg,' said Bildad steadily, 'thy conscience may be drawing ten inches of water or ten fathoms—I can't tell; but as thou art still an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy conscience be but a leaky one, and will in the end sink thee foundering down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg,'"

"It is a canon with some critics that nothing should be introduced into a novel which it is physically impossible for the writer to have known: thus, he must not describe the conversation of miners in a pit if they all perish. Mr. Melville hardly steers clear of this rule, and he continually violates another, by beginning in the autobiographical form and changing ad libitum into the narrative. His catastrophe overrides all rule: not only is Ahab, with his boat's-crew, destroyed in his last desperate attack upon the white whale, but the Pequod herself sinks with all on board into the depths of the illimitable ocean. Such is the go-ahead method."

[A STORY WITHOUT A NAME][5]

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE

BY G. P. R. JAMES, ESQ.

CHAPTER L.

Sir Philip Hastings, I have said, was reading a Greek book when Mr. Short entered the library. His face was grave, and very stern; but all traces of the terrible agitation with which he had quited the side of his wife's death-bed, were now gone from his face. He hardly looked up when the surgeon entered. He seemed not only reading, but absorbed by what he read. Mr. Short thought the paroxysm of grief was passed, and that the mind of Sir Philip Hastings, settling down into a calm melancholy, was seeking its habitual relief in books. He knew, as every medical man must know, the various whimsical resources to which the heart of man flies, as if for refuge, in moments of great affliction. The trifles with which some will occupy themselves—the intense abstraction for which others will labor—the imaginations, the visions, the fancies to which others again will apply, not for consolation, not for comfort; but for escape from the one dark predominant idea. He said a few words to Sir Philip then, of a kindly but somewhat commonplace character, and the baronet looked up, gazing at him across the candles which stood upon the library table. Had Mr. Short's attention been particularly called to Sir Philip's countenance, he would have perceived at once, that the pupils of the eyes were strangely and unnaturally contracted, and that from time to time a certain nervous twitching of the muscles curled the lip, and indented the cheek. But he did not remark these facts: he merely saw that Sir Philip was reading: that he had recovered his calmness; and he judged that that which might be strange in other men, might not be strange in him. In regard to what he believed the great cause of Sir Philip's grief, his wife's death, he thought it better to say nothing; but he naturally concluded that a father would be anxious to hear of a daughter's health under such circumstances, and therefore he told him that Emily was better and more composed.

[5] Concluded from page 499.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, by G. P. R. James, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New-York.

Sir Philip made a slight, but impatient motion of the hand, but Mr. Short went on to say, "As she was so severely and terribly affected, Sir Philip, I have given Mistress Emily a composing draught, which has already had the intended effect of throwing her into profound slumber. It will insure her, I think, at least six, if not seven hours of calm repose, and I trust she will rise better able to bear her grief than she would be now, were she conscious of it."

Sir Philip muttered something between his teeth which the surgeon did not hear, and Mr. Short proceeded, saying, "Will you permit me to suggest, Sir Philip, that it would be better for you too, my dear sir, to take something which would counteract the depressing effect of sorrow."

"I thank you, sir, I thank you," replied Sir Philip, laying his hand upon the book; "I have no need. The mind under suffering seeks medicines for the mind. The body is not affected. It is well—too well. Here is my doctor;" and he raised his hand and let it fall upon the book again.

"Well then, I will leave you for to-night, Sir Philip," said the surgeon; "to-morrow I must intrude upon you on business of great importance. I will now take my leave."

Sir Philip rose ceremoniously from his chair and bowed his head; gazing upon the surgeon as he left the room and shut the door, with a keen, cunning, watchful look from under his overhanging eyebrows.

"Ha!" he said, when the surgeon had left the room, "he thought to catch me—to find out what I intended to do—slumber!—calm, tranquil repose—so near a murdered mother! God of heaven!" and he bent down his head till his forehead touched the pages of the book, and remained with his face thus concealed for several minutes.

It is to be remarked that not one person, with a single exception, to whom the circumstances of Lady Hastings' death were known, even dreamed of suspecting Emily. They all knew her, comprehended her character, loved her, had faith in her, except her own unhappy father. But with him, if the death of his unhappy wife were terrible, his suspicions of his daughter were a thousand fold more so. To his distorted vision a multitude of circumstances brought proof all powerful. "She has tried to destroy her father," he thought, "and she has not scrupled to destroy her mother. In the one case there seemed no object. In the other there was the great object of revenge, with others perhaps more mean, but not less potent. Try her cause what way I will, the same result appears. The mother opposes the daughter's marriage to the man she loves—threatens to frustrate the dearest wish of her heart—and nothing but death will satisfy her. This is the end then of all these reveries—these alternate fits of gloom and levity. The ill balanced mind has lost its equipoise, and all has given way to passion. But what must I do—oh God! what must I do?"

His thoughts are here given, not exactly as they presented themselves; for they were more vague, confused, and disjointed; but such was the sum and substance of them. He raised his head from the book and looked up, and after thinking for a moment or two he said, "This Josephus—this Jew—gives numerous instances, if I remember right, of justice done by fathers upon their children—ay, and by the express command of God. The priest of the Most High was punished for yielding to human weakness in the case of his sons. The warrior Jephtha spared not his best beloved. What does the Roman teach? Not to show pity to those the nearest to us by blood, the closest in affection, where justice demands unwavering execution. It must be so. There is but the choice left, to give her over to hands of strangers, to add public shame, and public punishment to that which justice demands, or to do that myself which they must inevitably do. She must die—such a monster must not remain upon the earth. She has plotted against her father's life—she has colleagued with his fraudulent enemies—she has betrayed the heart that fondly trusted her—she has visited secretly the haunts of a low, vulgar ruffian—she has aided and abetted those who have plundered her own parents—she has ended by the murder of the mother who so fondly loved her. I—I am bound, by every duty to society, to deliver it from one, who for my curse, and its bane, I brought into the world. She must be put to death; and no hand but mine must do it."

He gazed gloomily down upon the table for several minutes, and then paced the room rapidly with agony in every line of his face. He wrung his hands hard together. He lifted up his eyes towards heaven, and often, often, he cried out, "Oh God! Oh God! Is there no hope?—no doubt?—no opening for pause or hesitation?"

"None, none, none," he said at length, and sank down into his chair again.

His eye wandered round the room, as if seeking some object he could not see, and then he murmured, "So beautiful—so young—so engaging—just eighteen summers; and yet such a load of crime!"

He bent his head again, and a few drops of agony fell from his eyes upon the table. Then clasping his forehead tight with his hand, he remained for several minutes thoughtful and silent. He seemed to grow calmer; but it was a deceitful seeming; and there was a wild, unnatural light in his eyes which, notwithstanding all the apparent shrewdness of his reasoning—the seeming connection and clearness of his argument, would have shown to those expert in such matters, that there was something not right within the brain.

At length he said to himself in a whisper, as if he was afraid that some one should hear him, "She sleeps—the man said she sleeps—now is the time—I must not hesitate—I must not falter—now is the time!" and he rose and approached the door.

Once, he stopped for a moment—once, doubt and irresolution took possession of him. But then he cast them off, and moved on again.

With a slow step, but firm and noiseless tread, he crossed the hall and mounted the stairs. No one saw him: the servants were scattered: there was no one to oppose his progress, or to say, "Forbear!"

He reached his daughter's room, opened the door quietly, went in, and closed it. Then he gazed eagerly around. The curtains were withdrawn: his fair, sweet child lay sleeping calmly as an infant. He could see all around. Father and child were there. There was no one else.

Still he gazed around, seeking perhaps for something with which to do the fatal deed! His eye rested on a packet of papers upon the table. It contained those which Marlow had left with poor gentle Emily to justify her to her father in case of need.

Oh, would he but take them up! Would he but read the words within!

He turns away—he steals toward the bed!

Drop the curtain! I can write no more.

Emily is gone!

CHAPTER LI.

When Mr. Short, the surgeon, left the presence of Sir Philip Hastings, he found the butler seated in an arm-chair in the hall, cogitating sadly over all the lamentable events of the day. He was an old servant of the family, and full of that personal interest in every member of it which now, alas, in these times of improvement and utilitarianism (or as it should be called, selfishness reduced to rule), when it seems to be the great object of every one to bring men down to the level of a mere machine, is no longer, or very rarely, met with. He rose as soon as the surgeon appeared, and inquired eagerly after his poor master. "I am afraid he is touched here, sir," he said, laying his finger on his forehead. "He has not been at all right ever since he came back from London, and I am sure, when he came down to-night, calling out in such a way about gathering herbs, I thought he had gone clean crazy."

"He has become quite calm and composed now," replied Mr. Short; "though of course he is very sad: but as I can do no good by staying with him, I must go down to the farm for my horse, and ride away where my presence is immediately wanted."

"They have brought your horse up from the farm, sir," said the butler. "It is in the stable-yard."

Thither Mr. Short immediately proceeded, mounted, and rode away. When he had gone about five miles, or perhaps a little more, he perceived that two horsemen were approaching him rapidly, and he looked sharp towards them, thinking they might be Mr. Atkinson and the groom. As they came near, the outlines of the figures showed him that such was not the case; but the foremost of the two pulled up suddenly as he was passing, and Marlow's voice exclaimed, "Is that Mr. Short?"

"Yes, sir, yes, Mr. Marlow," replied the surgeon. "I am very glad indeed you have come; for there has been terrible work this day at the house of poor Sir Philip Hastings. Lady Hastings is no more, and——"

"I have heard the whole sad history," replied Marlow, "and am riding as fast as possible to see what can be done for Sir Philip, and my poor Emily. I only stopped to tell you that Mrs. Hazleton has been taken, the vial of medicine found upon her, and that she has boldly confessed the fact of having poisoned poor Lady Hastings. You will find her and Atkinson, the high constable, at the house of Mrs. Warmington.—Good night, Mr. Short; good night;" and Marlow spurred on again.

The delay had been very short, but it was fatal.

When Marlow reached the front entrance of the court, he threw his rein to the groom, and without the ceremony of ringing, entered the house. There was a lamp burning in the hall, which was vacant; but Marlow heard a step upon the great staircase, and looked up. A dark shadowy figure was coming staggering down, and as it entered the sphere of the light in the hall, Marlow recognized the form, rather than the features, of Sir Philip Hastings. His face was ashy pale: not a trace of color was discernible in any part: the very lips were white; and the gray hair stood ragged and wild upon his head. His haggard and sunken eye fell upon Marlow; but he was passing onward to the library, as if he did not know him, tottering and reeling like a drunken man, when Marlow, very much shocked, stopped him, exclaiming, "Good God, Sir Philip, do you no know me?"

The unhappy man started, turned round and grasped him tightly by the wrist, saying in a hoarse whisper, and looking over his shoulder towards the staircase, "Do not go there, do not go there—come hither—you do not know what has happened."

"I do, indeed, Sir Philip," replied Marlow in a soothing tone, "I have heard——"

"No, no, no, no!" said Sir Philip Hastings. "No one knows but I—there was no one there—I did it all myself.—Come hither, I say!" and he drew Marlow on towards the library.

"He has lost his senses," thought Marlow. "I must try and soothe him before I see my poor Emily. I will try and turn his mind to other things;" and, suffering himself to be led forward, he entered the library with Sir Philip Hastings, who instantly cast himself into a chair, and pressed his hands before his eyes.

Marlow stood and gazed at him for a moment in silent compassion, and then he said, "Take comfort, Sir Philip. Take comfort. I bring you a great store of news; and what I have to tell will require great bodily and mental exertions from you, to deal with all the painful circumstances in which you are placed. I have followed out every thread of the shameful conspiracy against you—not a turning of the whole rascally scheme is undiscovered."

"She had her share in that too," said Sir Philip, looking up in his face, with a wild, uncertain sort of questioning look.

"I know it," replied Marlow, thinking he spoke of Mrs. Hazleton, "She was the prime mover in it all."

Sir Philip wrung his hands tight, one within the other, murmuring "Oh, God; oh, God!"

"But," continued Marlow, "she will soon expiate her crimes; for she has been taken, and proofs of her guilt found upon her, so strong and convincing, that she did not think fit even to conceal the fact, but confessed her crime at once."

Sir Philip started, and grasped both the arms of the chair in which he sat, tight in his thin white hands, gazing at Marlow with a look of bewildered horror that cannot be described. Marlow went on, however, saying, "I had previously told her, indeed, that I had discovered all her dark and treacherous schemes—how she had labored to make this whole family miserable—how she had attempted to blacken the character of my dear Emily—imitated her handwriting—induced you to misunderstand her whole conduct, and thrown dark hints and suspicions in your way. She knew that she could not escape this charge, even if she could conceal her guilt of to-day, and she confessed the whole."

"Who—who—who?" cried Sir Philip Hastings, almost in a scream. "Of whom are you talking, man?"

"Of Mrs. Hazleton," replied Marlow. "Were you not speaking of her?"

Sir Philip Hastings stretched forth his hands, as if to push him farther from him; but his only reply was a deep groan, and, after a moment's pause, Marlow proceeded, "I thought you were speaking of her—of her whose task it has been, ever since poor Emily's ill-starred visit to her house, to calumniate and wrong that dear innocent girl—to make you think her guilty of bitter indiscretions, if not great crimes—who, more than any one, aided to wrong you, and who now openly avows that she placed the poison in your poor wife's room in order to destroy her."

"And I have killed her!—and I have killed her!" cried Sir Philip Hastings, rising up erect and tall—"and I have killed her!"

"Good God, whom?" exclaimed Marlow, with his heart beating as if it would burst through his side. "Whom do you mean, sir?"

Sir Philip remained silent for a moment, pressing his hands tight upon his temples, and then answered in a slow, solemn voice, "Your Emily—my Emily—my own sweet—" but he did not finish the sentence; for ere the last words could be uttered, he fell forward on the floor like a dead man.

For an instant, stupified and horror-struck, Marlow remained motionless, hardly comprehending, hardly believing what he had heard. The next instant, however, he rushed out of the library, and found the butler with the late Lady Hastings' maid, passing through the back of the house towards the front staircase.

"Which is Emily's room?" he cried,—"Which is Emily's room?"

"She is asleep, sir," said the maid.

"Which is her room?" cried Marlow, vehemently. "He is mad—he is mad—your master is mad—he says he has killed her. Which is her room?" and he darted up the staircase.

"The third on the right, sir," cried the butler, following with the maid, as fast as possible; and Marlow darted towards the door.

A fit of trembling, however, seized him as he laid his hand upon the lock. "He must have exaggerated," he said to himself. "He has been unkind—harsh—he calls that killing her—I will open it gently," and he and the two servants entered it nearly together.

All was quiet. All was still. The light was burning on the table. There was a large heavy pillow cast down by the side of the bed, and the bed coverings were in some disorder.

No need of such a stealthy pace, Marlow! You may tread firm and boldly. Even your beloved step will not wake her. The body sleeps till the day of judgment. The spirit has gone where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.

The beautiful face was calm and tranquil; though beneath each of the closed eyes was a deep bluish mark, and the lips had lost their redness. The fair delicate hands grasped the bed-clothes tightly, and the whole position of the figure showed that death had not taken place without a convulsive struggle. Marlow tried, with trembling hands, to unclasp the fingers from the bed-clothes, and though he could not do it, he fancied he felt warmth in the palms of the hands. A momentary gleam of hope came upon him. More assistance was called: every effort that could be suggested was made; but it was all in vain. Consciousness—breath—life—could never be restored. There was not a dry eye amongst all those around, when the young lover, giving up the hopeless task, cast himself on his knees by the bedside, and pressed his face upon the dead hand of her whom he had loved so well.